Wrong, Los Angeles Times, Declining Academic Rigor Is Responsible for Falling Test Scores, Not Climate Change

The Los Angeles Times (LAT) recently published an article asserting that “rising heat is causing students to underperform across the globe.” This is false. This is the kind of tidy, single‑cause climate narrative that papers love for two reasons. First, it absolves one of their favorite liberal institutions, the public school system, of responsibility for poor student performance. Second, it points to climate change as a convenient scapegoat for public schools’ failure, no matter how ridiculous that connection sounds to any reasonable person. The LAT’s claims don’t square with history, which includes decades of education policy that have steadily watered down standards. It also ignores an easy solution to improve student comfort, air conditioning.

The author of the LAT article, “Rising heat is causing students to underperform across the globe,” claims, “[e]ven on days when temperatures were between 80 and 90 degrees Fahrenheit, the data show that students can experience heat stress, followed by a drop in cognitive performance.”

That’s a sweeping generalization ignoring the fact that correlation is not proof of causation.

Basic historical perspective matters. The author of the LAT article ignored the fact that the 1930s were far hotter than at present—yet no nationwide academic collapse followed. See the figure below from the EPA:

As seen in the figure, the United States endured extraordinary heat waves in the 1930s, with many all‑time state heat records set during that decade still standing. Yet there’s no evidence of a contemporaneous, heat‑driven academic nosedive following those years. In fact, during the 1930’s, when there was no air conditioning at all, the number of people unable to read or write in any language, the illiteracy rate, was 4.3 percent in the United States. By comparison, today’s modern public school system has resulted in approximately 21 percent of the adult population being functionally illiterate, meaning they struggle to perform basic reading tasks, lacking the basic reading skills to navigate everyday life.

If heat alone were an academic wrecking ball, the 1930s should have left a stark, indelible crater in student outcomes. They didn’t. For context, see Climate at a Glance: U.S. Heat Waves.

In fact, it’s not clear that hot temperatures necessarily result in declining academic performance. Each year perennially hot India and Southeast Asian countries produce thousands of the world’s top scientists, engineers, statisticians, computer scientists, and mathematicians. Heat evidently hasn’t stunted those nations’ children and teens’ abilities to learn.

Even if heat matters at the margins, air conditioning (AC) neutralizes most of it—and most schools in the United States have (or are adding) AC systems. According to this report,

In the 1950s, the introduction of air conditioning into schools across the United States played a crucial role in transforming the educational landscape. This innovation not only made year-round learning possible but also enhanced student well-being, academic performance, and the overall quality of education.

Hot stuffy rooms may impact learning, but that’s a building‑management problem, not “a climate crisis.” The strongest empirical study on “heat and learning” found that air conditioning largely erases and impact heat might have on test scores. The authors explicitly conclude that learning losses from hotter school days are mitigated by classroom AC.

In practice, American districts have been steadily installing or upgrading AC. Examples range from Los Angeles Unified School District’s (LAUSD) policy of AC in classrooms to continuing district‑level build‑outs: The website LAist reports LAUSD’s AC policy and challenges keeping aging units running. School districts in historically cooler locations, like in Denver, are also rapidly installing air conditioning in those campuses currently lacking it.

A 2020 GAO report found that 41% of districts needed HVAC updates—telling us many systems exist but are aging and need replacement, not that AC is absent.

If the LAT were serious about student performance related to temperatures a better headline for its article would have been, “Increase Air Conditioning in Schools to Boost Learning.” Instead, we get climate alarm.

The real story of falling performance is three decades or more of “dumbing down” education. The uncomfortable truth is that U.S. schools have been lowering expectations, and inflating grades for years. Simultaneously, the education establishment has been radicalized, substituting controversial social programs and subjects while deemphasizing core disciplines, or worse, suggesting that math and science must be viewed through the lens of race or sex. Physical writing is now almost unknown and reading for pleasure, and the use of imagination it requires, has collapsed—especially among teens—replaced by the instant feed of video games and online media, which require no substantive imaginative thought. These trends pre‑date any recent heat uptick and track far better with long‑run test stagnation and decline.

Here are some points on those issues.

1) Grade inflation is real—and long‑running

ACT’s multi‑state analyses document decades of grade inflation in high schools, not explained away by student or school characteristics. Their review: [Grade Inflation Continues to Grow in the Past Decade] shows sustained growth in GPAs unaccompanied by commensurate gains in external scoring measures.

2) Standards and accountability have been eased—including eliminated exit exams

California suspended and then eliminated its high school exit exam via SB‑172, severing the link between a diploma and minimum academic mastery. That’s not climate; that’s policy.

Alongside this sits decades‑long debate over social promotion (passing students to the next grade absent mastery), documented in research and practitioner statements.

3) Deep reading is disappearing

Federal data show a decades‑long collapse in reading for pleasure, tightly associated with lower comprehension and vocabulary growth. The National Endowment for the Arts summarizes NAEP’s long‑term trend survey findings: from 2012–2023, the share of 13‑year‑olds reading “almost every day” fell sharply; their average reading score also declined over that period.

When students don’t read deeply, they don’t build the background knowledge and vocabulary that drive success in complex texts—no matter the thermostat setting.

4) What the tests actually show over 30 years

The NAEP Long‑Term Trend and main NAEP series—our best consistent yardsticks—report that U.S. reading and math scores have stagnated or drifted down in the 2010s–2020s after earlier gains in the 1990s/2000s.

None of these educational assessments attribute long‑run U.S. underperformance to rising classroom temperatures. They point to curriculum, instruction, standards, engagement, and literacy habits.

Perhaps, not coincidentally, the decline in test scores has also coincided with the introduction and sometimes forced integration of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and Critical Race Theory, into schools. Often displacing historically core courses in history, civics, and other disciplines.

The LAT took a complex, decades‑in‑the‑making education problem and tried to pin it on the weather mislabeled as climate change. That’s not journalism, rather it is narrative promotion. The record shows that in 1930s were hotter were hotter than today, and many countries around the world are hotter than the United States, and have been throughout history, yet high quality learning, with higher literacy rates, existed in those times and nations. The evidence also shows that to the extent that temperature does hamper learning, AC largely neutralizes heat‑classroom effects. Also, thirty years of softening standards, grade inflation, social promotion, and the decline of real reading line up far better with the test score arc. So, spare us the climate catechism—instead, try write a headline and a story with intellectual honesty for a change.

Anthony Watts

Anthony Watts is a senior fellow for environment and climate at The Heartland Institute. Watts has been in the weather business both in front of, and behind the camera as an on-air television meteorologist since 1978, and currently does daily radio forecasts. He has created weather graphics presentation systems for television, specialized weather instrumentation, as well as co-authored peer-reviewed papers on climate issues. He operates the most viewed website in the world on climate, the award-winning website wattsupwiththat.com.

Originally posted at ClimateREALISM