Two weeks ago, the world of education was rocked by a bombshell report from the University of California San Diego. It revealed that the number of UCSD students who lack basic reading and math skills has absolutely exploded since 2020. The percentage of students needing a remedial class on basic junior-high-school level math jumped from 0.5% to over 12%. Some were even unable to do basic elementary school math. More than a fifth of entering students now fail to meet basic writing requirements.

According to the report, pandemic learning loss is one reason there are so many incapable students showing up at UCSD, but most of the problem is due to falling admissions standards. The UC system eliminated standardized test requirements in 2020, and since then it has been admitting rising numbers of kids from bad schools that inflate grades by ridiculous amounts.

Lots of people have written very good articles about this report since then, so I’ll quote from a few of them. The Argument’s Kelsey Piper talks about how the problem isn’t that UCSD students haven’t completed the required K-12 math courses — it’s often that they did complete the courses but were given passing grades without actually learning math:

Only 39% of the students in the remedial class knew how to “round the number 374518 to the nearest hundred.”

Reviewing test results like these, you would expect transcripts full of Cs, Ds, or even failing grades. But alarmingly, these students’ transcripts…said they had taken advanced math courses and performed well.

“Of those who demonstrated math skills not meeting middle school levels,” the report found, 42% reported completing calculus or precalculus…The students were broadly receiving good grades, too: More than a quarter of the students needing remedial math had a 4.0 grade point average in math. The average was 3.7…A number of high schools are awarding A grades to AP Calculus students who do not have any calculus skills and who would get the lowest possible score on the AP Calculus exam if they took it…

“I have taught AP Calc in circumstances that produced this kind of result,” one public school high school math teacher told me. “No one can do fractions.”…[A]lmost all of them fail the AP Calculus exam at the end of the year.

And The Atlantic’s Rose Horowitch finds that while the problem is especially severe at UC schools, it’s a nationwide issue, and it has its roots in falling standards at public schools:

[UCSD’s] problems are extreme, but they are not unique. Over the past five years, all of the other University of California campuses…have seen the number of first-years who are unprepared for precalculus double or triple. George Mason University…students began arriving at their calculus course unable to do algebra…

America’s students are getting much worse at math. The decline started about a decade ago and sharply accelerated during the…pandemic. The average eighth grader’s math skills, which rose steadily from 1990 to 2013, are now a full school year behind where they were in 2013, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress…

Many [school] districts adopted a “no zeros” policy, forcing teachers to pass students who had little command of the material. One study of public-school students across Washington State found that almost none received an F in spring 2020, while the share of students who received A’s skyrocketed. Math grades have remained elevated in the years since…Together, these changes meant that even as students’ math preparation was stagnating, their grades were going up.

New York Magazine’s Andrew Rice has more details on the collapse of public education in America:

Last winter, the federal government released the results of its semi-annual reading and math tests of fourth- and eighth-graders…On reading tests, 40 percent of fourth-graders and one-third of eighth-graders performed below “basic,” the lowest threshold…

Nearly 30 percent could not pick the answer (“He wants to read it instead”). A similar proportion of eighth-graders failed to come up with the following sum:

12 + (-4) + 12 + 4 = _______.

…One math problem set out a scenario involving a restaurant check…Test-takers were asked to add the costs of…six items and calculate a 20 percent tip. Three-quarters of the high-schoolers were unable to correctly answer one or both parts of the question.

Rice’s article is very long and has many more details about how and why public education quality has collapsed in America. The basic story is that the education reform movement spearheaded by George W. Bush, which focused on improving test scores, collapsed in the mid-2010s. After that, public schools across the country began to lower their standards — passing kids who didn’t know the material, making their curricula a lot easier, etc. Often, kids just skip class entirely — in Oregon, around a third of all schoolchildren are chronically absent from school.

This was sometimes done in the name of “equity”— even though the new lax policies lead to widening racial and gender gaps. The rise of phones in schools probably exacerbated the trend, as did the pandemic, but the fundamental cause is lax standards everywhere.

