The Flatline and the Way Out- American Education Reform

American education reform: A Founder's Case for Rebuilding American Education Around Inspiration, Real-World Skills, and the Courage to Question

By James Prendamano

Founder, The Prendamano Academy · CEO, PreReal Investments Inc. and PreReal | Prendamano Real Estate

A white paper — August 2026

Business leader and educator James Prendamano calls for changes to American education as test scores decline and AI reshapes the workforce. His new white paper examines decades of academic performance and proposes six changes for the future.

"By the end of third grade, we can predict with unsettling accuracy which children will graduate and which will not. Then we spend the next nine years proving ourselves right."

A note before you read this

I spent a lot of school days quietly praying the teacher would skip my name. If you have ever felt that — the small panic of being lost while the room moves on without you — then you already understand why I wrote this. That feeling stayed with me for years. And here is the part that should stop all of us cold: I did not make it out because the system caught me. At the time, I called it luck.

I have done enough work on myself since to know it was not luck. The signs were there the whole time — the right skills, the right mindset, the few people who believed in me — I just finally learned to listen. That combination gave me options, income, and confidence. But no one placed it in front of me during the years that shape a person, when it would have changed everything, and almost none of it came from a classroom.

Now, before you decide whether this argument is worth your time, you are owed something: you should know who is making it. I will do this quickly, because bragging makes my skin crawl. Over two decades I have closed more than 1,500 transactions, moved over a billion dollars in deals, made payroll, and built teams — leading large-scale, transformative developments from the neighborhoods of New York City to the New Mexico desert. That work has been featured in The New York Times, The Real Deal, and the Albuquerque Journal, among other major publications. Governors and mayors have appointed me to boards and public authorities more times than I keep track of: a governor's seat on a state spaceport authority, city appointments to economic-development agencies, and more. And I did not arrive at this argument yesterday — I first made the case that America's schools have flatlined, and can be revived, in the pages of the Albuquerque Journal; what follows is the fuller version. I do not tell you this to impress you. I tell you because it means I have spent my life on the side of the table where things actually get built — and from that seat, over and over, I have watched precisely what separates the people who build a life from the people who stay stuck.

I will be equally direct about what I am not. I am not an academic, I never ran a school of education, and I will not pretend otherwise. What I bring is the other thing — the view from the field instead of the faculty lounge — and I have come to believe it is exactly what this conversation has been missing.

Here is the whole argument in one line: the things that actually build a life are the things school almost never teaches — and instead of teaching them, we leave them to chance.

And this is the part I feel in my bones. Children are the most precious resource this world has, and we are not inspiring them — we are processing them. I know the difference firsthand. For years I went to work because I felt I had to: fear, obligation, the pull of status. It was a grind. But when I am genuinely inspired by something — the way I am by this — you cannot keep me away from it. That is the whole game. A child who is made to learn endures school. A child who is inspired to learn becomes unstoppable. We have built a system that is very good at the first and has nearly forgotten the second.

So I stopped waiting and took action — because the hardest thing I ever learned in business is that the real damage is almost never in acting. It is in standing still. I built a free academy. It is one person refusing to stand still. But one person taking action was never the goal. The goal is to inspire millions to act alongside me — teachers, parents, builders, and leaders like the one reading this page — until we have transformed how an entire generation is prepared for the world. This paper lays out the problem with data you can check yourself, and, above all, the solutions. Not because I have all the answers, but because someone has to move first.

Let's get to work.

The Flatline and the Way Out calls for an education system that moves beyond compliance and memorization to emphasize curiosity, creativity, critical thinking and real-world problem-solving, preparing students for a rapidly changing, AI-driven world.

Part One — The Flatline

The numbers nobody wants to sit with

Start with the single most uncomfortable fact in American education.

We have roughly doubled what we spend, per student, in real inflation-adjusted dollars over the last five decades — real per-pupil spending rose about 140% between 1969–70 and 2014–15 (Education Resource Strategies). And over that same half-century, the measured reading and math skills of our 17-year-olds have barely moved.

