I can’t claim to be an expert on the history of education, but it seems to me that Sputnik caused things to change. My impression is that education in the US was really very good up through the 40s and 50s. Kids could do math, they had nice penmanship, they could read and write well. Greek had gone out of fashion, but many kids still took Latin. The public schools were (mostly) delivering a quality education to the majority of kids.
Then the Russians launched Sputnik.
America panicked. We were losing the space race! The commies were beating us! All of a sudden, “experts” appeared with lots of whiz bang ideas for the schools. We got “New Math” which no one understood. We dropped Latin. We dropped Phonics. We changed History into Social Studies. Everything became about social engineering. Shop went away. Home Economics went away.
And here we are. Schools are just for social engineering, few people get a decent education from government schools, AND we have no space program.
“Ever since, at the latest, Drop and Cover. Maybe before that.”
...maybe with the metastasization of communist expansion that began in 1917 in the Soviet Union.
IMHO
Duck and cover.