Most of the articles about this slow-motion disaster just stick to decrying the report, calling for tighter educational standards, and tracing the demise of the education reform movement. I share their alarm, and I agree with their prescriptions. But I think it’s also worth thinking about exactly why education is going down the tubes in America.

One obvious possibility is that this is just another case of progressive activist culture on autopilot. In the past two or three decades, progressive governance has absolutely collapsed at the city and state level in a number of areas — housing, crime, infrastructure city services, and so on. It makes sense that education would just be one more failure of a progressive ideology that consistently prizes the bad ideas of the loudest activists. In this case, it was activists who pressured the UC system into dropping standardized test requirements.

Another obvious theory is that America is a very rich country, and the richer people get, the less they want to work hard — and helping your kids get through a tough, demanding education system is certainly hard work. Andrew Rice’s article mentions how local school board elections are usually dominated by upper-income white voters, while the degradation of educational standards tends to impact disadvantaged minorities more.

But I think there’s something else going on here. The extremely widespread nature of the breakdown of American education suggests that it’s not just progressive activism and lazy rich people. I basically see efforts to dilute and hobble the U.S. education system as a misguided attack on our pervasive economic and social inequality. To put it bluntly, Americans think that by giving everyone a free pass and refusing to educate smart kids, they can smooth out some of the inequality that results from the uneven distribution of talent.

Killing education is an incredibly bad form of “predistribution”

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Over at NRO, Andrew McCarthy largely agrees with Jack Goldsmith's conclusion that the the reported attack on survivors of a drug boat strike was unlawful. According to McCarthy, "If this happened as described in the Post report, it was, at best, a war crime under federal law." He writes further:

even if we stipulate arguendo that the administration has a colorable claim that our forces are in an armed conflict with non-state actors (i.e., suspected members of drug cartels that the administration has dubiously designated as foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs)), the laws of war do not permit the killing of combatants who have been rendered hors de combat (out of the fighting) — including by shipwreck.

To reiterate, I don't accept that the ship operators are enemy combatants — even if one overlooks that the administration has not proven that they are drug traffickers or members of designated FTOs. There is no armed conflict. They may be criminals (if it is proven that they are importing illegal narcotics), but they are not combatants.

My point, nevertheless, is that even if you buy the untenable claim that they are combatants, it is a war crime to intentionally kill combatants who have been rendered unable to fight. It is not permitted, under the laws and customs of honorable warfare, to order that no quarter be given — to apply lethal force to those who surrender or who are injured, shipwrecked, or otherwise unable to fight.

A key point here is that McCarty is not relying upon UN-affiliated entites nor unincorporated international law for his conclusion. Rather, he is resting his contentions on federal law (including those portions of the laws of war or international law that have been formally ratified by the Senate).

The laws of war, as they are incorporated into federal law, make lethal force unlawful if it is used under certain circumstances. Hence, it cannot be a defense to say, as Hegseth does, that one has killed because one's objective was "lethal, kinetic strikes."

And, it is worth noting, that federal law imposes the most severe penalties on war crimes.

McCarthy also highlights the fundamental irrationality of the Administration's policy, particularly given the constraints of federal law

. . . if an arguable combatant has been rendered hors de combat, targeting him with lethal force cannot be rationalized, as Bradley is said to have done, by theorizing that it was possible, at some future point, that the combatant could get help and be able to contribute once again to enemy operations. . . .

if the Post report is accurate — Hegseth and his commanders changed the protocols after the September 2 attack, "to emphasize rescuing suspected smugglers if they survived strikes." This is why two survivors in a subsequent strike (on October 16) were captured and then repatriated to their native countries (Colombia and Ecuador).

This was a ludicrous outcome: under prior policy, the boat would have been interdicted, the drugs seized, and the operators transferred to federal court for prosecution and hefty sentences. Under the Trump administration's policy, if the operators survive our missiles, they get to go back home and rejoin the drug trade. But put that aside. The point is that, if the administration's intent to apply lethal force were a defense to killing shipwrecked suspected drug traffickers, the policy wouldn't have been changed. It was changed because Hegseth knows he can't justify killing boat operators who survive attacks; and he sends them home rather than detaining them as enemy combatants because, similarly, there is no actual armed conflict, so there is no basis to detain them as enemy combatants.

