THE CRISIS THAT NEVER ENDED!
In the Fall of 1957 the Soviet Union in quick succession launched 2 artificial satellites, Sputnik 1 and 2. This triggered a massive reappraisal of the US educational system, in regards to the effective teaching of science and mathematics in the K-12 sequence, and in college undergraduate programs. Existing textbooks were found to be wholly inadequate. Teams of university faculty wrote new textbooks for physics, biology, and chemistry courses in high schools. New introductory texts were also written by top-notch physicists for college-level courses. [However, most high school teachers teaching physics, chemistry, advanced math and biology had NEVER had a college-level course in these topics! The good texts turned out to be too advanced for many of them, and they tended to skip the “hard parts.”] Federal programs like the National Defense Education Act provided valuable scholarships and fellowships for students majoring in physics and engineering.
A number of annual educational surveys were conducted. What survives today is the so-called National Assessment of Educational Progress. Even more useful were consistent international surveys which allowed comparison of US students at every grade level to their counterparts in typical first-world, second-world and third-world nations. What survives today is the Program for International Student Assessment, which surveys 34 representative nations. [Earlier surveys compared up to 50 or 60 countries.] The results were sobering, because by the 1980s, US students were either in last place or tied for last place among all nations surveyed, in general knowledge of grade-appropriate math, science, and reading ability. During the administration of George H. W. Bush, legislators decided to implement a “crash program” to bring US children from last place to first place in international rankings. Eventually this became The Goals 2000: Educate America Act (P.L. 103-227), which was signed into law on March 31, 1994, by President Bill Clinton. It failed completely, as did the later No Child Left Behind Act. Today US K-12 students rank 27th out of 34 in math and 20th out of 34 in science.

The results are what you might expect. About 50% of science Ph. D. degrees awarded in the US are awarded to foreign-born and foreign-educated individuals, who have come to the US for their advanced degree, simply  because the US still has the best universities in the world in terms of graduate education in the sciences and engineering. They still have top-notch faculty and adequate funds for research equipment... but for how long? As you might also expect, more than  50% of science and engineering faculty in American universities now are foreign-born, and the ratio is of course increasing with time.

The US is unique among world powers in the wretched performance of its K-12 students... although Canada and Finland may be playing catch-up.


A big factor in the current situation is that for the past two decades the US has been in very rapid transition into a de facto Third World nation, with a vanishing middle class and a rapidly increasing underclass at or below the poverty line. Some detailed studies of K-12 dropout rates and causes, conducted for example by my colleague Prof. Mike Marder in the UT Physics Department, show that poverty is the only significant factor in predicting and understanding dropouts from the K-12 system.
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