US Students Are Trapped in a Mathematical Doom Loop
Tomorrow’s educators are relying too heavily on fads that de-emphasize facts and eliminate exams.
You don’t need a toy to do math or spell.
Photographer: Bloomberg
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For a generation that brought us Dictionary.com’s 2025 Word of the Year — 6-7 — you’d think Gen Alpha would be great with numbers. But according to the Bloomberg editorial board, broad swaths of today’s youth can’t convert a fraction to a decimal to save their lives. It’s not a new problem, per se, but it is a sticky one in the US: