America's Education Crisis: A Call for Change

America's education system is facing a serious problem. Students today are not doing as well as they used to in important subjects like reading and math. This issue started before the COVID-19 pandemic, but the pandemic made things worse. The problem is not just about grades; it's about how well students can think critically and understand what they read. The decline in education is happening at the same time as a decline in democracy. People are not as good at telling fact from fiction, and this is a big problem. Social media and artificial intelligence are making it harder for people to think critically. The future of democracy depends on people being able to think for themselves and disagree in a respectful way. Policymakers are not doing enough to fix this problem. The gap between rich and poor is getting wider, and education is making this gap even bigger. The Trump administration's decision to weaken the Department of Education is a bad example of how not to solve this problem. The decline in education is having real-world consequences. For example, the vaccination rate for measles, mumps, and rubella has dropped because of misinformation. This is a public health crisis, but it's also a democracy crisis. People who want to control the agenda are taking advantage of the decline in education. Strongmen do not welcome critical thinking. They want to control what people think and stifle dissent. This is happening in countries like Russia, Hungary, and China, but it's also happening in the United States. For example, the "Stop WOKE Act" in Florida and the crusade by Christian nationalists to get the Ten Commandments into grade school classrooms are examples of this.Pulling American schools out of this downward spiral will not be easy. The U. S. education system is complex and decentralized. The urge to reform it is a constant theme of elected officials. But we've let our national leaders suck up too much attention with the right's culture wars instead of doing the hard work of understanding the problem of student underachievement. Many classic learning models still work. For example, a 2025 study found that public Montessori preschool programs provide superior early learning outcomes for children ages 3–6 than traditional programs. A small Michigan school district has reconfigured its reading program based on science and data. Its third graders have improved their English proficiency on standardized tests by 12%. In Newark, the KIPP charter network created the Evening Learning Program on weeknights for students to help make up for Covid-year losses and to help parents who have evening jobs. Technology can both help and hurt student achievement. Students now have more choice and access to quality education through both in-person and online classrooms. Learning has become more engaging for many students with innovations like incorporating gaming technology into curricula. And AI can offer promising new approaches by serving as a personalized tutor, assisting teachers with better grading and lesson planning, and helping workers learn new skills. But there's also a glaring downside to technology: It has the potential to make us dumber, conditioning us to think less and think less critically. It's time to tap that American spirit again. Since we can't rely on the White House to lead on this, it will be up to the states to rekindle those energies and skills and advance an education moonshot. We can't waste another minute. Kids grow up fast.