America in the Age of Trump: A Bipartisan Guide

Praise for America in the Age of Trump

"America in the Age of Trump is must reading for anyone interested in politics and governing or in the current dysfunction of our political system. Douglas Schoen and Jessica Tarlov are great scholars and practitioners of American politics. They are two of the country’s finest pollsters and strategists who have seen it all—from advising presidents in the White House to analyzing the voters in the precincts across America.

The polarization in this country today is explained clearly, and the voter anger that elected Donald Trump our 45th president and the crises he faces will be more easily understood. Every citizen who cares about this extraordinary country of ours should read this book and be enlightened about what’s going on around them."

—ED ROLLINS, former assistant to President Reagan for political and governmental affairs, and former co-chairman to the National Republican Congressional Committee

"Page after page, I found myself arguing with this book, but it was a good argument to have. America in the Age of Trump is a terrific read, engaging and richly sourced, a provocative take on big, controversial issues and on political leaders from Obama to Trump—and nearly everyone else in between. It is especially powerful regarding the loss of trust in institutions. You may disagree with some or much of it, as I do, but it will challenge you to think critically about your own views and justify your idea of the American future."

—BOB SHRUM, Democratic strategist and the Carmen H. and Louis Warschaw Chair in Practical Politics at the University of Southern California

No bombast, no bull feathers. All real solutions for people of all political stripes worried that America is on the wrong track thanks to never-ending fighting inside the deep political divide in Washington. Schoen and Tarlov, two of the best pollsters and political thinkers, lay out practical, effective ideas for how President Trump’s America can get back its ‘Can-Do’ spirit.

—JUAN WILLIAMS, political analyst at Fox News Channel, co-host of The Five, and columnist for The Hill

© 2017, 2018 by Douglas E. Schoen and Jessica Tarlov

Preface © 2018 by Douglas E. Schoen and Jessica Tarlov

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First American edition published in 2017 by Encounter Books, an activity of Encounter for Culture and Education, Inc., a nonprofit, tax exempt corporation.

Encounter Books website address: www.encounterbooks.com

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48‒1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

First paperback edition published in 2018.

THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGUED

THE HARDCOVER EDITION AS FOLLOWS:

Names: Schoen, Douglas E., 1953– author. | Tarlov, Jessica, 1984– author.

Title: America in the age of Trump: opportunities and oppositions in an unsettled world / by Douglas E. Schoen and Jessica Tarlov.

Description: New York: Encounter Books, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2017001982 (print) | LCCN 2017023756 (ebook) | ISBN 9781641770132 (Ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Political culture—United States. | Political ethics—United States. | Trust—United States. | Public opinion—United States. |

United States—Politics and government—Public opinion. |

United States—Politics and government—21st century.

Classification: LCC JK1726 (ebook) | LCC JK1726 .S365 2017 (print) | DDC 320.60973—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017001982

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CONTENTS

Preface to the Paperback Edition

Introduction: The Atmosphere Is Collapsing

1The Loss of Trust and Optimism

2The Failure of Politics

3The Crisis of Values

4Poverty and the Underclass

5The Racial Divide

6Crime, Policing, and Incarceration

7Educational Failure

8The Hollow Economy: Inequality and the Loss of Mobility

9America’s Competitive Decline—and How to Reverse It

10The Health Care and Entitlements Albatross

11National Security Emergency

12The Endangered American Idea

Afterword

Notes

Index

PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION

When this book was first published, in July 2017, Donald Trump had been president for less than six months, and the novelty—and shock—of his ascendancy to the White House was still fresh. Analyses of why and how Trump had won and Hillary Clinton had lost were still appearing; the Trump presidency was regarded as an unfathomable break from American precedents and history. And in many ways, that impression holds today, more than a year later. But it is also true that Americans, whatever their political persuasion, have adjusted to the reality of Trump in the White House. You can get used to anything, an old British saying has it, and the United States has gotten used to the idea that Donald Trump is president.

