A symptom of our decline (Score 1)

This school board member's (lack of) quantitative skills and his attitude towards them are now endemic in the U.S., and are emblematic of the decline of our culture and of our institutions. As a faculty member in a large public university I helped put in place a program to require students to pass a test of 8th-grade math (mostly arithmetic) before passing the university's gen-ed math class (the easiest offered). This test was modeled on state requirements for that grade level, and contained nothing students were not ostensibly required to know before receiving a high school diploma. They were given any amount of free tutoring they wanted, and could take the test as many times as they needed to pass. The reaction to this requirement from the students, their parents, and even some faculty was so ferocious that it had to be abandoned, which means the university continues to award bachelor's degrees to people who can't calculate a percentage, or who even know what that means. This situation indicates that the U.S. will not recover as a functioning democratic republic, because the ignorant cannot govern themselves.