With the success of the early twentieth century grassroots “High School Movement,” the U.S. led all rich and industrialized countries in mass secondary education throughout much of the twentieth century. What’s particularly remarkable is that the U.S. expanded secondary access at a time when the country was receiving large numbers of immigrants. Education was seen as a means of absorbing and integrating relatively uneducated immigrants into the U.S. economy and society. The higher educational attainment of U.S. workers over counterparts elsewhere was a key factor in the U.S.’s economic growth and preeminence in the twentieth century.    

What’s less clear is why, despite spending double the average of other OECD countries on education, student proficiency levels have stagnated or declined since the early 1990s. Compared with other countries, the U.S. is losing ground. The OECD’s latest Program for International Student Assessment, or so-called PISA scores, showed the U.S. in 16th place out of 81 countries in science, 34^th in math, and 20^th in  reading. East Asian countries typically have the highest rankings. 

The U.S. decline is particularly evident in another OECD assessment that measures adult literacy and numeracy skills in advanced economies. In a comparison between the oldest generation — those born from 1947 to 1957 — and those born from 1988 to 1996, the “U.S. gains are especially weak.” The U.S. was dead last among 26 countries on math gains, and second to last on literacy gains by the younger generation. Only 45% of U.S. adults read at 6^th grade level or above. 

Many reasons have been advanced to explain the decline, from low teacher pay compared to other advanced economies to local funding structures advantaging schools in wealthier suburbs while handicapping those in poorer areas. Some experts have focused on cultural differences. Asian educational curricula are often highly structural and focused on core subjects. National exams are central to student evaluation and university achievement, motivating intense preparation that also spills over when students take PISA tests. 

Others point to the dramatic gap between high and low achievement in the U.S., a gap that has widened in the past decade or so.  As many low achievers come from economically disadvantaged areas, that would reinforce the “class” explanation. “Students from low-income backgrounds who fall drastically behind…represent a far larger portion of the population” than in other countries.

Government Efforts to Boost Education

Different administrations have tried to stem the decline: George W. Bush had his “No Child Left Behind” program while Barack Obama initiated several programs including “Every Student Succeeds” and “Race to the Top.” The new Stanford report “underscores that many districts have experienced a long-term slump in student achievement, not just a blip during the pandemic.” Since the pandemic, scores have “inched” up in reading and “climbed more steadily” in math, but the advancements are not enough to undo the longer-term decline. In a third of school districts, today’s eight-graders are reading a full grade level below where they were in 2015. Even in the richest districts, “more than half [of students] have lower test scores compared with a decade ago.”  The districts with the least improvement are middle income areas. Poorer areas benefitted from pandemic assistance, and parents in the richer areas stepped in to pay for tutorial support. 

The Stanford report points to changes that occurred in 2015 when Congress dialed back on George W. Bush’s 2002 No Child Left Behind. With the post-2015 changes, annual testing requirements in reading and math were maintained, but states had more flexibility to design their assessments and school rating systems. The Stanford report suggests the changes reduced the pressures on teachers and schools to improve students’ performance.  Another detrimental factor is the proliferation of internet devices. Students now say they are constantly online, which is reinforced by the fact that schools are providing students with tablets and laptops as early as kindergarten. Many students say they no longer or hardly ever “read for fun.” 

A movement to ban mobile phones in the classroom is gathering momentum. These devices are seen as a distraction inhibiting learning. Worried that AI is also preventing students from developing critical skills such as writing, some high school and university teachers are requiring students to write their essays in class without access to any devices. Chatbots can easily produce well-written essays on any subject, and students are increasingly using AI to do their homework. 

But technology doesn’t completely explain the decline in reading scores. An academic study of reading habits of Americans between 2004 and 2024 found that the loss of reading was not evenly spread across the U.S. The steeper drops were among those with lower income or educational attainment and those in rural areas. Moreover, those who continued to read spent more time doing so in recent years.

Other Measures Are Needed

Raising teacher pay could draw better candidates and raise teacher retention. Average teacher pay in the U.S. is above the OECD median but below many of the top European and Asian countries with which the U.S. competes. Teachers’ real earnings have declined on average by 5% since 2017.  Despite better benefits than many professions, U.S. teachers face a record 26.6% pay penalty in 2023 compared to other college-educated professionals who are seeing their pay rise faster, according to the Economic Policy Institute. (The Institute defines a pay penalty as the regression-adjusted gap between the weekly wages of teachers and college graduates working in other professions.) Teacher pay also varies greatly from state to state, with those in the Northwest plus California providing higher pay compared to poorer states. There is evidence that higher teacher pay leads to better student performance, in part by attracting top graduates to the teaching profession. A Harvard study found that students taught by high quality teachers are also more likely to go to college and live in better neighborhoods, and for female students, less likely to have children as teenagers.      