That doesn’t mean that this new reality is tranquil or calm—far from it. Trump’s presidency, however long it lasts, seems destined to be the most contentious, polarizing, and politically furious in the history of our country. Supporters, opponents, and those many Americans somewhere in the middle all have their views. All have become accustomed to the sense that in this presidency, each day is unwritten. Surprises abound.

Regardless of whether one is or was a Trump supporter or a Trump opponent, objectivity demands an important concession: he inherited, as president, a country powerful and successful but also deeply troubled, polarized, and, in at least several key areas, increasingly dysfunctional. It was that country—whose problems did not originate with Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, though Obama contributed to them—that we attempted to diagnose in the first edition of this book, on the eve of the Trump presidency. Our analysis concluded that America was a nation in decline—not a decline that couldn’t be reversed, but a decline nonetheless, and one likely to accelerate in the absence of major reform, politically, socially, and even culturally.

In the original introduction to this book, which follows, we identified a number of crises affecting American life, including a crisis of trust in America’s governing institutions and a crisis of governance at the political level—crises that reflected and reinforced one another. And, relatedly, we declared ten propositions about the state of the country, which we’ll reproduce here without elaboration. (Each is discussed fully in the introduction.)

•The American education system is a failure at every level.

•By traditional indicators, the American economy is recovering—but wages are stagnant, the middle class is hollowing out, and the American dream is on life support.

•We are approaching a national emergency of military readiness and preparedness in a world of mounting security threats.

•The American criminal justice system properly punishes those who commit serious crimes, but it is also sentencing generations of young men guilty of less serious offenses to doomed futures—exacerbating the deepening problems of the underclass.

•We have a health care and entitlement crisis that will only get worse with the aging of the population.

•Never in American history has the public had such little faith in our institutions.

•The United States faces a crisis of values.

•The structure of the American family is in collapse—across racial groups.

•The country faces the most troubling vacuum of political leadership in its history.

•The future of the American idea is very much in question.

A new edition of this book marks an appropriate moment to step back and assess briefly how these arguments stand up and what developments have occurred since that might have changed the equation. Has progress been made in any of the areas that we warned about?

We can start with the easy part: we don’t see any reason to dial down our warnings about our ten propositions, or about our generally worried tone for the nation’s future. All of the areas identified above remain of gravest concern. However, it is also true that in some areas, there are developments worth reporting. America in the Age of Trump is a big book, both in scope and size; its 12 chapters cover enormous ground regarding argument and policy detail, along with a substantial amount of suggestions for reforms, policy and otherwise. We won’t go through them all—that would require another book—but we’d like to focus on some notable areas, both to reiterate proposals and warnings and, in some cases, to mark signs of progress.

The most logical area to start with is the economy, an area that President Trump has touted aggressively for more than a year, and with some justification. While it is true that Obama handed over an economy that had been growing for the most consecutive quarters in history, Obama’s growth rates were the weakest for a sustained recovery in the nation’s history. Obama deserves credit for shepherding the United States out of the financial crisis and arresting the cycle of recession and job loss, but he was never able to reignite growth in any substantial way. Annual GDP growth under Obama never crossed the 3 percent threshold considered a benchmark by many economists.

Under Trump, however, growth is rocketing. The U.S. Economy Suddenly Looks Like It’s Unstoppable, a June 1, 2018, CNBC story headlined. And indeed, we are in the midst of the most robust period of GDP growth in many years, one that has also created encouraging jobs reports and wage growth. Unemployment stands at just 3.8 percent, the lowest level since 2000.¹ Economists are revising upward their growth forecasts for the rest of the year, to above 4 percent. And the black unemployment rate, at 5.9 percent in May 2018, was the lowest since the government began tracking it in 1972.²

How much has Trump done to bring this about? That will remain a subject of debate, as economic ledgers from presidency to presidency always are. Democrats and Obama supporters will claim that Obama is the father of this economic boom, but if that is really true, they need to explain why, after the economy ceased shrinking in 2009—nine years ago—it never saw the growth that it is seeing now. Something else seems to be at play.

