No, US students didn’t fall ‘from 1st to 24th’ after 1979 | Fact check

A Nov. 14 Instagram post (direct link, archive link) uses a meme with an image of former President Jimmy Carter to claim U.S. educational achievement has plummeted.
“In 1979 I created the Department of Education,” reads on-screen text in the image. “Since then America went from 1st to 24th in education.”
X owner Elon Musk made the same claim in a post on X, formerly Twitter, that was reposted 98,000 times. The claim also circulated widely on Instagram.
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There is no evidence to support the claim. While multiple studies have compared U.S. students to their peers in other countries, none show they ranked first in 1979, nor do any say they ranked 24th in 2024.
There isn’t a definitive way to rank a country’s education quality, but multiple studies show results contrary to the trend claimed in the post.
Martin Carnoy, a professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education, told USA TODAY that the claim is “completely inaccurate.”
“These are very rough comparisons, but it can be said that U.S. middle school and secondary students have always done poorly on international tests of mathematics compared to students in other developed countries and have done better in science and reading,” Carnoy said.
Many U.S. adults believe the country is either average or below average at teaching students science, technology, engineering and math, according to a Pew Research Center survey released in April.
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But the results of a test measuring students’ reading, math and science skills from about 80 countries show more of a mixed bag. In 2022, the test – called the Program for International Student Assessment – found five education systems with higher average reading scores than the U.S., 25 with higher math scores and nine with higher science scores.
The test has existed since 2000, when 32 countries participated. That year, eight countries had higher math scores than the U.S. and seven countries had higher science scores. U.S. students performed “about as well on average” in reading compared to students in other participating countries.
U.S. News & World Report ranked the U.S. as the top country for education in 2024 as part of its “Best Countries” rankings, which are based on an international survey of nearly 17,000 people who were asked “whether a country has a well-developed public education system, whether respondents would consider attending university there and if that country has a reputation for top-quality universities.” The news outlet has only ranked countries in that way for nine years.
There is no evidence of any widespread decline in student achievement in the U.S. since 1979, Carnoy said. U.S. math scores have been below many other countries for decades.
In the mid-1960s, U.S. 13-year-olds were outperformed in math by students in all but one of the 11 other countries that participated in the First International Mathematics Study, while U.S. students in their last year of high school were ranked last, according to a National Center for Education Statistics report published in 1992.
A similar study of math skills conducted in the early 1980s broke the results down by category, and found the U.S. was near the bottom in most of them.
A different report published by the National Center for Education Statistics in 1993 analyzed two decades of National Assessment of Educational Progress results. It says “overall trends in science, mathematics and reading suggest few changes in levels of educational achievement.”
National Center for Education Statistics charts of reading and math scores for 9-year-olds and 13-year-olds in the U.S. don’t show significant declines since 1979. Rather, math scores are up since then while reading is at about the same level, according to the latest test results from 2022 and 2023.
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The high school graduation rate in the U.S. for the 1979-80 school year was 71.5%, far below the 87% reported for the 2021–22 school year. The college enrollment rate for those who completed high school has risen from 49.4% in 1979 to 61.4% in 2023, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
It is important to recognize the U.S. doesn’t have only one education system – instead, each state has its own, Carnoy said.
“Student performance in some states has increased greatly in the past 30 years, and not so much in other states,” he said.
Carter signed the bill that created the Department of Education on Oct. 17, 1979, saying the federal government had “for too long failed to play its own supporting role in education as effectively as it could.”
It wasn’t the first time that the U.S. had a Department of Education, though. In 1867, President Andrew Johnson signed a bill that created the country’s first Department of Education, but it was demoted to an office in the Department of the Interior about a year later “due to concern that the department would exercise too much control over local schools,” according to the current Education Department website.
President-elect Donald Trump has said he supports eliminating the Department of Education, calling it a “bloated and radical bureaucracy.”
USA TODAY reached out to the social media user who shared the post for comment but did not immediately receive a response.
Snopes also debunked the claim.
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