The abysmal student achievement results reported in the 2024 Nation’s Report Card, the annual measure by the National Assessment of Education Progress, triggered the usual alarm bells. Teachers’ unions also responded in a familiar way: demanding even more taxpayer “investment” in American schools, already among the most expensive in the world.
But there’s a further dimension to American schools’ troubles. The NAEP shows how schools fail to bring students to basic levels of proficiency. Other measures, like the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) international rankings, reveal much the same when it comes to U.S. students’ average performance. But neither test gets at American schools’ failures at the “excellence” end of the spectrum—an equally important problem. The United States relies on its top-performing students to advance innovation, prosperity, and national security.
What happens when a country fails to nurture its top students—especially in STEM fields? We are facing the results. On the morning of January 27, a panicked U.S. stock market took a nearly trillion-dollar hit on news that Chinese AI startup DeepSeek had created, reportedly on a mere $6 million dollar investment, a large language model that could compete with, if not surpass, ones created by American companies costing billions of dollars. Pioneering Internet entrepreneur and leading venture capitalist Marc Andreesen called it “AI’s Sputnik moment.”
Industry experts have raised questions about DeepSeek’s claims, from the alleged $6 million investment figure (one analyst said that it likely exceeded $1.6 billion) to allegations that it had misused OpenAI’s intellectual property or obtained restricted Nvidia chips. Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to dismiss the significance of this episode.
Two elements make China’s DeepSeek challenge troubling. The first concerns AI itself, a foundational technology with national security implications—and DeepSeek is only one of several Chinese AI companies making significant strides. Second, AI is not the only area in which the U.S. has seen its lead in science and technology innovation erode. An ominous pattern is emerging as well in semiconductors, batteries, quantum computing, and hypersonic aviation, among other technologies.
Or consider the debate over H-1B visas and American reliance on importing foreign STEM professionals. At first glance, the debate seems overcooked. In 2024, the U.S. granted 188,400 H-1B visas, a figure dwarfed by the estimated 3 million aliens who entered the country illegally. No one seriously argues that we should kill a program that brought us innovators like Zoom founder Eric Yuan, VC pioneer Vinod Khosla, and, yes, Elon Musk. Nor does anyone—least of all Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, both H-1B defenders—deny that the program needs major reforms.
Still, the H-1B fight points to an underlying problem for the United States. At last count, 86 percent of H-1B approvals were for STEM professionals. If American schools were turning out sufficient numbers of competitive STEM professionals, the need for H-1Bs would plummet. If we were to cancel the program tomorrow, U.S. companies would outsource more work to qualified professionals abroad. And if they were prohibited from doing that, they would cease to be globally competitive.
The United States once led the world in STEM talent. Top minds produced breakthroughs in everything from aerospace to semiconductors to biomedicine to software. Today, however, fewer and fewer pockets of excellence flourish in American STEM education.
In universities, excellence endures in top departments in part because F-1 visas (for non-immigrant foreign students) often account for more than half of students in their graduate programs. Many later go on to apply for H-1Bs. In K-12 schools, excellence is both increasingly rare and under constant ideological assault. Consider Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJ) in Virginia, for many years the nation’s top-ranked high school. In 2020, “racial-justice” advocates replaced TJ’s race-blind, test-based admissions with an unholy trinity of quotas, “holistic” criteria, and lotteries, sending TJ into a downward spiral of mediocrity. Other renowned merit-based schools, like New York City’s specialized high schools, Boston’s exam schools, and San Francisco’s Lowell High School, have come under similar attack.
China’s approach could not be more different. In the span of just a few years, clones of TJ, called Thomas Schools, have emerged in cities such as Shanghai, Nanjing, and Jinan. Offering immersive bilingual Chinese-English education, the schools are staffed with instructors from around the world. With a relentless focus on STEM excellence, they imitate the TJ model down to the smallest details, from curricula to research projects and even floor plans, obtained by means of generous donations from Chinese-linked groups.
Beijing’s “Double First-Class Initiative” looks to develop world-class Chinese universities and disciplines. China already accounts for 66 of Nature Index’s Leading 150 Young Universities globally and has ramped up its recruitment of talent from around the world. It’s all part of China’s goal to be tops in STEM worldwide.
Emerging powerhouse India is no slouch, either, in cultivating STEM excellence. India’s average educational attainments are not highly regarded; in the nation’s only participation in the PISA ranking in 2009, its students, drawn from two provinces with comparatively strong school reputations, ranked third from last out of 74 countries. But its achievements on the “excellence” end of the educational spectrum are impressive. In 2024, India’s International Math Olympiad team registered a best-ever fourth-place finish, earning congratulations from Prime Minister Narendra Modi. A whopping 72.3 percent of U.S. H-1B visas approved in 2023 were for workers from India. Top graduates from the most academically rigorous programs of the 23 world-class Indian Institutes of Technology are formidably talented.
But to the woke Left, discussions of talent and productivity are suspect. This worldview is well-recognized by now in the code words diversity, equity, and inclusion, along with their many offshoots and variations. Activists have used all this terminology to sabotage excellence in education. They’ve done so either directly, by dumbing-down standards and content, or indirectly, by demeaning the values essential for great education—standards, merit, self-discipline, competitiveness, achievement—as “privileged,” “white,” “settler-colonialist,” and “far-right.”
The devastation wrought by the woke Left’s assault on American education has been well documented. If the U.S. can return to promoting competition, achievement, and excellence, the H-1B “problem” will take care of itself—and Americans will prove more than equal to the challenge of our latest Sputnik moment.
Top Photo by Nic Antaya for The Washington Post via Getty Images