Wage growth data is fairly mixed, reports The New York Times: “Although wages grew 3.8 percent since the same month a year ago on average, workers on the lower end of the income spectrum have been seeing slower wage gains than people who earn more.”

As the private sector’s been doing its thing, federal officials are hard at work, um, reducing supply: “Trump’s crackdown on immigrants has lowered the number of additional jobs required to absorb people newly looking for work,” reports The New York Times. “The Department of Homeland Security said 527,000 people have been deported since January, with more leaving under pressure.”

America’s learning crisis: “For the past several years, America has been using its young people as lab rats in a sweeping, if not exactly thought-out, education experiment. Schools across the country have been lowering standards and removing penalties for failure. The results are coming into focus,” writes Rose Horowitch at The Atlantic. “Five years ago, about 30 incoming freshmen at UC San Diego arrived with math skills below high-school level. Now, according to a recent report from UC San Diego faculty and administrators, that number is more than 900—and most of those students don’t fully meet middle-school math standards.”

“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, the gold standard for tracking academic achievement,” continues Horowitch. “Students in the bottom tenth percentile have fallen even further behind. Only the top 10 percent have recovered to 2013 levels. On the one hand, this means that math scores are close to where they were in the 1970s—hardly the Dark Ages. On the other hand, losing 50 years’ worth of math-education progress is a clear disaster.”

It’s possible there’s a distraction issue; these numbers first started dipping in 2015, around the advent of smartphones for this demographic. It’s possible students believe these math skills to be useless, either not required for good jobs or easily replaced by AI. It’s also possible, posits Horowitch, that all of this has a lot to do with schools’ declining standards. Why perform highly if you’re not being asked to?

COVID-19, of course, “supercharged” these trends, writes Horowitch. “Districts that spent most of the 2020–21 school year mandating remote learning saw students fall more than half a grade behind in math; districts that reopened earlier saw more modest declines.” Some districts, believing that children were too distraught from the period of rapid, chaotic change, implemented “no zero” policies, where they would simply not fail anyone even if their performance was terrible. And an equity mindset further supercharged all of this, as more and more colleges decided to do away with the standardized testing that would allow admissions officers to be able to tell if students had true command of these skills.

TLDR: When authorities worshipped the idols of equity and safetyism, students suffered. And all of this was compounded when adults let teenagers’ attention spans atrophy.

Scenes from New York: Speaking of safetyism, I appear to have started a parenting discourse.