Other ideas include expanding “high dosage” tutoring in public schools.  Such tutoring has been shown to increase student performance. Wealthy parents have long relied on tutoring to boost the achievement of their children. As mentioned, the federal government paid for tutoring in public education during the pandemic, which boosted student performance. Federal support stopped, however, when schools reopened.  Some have proposed that the Federal government could help support tutoring in public schools by paying for college students to tutor through AmeriCorps and work-study programs.

Allowing families more choices to select charter schools, public school district programs, or specialized schools through a single application process has been successful in the District of Columbia in boosting student attendance and parental satisfaction. DC students’ performance on state tests is showing significant improvement, but scores still fall short of what is considered proficiency for their grade level. 

Finally, the improvement in reading scores in Mississippi, one of the poorest states, shows that advances are possible. Fourth graders’ reading scores improved by nine points in Mississippi from 2013 to 2022, while over the same period Maryland fourth graders’ reading levels fell by 20 points.   Mississippi implemented a multifaceted strategy that focused on teacher training along with investing in phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and reading comprehension. Students had to repeat third grade if they failed to meet reading standards. Alabama and Louisiana adopted similar measures and have also seen gains in K-4 reading scores. However, the early success in fourth-grade reading has not translated into similar gains in eighth-grade reading. Continued success will require additional efforts throughout the course of primary and secondary education for students to maintain proficiency.  

Collateral Damage

The U.S. is increasingly unequal, and the education system appears to be aggravating rather than helping to alleviate the problem. The recent National Assessment report revealed that the achievement gap between the nation’s highest- and lowest-performing students has grown steadily for over a decade. Vanderbilt University researchers have found that high-achieving students from the wealthiest 20% of U.S. families are six times more likely to study advanced coursework than equally high-performing students from the poorest 20%. The inequality persists at the university level: Children with parents in the top 1% of the income distribution are 77 times more likely to attend an elite university than children from the bottom 20% of the income distribution, according to Harvard researchers. Opening the doors of elite institutions to those less fortunate could increase social mobility. When students from the bottom 20% attend elite universities, their lifetime earnings end up equaling those from the top 1%. Harvard research found that some less selective universities such as City College of New York also have a good record of helping students from low-income families achieve lifetime success. A crucial factor is the personalized help that such universities provide disadvantaged students.

Forging New Pathways

The emphasis on sending all students to colleges and universities has squeezed vocational education despite many students saying they don’t want higher education. In Europe, classroom learning is blended with hands-on workplace training, which U.S. educators now see as the superior approach. Vocational education has been rebranded as “career and technical education” (CTE) to highlight its role in both college and career readiness, and to reduce the stigma attached to vocational education. Instead of providing only entry-level workforce preparation, CTE includes “academic, technical, and employability knowledge and skills to succeed regardless of postsecondary pursuits.” There are huge advantages for schools offering CTE: “better attendance, advanced STEM course enrollment, improved standardized test performance, and increased high school graduation rates.” Connecting school with training and potential employment does wonders for student motivation. CTE programs often include workplace employment experiences. 

Student and parental interest in CFE programs is surging, but there are teacher shortages in key areas such as manufacturing, IT, health science, and STEM CTE, limiting the programs’ attractiveness. Most states have technical schools or community colleges offering post-secondary programs. The real problem is capacity: With 2.9 million openings each year for new skilled workers, there are only 1.25 million newly trained workers coming through colleges, trade schools, and registered apprenticeships. 

Preparing for the Worst

Some companies are already laying off workers, anticipating that the need for employees will be less when AI comes fully online. While Dario Amodei, chief executive of the AI firm Anthropic, has warned that nearly half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in tech, finance, law, and consulting could be replaced or eliminated by AI, others, including many economists, caution that it may take a long time before AI supplants humans across all fields. In 2016, internet founder Geoffrey Hinton recommended against training new radiologists because AI models would soon read x-rays more accurately than trained humans could. Ten years later, Hinton has shown to be partly right: X-rays are routinely processed by AI, but the number of radiologists has also increased. These technological advancements have allowed them more time to consult with patients and doctors and to refine diagnoses along with developing new solutions. But, in other fields, such as computer programming, there’s likely to be more job destruction. 

For those whose jobs are eliminated, retraining is more successful if they have the foundational skills — literacy, numeracy, and technical basis. Even in the absence of job losses, retraining can benefit individuals, equipping them for better jobs, as well as businesses who want to retain their workers. If the most pessimistic forecasts turn out to be correct and AI eliminates millions of jobs, then governments will need to step in with financial support for those out of work while new jobs surface. Retraining will likely be important for qualifying for those new jobs. In any case, successful retraining necessitates a solid foundation of transferable skills learned at school and on the job.  

The early twentieth century high school movement was a grassroots movement that drew on  earlier efforts, such as the nineteenth century Common School movement, to expand educational access to a wider swath of the citizenry — not just for economic benefits but also to build a stronger democracy. For the educational activists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, “Republics have been among the least stable forms of government and were always collapsing from their internal antagonisms and self-seeking citizens.” Just as the high school movement prepared the U.S. for the economic and social challenges of the second half of the twentieth century, it might be time for a revival if the “American Century” is to survive into the twenty-first century.