29 Nov

Public Education in America

“Does K-12 public education have a future?” – The Lonely Realist

How will artificial intelligence, budget cuts, tax incentives, social media influence, partisan-induced truthiness, and burgeoning charter-, private- and home-schooling affect America’s skill- knowledge-based education system?

Whatever the rationale, and as TLR has been highlighting for years (e.g., here, here, here, here, and here), America’s K-12 public education system has been failing. Results from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) evidence a steady erosion regression in overall U.S. student performance. Math scores showed one of the steepest declines, with U.S. students ranking 28^th out of 37 OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries [ED NOTE: allow that number to sink in]. Science performance was below the OECD average. The 2024 test results for 12^th grade students from the National Assessment of Educational Progress mirror the PISA conclusion. Those test scores are at a three-decade low with only one-third of high school seniors having the math and reading skills necessary for college-level work. A recent Pew Research study confirms American parents’ awareness of the problem: 32% believe that K-12 science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education is below average and a third rate American public education as merely average. Although the United Nations’ 2023–2024 Education Index ranked the U.S. 15^th globally, 15^th is soberingly weak. Moreover, the UN’s focus was on quantity and not quality – 92% of U.S. adults have at least a high school degree, which is not an accurate index of educational excellence or achievement.

America in the early 20^th Century made universal public education a national priority and at great cost made free, compulsory education through high school the national standard. That was an unprecedented leap forward in policy and practice…, but that was 100 years ago (when State and local government spending amounted to just 5% of GDP, compared with 36% now). America today needs to face the harsh reality that its 20^th Century educational advantages have evaporated. Its national standard-setting has been abandoned in favor of localized populist policy-making that doesn’t measure up to modern 21^st Century STEM standards. It is past time for America to take the steps necessary to repair the damage. Attempts over the past 2+ decades to do so have been fruitless unsuccessful. A bipartisan Congress in 2001 set national standards in the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLBA) that mandated standardized testing to provide a measurement mechanism for educational success that stressed competition through the accumulation of data. After pushback from those who oppose “capitalist competition” (what Betsy DeVos, the former Secretary of Education, described as laissez-faire educational capitalism) and meritocratic teacher evaluation “teaching to the test,” a super-majority in Congress in 2015 enacted the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), the successor to NCLBA that eliminated nationwide testing in favor of State-by-State standard-setting. If the goal was to improve national educational achievement, ESSA has failed. States have set self-serving internal bars that fail to provide comparative means (yet alone accurate ones) for delineating educational standards or measuring success. There is no accepted accountability standard for schools, teachers, students…, or parents…, and no reformation mechanism for failure. Not only have States lagged in producing the data necessary for transparency, the variation in standard-setting means that the data has little (and often no) utility or applicability. The concept behind State-by-State (and devolving locality-by-locality) K-12 programs is to empower local educators and parents to develop and execute their own creative educational and achievement programs and to do so with Federal aid that promotes innovation and emulation. However, without the Federal oversight that the NCLBA fostered, States and localities have had an inadequate incentive to learn from their successful counterparts. They instead have adopted idiosyncratic preferences, including religious, political and personal ones, that do not either measure or further success for future generations.

America has proven that the best way to foster quality indeed is through “capitalist competition.” Educational success necessarily requires measurement mechanisms, whether by comparative testing or standardized achievement scoring. Graduation rates themselves are valueless as are State-sponsored methodologies designed to appease rather than inform. State governments in fact have chosen educational policies that amount to populist vote-buying, the principal example of which is educational voucher programs that give parents a Federal-and-State-funded subsidy to choose among private schools, religious schools and home-schooling, virtually all of which dispense with quality standards and comparative measurements. For example, the model adopted by Arizona, Arkansas, Florida and Utah (with Texas and Tennessee following in 2026) provides vouchers to all families irrespective of need, income or available choices. As The Economist recently pointed out (while criticizing the Florida voucher program), “most states (but not Florida) require homeschoolers to teach core subjects like math, reading, and history, [but] in practice don’t enforce it,” with Jon Valant of the Brookings Institution adding that “I don’t see why we should be using public funds to pay for an education that lacks real quality control.”

The goal of educational voucher programs, charter-schooling, private-schooling and home-schooling is to foster innovation through choice – that is, to seek excellence by disrupting America’s outdated K-12 public school template. However, without a method for determining relative success, no alternative has (yet) delivered on the promise of improved education, most evidently when mixed with State and local child-education prejudices preferences. AI, however, is likely to change that calculus with personalized learning that both teaches and assesses individual student understanding, adjusting difficulty, pacing, and explanatory approaches to match each student’s skills and needs. Significantly, AI educational tools also will provide real-time comparative performance data. The inevitable(?) local reallocation of Federal and State funding to integrate AI technology into the educational process will both enhance and, to a significant extent, replace human teaching by demonstrating how funding might more successfully be utilized at all levels of education for public-, charter-, private- and home-schooling. As the Hoover Institution’s Education Futures Council has noted, the widespread adoption of school choice is making it possible for parents, especially low-income parents, to choose among public schools, charter schools, private schools, school vouchers, and other funding mechanisms that “follow the child” rather than having the child “follow the zip code.” The goal is to create a more effective and responsive system for all students…, and AI may well provide the ideal mechanism for determining how best to do so.

Finally (from a good friend)