That is not an opinion. It is the finding of the federal government's own long-term assessment. On the NAEP Long-Term Trend test — which has measured the same fundamental skills of 9-, 13-, and 17-year-olds since the early 1970s — the scores of 17-year-olds in 2012 were not significantly different from the scores of 17-year-olds in 1971 for reading and 1973 for math (The Nation's Report Card, 2012 Long-Term Trend; NCES Long-Term Trend). Independent analysts describe 17-year-old math over that period as showing "virtually no improvement" (Wing Institute).

Think about what that means. A child who walked into a classroom the year the microchip was invented came out reading at about the same level as a child today who has the entire internet in their pocket. We changed everything about the world around the school. We barely changed the school.

And the recent trend is worse, not better. When the test was given to 13-year-olds in 2023, math scores had fallen 9 points since 2020 — the largest drop in the test's 50-plus-year history — and reading had fallen to roughly where it was in 1971 (The Nation's Report Card, 2023; Chalkbeat). The 2025 results, released in June 2026, showed no meaningful recovery (NPR).

We are not holding steady. In the places that matter most, we are sliding.

It gets more personal than test scores

Numbers on a chart are easy to look past. So let me make it concrete.

• Fewer than one in three of our 8th graders read at a level the country's own standard calls "proficient." In 2024, just 30% hit that bar, and 34% — more than a third — scored below basic, the largest share in the 32-year history of the reading test (FutureEd; USAFacts).

• And the damage locks in early. A landmark study tracking nearly 4,000 children found that a student who is not reading proficiently by the end of third grade is four times more likely to leave school without a diploma — and for a low-income child who reads below grade level, the dropout rate runs six times higher than for proficient readers (Annie E. Casey Foundation). We can see the cliff coming when a child is eight. We mostly let them walk off it.

• Those kids become adults who struggle to read. Roughly 20% of American adults — about 48 million people — have low literacy, and about a third have low numeracy (NCES).

• Most adults cannot pass a basic money quiz. Only 27% of U.S. adults could answer five of seven simple financial questions correctly in 2024 (FINRA Foundation). We graduate people who can conjugate a verb in a language they will never speak but who cannot explain how a credit card works.

• The kids are not even in the building. Chronic absenteeism — missing at least 10% of the school year — nearly doubled from about 15% before the pandemic to a peak near 28%, and was still running around 23.5% in 2023–24, roughly 50% above where it was (Brookings; Hechinger Report). Nearly one in four kids is regularly not there.

• And the ones who are there have checked out. Gallup found that only about 18% of Gen Z K-12 students strongly agree that what they are learning is important, interesting, and aligned with their talents. A full third — about 33% — say they most enjoy learning when it connects to the real world, and only half feel prepared for their future (Gallup).

Read that last one again. A third of our kids are telling us, directly, that they learn best when it connects to real life — and we have built a system that mostly does not.

This is the flatline. Not a single failing. A whole set of them, reinforcing each other, decade after decade, while the invoice keeps going up.

Hold onto that last number, though — the third of kids telling us they learn best when it connects to real life. That is not a complaint. That is a map. They are telling us exactly what would light them up, if we were listening.

This is on us — not on teachers

This next part matters, so I want to get it exactly right.

The easy move is to blame teachers. That move is wrong, and I will not make it. I have met the people who show up early, stay late, buy supplies out of their own pockets, and carry kids on their backs through the year. Blaming them for the flatline is like blaming the pit crew for a car that was engineered in 1955.

But I am not going to let the rest of us off the hook either, because that is the honest failure. Teachers did not design this system. We did — all of us. We built it, we funded it, we defended it, and we kept sending our kids into it decade after decade knowing the results were not changing. The structure is a machine built for a different century, and the teachers are simply the ones standing inside it. If we want a different result, the responsibility does not sit with them. It sits with us: parents, communities, employers, policymakers, and people like me who have done well and now have the means and the obligation to help fix it.

The wave that changes the math on all of it

Here is what makes this urgent instead of merely sad.

For fifty years, the flatline was a tragedy we could absorb, because the economy still had a lot of room for people with average skills and no particular direction. That room is closing fast.

