Twenty years after Stossel warned us, We still pay top dollar for schools that dodge standards, dodge accountability, and graduate kids who can’t read or do math.
This editorial ran in the Tuesday 13 January 2026 edition of the Moscow-Pullman Daily News.
When I was a college freshman in 1977, my physics professor stopped mid-lecture. He wasn’t frustrated with us. He was frustrated with the government school system.
He was trying to walk the class through a basic problem: a block sliding down an inclined plane. Solving it used ninth-grade geometry—specifically, that “when two parallel lines are cut by a transversal, the alternate interior angles are equal.” That geometry determines the block’s acceleration down the incline.
Most of the class didn’t recognize the rule (neither did I). So instead of teaching college physics, he had to spend class time reteaching material that used to be assumed ninth-grade knowledge. His point was blunt: this wasn’t advanced math. It was basic geometry that schools had stopped teaching.
That moment stuck with me—not because the math was hard, but because it exposed something deeper. Standards hadn’t slipped; they’d been abandoned. Ignorance became the product.
That professor wasn’t just any academic. He was a retired Navy nuclear officer who believed systems either worked or failed—and he inspired me to follow the same path. He reused exam questions and calibrated his tests with decades of data so the class average landed at 3.5.
Our class didn’t come close. The average came in under 3.0. Not a single student earned an A—including me, and I was a physics major.
As he sat in his office smoking his pipe, I asked him why no one received an A. He didn’t hesitate. “Because none of you deserved it.” It wasn’t said with anger or contempt. He didn’t grade on a curve; he graded against a standard established over decades.
I didn’t grasp its significance at the time.
Ten years later, I did. I was responsible for writing final exams at Navy Nuclear Power School. That’s when I learned where he learned his craft. With forty years of data and per-question averages and standard deviations, we could design exams that produced a grade of 3.5 ±0.15.
And yet, failure rates rose and more students washed out of the program. When that happened, fingers were pointed at the instructors.
But the problem wasn’t instruction. The distribution had changed. Decades of capable students still exerted statistical inertia in the data, masking the growing number of incoming students who simply weren’t prepared. Call it blunt but accurate: earlier generations masked the growing number of stupid students. When that balance tipped, the results became impossible to hide.
That’s not a mystery. And it’s not an accident. Twenty years ago this very month, John Stossel warned about this exact failure in Stupid in America on ABC’s 20/20.
In that segment, Stossel argued American schools fail not because kids can’t learn, but because the system rewards mediocrity and protects adults. He showed how low expectations and busywork replace real instruction, while bureaucracy blocks accountability. His conclusion was simple: more money won’t fix this. Competition and choice will.
I didn’t just observe this problem from the outside. I lived it.
From 2004–2018, I taught junior high and high school math. One class was eighth-grade Algebra I, using the 1980 Saxon Algebra I textbook. The eighth-grade final exam covered everything on today’s college SAT math section and lacked only two trigonometry questions from the ACT.
Stossel exposed the failures of government-run schools twenty years ago. Today, the results are even worse. U.S. math performance has slipped back to mid-1990s levels. American students now score below the OECD average in math— a milestone unthinkable a generation ago.
2024 NAEP scores show that 33% of eighth graders are reading at “below basic” levels, with reading scores at their lowest point on record. History and civics results are worse, with only a small fraction demonstrating basic understanding.
This collapse didn’t happen because we spent too little money. The United States ranks fifth globally in per-student K–12 spending. Yet on the most recent PISA math assessment, the U.S. ranked 33rd—next to Malta, Slovakia, and Croatia.
Money isn’t the constraint. Standards are. We spend more and get less in return. And as a reward for failure, teachers’ unions demand even more money, with no accountability attached.
Education fails slowly, then all at once. We didn’t lose rigor; we voted it away and moralized its absence. Standards matter because reality still exists, even when feelings protest. Until we restore standards—enforced standards—we’ll keep producing credentials without competence and diplomas without knowledge, then wonder why nothing works.