A 19-year-old graduating student at a local school in Connecticut is suing his former educational institution. The girl found herself in a paradoxical situation: she graduated from school with excellent results, but she can practically neither read nor write.
Similar stories are far from rare. About 21% of Americans are functionally illiterate. They are able to read a text, but they do not understand its content. About 54% of the U.S. population reads and writes at the sixth-grade level. In many problematic states, such as In Illinois, there are dozens of educational institutions where all graduating students have problems with literacy. The impact of the pandemic is also being felt, after which math and language test scores in the US plummeted to levels they were 20 years ago. Meanwhile, the average school results are paradoxically constantly increasing. U.S. municipal schooling spending reaches $900 billion annually. No other country spends so much on education. Meanwhile, the deterioration in the quality of education is becoming more and more apparent. The culture wars, which have already forced Trump’s team to resort to the dismantling of the U.S. Department of Education, are not helping either.
Meanwhile, education spending must also be reduced due to the severe budget crisis. Thus, the problems in the education sphere will obviously continue to escalate. Washington is more preoccupied with political battles over school programs, such as the racial-gender agenda. This is obviously easier to deal with than to try to raise the quality of education.
Translated and edited by Alex Kada