Artificial intelligence is reshaping the labor market in front of our eyes. The World Economic Forum projects that 22% of today's jobs will be disrupted by 2030, with 170 million new roles created, 92 million displaced, and 59 of every 100 workers needing to reskill (World Economic Forum, Future of Jobs 2025). McKinsey estimates that generative AI could automate around 30% of U.S. work hours by 2030, and found that demand for "AI fluency" in job postings grew sevenfold in two years — faster than any other skill (McKinsey Global Institute).

Here is what I actually believe. I think those numbers are too conservative. The people who model this for a living are pattern-matching against past technology shifts, and this is not a past technology shift. I have spent my career reading where markets are heading before the data catches up, and here is my read: there will not be a single job that looks the way it looks today five years from now. Not one. The change will be faster and more total than the forecasts admit, and the institutions slowest to feel it — including our schools — are exactly the ones about to be hit hardest.

The first rung of the career ladder is already fraying fastest. Recent-college-graduate unemployment has climbed above the national rate, and the entry-level roles that used to launch careers are getting scarcer (The New York Times). Serious people still disagree about exactly how fast and how far this goes (The Atlantic), and I respect the debate. But the direction is not in question. The things machines do best — routine, repeatable, rule-following work — are exactly the things our schools are best at producing. The things machines cannot do — judgment, creativity, connection, the ability to ask the right question, the confidence to build something — are exactly the things we barely teach at all.

We spent fifty years optimizing kids to be excellent at the one thing that is about to be automated.

Why this is an opportunity, not a crisis

Here is where most people would tell you to panic. I am going to tell you the opposite, and I mean it.

The single most valuable lesson my career has taught me is this: the best opportunities of my life have always been hiding inside what looked, at first, like the biggest problems. Every deal I am proud of started as something everyone else called a mess. The distressed property. The market nobody wanted. The situation that looked like a crisis right up until someone was willing to see it differently.

Change is neutral. A wave does not care whether you drown or surf — the wave is just a wave. It is the meaning we assign to it that decides what happens next, and that meaning is a choice. This is not soft talk; it is the most practical thing I know. The same disruption that terrifies a system built for compliance is the greatest opening in a century to build a system built for creation. We have been handed a reason — finally — to stop defending a model that stopped working fifty years ago and to build the one our kids actually need.

That is the real story here. Not that our scores are flat. Not even that AI is coming. The story is that we are being handed the opportunity of the century to get this right, and whether it becomes a catastrophe or a renaissance depends entirely on the meaning we choose and the action we take.

I choose renaissance. Let me show you how we build it.

Part Two — Why the System Produces These Results

Before we talk solutions, we have to be clear-eyed about why the flatline persists. If more money and more effort haven't fixed it, then the problem is neither. It is not effort — teachers and kids are pouring in effort. And it is not money — we fund the hell out of education, roughly doubling real per-pupil spending, and the needle did not move. The problem is design. I see four design flaws.

1. We optimized for compliance, not creation

The system we have was built to produce reliable workers for an industrial economy — people who show up on time, sit still, follow instructions, and give the expected answer. That was a rational design for 1925. It measures the wrong things (recall over judgment), rewards the wrong behavior (compliance over curiosity), and signals to a huge share of kids that they are "not smart" because they are not good at the narrow game the system happens to score.

The wider world has been saying this for years — it is the core of Sir Ken Robinson's argument that schools "educate people out of their creativity" (TED), and of Ted Dintersmith and Tony Wagner's finding that our schools were "engineered a century ago for a world that no longer exists" (Ted Dintersmith). I am not the first to say it. I am here to do something about it.

2. We skip the foundation and go straight to the tactics

This is the mistake I see most often, and it is the one I feel most personally.

We hand kids twelve years of content — facts, formulas, dates, tactics — and we almost never help them answer the questions that actually determine whether any of it lands: Who am I? What am I good at? What do I value? What am I building toward?

In my own life, the accolades and the deals were never the thing. The thing was clarity — knowing my gifts, my values, my direction. Once I got that, everything else compounded.

Most people stumble into that clarity by accident in their forties, if ever. We should be guiding kids into it far earlier — in the formative years, when identity is still being formed and a little clarity changes the entire trajectory. You do not build a skyscraper by starting with the forty-second floor. You start with the foundation. Education has it backwards: all floors, no foundation.

