The state and local jurisdictions have clearly and without question done a horrible job educating our children. Nowhere is that clearer than in the South where Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana rank at the bottom.
What we need is not to dismantle the Department of Education but rather to strengthen it, by giving it the authority to institute a national, STEAM-focused (Science, Tech, Engineering, Arts, and Math) curriculum with standardized tests to measure progress. There’s no reason that kids in Alabama, or elsewhere, should be held back because their idiot legislators refused to fund schools or to teach evolution or fund programming classes.
Listen: I’ve worked in Big Tech for half a century. I have rarely seen kids from the Deep South in my industry (and having lived there I know there are a lot of smart kids); I can only conclude that it’s because their schools did not adequately prepare them for the tech job market.
This is not an issue of federal encroachment or wokeness or social engineering. This is about national competitiveness: while chaos rules our government India and China are quietly churning out hundreds of thousands of qualified engineering graduates every year.
We may indeed invest $500b in AI data centers (apparently, only in red states). But the only ones who will understand how to use them, at this rate, will be graduates of Tsinghua and Beijing Universities, and the Indian Institutes of Technology, while we sink into a morass of stupidity, idiot debates over meaningless issues, and mediocrity.