The Crisis Neither Party Is Equipped to Handle

In 1957, the Soviet Union shocked the world with the launch of its Earth-orbiting Sputnik satellite. The United States, fearful of the security risk and hoping to make the nation more competitive with foreign powers, reacted with dramatic investments in science-and-technology education. In 1983, “A Nation at Risk,” the report published by the National Commission on Excellence in Education, warned of a “rising tide of mediocrity” in American education that “threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.” The warnings helped spark a bipartisan national effort to improve the schools, and the following decades saw major federal initiatives such as George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act and Barack Obama’s Race to the Top program, accompanied by major state-level reforms to boost achievement.

America is again facing an educational crisis. Last week, TheNew York Times reported that American students “turned in grim results on the latest international test of math skills.” That test, the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), found that fourth graders have dropped 18 points in math since 2019, while eighth graders have dropped 27 points. The math scores of both high-performing and low-performing eighth graders fell. As the education reporter Dana Goldstein notes, the coronavirus pandemic is a major contributor to the decline, but not the only one: “In the United States, academic declines—and widening gaps between stronger and weaker students—were apparent before the pandemic,” she writes. In 2019, the National Assessment of Educational Progress found that two-thirds of American children could not read at a proficient level.

In math, Americans now lag behind their counterparts in places such as Singapore, South Korea, Britain, and Poland. Only 7 percent of American students scored at the highest levels in math—far behind the 23 percent in South Korea and Japan, and 41 percent in Singapore, who scored at that level. The decline in math scores is part of a much larger decline in educational performance overall—and an exacerbation of the achievement gap between rich and poor students. But despite the appalling numbers, the educational crisis was barely mentioned during the presidential debates, and there is scant evidence of the political will necessary to address it.

Any bipartisan consensus on education has shattered; President-Elect Donald Trump and Republicans at the state level seem more intent on waging culture wars about gender and religion than tackling achievement gaps. The education initiative that Trump has been most vocal about is his threat to abolish the federal Department of Education (which he is unlikely to achieve, because dismantling the department requires an act of Congress). Meanwhile, many congressional and state-level Democrats are reluctant to push back against either the educational establishment or the teachers’ unions. This dynamic appeared most notably in their failure to resist the unions’ push to keep schools closed during the early pandemic.

Some state educational bureaucracies have responded to the decline in student achievement by simply lowering their standards. In New York, Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and Alaska, for instance, education officials adjusted their passing scores on standardized tests or changed their definition of proficiency. And American parents continue to think their kids are doing just fine—in large part because of schools’ inflation of grades.

For decades, the consequences of underperformance have also been masked by the influx of international students into American higher education. A 2022 study found that foreign students made up a majority—sometimes as much as 80 percent—of students in U.S. graduate programs in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Meanwhile, immigrants make up about a quarter of all workers in STEM fields. It’s not yet clear how Trump’s massive crackdown on immigrants could affect opportunities for foreign students, or their willingness to come to the United States.

The federal government does not have total power to fix the issues in schools, but with the right amount of political motivation, it could increase efforts to enforce states’ accountability for their students. Once upon a time in America, we would have risen to the challenge, mobilizing our national will and resources to confront the crisis.

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