3. We taught kids to trust the answer instead of question it

This one is close to my heart, so I am going to say it plainly.

Somewhere along the way we fell into a trap. We started teaching kids to defer to the right answer — to trust a conclusion because an authority delivered it — as if that were the same thing as understanding it. It is not. Real science — real scholarship of any kind, in its purest form — does not ask you to trust. It demands that you question. The entire method is built on doubt, testing, and the willingness to overturn yesterday's certainty when the evidence changes.

And history proves the point over and over. The consensus is not always right — sometimes it is spectacularly wrong, defended by the most credentialed people in the room, until someone with the courage to question overturns it:

• For most of the 20th century, medicine was certain that stomach ulcers were caused by stress and acid. Two Australian researchers, Barry Marshall and Robin Warren, insisted a bacterium was the real cause and were dismissed for years — until they were proven right and awarded the Nobel Prize in 2005, an award the Nobel committee itself framed as honoring two men who "challenged prevailing dogmas" (NobelPrize.org).

• When Alfred Wegener proposed in 1912 that the continents drift across the earth, the geological establishment ridiculed him for decades. He died with his idea in disrepute. Today "plate tectonics" is the bedrock of earth science and Wegener is celebrated as the man who was right too early (American Museum of Natural History).

• In the 1840s, the physician Ignaz Semmelweis showed that doctors could stop killing mothers in childbirth simply by washing their hands. His colleagues rejected him, ran him out of the profession, and he died disgraced — before germ theory proved him completely correct and made handwashing the foundation of modern medicine (National Library of Medicine).

Every one of those breakthroughs came from a person willing to question what everyone "knew." When we teach kids to accept rather than interrogate, we do not make them scientific. We make them the opposite — and we do it at the exact moment in history when the ability to question is becoming the single most valuable skill a human being can own.

Because look at what is already happening with AI. When researchers at the Wharton School gave people an AI assistant that was sometimes wrong on purpose, the people accepted its faulty reasoning 73% of the time and overruled it less than 20% of the time — the authors called it "cognitive surrender" (Wharton, via reporting). Separately, only about one in four AI users ever bothers to click through and check a source the AI hands them (Brussels Times / AOP study). We are building a generation that takes the machine's first answer and moves on.

I do the opposite, and it is honestly one of my favorite things to do. When I get an answer from an AI, that is where the fun starts — I push it, challenge it, make it show its work, force it past the easy legacy answer until we get to something that actually holds up. It produces better answers, and more importantly, it keeps the muscle of inquiry alive. That is exactly the habit we should be building in every kid, every year.

A generation that cannot question is a generation that can be told anything. In an AI world, that is not a soft concern. It is a civilizational one.

4. We divided kids instead of grounding them

The deepest layer, and the one I care about most, is this. Our system is very good at sorting kids — by score, by track, by label — and very poor at grounding them in a sense of their own worth and their connection to something larger.

I will not hide where I stand. I believe in God. But I want to be just as clear about what I am not saying: this is not about my God versus your God. I have come to believe there is no such thing. There is Source — the one creative principle that every great tradition has been circling for thousands of years. Call it God, call it the Divine, call it the Universe, call it Source; the Christian, the Muslim, the Jew, the Hindu, the Buddhist, and the mystic are, at the deepest level, all pointing through different doorways at the same room. This is not a fringe idea. Philosophers have a name for it — the "perennial philosophy," the recognition of a single common wisdom at the heart of the world's religions — and it traces back through the Hermetic principles that underlie much of Western and Eastern thought alike (Perennial philosophy). The walls between traditions are human construction. What sits underneath them is shared.

And here is what moves me most: science is now backstopping the very same truth, arriving from the opposite direction. We are all made of the same particles. Quantum entanglement — the phenomenon that earned the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics — shows that two particles, once connected, behave as a single system even across vast distances (NobelPrize.org, Physics 2022). The observer effect and the famous double-slit experiment show that the act of observation itself participates in how reality takes shape (Scientific American). A person of faith looks at that and sees confirmation of what they always knew — that we are connected, that consciousness matters, that we are part of something larger. A scientist looks at the identical findings and sees rigorous, replicated physics. They are both right. Faith and science are not enemies here; they are two windows onto one reality, and for once the believer and the skeptic can stand at those windows side by side and both be telling the truth.