One key factor: the administration’s unambiguous signaling to the private sector that it has a friend in Washington. The most dramatic step in this regard was Trump’s long-pledged cut to the U.S. corporate tax rate, which had stood at a crippling 35 percent, far higher than most of our global competitors. We called for reducing the rate to no more than 25 percent while closing loopholes where possible. The Trump tax reform, passed in December 2017, slashed the corporate rate to 21 percent, a tremendous achievement and one that seems to be spurring hiring.

We also wanted to see the United States move to a territorial tax system that greatly reduces the tax burden on corporate profits earned overseas. The tax reform has taken major steps in this direction. Foreign revenue will now be taxed at a minimum. As Mihir Desai of the Harvard Business School puts it, the move to a territorial system will mean that American corporations don’t have a reason to leave anymore; and when they go compete in other countries, they’re on a level playing field with them because currently they’re facing this kind of tax when they come back home, which other corporations like German corporations or Chinese corporations don’t face, and so that is a big advantage of territoriality.³

In our economy chapter, we stressed an approach centered on encouraging growth and expanding opportunity. Our guess is that the Trump tax cuts and especially the administration’s regulatory reforms have played a crucial role in the budding boom that we’re seeing. Trump’s tax cuts have prompted hundreds of companies to give out $2,000 bonuses and wage hikes.⁴ They have also ignited capital spending, which has increased among S&P 500 companies by 39 percent, the fastest rate in seven years.⁵ And while the administration did not quite kill the marriage penalty—as it promised to do, and as we urged—the levy has been eliminated except for couples earning more than $600,000.

We felt strongly, and still do, that increasing the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is fundamental to expanding opportunity and promoting equity—while also encouraging and rewarding work. Unfortunately, the EITC has not been addressed. Nor has the minimum wage been increased. In both these areas, the administration can do more.

We urged aggressive regulatory reform, and the administration has been aggressively, one might even say historically, active on this front, rolling back regulations with a speed and sweep not seen in at least a generation. Trump’s administration has added fewer regulatory pages to the Federal Register since 1993, Bill Clinton’s first year in office. Trump has issued an executive order requiring the elimination of two regulations for each new one created. The administration claims to be on track for a below-zero regulatory budget, meaning no increase in regulatory costs. It has its eye on streamlining further regulations governing small businesses and infrastructure development.

We urged vigorous energy exploration, and the administration has also pursued this goal, approving access to the Dakota Access and Keystone XL Pipelines, which should have significant economic impact. The Interior Department is streamlining the federal leasing process for the oil and gas industries. And the administration has drafted a plan—sure to meet vigorous opposition—for expanding oil and gas drilling in U.S. continental waters.⁶

On infrastructure reform, we argued for an incremental and targeted approach, recognizing the fact that America’s greatest infrastructure needs are for upgrade and repair, not wholesale new building—an approach that probably won’t have much appeal for Trump, who prefers to build big or not build at all, and who pledged a massive infrastructure investment during the campaign. So far, though, nothing has come of those plans, and in general things have been quiet on the infrastructure front, at least at the federal level.

On balance, then, we are encouraged by the growth-and-opportunity focus of the Trump administration.

In America in the Age of Trump, we wrote that plans to reform American education should include many components, such as an emphasis on school and teacher accountability (including performance-based pay); the importance of high-quality, content-rich curricula; and giving parents a full range of education choices, including vouchers and charter schools. But the overarching principle that should guide these reforms is that of a market-based education system, with parents as the primary decision-makers.

We doubt very much that the administration will take steps in opposition to such goals. The question will only be what actions it takes, and how strongly it supports these actions, to further these aims. The administration’s proposed budget calls for a $1.1 billion investment into school choice, with a plan for Washington to help underwrite private-school voucher programs. The budget also includes $500 million in federal grants to school districts that expand and experiment with this plan; states could receive additional federal aid if they support the private-school voucher programs or open enrollment policies, with the money following the student to a school, whether public or private. In addition, some federal funds could be used to build new public charter schools. Schools could also use Title I money, normally for offsetting operating costs at schools with a higher concentration of poor students, to assist with the school choice program. Our sense is that even these modest goals will face furious opposition, and that the Trump administration’s education reforms will depend heavily on Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s political skills. The jury is out.

