Clearly, yet another generation of Americans is receiving substandard education and that is COMPLETELY UNACCEPTABLE in a nation as prosperous as ours. It’s not only unacceptable …it’s downright embarrassing.
The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) is an international assessment that measures the reading, mathematics, and science literacy of 15-year-old students. For the latest assessment, almost 700,000 students from 81 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) member and partner economies took the PISA test. Unlike other modern-day assessment tests, PISA questions do not measure memorization of facts. Instead, the questions measure real-world problem solving and critical thinking skills.
Highlights from the latest PISA report:
United States students ranked 16th in science and 9th in reading.
Our students ranked 28th in mathematics, which is in the bottom half of all the countries and the lowest U.S. math scores since the test was first taken in 2003. Over a third of American 15-year-olds were “low performers.” This means they were unable to do things like compare distances between two routes or convert prices into a different currency. Only seven percent of American students can do math at advanced levels. The United States had more students in the bottom group than most other industrialized OECD countries.
Students from China and India did not take the 2022 PISA test but, in 2018, China was first in all three categories.
Black and Hispanic American students performed, on average, far below Asian and white students, and American students from low-income backgrounds scored lower than the more affluent ones.
The United States spends more on elementary and secondary education than every country but Luxembourg, a small European country that is surrounded by Belgium, France and Germany.
That last one hits hard. Bad outcomes for our students are even more frustrating given that total expenditures for public elementary and secondary schools for the FY2023 school year was $947 billion.
Luckily, our universities are still considered to be the best in the world, which is why the Trump/Vance administration needs to back off its attacks on them. The top three universities on the 2025 Shanghai Ranking Consultancy’s list of the world’s best universities – Harvard, Stanford and MIT – are in the United States. In fact, we have 16 out of the top 25 spots. However, our continued success in higher education depends on the skill level of future American students. If the talent of our graduating seniors diminishes, our institutions of higher learning will have to progressively rely on foreign students to maintain their superiority (and we already rely on them heavily!).
Unsurprisingly, our politicians half-assed educational efforts have been frighteningly inadequate for decades. In the face of devastating evidence, the U.S. Congress consistently refuses to challenge failed policies or champion innovative ones.
In 2010, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released an impact study on the effectiveness of the Head Start program, which was established in 1965 as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. According to HHS, “the Head Start program promotes school readiness for children from birth to age 5 in low-income families through services that support early learning and development, health, and family well-being. Since its inception in 1965, the Head Start program has served about 39 million children and their families. In FY2022, the Head Start program was funded to serve about 833,000 children, pregnant women, and pregnant people in centers, family homes, and family childcare homes. The program is rooted in urban, suburban, and rural communities throughout the nation.”
The results of the 2010 study were alarming. Although “providing access to Head Start had a positive impact on children’s preschool experiences” and “access to Head Start had positive impacts on several aspects of children’s school readiness during their time in the program,” the “advantages children gained during their Head Start and age 4 years yielded only a few statistically significant differences in outcomes at the end of 1st grade for the sample as a whole.”
* Sidebar: While we think we have no choice but to honestly assess our current programs, we want to separate our overall verdict of the Head Start program from the many amazing people who work within it. Some of us have spent time in multiple classrooms around the nation and have found most of the Head Start employees to have huge hearts for our children and to be tireless in their dedication to them. In our minds, by not making the difficult changes necessary for them to succeed, we are failing them as much as anyone. We say these things in support of them, not as criticism of them. *
Two years later, a follow-up HHS report said this: “There were initial positive impacts from having access to Head Start, but by the end of 3rd grade there were very few impacts found for either cohort in any of the four domains of cognitive, social-emotional, health and parenting practices. The few impacts that were found did not show a clear pattern of favorable or unfavorable impacts for children.” The report continued, “No significant impacts were found for math skills, pre-writing, children’s promotion, or teacher report of children’s school accomplishments or abilities in any year.”
