Paraphrasing an old Soviet-era saw:
In America's government-run schools (aka, "public schools"), the students pretend to learn and the teachers pretend to teach.
Objective measures of performance have fallen in every academic area. This article refers to the decline in science and math. The following link documents the decline in basic literacy,
http://nces.ed.gov/NAAL/PDF/2006470.PDF .
That report's findings on the literacy of college graduates is even more shocking. The study addresses three types of literacy -- prose, document, and quantitative. The percentages of American college graduates that rate as proficient in these categories are as follows:
Prose 31% (down from 40% in 1992)
Document 25% (down from 37% in 1992)
Quantitative 31% (unchanged from 1992)
The standards for a "proficient" score on these tests are pretty low. They are more like reading the newspaper and balancing a checkbook than reading Kant and solving differential equations.
Other studies have documented similar performance declines in history and civics. Maybe fine arts education has not suffered as much, but there are relatively few serious careers for painters and musicians.
Decade after decade the government-run schools have wasted the time of American students and the treasure of the American people. Yet we still hear people say they "believe in public education".
My history students often railed at an algebra requirement. I justified it aying we wanted them to learn to think logically. By the way, 80% of history teachers neither majored or minored in history while history PhD's are largely unemployable.