Kerby Anderson

One of my recent in-studio guests had a rags-to-riches story that was one more example of achieving the American dream, like the one we heard recently for J.D. Vance. My guest attributed his success to education and is a strong proponent of the American educational system. But he also acknowledged that education in America faces many challenges.

Earlier this year, I wrote a commentary about the 1983 assessment of American education from the National Commission on Excellence in Education. The panel lamented: “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might have viewed it as an act of war.”

Forty years later, the state of education in America seems worse even though we spend more on education per capita than just about any other country in the world. Not so long ago, the US was producing the best and brightest students in the world. Now, they are about average in science and reading and below average in math.

As a nation, we don’t even know our history or basic political facts. A study done by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation discovered that only one in three (36%) Americans could pass the U.S. citizenship test.

During the recent Republican National Convention, we heard many speakers suggest school choice might be a solution. At a previous Republican Convention, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice observed that, “when I can look at your zip code and I can tell whether you’re going to get a good education, we’ve got a real problem.” It is unlikely that school choice will be mentioned positively in the upcoming Democratic National Convention.

An important issue in this election is how we can meet the education challenges before us.