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More (not so) fun facts:
54% of American adults read below a 6th grade level.
21% read below a 5th grade level, which is considered functionally illiterate.
High immigration numbers don't fully explain it either, as first gen immigrants only make up about 1/3 of those with low literacy.
I'm not sure if it played out quite like that originally, though I guess there would be some people's parents thinking that way, especially in 2026. Keep in mind, NCLB was bipartisan.
In 2003, though, I read that the reality for a majority of schools is a bit more stupid, they don't understand testing and statistics at the federal level and designed a system of accountability that promoted teach-to-the-test methods, which is mostly memorization. That's because low performing schools (read: poor schools) got punished for not meeting an arbitrary test score, so it was a go to survival tactic.
Conservatives still get their desired result, though, which is an education system with minimal critical thinking practiced. Perhaps it was a poison pill, or something, given it's made Americans by and large even dumber since then (and we were already doing bad for other reasons and Reagan).
This was back in 2012ish when the Republican Party platform was the following.
"Knowledge-Based Education We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student's fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority."
Yeah, can't have it in high school because that's lib-rule college shit.
That's around when the tea party movement was taking off, so that tracks. You see the seeds of what we see today back even in 2008, too; but to bring it back to reading deficits, we've had problems long before then (which, obviously, snowball into what we see today, e.g. Florida banning sociology and such).
Ooh, I kind of forgot about the madness of schools being funded mainly by their local neighborhood, making schools in poor neighbourhoods poor. Could it be that increased segregation or relative marginalization have had an impact significant enough to bring the mean down?
That's quite correct, but it's two fold. Even if you have funding from the state and feda (which we do get to offset this effect), the home lives of these kids are generally much worse than middle and upper neighborhoods, which also brings down the mean. We're talking pollution, 80 hour work weeks, higher incarceration, etc. it all brings down the mean.
Then the feds have the gall to REDUCE funding if schools can't bring themselves to by the bootstraps? It's awful. That said, Obama admin did help a little in this regard, since at least they did listen to the educational research on this.