The same goes for the Trump record on health care reform. Certainly most Americans heard Trump’s pledge to abolish Obamacare many times during the 2016 campaign—and, depending on their views, they either hoped or feared that he would deliver. But even with a Republican Congress, the administration proved unable to repeal the law, an outcome we don’t see as truly necessary to making meaningful change. In our health care chapter, we detailed a range of innovative proposals for change and reform. This cause goes on, and there have been important steps forward—above all, the repeal of the individual mandate (effective in 2019) and Trump’s signing of an executive order in 2017 allowing the purchase of health insurance across state lines. States can now design eligibility requirements for Medicaid as well, which can include requiring recipients to work. However, the employer mandate has survived, even as business groups push the IRS for relief from it and House Republicans have proposed legislation eliminating it. Repealing the employer mandate would encourage the creation of more full-time jobs, but after major efforts at health care reform crashed and burned in 2017, Republicans have not seemed eager to try again.

In the area of national security, again, the Trump record looks mixed. We warned that the United States faced a daunting task of recapturing respect around the world, especially from our rivals and adversaries. President Obama’s ‘lead from behind’ approach has failed, especially in the crucial areas discussed in this chapter: military and nuclear preparedness, China’s aim to supplant the United States as the world’s preeminent power, Russia’s power push, the proliferation of global terrorism, and cyber warfare. President Trump must reassert vigorous American foreign policy in the service of our ideals and national interests. Here, again, the scope of events and concerns in this area is too vast to revisit in a brief preface—encompassing policy concerning Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea and the ongoing War on Terror, among others.

The most encouraging steps Trump has taken, from our perspective, have been his loosening of the rules of engagement in the fight against ISIS in early 2017, the results of which have proved stellar; his robust increase in Pentagon spending, much needed; and his decision to provide lethal arms to Ukraine in its standoff against Russia, a step that Obama avoided. We were also pleased to see his withdrawal from the Iranian nuclear deal.

On the negative side, however, is Trump’s often disdainful approach toward United States allies, especially in Western Europe. His bombastic rhetoric, on Twitter and elsewhere, presents a constant threat of diplomatic or even military crises. Trump supporters like to point to his tough talk as the cause of his much-heralded summit with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, but they fail to acknowledge how this volatile stew of threats can just as easily work to the detriment of constructive relations—and, on the dark side, even precipitate hostilities. Finally, Trump’s arm’s-length, at best, defense of America’s traditional position as a protector of democratic governments and upholder of principles of open societies is deeply demoralizing and may yet have effects far more damaging than mere discouragement.

In America in the Age of Trump, we devoted a whole chapter to what we called the crisis of values, by which we meant the common moral and cultural glue that had once held the United States together—and which now seems to have frayed so seriously that many speak of the United States as having at least two opposed and irreconcilable cultures. Along with this cultural schism, and contributing to it, is the loss of religious faith among younger generations. While it is true that people can and do live moral lives in the absence of religious belief, it is also incontrovertible, through mountains of empirical evidence, that religious people tend to live more successful, happier, and more fulfilled lives. Thus, regardless of one’s personal views on faith, we should be welcoming a revival of religious and ethically grounded values in a culture that seems overrun with secularism and self-interested, even narcissistic, pursuits.

We need a re-moralization of our national dialogue, we wrote, one that emphasizes traditional virtues and reconnects with a heritage of robust moral and ethical principles—a heritage inseparable from religious faith. That’s easier said than done under any administration, but Trump’s presents unique challenges. On the one hand, the administration has been objectively very pro-religion, with the president himself often invoking God, with a religious and observant vice president, and with the various signals sent to people of faith that they have a friend in the Oval Office (as much as President Obama claimed to feel the same, the signals he sent usually went the other way).

