Education and Soft Power

Amy Zegart at Foreign Affairs:

If education and innovation are key to the United States’ ability to project power, then the country’s prospects are on shaky ground. American K–12 education is in crisis. Students today are scoring worse on proficiency tests than they have in decades and falling behind their peers abroad. U.S. universities are struggling, too, as they face greater global competition for talent and chronic federal underinvestment in the basic research that is vital for long-term innovation.

In 2023, math and reading scores among American 13-year-olds were the lowest in decades, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Half of U.S. students could not meet their state’s proficiency requirements. And scores on the ACT, the popular college admissions test, declined for the sixth year in a row, with 70 percent of high school seniors not meeting college readiness benchmarks in math and 43 percent not meeting college readiness benchmarks in anything. Notably, these trends began before the COVID-19 pandemic.

While students in the United States fall behind, students in other countries are surging ahead. According to the Program for International Student Assessment, which tests 15-year-olds worldwide, in 2022 the United States ranked 34th in average math proficiency, behind Slovenia and Vietnam. (Reading and science rankings were higher but barely cracked the top ten and top 20, respectively.) More than a third of U.S. students scored below the baseline math proficiency level, which means they cannot compare distances between two routes or convert prices into a different currency. At the top end, only seven percent of American teens scored at the highest level of math proficiency, compared with 12 percent of test takers in Canada and 23 percent in South Korea. Even pockets of excellence inside the United States don’t fare well internationally. Massachusetts was the top-scoring U.S. state in math in 2022 but would rank just 16th in the world if it were a country. Most U.S. states rank near the global median. And the lowest-scoring state, New Mexico, is on par with Kazakhstan.