Did American public schools help give rise to Trump? - SFChronicle.com

Did American public schools help give rise to Trump? - SFChronicle.com: Through more than a half-century, American schools have been blamed for almost every major national problem, from the Russians’ success in beating us into space with Sputnik in 1957 to the nation’s perceived failure to match the apparent economic successes of the Germans and the Japanese in the 1980s. If the schools didn’t shape up, according to Adm. Hyman Rickover, the “father” of the atomic submarine, the Russians would win the Cold War; if they didn’t shape up, according to an influential national report called “A Nation at Risk,” issued in 1983, the Germans and the Japanese would beat our economic brains out. “We have, in effect,” the report ominously warned, “been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament.