The relentless focus on improving test scores through drills and worksheets has backfired. It has demoralized teachers, made students hate subjects like reading and math, and ultimately led to stagnant or declining performance. The cure has become the disease.

Emanuel highlights Mississippi's reading score surge as a model that rejects both Republican voucher systems and Democratic abandonment of standards. The state paired public school investment with mandatory teacher training, phonics, and accountability tests.

By over-indexing on standardized tests, the education system teaches that every problem has a single correct answer held by an authority. This creates graduates who excel at logic problems but lack the common sense and initiative to solve ambiguous "life problems."

Despite the rapid shift to a decentralized, market-based education system, Florida lacks basic accountability measures. The state has no subject requirements for homeschoolers, and while students take standardized tests, the results are not published. This means policymakers and parents have no reliable data to determine if this experimental approach is helping or harming children's education.

Laws prohibiting "divisive concepts" and increasing parental oversight create a climate of fear. To protect their jobs, teachers avoid controversial topics, leading them to intentionally "keep it vague, default to bland"—in short, to teach poorly.

Schooling has become a victim of Goodhart's Law. When a measure (grades, test scores) becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Students become experts at 'doing school' — maximizing the signal — which is a separate skill from the actual creative and intellectual capabilities the system is supposed to foster.

AI makes cheating easier, undermining grades as a motivator. More importantly, it enables continuous, nuanced assessment that renders one-off standardized tests obsolete. This forces a necessary shift from a grade-driven to a learning-driven education system.

Many schools prioritize general skills over specific historical knowledge. This approach, exemplified by Illinois' sparse history standards, leaves students without the foundational understanding necessary to be informed citizens, even in well-funded schools.

The curriculum prioritizes easily testable, obsolete math skills over practical, modern concepts like estimation and optimization. This is because standardized tests favor single-answer questions over creative problem-solving, creating a system that teaches what is convenient, not what is valuable.