Christina Villegas has written an excellent and very important article but the problems she cites go way deeper into the present and more importantly the future of America and the world.
The dumbing down of America's schools and our students has created several generations of progressively less well educated Americans.
Once America recovers the political will to reverse this horrible trend where will the necessary well-educated people come from to initiate and carry out the reversal? We will need many thousands of great teachers. Where will we find them?
America has been the gravitational center of world freedom for a couple of hundred years. That center has now lost a large portion of its mass. What is going to replace this crucial centering mass? China and Russia? Their core education is way ahead of ours.
So while "the plan" has dawdled along waiting for the normies to realize what's going on, a generation of American children has been sacrificed to leftist, radical progressive ideology. That generation will be seen to be very important to the preservation of America's role at the center of world freedom. And it is gone.
The learning years are a physiological reality. You can't get them back once they've been squandered. Mathematics is taught to young eager minds for the reason that those minds are able to absorb mathematics. We don't teach maths to middle aged folks, do we?
So we need to get the damn plan moving. Even a crash program with a complete reversal of teaching priorities will not suffice to replace what we've allowed to slip away. Time does not come back. Youth does not return.
https://americanmind.org/salvo/the-purposeful-degradation-of-americas-schools/
What about rethinking education? Do kids really need school for learning or is it for socializing? I'm far from a genius yet i work in a technical field and i developed all these skills on my own, outside of school, using online resources and then i have continued to improve my skills by working with and learning from other professionals. Yes young kids need supervision but once they're a bit older i think smart kids can do self study. There's also a lot of people in school who really shouldn't be, they simply don't have the aptitude for that type of learning, as these kids get older they should probably go into vocational training.
THIS- the public government institutions weren't designed to educate, they were purposely designed to create compliant factory workers, ready for the "inevitable" consolidation with communism. To replace family and church with state and government. Those are direct words from the designers of the US school system, fervent Humanists who wrote quite a bit and even testified to such in front of Congress at the time, just to show how long things have been compromised.
These kinds of scores aren't going to lead the free world.
The most recent PISA results, from 2015, placed the U.S. an unimpressive 38th out of 71 countries in math and 24th in science. Among the 35 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which sponsors the PISA initiative, the U.S. ranked 30th in math and 19th in science.