How could this be? What I have just described amounts to an across-the-board collapse of standards in American education over the last 40 to 45 years. All I can do is speculate on how and why that happened. Here goes...
First of all, the period I have just mentioned started when American business, riding high since the end of World War II, was challenged by Asian countries offering much cheaper manufacturing workers with the skills as high as the typical American manufacturing worker. Not long thereafter, automation began to replace Americans doing low-skill and routine work at an ever-increasing rate. This led first to a stagnation and then a fall in real wages for the average employed American worker, a steep decline in the labor participation of men in the employed workforce and an equally steep increase in the rates of childbirth among unmarried women. These trends have combined to greatly increase the proportion of children entering the first grade who live in poverty, one-parent homes and in poor health. The issues here are not simply lack of money and the things money can buy. They go much deeper to a collapse of middle class values as the middle class is demoralized and its numbers dwindle. Little wonder that school teachers believe that society has dumped all of its problems at the schoolhouse door.
Source: Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics via “Real Wages Extend Fall as Food, Oil Prices Soar”, by Brett Arends, The Wall Street Journal, June 17, 2008.
But it only begins there, before children first come to school. As globalization and automation put increasing pressure on the middle class, parents everywhere put pressure on teachers to give their children grades that would enable them to go to college. Forty years earlier, Grandma was the first in the family to finish high school. Twenty years ago, Dad was the first to go to college. Now, all the kids have to go to college. For families in which prior generations were proud to be a boilermaker or electrician, now fear and shame would come if Junior were not a professional. In other countries, grades are the result of a student’s performance on an externally graded test. Everyone gets together to help Junior meet the high standards. In the U.S., the land of second chances and wobbly standards, it is far easier to put pressure on the principal to put pressure on the teacher to give Junior the grades required to get into college. So grade inflation made rapid headway in our schools.
Second, prior to the 1970s, teachers were often the first in their family to leave the working class and to go to college. There was pride and status attached to being a teacher. But, as more and more young people became college graduates and the relative standing of teachers among college graduates declined, and more then entered graduate school, the status of teachers declined. The emancipation of women and minorities in the professional workplace opened up opportunities for talented women and minorities who would otherwise have been teachers. So the absolute quality of our incoming teachers declined. As the level of literacy of teachers starting slipping, their mastery of the content they were learning slipped with it, which had consequences for the literacy levels of their students. Further, standards in the universities these future teachers were attending slipped as grade inflation became universal in higher education too, for reasons I will get to in a moment. This, too, contributed to the steady slippage in the literacy levels of our future teachers. As literacy declined, so did mastery of content.
Then the standards movement was stolen by the accountability movement. Facing tough sanctions from the federal government for low test scores, many states lowered whatever standards they had for high school students, so they could escape the consequences of poor student performance.
Market Data 
Markets 
AI