The problem? Trump himself and the very character of politics and political warfare in the Trump years. It’s hard to re-moralize the national dialogue when you stand accused of violating an agreement with Stormy Daniels, a prostitute; when other women have come forward and alleged behavior on your part that would, under normal circumstances, put you squarely in the crosshairs of the #MeToo movement; when your administration is embroiled in a Russia investigation and a special counsel investigation, and when one of your attorney defenders, Rudy Giuliani, essentially tries to normalize the payment of hush money. Whatever good the administration may have done on values issues behind the scenes, or what it might do in the future, any hope of a revival of traditional values in the Trump years seems beyond reach.

That goes as well for improved race relations. We wrote in our chapter on the racial divide that race relations, at the end of the Obama administration, had reached their worst ebb since the early 1990s. Unfortunately, the Trump years show no sign of reversing that trend. A May 2018 NBC News polls revealed that 64 percent of Americans believe that race relations remain a major problem. The irony is that Trump’s policies on race have gone some way to reverse the hyper-race-conscious efforts of the Obama administration, and his economic policies, as noted above, have resulted in the lowest black unemployment in recorded U.S. history. Yet these substantive achievements, which we applaud, will be overshadowed by Trump’s political recklessness on issues involving race, whether his handling of the deadly riot in Charlottesville, Virginia, or his stoking of the NFL national anthem protests. Trump will almost surely leave behind a more heated racial climate than the one he inherited.

We see little cause for encouragement regarding the many strands that made up our chapter called The Failure of Politics. We called for reforms included public financing for campaigns, tightening of anticoordination laws surrounding Super PACs, and term limits across the board. These things almost certainly won’t happen. Nor, most likely, will centrist solutions that we offer in that chapter on guns (particularly regarding background checks) and on our crippling budget deficits (implement Simpson-Bowles, which the American people support).

On immigration, we have seen once again, in the Trump years, that neither party is willing to embrace the middle-of-the-road solution that can forge a lasting resolution: comprehensive border security and an end to the constant flow of illegal immigrants, coupled with a path to citizenship for those already here, on one crucial condition—if you slip up, you’re out. Neither party wants to give ground on their protected area of that equation.

There is one area covered in this chapter, though, that, despite themselves, the Republicans and Democrats will probably redeem our judgment on: the growth of third parties. We called for more enterprises such as Americans Elect to jumpstart a full-fledged third-party movement and called for the reform of the presidential debate system to allow outsiders to enter more readily. The way things are going in Washington, though, these things might happen without much help—the American people, especially the young, are souring on both parties. A new era might yet be upon us, in which the traditional party lines become unrecognizable or at least transformed. More than 40 percent of Americans identify as Independents today, and a September 2017 Gallup poll found that 61 percent of respondents believed that a third party is needed, the highest such result ever measured.⁷

The irony of President Trump’s embrace by the conservative wing of the GOP is that his presidency will likely wind up weakening both parties. As polarizing as Trump is along partisan lines, our guess is that the net effect of his term or terms in office will be to hasten the decline of the two-party system and drive an even deeper hunger for alternatives.

It is perhaps typical of our democratic system that a book such as this requires a preface to a new edition—but not such a terribly long one. Many things have indeed changed since last year, as we have briefly chronicled above, while at the same time, the broader, underlying challenges and problems remain more or less what they were. The core of the arguments that we made remain in force: America faces genuine decline if it does not vigorously address the many crises that are brewing institutionally and socially. Like all presidents, Donald Trump has addressed some of these problems while also introducing new ones. The years ahead will determine a verdict on whether the Trump presidency, on balance, proves good for the United States—first at the polls in 2020, but more enduringly, in the lives of Americans.

INTRODUCTION

The Atmosphere Is Collapsing

Look, you want to know what the biggest national security threat is to this country right now? It’s the total dysfunction in Washington—the fact that so little can be done by the Congress. They can’t even resolve the issue of homeland security. They can’t deal with budgets.

—LEON PANETTA¹

The decisions that created today’s growth—decisions about education, infrastructure and the like—were made decades ago. What we see today is an American economy that has boomed because of policies and developments of the 1950s and ’60s: the interstate-highway system, massive funding for science and technology, a public-education system that was the envy of the world and generous immigration policies. Look at some underlying measures today, and you will wonder about the future.

