Commentary By Gary Wolfram
Public education in America needs reform—and badly. There is an abundance of data showing the underperformance of our nation’s public schools. For example, the results of a major cross-national test, the 2015 Program for International Student Assessment, placed American students 30th in math and 19th in science out of all 35 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, an organization of the largest advanced economies. And the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress administered by the U.S. Department of Education found that a mere 40 percent of 4th graders, 33 percent of 8th graders, and 25 percent of 12th graders were “proficient” or “advanced” in math.
That’s not to say that all public schools are bad—quite the contrary. However, ineffective education tends to center in large, urban areas. When was the last time you heard someone say they wished they could move to Detroit to send their kids to that city’s public schools? It’s a pointed question—but the answer would be just the same if you said Chicago, Atlanta, Los Angeles, or Philadelphia. This is not a single state or a single school’s problem—it is a systematic problem for the entire country.
Consider this sad reality: Our nation produces technology so advanced that I could use the phone in my pocket—which is already three generations old—to take a video of you and email it to someone in London, but at the same time we can’t seem to teach a 4th grader to read in Detroit. Does this make sense? Why have we allowed this state of affairs to arise?
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