If you read the latest edition of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as “The Nation’s Report Card”, things are not going well in our nation’s public schools.  Clearly, the long tail effects of the COVID pandemic are at play here. One respected educational researcher, Dan Goldhaber, did not want to sugarcoat the findings about reading and math proficiency among America’s 4th and 8th graders.  He said “I don’t think this is the canary in the coal mine.  This is a flock of dead birds in the coal mine. The results saw something of a good bump in the wake of No Child Left Behind in the early 00’s but plateaued before the pandemic and have been downward ever since. To discuss what’s happening here and provide some solutions is Mark Schneider a non-resident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute(aei.org).  His work focuses on educational research.  He was the Commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics.