Americans Unite Against Making the Country Better

In the 1990s and 2000s we had a bunch of Federal reforms aimed at making public schools better, most notably "No Child Left Behind." As measured by test scores, students started getting better.

But much of America hated it, including leftists who hate standardized tests and conservatives who hate Federal interference in public education. So in 2015 we got the Every Student Succeeds Act, which dropped all the requirements for recipients of Federal funding that were driving the pressure.

It was a paradigmatic case of how, in America, political agendas can wreck any program, not matter how beneficial.

Test scores started to fall, and then in the pandemic they plunged.

When they came back only modestly after the pandemic, people began shouting about this, and now we once again have a lot of discourse around student test scores. But the Feds won't be stepping in, and it is up to the states to enact programs like the one in Mississippi to get test scores back up.

With the huge headwind created by the vast spread of short-form video and other smartphone distractions, it is going to be very hard to get students reading again. But, hey, we have AI for that, right?