The post McCarthy: "'We Intended the Strike to Be Lethal' Is Not a Defense" appeared first on Reason.com.

We hope all of our U.S. readers enjoyed a happy Thanksgiving yesterday. Today we’re sharing a guest post from our Assistant Editor Caroline Sutton on an innovative system for getting donated food to the places it’s needed most.

One of Susannah Morgan’s early memories from her years running the Food Bank of Alaska involves a truckload of pickles she never wanted. Not jars of pickles, either — five-gallon buckets. Accepting them meant paying $5,000 to ship that heavy load across the Gulf of Alaska. Rejecting them meant losing her place in line and waiting who-knows-how-long to be offered another donation from Feeding America, a clearinghouse that collects surplus food from grocery stores, producers, and farms and routes it through a national network of food banks like hers. In that moment, she was forced to choose between wasting scarce resources or wasting scarce opportunities.

For decades, this was simply how the largest charitable food network in the United States functioned.

Food banks waited their turn. A donor offered the central clearinghouse whatever he happened to have on hand. And each food bank, equipped with imperfect information, faced the same narrow question when it finally reached the front of the line: yes or no? Either take the pickles or fall to the bottom of the list. Either pay to ship something they sort of wanted, or save scarce resources in the hopes something more useful would be available later.

The entire system relied on generosity, and it did receive immense generosity, but lacked any of the institutional structure that would allow that generosity to turn into something bigger. Morgan told me the old system created a “scarcity mindset,” in which food banks compared their luck with everyone else’s and quietly resented the randomness. At one point she had been desperately requesting frozen chicken for months, only to get a call announcing: “Good news — we finally got you chicken. Bad news — it’s in Alabama.” She was sitting in Anchorage at the time. Under the old rules, she either had to send a truck across the continent or lose her place in line. “Nobody does their best work in a scarcity mindset,” she said. It was a system powered by goodwill but governed by guesswork.

Twenty years ago, Feeding America decided to try something different. And the story of that experiment begins at the University of Chicago, which is not where you might instinctively look for anti-hunger policy ideas, but is a place unusually well equipped to think about allocation problems.

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Building a better food bank

In the early 2000s, the charity brought in Chicago business school professors — including economist Canice Prendergast, operations expert Donald Eisenstein, and organizational behavior scholar Harry Davis — to help figure out how to allocate donated food across more than 200 food banks in a way that reflects real needs, real preferences, and real constraints. Feeding America was facing one of the classic dilemmas of public policy: how to match scarce resources to competing priorities fairly, efficiently, and predictably.

What struck the economists was the absence of information. Food banks had no way to express what they valued, no view of what was available, and no means to coordinate across regions. Some were excellent at logistics. Others had deep relationships with donors. Others had neither advantage. Yet all were trying to serve their communities under enormous pressure.

The Chicago team proposed something that, at the time, sounded like an odd choice for a charitable network: a market, complete with a custom-designed currency called “shares.” Every food bank would receive an allotment of shares based on how many people it served. Those shares could then be used to bid on truckloads of food in a daily national auction.

If a food bank desperately needed cereal, it could signal that by bidding more. If it already had enough cereal but urgently needed rice, it could save its shares for that instead. If something undesirable arrived — like potato chips or, true story, Tupperware lids missing their containers — the auction assigned it a negative price: taking it earned you extra shares.

It was a system designed to convert preferences (information each food bank had about its community’s needs) into visible, actionable signals. Prendergast describes this as the price discovery function of markets: the mechanism that reveals “how much you like a certain kind of food compared to another kind of food.” The bidding activity quickly revealed patterns no centralized planner could have seen.

Cereal, for instance, wasn’t just more valuable than broccoli; it was dramatically more valuable. The economists had assumed maybe a 6:1 ratio in preference intensity. The auction showed a ratio closer to 35:1.