This analysis was disheartening to say the least, but more disturbing was the reaction of the Obama Administration and the U.S. Congress – which both decided to just throw more money at the problem. Despite the discouraging evidence in the 2010 study, Congress authorized $8.2 billion for Head Start in 2011, almost a billion more than they allocated in 2010. Combined, from 1970 to 2000, the budgets for Title I and Head Start grew in inflation-adjusted dollars from $1.7 billion to $13.8 billion. The combined budget for 2010 for both was $21.7 billion.
“Head Start remains a key part of the Obama Administration’s strategic focus on early learning,” said HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius at the time. She continued, “Still, for Head Start to achieve its full potential, we must improve its quality and promote high standards across all early childhood programs.” Ya think? Ms. Sebelius, with all due respect, that was the understatement of the year. When you made that statement, Head Start had already had 47 years and nine presidents to prove its effectiveness.
In April 2019 – ten years after that devastating HHS impact study – researchers from Brown University released a study that replicated and extended Harvard professor David Deming’s 2009 evaluation of Head Start’s life-cycle skill formation impacts (in 2009, Professor Deming’s study found that attending a Head Start program had lasting positive impacts into early childhood). The researchers from Brown found that after “extending the measurement interval for Deming’s adulthood outcomes, we found no statistically significant impacts on earnings and mixed evidence of impacts on other adult outcomes. Applying Deming’s sibling comparison framework to more recent birth cohorts born to CNSLY mothers (mothers who participated in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 Children and Young Adults) revealed mostly negative Head Start impacts. Combining all cohorts shows generally null impacts on school-age and early adulthood outcomes.”
Regardless, these damaging assessments of Head Start weren’t even a speed bump for the Trump and Biden administrations, or the U.S. Congress. For FY2019, Congress appropriated $10 billion for programs under the Head Start Act; $10.6 billion for FY2020, plus an additional $750 million under the CARES Act; $10.7 billion for FY2021; $11 million for FY2022; $12 million for FY2023; $12.27 billion for FY2024; and $12.5 billion for FY2025.
Lackluster performance is not the only problem that plagues Head Start. In December 2024, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a disastrous report outlining significant fiscal mismanagement at Head Start, as well as severe instances of neglect and negligence that put children’s well-being at risk. For the report, the GAO analyzed Head Start programs that were operating under interim management (when a Head Start program loses its federal grant due to poor performance, interim managers are appointed by the Office of Head Start (OHS) to run the program until a new grant recipient can be placed).
The GAO found that “OHS skipped crucial monitoring steps and did not enforce certain standards for programs under interim management for at least the last five school years. For example, it did not monitor half of the 28 programs due for monitoring between January 2020 and June 2024, leaving it unaware of documented and potential child safety incidents and other concerns. Further, OHS had neither assessed classroom quality nor monitored finances for all programs under interim management, both of which are required under the Head Start Act. Lastly, OHS officials stated that they had never enforced enrollment standards or required Head Start funds to be returned for children not served. In the 2022- 2023 school year, GAO found that fewer than half of the nearly 4,000 Head Start seats available in programs under interim management were filled.” These programs spent 72 percent of the total amount of taxpayer-funded grants, even though their enrollment was just 47 percent.
The incompetence and irresponsibility involved in how that money was spent is preposterous. For example, one manager “agreed to pay rent that was more than four times what the current grant recipient paid for classroom space in the local area” while, at another site, “one local staff person described carefully scrutinizing invoices and urging the interim manager’s staff to contest charges. This staff person said they insisted that the program solicit additional bids rather than accept the landlord’s quote for food service, which the staff person said ultimately saved the program nearly a million dollars per year.” Meanwhile, the programs “frequently ran out of diapers, baby wipes, soap, and other essentials,” which forced teachers to “purchase these items with their own money.”
But money is inconsequential compared to the negligence the analysis uncovered. “One former center director described,” for instance, “witnessing a teacher grab a child by the hood of their coat and slam them to the ground. The former center director said that the interim program director instructed them to not report the incident or fire the teacher.” At another site, a former local center director said that “the interim manager instructed her not to inform parents that environmental testing had revealed mold in two classrooms, even though children and staff had developed respiratory symptoms, and one child had a known allergy to mold.”