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Are you smarter than a fifth grader?
That's the provocative question put to countless contestants on a popular game show who are often stumped because they don't know basic information found in an elementary school textbook.
It's funny, but it's also a sad reflection of the poor quality of the public school system and the educational attainment of its graduates. Only one in four American adults can name all three branches of government or answer a basic math question, even with a calculator. More than a third don't know the century in which the American Revolution took place. Eighty-three percent of Americans failed a basic test on the American Revolution.
Our so-called "higher education" institutions are seeing this persistent ignorance firsthand: Hundreds of colleges across the country placed more than half of incoming students in at least one remedial course—basically teaching them high school level material, once again. Nearly 40 percent of students at two-year schools and a quarter of those at four-year schools failed to even complete their remedial classes.
Is it any wonder that millions of kids are exiting the public school system, shepherded down alternative paths by parents who are fed up with the mediocre status quo and who want a better education for their child?
The mediocrity many parents perceive in the status quo is not a new trend. April 26 is the 40th anniversary of the landmark report "A Nation at Risk," in which the National Commission on Excellence in Education warned, after an 18-month study, that our society's foundations were being "eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and as a people."
While there have been some improvements at the margins, very few would argue that, on the whole, America's schools are producing more educated and informed adults today than they were four decades ago.
The data clearly demonstrates that this mediocrity persists and has, in many cases, worsened. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), often called the "nation's report card," only 26 percent of eighth graders perform math proficiently, and only 31 percent were reading at a proficient level. And compared against the U.S.' largest economic competitors, American students rank dead last.
Schools have become job programs for adults with huge infusions of cash that do not correlate to improved education outcomes. Indeed, the school districts that spend the most per student—New York, Washington DC, New Jersey, and Vermont—consistently rank poorly. And yet when challenged, the status quo's ardent defenders inevitably resort to the same tired tactic: demanding more money.
The system is broken in many ways, but core to understanding these problems is recognizing that the government school system is a quasi-monopoly that has long benefitted from funding guarantees no matter its quality of output. Society's slide into educational mediocrity has not decreased funding; it has counterproductively increased it.
As anyone with a basic comprehension of economics—which is sadly few adults—understands, monopolies increase costs and decrease quality, because they are spared the competitive pressure that would incentivize them to decrease costs and improve quality to keep their customers.
We can continue tweaking education policy all we want, but as Thoreau said, "There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root." The evils of mediocre education need more than mere tweaks: We must address the core problem and introduce competitive pressure to improve outcomes for millions of American students.
This viewpoint is increasingly shared by elected officials across the country who are enacting so-called "school choice" bills that allow parents to direct their child's education dollars to an alternative institution like a private or micro school. As participation in these programs increases, public schools may finally feel the heat and focus on substantive improvement to benefit their students.
That outcome can't come soon enough. Today's social battles, economic challenges, entrenched political problems, and negative future outlook are all connected to the widespread ignorance that our nation's schools have enabled. Decades of mediocrity come at a steep cost.
Thomas Jefferson rightly observed that "if a nation expects to be ignorant and free... it expects what never was and never will be." America's future potential will significantly diminish if we continue to tread water in the rising tide of mediocrity.
Connor Boyack is president of Libertas Institute and the author of 40 books. Corey DeAngelis is senior fellow at the American Federation for Children. They are co-authors of the new book, Mediocrity: 40 Ways Government Schools are Failing Today's Students.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