Produce, which is perishable and already abundant in the donation pipeline, often cleared at nearly zero shares. Shelf-stable foods like pasta, rice, and canned goods drew consistently high bids. Potato chips, which are low in nutrients and break easily during transport, were so unwanted they routinely required subsidies to move.

And the system changed donor behavior as well. Under the old queue system, donors could wait days for a food bank to accept or reject an item, leaving their warehouses clogged with product they were trying to move quickly. But once 200 food banks were simultaneously able to bid, donations moved immediately. The increased liquidity, as Prendergast put it, made donors more willing to give, and the supply of food moving through the network rose by 50 million pounds in the first year after the new system’s introduction.

Under the old queue, food banks routinely received items that another food bank valued far more — a mismatch the Chicago team saw everywhere. Idaho might be offered yet another truckload of potatoes when its warehouse was already full, while a different food bank hundreds of miles away was desperate for produce. A food bank heavy on dairy but low on dry goods might be offered more milk it couldn’t refrigerate. Fresh produce often arrived close to expiration, meaning that a single misdirected shipment could spoil before anyone could use it. And food-rich banks, the ones with strong donor networks, often had surplus in the categories that food-poor banks lacked. The market allowed all of this to be reshuffled toward higher-value uses. Prices revealed which food banks needed what, and donations flowed accordingly. It was an example of something Slow Boring readers know well: moral impulses matter, but systems are what make moral impulses effective.

Morgan told me the biggest change wasn’t any single donation but the visibility the system gave her. For the first time, she could see what was being donated nationally and how often certain items appeared. She knew what she already had in her warehouse, what it would cost to bring something to Alaska, and what her community actually wanted.

“I had all of this data that the central clearinghouse didn’t have,” she said. “I could use [it] to make good decisions.”

That meant she could plan instead of react. If apples from Seattle were appearing regularly and surviving the trip north, she could save up just a few shares for them and make sure Alaska had fresh fruit for the holidays. If something was unpopular, like Tupperware lids, the system eventually assigned it a negative price, letting food banks earn shares by taking it.

“It was transformational,” she said. “We could actually change our strategy around what food that we purchased, what food that we got through this system, what food that we tried to get through the government systems, in order to make all of that balance better for the people who are experiencing hunger in Alaska.”

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What the future holds

Now, with nearly 20 years of price data behind them, Feeding America is considering whether to evolve the system again. If prices are this stable and predictable, does the network even need an auction? Should they move to something more like a supermarket model, where prices are posted and food banks buy what they want directly, without bidding?

It would be faster, simpler, and more intuitive. But the auction has safeguards that a posted-price system wouldn’t. Right now bids are sealed and only accepted twice a day, which prevents large, well-staffed food banks from hovering over the system and “sniping” high-value loads at the last minute. Share budgets were originally set according to need, so the highest-need food banks entered the market with more purchasing power. And smaller food banks can delegate bids to an employee of Feeding America, where a food bank simply outlines in broad terms its needs to that person, which helps level the playing field. In a shock like this month’s SNAP freeze1 during the shutdown, when demand jumped overnight, a posted-price system could break down into a first-come, first-served rush. The auction, for all its friction, preserves fairness.

This is the eternal challenge of market design: optimizing for both efficiency and equity at once. The Chicago team solved one version of that tradeoff 20 years ago. Now the charitable network is debating the next version.

What stands out most, though, is how impactful the original choice system turned out to be. It took a sector defined by goodwill, volunteerism, and moral urgency and gave it a structure that made those virtues effective. It replaced guesswork with information, rivalry with trust, and improvisation with planning.

Food banks no longer have to choose between shipping pickles and losing their place in line. They can get the things their communities actually need. Donors know their generosity is used well. And families — millions of them — receive more food than they would have otherwise.

Abundance isn’t just about having more. It’s also about making the most of what we already have. And sometimes, that begins with a market, a handful of shares, and the decision to build a better system.

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