American schools weren’t broken until Silicon Valley used a lie to convince them they were—now reading and math scores are plummeting

Two girls look at a laptop placed on a desk. (Credit: Gordon Chibroski/Portland Press Herald—Getty Images)

For more than a decade, a trend has emerged in standardized testing data for students in Utah. After years of increasing reading and math scores, results from the state’s National Assessment of Educational Progress testing for fourth- and eighth-graders have shown a steady and continuing downturn.

Neuroscientist and former teacher Jared Cooney Horvath noticed the inflection point of this data coincided with the implementation of Student Assessment of Growth and Excellence (SAGE), the state’s first computer-adaptive test.