The Shrinkflation of Standards

We all know the frustration of the grocery aisle. You pay the same price for a box of cereal, but the bag inside is half empty. You get less for your money.

Our public education system is doing the exact same thing to our children.

This is the shrinkflation of standards.

California taxpayers fund massive education budgets year after year. We spend nearly $25,000 per student across all funding sources. We pay a premium, yet proficiency scores drop while graduation requirements quietly slip away. We are paying full price for a watered down product.

This decline is a matter of policy. Since the state eliminated the High School Exit Exam in 2015, we have removed the only objective checkpoint for basic literacy and math. Laws like AB 104 further lowered the bar by allowing districts to exempt students from local graduation requirements and swap letter grades for Pass/No Pass.

The results of this managed decline are showing up at our state's top universities. At UC San Diego, a university faculty report found the number of incoming freshmen needing remedial math surged from one in 200 students in 2020 to nearly one in eight by 2025. The university was forced to rework its remedial math curriculum from scratch because students are missing elementary concepts.

A quarter of the students placed in these courses could not solve a basic first grade balancing equation. They could not figure out what number goes in the blank for:

7 + 2 = ___ + 6

More than 60% could not divide a fraction by two. They could not figure out how to split a half into a quarter.

When an elite research university has to teach first grade math to high school graduates, the K-12 system has failed its core mission. Pushing kids across a graduation stage without fundamental skills is a mathematical impossibility for upward mobility. It is the hidden tax of our state's affordability crisis.

A major driver of this shrinkflation is stolen time. When schools lower the bar to artificially boost pass rates, they hide a systemic loss of actual teaching.

Our LIMIT policy, Lost Instructional Minutes In Teaching, will measure the exact amount of learning time stolen from students due to severe behavioral disruptions. When a classroom is constantly derailed, we pay for a full day of school but students receive a fraction of the instruction.

We cannot fix a broken system by hiding the lost time or lowering the bar. A high school diploma must be a guarantee of competence, not a receipt for stolen time. Other candidates want to throw more tax dollars at the current system or abandon public schools entirely. We need actual accountability.

Ending the shrinkflation of standards is the first step toward shrinking the ballooning cost of our schools. We are done paying premium taxes for a compromised future.

Together, we will end the shrinkflation of standards.