The problems facing America are many, unmistakable, and largely immediate. Anyone with even the slightest ability to fog a mirror knows that concerns include affordability, public safety, drug addiction, terrorism, healthcare costs, and political dysfunction.

Yet, among those issues and others, the quality of our public schools rarely ranks among our top 10 challenges requiring prioritized attention.

However, such omission portends less America’s renewal than America’s decline. That is, since the future of our nation largely depends on educating future generations, it’s worth noting that by virtually any metric, our schools have increasingly become far less an incubator for leaders than a blackboard bungling catalyst spawning the aimless and dependent.

Undeniably, student test results have declined for more than a decade, and that trend has not reversed post-COVID. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the congressionally mandated measure of what students should know, declining student performance is significant, long-running, and not solely COVID-related.

Examples of blackboard bungling are widespread across subject areas and grade levels. Among 12th graders, scores are at historic lows: only one-third are considered “proficient” in reading, and just 22 percent are equally able in math. In fact, reading proficiency has fallen from 40 percent in 1992 to just 35 percent in 2024, and math scores for high school seniors are at their lowest level in more than 20 years.

But declining test scores are not limited to 12th graders. With few exceptions, math and reading results among younger students have followed the same trend. Overall, only four states have shown measurable gains in reading and math proficiency since 2022, and national averages for fourth and eighth graders remain well below pre-COVID levels.

But comparing our students with those from around the world is only slightly more positive. In a global assessment measuring how well 15-year-olds from over 65 nations apply knowledge to real-world problems, our students ranked sixth in reading, about average in science, and math results were described as “among the lowest ever measured.”

So how is it that the children of the only remaining superpower perform so poorly? Is it that we spend less on education? Or is our instructional time below that of other nations?

While there is no single cause for our scholastic malaise, its source is neither of the above.

Statistically, only Luxembourg and Norway spend significantly more per pupil than does the United States, which already spends 38 percent more than the average of almost 40 other advanced nations. And as for instructional time, the U.S. is also well above average, ranking third among those same countries.

Source: VidNews » Feed