—FAREED ZAKARIA²

The American Century, 1914–2014. RIP.

—MICHAEL LIND³

On September 19, 2014, President Obama had just left the White House residence with his family, on their way to Camp David for a summer weekend.

Moments later, Omar J. Gonzalez, a U.S. Army veteran of the Iraq war suffering from PTSD, jumped the black iron White House fence and raced across the lawn, undetected and unhindered by the Secret Service. Gonzalez approached the North Portico door, the iconic entrance, flanked by white columns, known to all Americans—and in front of which a Secret Service agent is supposed to stand at all times. No agent was in position as Gonzalez approached, however. He turned the handle; the door was unlocked.

Gonzalez went in. He was met by a female agent, whom he overpowered. Armed with a three-and-a-half-inch knife with a serrated blade, Gonzalez walked around inside the White House, supposedly one of the most heavily guarded buildings in the world. He passed through the Entrance Hall and the staircase leading to the White House family quarters, from which the Obamas had departed minutes earlier. He made it into the 80-foot-long East Room, the stately ballroom from which presidents sometimes give important speeches—as when Obama announced to the nation that U.S. forces had killed Osama bin Laden.

Finally, two Secret Service agents caught up with Gonzalez, tackled him, and subdued him. Gonzalez was arrested and later hospitalized. He pled guilty to two charges and will serve a brief prison sentence.

In a post-9/11 era of hyper-security, in which cities large and small had drawn up plans for all kinds of dreadful contingencies, most Americans assumed that if any place was safe from terrorists, it was the White House. Yet here the president’s own home had been breached, not by terrorists but by a lone unstable individual, who had simply walked in through the front door.

In the aftermath, politicians and commentators focused their ire on the Secret Service, which had seen one fiasco after another in recent years—including a security breakdown at a 2009 White House dinner that allowed a couple to crash the event and meet the Obamas, alcohol and sex scandals, a 2011 episode in which bullets struck the White House, and other incidents in which individuals had scaled the White House fence.

Gonzalez-like incidents don’t just happen; they are not the result of one-day glitches. They are the byproduct of institutional decay. Secret Service director Julia Pierson resigned soon afterward, and subsequent investigations revealed that agents’ radios hadn’t functioned properly, that some agents weren’t trained properly in how to use them, and that an alarm system in the White House had malfunctioned.⁴ It’s not clear if the agency can ever recapture its lost prestige.

The Gonzalez episode illustrates more than the decline of the Secret Service: it also stands as a fitting symbol of a nation in a tailspin. When Gonzalez was apprehended, he said that he had wanted to warn the president that the atmosphere is collapsing. He may have been speaking in meteorological terms, but taken broadly, his phrase is fitting. For millions, it is the atmosphere of American life that seems to be collapsing.

By now, most Americans know that the country faces enormous fiscal, economic, social, and national security challenges: out-of-control federal spending, frighteningly large deficits, massive gaps in income and opportunity, family breakdown and cultural division, political dysfunction and paralysis, and a roiling, violent world in which American power seems increasingly incidental. And in the midst of all this—with two wars essentially lost over a decade, an economy recovering by traditional indicators but creating too few decent-paying jobs, and a vacuum of political leadership in Washington, both in the White House and in Congress—few signs suggest that we are about to turn things around.

Indeed, by this time in our history, the United States faces an existential crisis for our survival. It is a crisis with many facets:

•The crisis of values that jeopardizes our culture—the breakdown of the family, the loss of belief in traditional virtues, and the decline of American confidence.

•The crisis of trust in America’s governing institutions that threatens our democracy.

•The crisis of governance that stifles the aspirations of millions of Americans.

•The crisis of education—a corrosive, broad-ranging failure in American schooling—that stunts our competitiveness as a society.

•The crisis of national security that endangers our public safety, imperils the cause of democracy overseas, and weakens America internationally.

