\n<\/p>\n
Cassidy sent information requests to 35 universities.<\/p>\n
Bill Clark\/CQ\u2013Roll Call Inc.\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
A Senate committee chair has launched an investigation into what he says is a decline in how prepared freshmen accepted into selective institutions are for math courses there.<\/p>\n
Sen. Bill Cassidy, the Louisiana Republican who chairs the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, announced Friday that he\u2019s sent letters to 35 institutions, including Ivy League universities, the Georgia Institute of Technology, Rice University and more.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe United States faces a crisis in student achievement at the K\u201312 level that has begun to spill over into higher education, especially in math,\u201d Cassidy wrote in the letters. <\/p>\n
He cited the widely discussed November report from the University of California, San Diego, in which a university working group said that one in 12 first-year students in the fall placed into math below a middle school level, despite having a solid math grade point average from high school.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis state of affairs is unacceptable and demands immediate corrective action,\u201d Cassidy said. <\/p>\n
He\u2019s asking each of these institutions to provide data on freshman placement into math courses, explanations of how placements are decided, information on math classes that include precollege content, descriptions of universitywide math graduation requirements and info on whether they require the SAT, ACT or other math tests for admission. The due date is Feb. 5.<\/p>\n
A Cassidy spokesperson didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment Friday on why he\u2019s only investigating selective institutions. <\/p>\n
The UC San Diego report provided some reasons for its first-year students\u2019 math deficits.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis deterioration coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic and its effects on education, the elimination of standardized testing, grade inflation, and the expansion of admissions from under-resourced high schools,\u201d the report said. \u201cThe combination of these factors has produced an incoming class increasingly unprepared.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Cassidy sent information requests to 35 universities. Bill Clark\/CQ\u2013Roll Call Inc.\/Getty Images A Senate committee chair has launched an investigation into what he says is a decline in how prepared freshmen accepted into selective institutions are for math courses there. Sen. Bill Cassidy, the Louisiana Republican who chairs the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":42836,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[22500,4673,4693,22501,4015,7881],"class_list":{"0":"post-42835","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-cassidy","9":"tag-colleges","10":"tag-math","11":"tag-placements","12":"tag-probes","13":"tag-selective"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42835","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=42835"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42835\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/42836"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=42835"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=42835"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=42835"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}