The Dumbing Down of K-12 Education in America

The inability of U.S. students to perform on par with the majority of other developed nations should cause alarm, given its implications for America’s global leadership. Instead, while other countries take their K-12 education seriously, American leaders are satisfied with pumping more money into an outdated system that continues to fail students and produces mediocre results.

Here’s the sad truth. Twenty-five countries outperform U.S. K-12 students. Those leading the way are China, Hong Kong, Finland, Singapore, South Korea, Japan, and Canada. China’s students not only place first overall, but they dominate each individual subject as well. U.S. students straggle in at 33rd in math, 23rd in science, and 17th in reading.

Of course, you wouldn’t learn this listening to the rhetoric coming from our political and educational leaders. Instead, they tout data that ranks U.S. students against other American students, states boast about their performance relative to other states, and school districts flaunt two percent gains in graduation rates.

The reality is even worse than the weak performance on average. The majority of U.S. public school students do not achieve grade level proficiency. The Nation’s Report Card reveals that only 28.7 percent of 4th-graders, 26.4 percent of 8th-graders, and a mere 22.8 percent of 12th-graders reach basic proficiency levels averaged across seven subjects (civics, geography, mathematics, reading, science, U.S. history, and writing) on the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests. In other words, over 71 percent of our students lack basic academic proficiencies at the end of their 13-year K-12 schooling.

At a time in history when more learning and skill development are needed, the opposite has occurred. As witnessed throughout the 2020-2021 school year, teacher unions led the charge in our government-funded and run K-12 public education system to make things worse. Putting partisan politics and self-promotion ahead of student learning, they refused to allow teachers to return to their classrooms until outlandish demands are met — including moratoriums on charter schools, defunding the police, and Medicare for all.

Furthermore, the school week was reduced from five days to four days a week, with instruction only provided a few hours a day remotely. When in-person school finally resumed after an entire calendar year, the low norm accepted by multiple governors was a mere 30 percent of pre-pandemic instruction hours — e.g., two-and-a-half-hour school days, four days a week.  READ MORE...