Whole Hog Politics: Idiocracy alert

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It is easy — indeed, too easy — to see the damage that the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns did to America’s young people. 

I say “too easy” because, as the most recent estimates from Stanford University’s  Educational Opportunity Project show, damage to students’ abilities in reading and math compared to pre-pandemic levels are too obvious even for a layman to miss. 

Scores cratered in 2022, but when we saw a small rebound in 2024, there was hope that it was the beginning of a robust comeback. Instead, we see now with the 2025 numbers that it wasn’t the start of a comeback but maybe more like a dead-cat bounce. Kids are in trouble and falling further behind. 

But it is also “too easy” because the pandemic provides a convenient excuse and a catchall explanation for what is, in reality, a longer and more worrisome trend. The failure of America’s public schools can’t be pinned on any one thing — not phones, not pharmacology, not teachers’ unions, not unsafe environments and not even the lockdowns. Partisans and political addicts are prone to prefer some answers to others, but doing so blinds them to the larger, more disquieting truth.

American education has been in a phase of systemic decay for decades, and the consequences are piling up. Right now, as the global economy is yet again being reinvented by artificial intelligence and quantum computing, America’s schools are cranking out year after year of failure. Since 2015, 83 percent of districts have lost ground on reading and 70 percent have lost ground on math. 

There are lots of individual success stories to tell from districts and states that have beaten the trend, but the unmistakable truth is that the mechanism on which America has relied since 1965 to produce capable adults — universal K-12 education supported by federal tax dollars and accountable to federal standards — has failed. It won’t matter whether the United States or China wins the current struggle over which AI models run the world if Americans can’t run AI models.

Of course, those were the kinds of arguments about economic viability and the contest between great powers that launched the 1965 effort. We certainly won that round, knocking out the Soviets with a nation of doers and builders who could out-innovate their counterparts. But there is something else the matter now, too — perhaps partly as a consequence of that kind of very pragmatic thinking about education.

America’s political system is failing. We spend a lot of time here talking about the systems and institutions that are contributing to the problem: partisan primaries, an overcrowded House of Representatives, media bubbles etc. But we should not forget that the boiling hot water in which all of that is steeping is an American electorate that is less and less able to govern itself.

I have heard for most of my life from both Republicans and Democrats how America’s public schools are in crisis. They see different causes and highlight different specific problems, but on the fact that the schools are a mess, the parties tend to agree. So why would anyone be surprised that the generations of voters produced by those schools make worse and worse decisions?

It isn’t just the obvious, direct problem that schools do so little to educate students about our system of government and shared history, but that we are losing ground at the basic work of being good, productive, self-sustaining citizens.

The famous lines from Thomas Jefferson to Charles Yancey in 1816 here very much apply: 

“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilisation, it expects what never was and never will be. The functionaries of every government have propensities to command at will the liberty and property of their constituents. There is no safe deposit for these but with the people themselves; nor can they be safe with them without information. Where the press is free, and every man able to read, all is safe.” 

The new report should remind us not just that we’re losing in the short-term struggle to remain the world’s leading nation and for the betterment of the individual students facing life unprepared but also for the American idea of ordered liberty........

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