America’s Schools Are Worse Than Mediocre

By Connor Boyack & Corey DeAngelis

Monday, April 24, 2023

 

‘A rising tide of mediocrity” — that’s how a group of education stakeholders and reformers described the state of America’s K–12 schools after an 18-month study. The group’s report, A Nation at Risk, noted that we might have viewed this mediocre education system as an act of war had it been imposed upon us by a foreign government. “As it stands,” they wrote, “we have allowed this to happen to ourselves.”

 

However familiar it may sound, this report was not a recent effort. It was published in 1983.

 

April 26 marks the 40th anniversary of the day this landmark report was published by the Reagan administration. Has the tide of mediocrity risen further or receded since then? Most likely the former; few would argue that public schools are doing a better job of educating kids today than they did 40 years ago.

 

The frank reality — despite all the protestations of the teachers’ unions, whose continuing success depends upon them to defend the status quo at all costs — is that America’s public schools are doing a very poor job at their core mission of educating children. Let’s review three brief examples.

 

First consider the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), often called the “nation’s report card,” which recently showed that only 26 percent of eighth-graders performed math proficiently and only 31 percent were reading at a proficient level. Mediocrity indeed.

 

How does the U.S. compare to other countries? For that we turned to the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which placed the U.S. 36th out of 79 countries in math, with average scores in the other tested subjects as well. This is nothing new; as one education researcher remarked, the scores for American students “have always been mediocre.” And when compared with the U.S.’s largest economic competitors, our students rank dead last.

 

The second example is the progressive dumbing-down of curricula used in schools across the country. Consider this set of questions from an 1895 test administered to eighth-grade students in Salina, Kan.:

 

District No. 33 has a valuation of $35,000. What is the necessary levy to carry on a school seven months at $50 per month, and have $104 for incidentals?

 

Find the interest of $512.60 for 8 months and 18 days at 7 percent.

 

Find bank discount on $300 for 90 days (no grace) at 10 percent.

 

“But we have calculators to do that today!” some might protest. Yet few students —  indeed, few adults — would be able to answer these basic questions even with assistance.

 

A third example of the mediocrity of today’s public schools is their remarkable inefficiency and unimpressive bang for the taxpayer’s buck. As of 2020, American taxpayers were compelled to spend an average of $16,000 for every student in elementary and secondary education, an amount that is 34 percent higher than the average spent by other countries in the PISA assessment.

 

Perhaps H. L. Mencken was right in saying that the goal of government schooling is “to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry . . .”

 

Since 1970, the inflation-adjusted cost of educating a K–12 student in America “has almost tripled while test scores . . . remain largely unchanged,” as the Cato Institute found. More money does not produce better education outcomes. Indeed, the jurisdictions that spend the most per student — such as New York; Washington, D.C.; New Jersey; and Vermont — consistently rank poorly in education outcomes.

 

Flush with cash, the system has sadly devolved into a jobs program for adults. Half of the states “now have more noninstructional personnel than teachers.” From 1950 to 2012, student enrollment increased by 96 percent while teacher growth was 252 percent and non-teaching school administrators grew an astonishing 702 percent.

 

These are three examples of many. Our new book, Mediocrity, published on the 40th anniversary of the “rising tide” warning, highlights 40 of them. If the tide of mediocrity was rising four decades ago, we believe that its dangerously high level today has now submerged millions of students beneath its destructive force.

 

The warning for Americans today is thus even more urgent than the one issued in 1983, which warned that this educational mediocrity “threatens our very future as a nation and a people.” Will we heed the warning this time?