Is Education America’s New Race to the Moon Challenge?

Permacrisis is the word Collins Dictionary coined in 2022, as a way to describe the ongoing feeling of uncertainty on multiple fronts: commercial, political, social, and financial. Add the most recent NAEP report on the national decline in math and literacy levels across the country, the largest seen since the 1980s, and one can see how educational publishers seem to be finding themselves at the forefront of a behemoth permacrisis mode full of challenges and market opportunities in the upcoming years.¹
 
On the opportunity and euphoric side of the education market, 2023 finds most educational buyers having ample inventory, under last year’s mode of just-in-case purchasing, as Nada Sanders, distinguished Professor of Supply Chain Management at Northeastern University described 2022’s supply chain management. It’s great timing as ARP’s funds continuously flow to public school districts targeted toward eliminating immense gaps in math and literacy, as well as infrastructure and technology.²

Education seems to be one of the newest priorities of our policymakers, as it has become apparent the United States doesn’t fare well against other OECD nations. While we are still expecting the 2022 results of The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), one can see that America’s positioning in the 2018 report lagged many spots below China, Singapore, and most European countries. It’s likely that the learning loss of the pandemic will further exasperate USA’s position lagging against China, who ranks number one, and the majority of Europe. The country’s underperformance in PISA was recently coupled with the passing of its hegemony on a multitude of scientific metrics to China. This development further increased the stakes of pre-college education in 2022 as shown by a white paper published by The National Board of Science urging the U.S. government to further support high-quality pre-college science and math education.³
 
Educational publishers are ready to tackle that challenge and have spent millions of dollars developing stellar K-12 curriculum products to help the nation’s students thrive in the 21st century, whilst firmly keeping their feet grounded on the values that were key to America’s triumph on the moon: intellectual humility, intense perseverance, and imaginative creativity.

¹The Nation's Report Card
²The White House, How The American Rescue Plan Is Keeping America’s Schools Open Safely, Combating Learning Loss, And Addressing Student Mental Health, March 2022
³National Science Foundation, The State of U.S. Science and Engineering, January 2022

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