Start with a number a professor published about her own students. A teaching professor of mathematics at Berkeley gave her calculus class an eight-topic readiness test, and the single most common score was zero. Not the average score. The most common one. One of her students could not solve seven x minus five equals nine. These are students the University of California chose to admit, and she is now splitting a lecture hall of several hundred into sections so she can teach middle school fractions to part of the room.
It did not happen by accident. In 2020 the University of California threw out the SAT and ACT for admissions, overruling its own academic senate, which had recommended keeping the requirement for another five years while a replacement was built. Before that change, seven in ten Berkeley calculus students arrived ready. After it, fewer than half. More than a thousand University of California faculty have now signed a system-wide petition to bring standardized testing back for science and engineering admissions, including more than two thirds of the system's mathematics faculty, and one professor involved called the level of agreement unprecedented. The administration is still arguing about it.
Angela Morabito spends the hour with Jenny Beth Martin and co-host Robert McNeily tracing the same instinct through the whole system. The University of Michigan's largest college will stop putting first-semester freshman grades on the official transcript, while the registrar quietly keeps those grades for athletic eligibility, financial aid, and academic honors. Two former Metro Nashville teachers say administrators directed them to change failing grades to passing ones, and the teacher of the year at her middle school quit rather than do it. Morabito, who came up through the Atlanta area when a testing scandal ended in racketeering convictions, calls it academic fraud and says two teachers in one district is almost certainly not the whole story.
Then the consequences. A CBS News and YouGov poll of 2,287 adults finds 58 percent of Democrats view socialism positively and 32 percent view capitalism positively, and among Democrats with a college degree, 71 percent are warm on socialism. Roughly one in three American men over 15 are neither working nor looking for work. And there is one state that fixed it: Mississippi went from forty-ninth in reading and fiftieth in math in 2013 to ninth and sixteenth today, on roughly half of what New Jersey spends per student.
Jenny Beth Martin also gives a straight update on the SAVE America Act — the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, the proof-of-citizenship and voter identification bill — after the Senate left for a five-week recess without passing it.
Guest: Angela Morabito, spokeswoman for the Defense of Freedom Institute, visiting fellow at the Independent Women's Forum, and former press secretary at the United States Department of Education.
Your job for today is in the episode. Election day is seventy-eight days out. To reach your senators and your representative, the Capitol switchboard is 202-224-3121.
More at jennybethshow.com and teapartypatriots.org.
00:00 — The Most Common Score Was Zero
01:15 — The Theme: When Big Government Gets Involved
02:38 — The Supreme Court, Mail-In Ballots, and Citizenship
04:35 — Primaries, Iran's Bounty, and 123 Denaturalizations
07:47 — Meet Angela Morabito
08:43 — The University of Michigan Hides Freshman Grades
13:04 — Nashville: Change the Failing Grade or Else
22:13 — Berkeley: Calculus Students Who Cannot Do Fractions
29:23 — The Department of Education Takes On Passing the Trash
31:33 — The Case Against the SAT, and the Answer to It
36:38 — Final Thoughts: School Choice Is Coming in 2027
39:45 — The Poll: Socialism and the College Degree
44:27 — One in Three American Men Out of the Workforce
51:02 — Mississippi Went From Fiftieth to Sixteenth
56:03 — Where the SAVE America Act Stands
1:00:17 — Losing a Battle Is Not Losing the Fight
1:03:16 — Your Job for Today
1:05:09 — Laken Riley Deserved Better
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