Once upon a time, before World War II, American schools, from elementary through university, were the world’s envy. Year after year, the American education system, including public and private institutions, topped most, if not all, global rankings. Little wonder the post-war American economy, fed by well-educated high school and college graduates, was also a world leader.

However, with the massive buildup of the federal bureaucracy during WWII, Washington, DC, turned its sights toward the nation’s schools. Among its chief desires was to exert its influence and centralize an already successful system, then operated independently by each county and state. Gradually, through grants, favors, promises, and pressure, the post-war federal government increased its informal leverage over the individual state and local bodies tasked with controlling the nature and quality of their educational outlets. In time, a growing liberal mindset within the government led to more calls for even greater federal involvement.

As usual, increased central-government meddling led to increased bureaucracy, burdening teachers with increased administrative duties and dramatically cutting into their time and energies once devoted to students. Around the same time, Americans witnessed the number of single-parent families increase while many mothers in two-parent families joined the workforce. Participation in parent-teacher associations waned. With less parental involvement and oversight, standards and grades inevitably slipped, although slowly at first.

Then, in 1979, under the Carter Administration, the federal government created a new cabinet-level office—the federal Department of Education. Soon, new federally-mandated programs—and even more money—began flowing from Washington to each of the fifty states but with many “strings” attached. With all that money, an even more extensive and burdensome bureaucracy followed.

Gradually, programs and new directives promoting ideas and concepts like self-esteem and positive motivation competed with core educational ideas and concepts like testing, discipline, grading, and accountability—for both student and teacher. When grades and other easily measured achievement standards faltered, the answer was not increasing accountability but another federal program, more money, more strings, more paperwork, and even less accountability for all.

From the late 1970s, many of the most devoted teachers began to exit the system, discouraged by the changes in school culture (and a frightening lack of discipline). Teacher dissatisfaction rates continued to rise while colleges graduated fewer teaching candidates. Desperate for help, local school boards, under pressure and new guidelines from the Department of Education, altered their hiring standards, mediocrity ensued, and highly disruptive teacher strikes became commonplace.

Moreover, administrators lowered the qualifications for academic tenure, making it difficult to remove an underperforming teacher. According to “What Is Teacher Tenure?” an article by education.com:

Critics say that teacher tenure makes it virtually impossible to fire bad teachers. According to a recent study by The New Teacher Project (TNTP), even though 81 percent of administrators say there is a tenured teacher in their school who is performing poorly, at least half of the districts studied failed to dismiss any tenured teachers for poor performance in the two to five years the study took place. That’s because getting rid of teachers with tenure can involve years of review and bureaucratic hurdles, and can cost tens of thousands of dollars per teacher.

The new century brought even more challenges to America’s education system. Today, federally mandated policies to promote social justice concepts in the classroom tax already overburdened teaching plans. Political agendas advocating diversity, equity, and inclusion crowd out the classroom time for core subjects like reading, science, and math. Critical Race Theory pits children of color against their white classmates while transgender affirmation for students as young as five, allowing for mixed-sex use of bathrooms and locker rooms, threatens to destroy what remains of the core mission of our public schools.

Adding insult to injury, the federal response to the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted a struggling system with draconian lockdown policies, eliminating in-person learning and replacing it with a disastrous effort to implement online classroom instruction nationwide. The result is an acceleration of sinking national test scores measuring proficiency in reading and math and an increase in mental health issues for both teachers and students.

From an article published by The Epoch Times in October 2022 entitled “Decades of Student Progress Wiped Out; National Math and Reading Scores at Historic Lows: Report,” we derived the following three quotes:

Chair of the National Assessment Governing Board and former governor of North Carolina, Bev Perdue, asserts: “We are talking about a really serious erosion of children’s capacities to read and count in the next generation of the workforce. So this becomes a global economic issue for America.”

Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin declares: “We must acknowledge the glaring reality that we face together: our nation’s children have experienced catastrophic learning loss. We also must clearly recognize that the underpinnings to this catastrophic performance were decisions that were made long before we had ever heard of COVID-19.”

Finally, Dr. Vicki Alger of the Heartland Institute cautions: “We should be careful not to make COVID school closures the whole story. School closures made an already bad situation worse. Alarming proportions of students are still not proficient in the core subjects of math and reading.”

Sadly, the American education system continues to fall from its once high perch, where it defined excellence and graduated great civic and industrial leaders, down into mediocrity. It appears increasingly evident that the government of man cannot heal the crippling damage it has wrought on the classroom and, by extension, the nation.

After considering all that has happened to our schools, perhaps a historic event from 1962 is even more telling. In June that year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against school-sanctioned prayer. Many religious observers concluded, then and now, that we effectively kicked God out of the classroom and replaced Him with the federal government. Perhaps it is time to consider the words of our great God from II Chronicles 7:14, “If My people who are called by My name will humble themselves, and pray and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.”