You do not have to share one inch of my faith to see the practical payoff for a child. Whether you arrive at it through God, through physics, or through plain human decency, the lesson we should be teaching every kid is the same: that they are powerful creators, that they are far more alike than different, and that the imagination they carry is the most valuable resource they will ever own. And it starts with the self, because it has to. We ask children to love their neighbor — but how is a child supposed to love their neighbor before anyone has taught them to love themselves?

Here is what should stop every school board in the country cold. This is not soft. It is the hardest-nosed data in education. A student who has just one teacher who makes them excited about the future, in a school they believe is committed to their strengths, is 30× more likely to be fully engaged in their learning — and engagement is one of the strongest predictors of achievement we have (Gallup, via Education Week). Engaged students are 2.5× more likely to earn excellent grades; disengaged students are nine times more likely to earn poor ones (Gallup). Hope — plain hope for the future — predicts a student's grades better than their IQ or their test scores (APA). And it does not stop at graduation: in the workplace, an inspired worker is 125% more productive than a merely satisfied one — it takes two and a quarter contented people to match a single inspired one (Bain & Company).

Read those numbers again, because they demolish the whole premise we have been running our schools on. We have been grinding kids down in the name of rigor — drilling, ranking, testing, fearing — when the evidence says a child who is inspired, hopeful, and connected doesn't just feel better, they outperform the grinder by multiples. Fear is not the fuel. Inspiration is. Our beliefs, understood at their root, were never meant to divide us; they were meant to connect us. We are all one. A child grounded in their own worth — who believes they are capable, connected, and here on purpose — is a child who can finally extend that worth outward. That, far more than any test score, is what I want our schools to build. Kids who believe they are capable build things. Kids who believe they are worthless do not. The single cheapest, highest-leverage intervention in all of education is helping a child believe, correctly, that their future is theirs to build.

Part Three — The Way Out

Enough about what is broken. Here is what I propose we build. Six moves. Some I have already started. All of them are within reach right now, without waiting for a single act of Congress.

Move 1 — Put the foundation first: mindset and self-knowledge before content

Every student should be guided, explicitly and early, through the questions that determine everything else: how they operate, what their natural gifts are, what they truly value, what their "why" is, and who they are choosing to become.

This is not fluffy. It is the most practical thing we can teach, and it maps almost perfectly onto what the labor market is now screaming for. America Succeeds analyzed 76 million job postings and found that 76% require at least one "durable skill" — communication, leadership, critical thinking, growth mindset, fortitude — and that these are the human differentiators in the age of AI (America Succeeds). The market is telling us the foundation is the skill.

I built the first eleven modules of my academy around exactly this — operating code, core gifts, core values, purpose, declaration, vision, identity, environment, goals, blueprint, and alignment — because I believe it is the missing first year of every education.

One thing about this matters enormously, and it is the difference between a real practice and a worksheet you file away. None of this gets carved in stone at age eight. Your core values, your sense of your own why, the declarations you write and the goals you set — these are not taught once and locked in. They are revisited, every single year, K through 12. That is the entire point. A child is supposed to grow, and as they grow their answers are supposed to deepen and change. The seven-year-old's why is not the seventeen-year-old's why, and it should not be. We are not installing a fixed identity in a kid and walking away. We are teaching them a practice of returning to the questions as they become more of who they are — which is exactly how growth, inspiration, and a healthy sense of self actually take hold.

Move 2 — Teach the skills that build a life

Financial literacy. How to read people and strike a deal. Communication. Leadership. Entrepreneurship. How to measure risk, build trust, and turn an idea into income. How to use AI as a tool instead of fearing it or cheating with it.

My first full curriculum runs through real estate investing and brokerage, because it is the field I know cold and because it teaches universal principles: recognize opportunity, measure risk, read the person across the table, build trust, and use knowledge to create value. Those skills transfer to almost anything. My hope has always been that others take this exact model and build free pathways into medicine, technology, the trades, the arts, and everything else.

