(Getty Images) Imagine if only 22 percent of graduating military cadets met standards in strategic planning, or if only 35 percent of new pilots could demonstrate proficiency in reading flight instruments. Surely, the nation would demand immediate action.
Yet when America’s schools produce equally alarming outcomes for our children, we barely blink.
The recent release of the National Assessment of Educational Progress Long-Term Trend data should have set off alarm bells in every governor’s office, every state legislature, and every school board meeting in the country. Instead, many headlines celebrated modest gains among 9-year-olds as if they signaled a turnaround. That’s like applauding a patient for opening his eyes while ignoring that he’s still in intensive care.
The reality is devastating.
Yes, 9-year-olds showed some improvement in reading and math compared with 2022. But 13-year-olds — students who should be building the academic foundation for high school and adulthood — showed virtually no progress since 2023 and remain well below their pre-pandemic performance. And we already know where that road ends.
In last year’s results, just 22 percent of America’s high school seniors were proficient in math and only 35 percent are proficient in reading. Think about that: Nearly eight out of ten graduating seniors cannot demonstrate proficiency in math. Nearly two-thirds cannot demonstrate proficiency in reading.
The more shocking fact might be that these numbers no longer shock us.
We have become the educational equivalent of passengers on a slowly sinking ship. Because the water rises inch by inch, no one notices until it’s around their knees. Every disappointing assessment is explained away as an anomaly. Every widening achievement gap becomes someone else’s problem.
Every generation of children inherits a system that performs worse than the one before it, and somehow the adults convince themselves things are getting better. They aren’t.
America spends among the most per pupil on K-12 education in the developed world, yet our outcomes consistently fail to match our investment.
On the international front, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s most recent PISA assessment, U.S. 15-year-olds scored 465 in mathematics — below the average of 472. Twenty-five education systems outperformed the U.S. in math. Even more troubling, the 2022 result represented one of the lowest math performances ever recorded for American students on the exam. Meanwhile, countries like Singapore, Japan, South Korea, and Estonia continue to produce world-leading outcomes by refusing to accept mediocrity as inevitable.
The gap isn’t merely academic. Today’s struggling reader becomes tomorrow’s worker unable to fill skilled jobs. Today’s student lacking mathematical proficiency becomes tomorrow’s engineer, entrepreneur, or technician competing in an increasingly unforgiving global economy. National security, economic competitiveness, technological leadership, and civic participation all begin with whether children can read, write, and calculate.
As the leader of the free world, America should be setting the global standard for educational excellence. Instead, we’ve become remarkably adept at managing decline.
For decades, policymakers have responded to disappointing results by proposing more spending, more bureaucracy, and more regulations — all while preserving the same monopoly structures that have produced these outcomes. Families are too often expected to wait patiently while institutions debate incremental reforms.
Children don’t have that luxury.
That’s why the Treasury Department’s recent move to advance regulations implementing the new federal scholarship tax credit program deserves far more attention than it has received.
The Federal Tax Credit Scholarship Program recognizes a simple truth: parents know their children better than any bureaucracy does. By encouraging private donations that fund scholarships for eligible students, the program gives families access to educational environments that better fit their children’s unique needs rather than forcing them into a one-size-fits-all system.
The Center for Education Reform has argued for decades that we cannot solve chronic educational failure by trapping more children inside schools that aren’t working for them. We improve outcomes by empowering families with meaningful choices and by allowing innovation, competition, and accountability to flourish.
The National Assessment for Educational Progress results should serve as a wake-up call — not because they were unexpectedly bad, but because they have become expected.
The greatest tragedy isn’t that our education system is failing. It’s that we’ve become so accustomed to failure that we’ve stopped demanding excellence. America’s children deserve better than excuses. They deserve better than complacency. And they deserve the freedom to find a school where they can succeed.
Jeanne Allen is the founder and CEO of the Center for Education Reform, dedicated to expanding educational opportunity and improving economic outcomes for all Americans.
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