•The crisis of solvency of our definitive entitlement programs and the need to find alternatives to President Obama’s failing health care program.

•The crisis of an American economy that no longer provides upward mobility.

•The crisis of America’s ever-expanding prison population, its persistent underclass, and the consistent weakening of our social fabric.

It has become commonplace to read about American decline, both domestically and overseas; to hear that our political deadlock makes solving our major problems all but unachievable; and to wonder if solutions to these problems are possible anymore. The wreckage mounts, even as the failure of our leaders and institutions to solve the problems becomes depressingly familiar. Is America headed for irrevocable decline, or is there some path forward that can take us to a more promising future? The goal of this book is to answer these questions.

TEN PROPOSITIONS

What follows are ten propositions about the state of the country that we will amplify in some detail in this introduction and at greater length over the course of this book. We don’t pretend that they are all-inclusive for what is wrong in the United States; no such list, in a country as big and complex as ours, can hope to account for everything. But we do believe that these themes account for a substantial portion of what we face—and what we must address. We also maintain that the underlying problems in each area are not commonly understood—that often, we react to symptoms instead of causes, which themselves are poorly understood. It follows, then, that the solutions will also be less commonly known.

1.Dhe American education system is a failure at every level.

Our schools are not preparing our kids, especially those of lower income, for a competitive global economy. The flaws of the current system ensure that the United States will continue to fall behind internationally. And these flaws start at the very outset, with early elementary school education, and extend all the way to postsecondary education and beyond. Begin with the simple statistics:

•Only 24 percent of eighth- and twelfth-grade students can write proficiently.⁵

•Two out of three eighth-graders can’t read proficiently.⁶

•Nearly two-thirds of eighth-graders scored below proficient in math.⁷

•Only one in four high school students graduates ready for college in all four core subjects (English, reading, math, and science), which is why a third of students entering college have to take remedial courses.⁸

•Only 4 percent of African American students and 11 percent of Hispanic students finish high school ready for college in their core subjects.⁹

There’s more. When compared with our international peers, America looks like an also-ran, with embarrassing—and troubling—performance numbers.

•American students rank 27th in math, 20th in science, and 17th in reading among students in 34 industrialized countries.

•By the end of the eighth grade, the students of Massachusetts are two years behind in math compared with their peers in Shanghai, China.

•Only three-quarters of 15-year-olds in the United States reach a baseline mathematics proficiency, a number below the average of industrialized countries and far below the average of 90 percent or more in China, Korea, and Singapore.

•U.S. students are particularly weak in areas dealing with higher cognitive demands, like the translation of mathematics to real-world situations.

•Only 50 percent of U.S. students are even motivated to learn mathematics, compared with the average of 53 percent of other industrialized countries.¹⁰

And by the time they reach college age, American students have a host of other problems. Many can’t afford college tuition. Others are saddled with student loan debt—in aggregate, it exceeds $1 trillion nationally¹¹—that forecloses opportunities. The average undergraduate who takes out a loan to pay for college is more than $37,000 in debt by the time he graduates.¹² Loan defaults are running at nearly 12 percent.¹³ And yet, without higher education, young Americans face an even more circumscribed future. Getting good-paying jobs requires a college education today: young people with college degrees earn on average 63 percent more than high school graduates, who are also more likely not to be working period.¹⁴

Given the importance of getting through school, especially for disadvantaged kids, and the difficulties of paying off student loans and other debts, getting a job after graduation is more pressing than ever. Yet classroom curricula and workplace requirements are out of sync. In a 2013 survey of 2,001 students or recent graduates and 1,000 hiring managers, educational-products firm Chegg evaluated the difference between skills that employers demand and what recent graduates are prepared to take on. Less than 40 percent of the hiring managers found recent graduates qualified for work in the areas in which they had studied.¹⁵ Colleges should update curricula to keep up with changing workplace demands.

One solution some have looked to—as President Obama did—is community colleges, but even these institutions, which offer more practical education, send fewer than one-seventh of their graduates on to earn bachelor’s degrees.¹⁶ The problem is only worsening, as can be seen by looking at