The public appetite is already here: 30 states now guarantee a personal-finance course to graduate, up from just 8 in 2020 (Next Gen Personal Finance). We are pushing on an open door. Let's push harder, and let's make the material free.

Move 3 — Make AI fluency and critical thinking the same lesson

We should stop treating AI as contraband and start teaching kids to use it with confidence and to interrogate it with skepticism. Those are not opposite skills. They are the same skill, and it is the defining literacy of this era.

The right frame is not "trust the machine" and it is not "fear the machine." It is: use the machine, then check its work — because you are the one responsible for the truth. Used well, AI is the most powerful creative instrument ever handed to a human being — I have come to think of it as the ultimate manifestation tool: it can take an idea in your head and help you build it into something real faster than any generation before us could dream of. But a tool that powerful in the hands of someone who cannot question it is a liability. We teach kids to drive before we hand them keys. We should teach them to think before — and while — we hand them AI.

Move 4 — Teach the courage to question as a core discipline

I want a dedicated strand, running from the early grades through graduation, whose entire job is to make questioning a skill rather than a personality trait.

That means teaching kids how to evaluate a source, weigh competing claims, spot a weak argument, and hold two ideas in tension without panicking. It means using genuinely open, wonder-sparking questions — great mysteries of history, science, and human achievement — as the vehicle for practicing evidence and discernment, always landing on the discipline of evidence rather than on any pet conclusion.

The goal is not to teach kids what to think. It is the opposite. It is to make them impossible to fool. In an AI world, that is the whole ballgame.

Move 5 — Ground every child in their own worth

Before we sort a child, we should ground them. Every student should leave school having been told, in a hundred different ways, a simple true thing: you are capable, your imagination is powerful, and your future is yours to build.

And this is not wishful thinking — it is one of the best-documented findings in all of education. In a national experiment run across 65 public schools and published in Nature, a growth-mindset lesson that took students under one hour total measurably raised the grades of lower-achieving ninth graders and increased how many went on to take advanced math (Yeager et al., Nature, 2019). Decades of research on the "Pygmalion effect" show the same thing from the other direction: when a teacher genuinely believes in a student, that student performs measurably better (American Psychological Association).

What a child believes about their own capability is not a nice-to-have. It is one of the highest-leverage variables we have — and it is nearly free.

So we should teach it, deliberately, in a way that unites rather than divides — that treats the creative spark in every child as common ground rather than a wedge. A child who has been taught to value themselves is a child with something to give; you cannot pour from an empty cup. Inspire that child and you do not just lift a test score — you light something that does not go out. I would rather graduate a generation that sees itself as fundamentally connected, capable, hopeful, and here on purpose, than one more class trained to see the person across the aisle as the enemy. We are all one. A school that teaches a child to believe it has done the most important work there is.

Move 6 — Prove it by building, then give it away

Here is the move that ties the rest together, and it is the one I am living.

We do not need another national panel or another five-hundred-page report. We have had those for fifty years and we got a flatline. What we need is builders — teachers who test new units, parents who ask for electives in financial literacy and AI, entrepreneurs who publish free courses, and students who help shape what comes next.

So I stopped waiting and built. The Prendamano Academy is free, forever. It begins with the questions every person needs to answer before moving forward with purpose. It includes hundreds of worksheets and a custom AI tutor that speaks only the language of the curriculum and is available around the clock. Parents tell me their teenagers argue with the AI tutor more than they argue with them. I take that as progress.

There is a choice underneath that word, free, and it was not the obvious one. I build and sell things for a living. I own thousands of parcels of real estate, I know how to raise capital, and I know how to scale. The natural move — the easy one — would be to package this as a private school or a paid platform and let the market do the rest. A private school would even spare me the bureaucracy that makes the free path so much harder. I am not doing that, and the reason is simple. This whole thing started as a discomfort: I was handing my own children every advantage I had — my way of thinking, my judgment, everything I had learned — and it felt wrong that the gift stopped at my own front door. Building a private school would not fix that. It would do the opposite. It would take the advantages already concentrated among the advantaged and concentrate them a little further. A paywall would betray the one thing that made me start. So the harder path is the only honest one: free, for everyone, no exceptions and no upsell waiting at the end. I would rather do the heavier lift and be at peace with it.

