🌊 Inside America’s Schooling Disaster

Test scores have plummeted nationwide over the last decade. Covid lockdowns are just the start

On Mother’s Day, I watched the acclaimed and controversial documentary “Waiting for Superman” for the first time.

Unfortunately, I quickly found out it wasn’t a superhero movie. In fact, it had nothing to do with comic books. “Waiting for Superman” is a harrowing portrait of America’s failing public education system. Never did I think I would want to watch Father of the Bride Part II on Mother’s Day so badly.

The documentary follows the experiences of five kids, almost all poor and born into terrible family situations, in public schools in DC, LA, NYC, and elsewhere. Its central metaphor is that public schooling in America is like a lottery system. In some school districts, you hit the jackpot – good teachers, high standards, new facilities, and resources to get you to top colleges. But in others, including in our biggest cities, you are the loser, stuck on an assembly line that takes you to a “dropout factory,” a high school with a less-than-50% graduation rate.

The mastery – and, perhaps, cruelty – of the documentary was that it roped you into their lives so beautifully that when they got rejected from their charter schools at the end, you felt compelled to get off the couch and canvas for signatures to reform schools, and also barge down the halls of the charter schools to ensure those kids get admitted.

Then I remembered the documentary was made in 2010, which made me want to look into education policy today. For, indeed, the movie was not based purely on anecdotes; it shared some mind-boggling statistics, too:

• The US spends more per pupil than almost any other developed nation, yet ranks near the bottom in math and reading among industrialized countries;

• The difference between a great teacher and a bad teacher at any given school for a single year is an entire year’s worth of learning (great teachers do 1.5 years’ worth of learning; bad ones, 0.5);

• It is nearly impossible to fire a bad teacher in most public school districts. Of 876 districts in Illinois, 61 attempted to fire a teacher, and only one was successful;

• Nationally, only 1 in 2,500 teachers loses their license for performance reasons. By comparison, 1 in 57 doctors will lose their medical licenses, and 1 in 97 lawyers will lose their lawyers’ license;

• And in New York City, teachers accused of misconduct wait months and sometimes years for hearings while drawing full salaries at an annual cost of $100M.

Wow. Well, we’ve had 15 years to figure it out since the documentary came out. Have we made any progress?

New data from Stanford’s Educational Opportunity Project would answer that question with a resounding and depressing “no.”

Test scores have declined precipitously nationwide since around 2013, three years after the movie came out. To see this decline visually is stunning. The below charts from The New York Times (using data from the Stanford project) show just how far they’ve fallen. From 2015 to 2025, reading scores have fallen by over an entire grade level in states like Vermont. California’s scores fell behind Mississippi’s. The project did not include data from New York and Illinois, though considering their public school systems were the central villains of the documentary, we can safely conclude their trends weren’t pretty either.

So what’s happening? Why are scores in freefall?