I did not build it to replace public schools. Public education remains one of the strongest engines of opportunity this country has. I built it to prove that the foundation-first, skills-forward, question-everything model works and can be free — and to invite every educator, coder, parent, and student to use it, question it, improve it, or go far beyond it.

Now, to be exact about what this is not: I am not proposing that we throw out the fundamentals. Reading, writing, mathematics, real historical knowledge, scientific literacy — these are the non-negotiable foundation, and any serious model keeps them. What I am proposing is that we augment that foundation with the things we have been ignoring: how to think, how to question, how to know yourself, and how to build a life. Keep the base. Add the part we left out.

Part Four — What I'm Asking

I am not asking for your money and I am not asking you to trust me. I am asking three things.

If you are an educator or run a district: try a unit. Take the free curriculum outlined alongside this paper, run it as an elective or a weekly block, and tell me honestly what worked and what didn't. I will keep improving it with you.

If you are a parent: ask your school for electives in financial literacy, AI fluency, and life skills — and in the meantime, put the free academy in front of your kid.

If you are a builder, a funder, or a policymaker: help me scale the model, or better yet, build your own version for your own field. The more free pathways exist, the faster the flatline ends.

The world will not slow down so everyone can catch up. Our kids should not have to wait decades, or borrow a mountain of debt, to learn the skills that actually work in the real economy. Children are the most precious resource this world has. And a generation that is inspired to learn, grounded in its own worth, and taught to question everything is not merely better prepared for the age of AI — it is the finest thing our hands could build with the moment we have been handed. Fear would have us protect what we already have. Inspiration builds what does not yet exist. I know which one I want teaching my kids, and I suspect you do too.

I reached the point where watching felt irresponsible. So I stopped waiting, took action, and started inviting everyone I could to act with me. The invitation is open. The only wrong move left is to keep standing still.

Let's get to work.

Business leader and educator James Prendamano calls for changes to American education as test scores decline and AI reshapes the workforce. His new white paper examines decades of academic performance and proposes six changes for the future.

The Prendamano Academy is free at PrendamanoAcademy.com.

Sources

All statistics in this paper are drawn from primary sources, linked inline. Key references:

• NAEP Long-Term Trend, 17-year-olds unchanged since 1971/1973 — The Nation's Report Card; NCES

• 2023 Long-Term Trend, record math decline — The Nation's Report Card

• 8th-grade reading proficiency (30%) — FutureEd

• Adult literacy (1 in 5) — NCES

• Financial literacy (27%) — FINRA Foundation

• Chronic absenteeism — Brookings; Hechinger Report

• Student engagement — Gallup

• Author's op-ed on the fifty-year flatline — Albuquerque Journal

• AI and jobs — World Economic Forum; McKinsey Global Institute

• Durable skills in job postings (76%) — America Succeeds

• Per-pupil spending growth (+140%) — Education Resource Strategies

• Personal-finance mandates (30 states) — Next Gen Personal Finance

• People accept faulty AI reasoning ~73% ("cognitive surrender") — Wharton, via reporting

• Only ~1 in 4 AI users verify sources — Brussels Times / AOP

• Third-grade reading predicts graduation (4× / 6×) — Annie E. Casey Foundation

• Growth-mindset national experiment raises grades — Yeager et al., Nature, 2019

• Teacher-expectancy / Pygmalion effect — American Psychological Association

• Scientific consensus overturned — Nobel Prize 2005, H. pylori; AMNH, plate tectonics; NLM, Semmelweis

• Quantum entanglement & the observer effect — Nobel Prize 2022, Physics; Scientific American, double-slit

• Perennial philosophy / common wisdom across traditions — Perennial philosophy

• Engagement, hope, and inspiration outperform by multiples — Gallup, via Education Week (30×); Gallup (2.5× / 9×); APA (hope beats IQ); Bain & Company (inspired 125%)