If I tell you that adult science literacy has tripled since I was in college, that would seem to be a good thing.  And if I tell you NIH funding has gone up 50% since 2001, that would also be a good thing.

But then you're probably not in science media. Like in mainstream news, good things are boring and if you are a politically-funded constituency like education or science academia, good news is bad for business. We can't note that science literacy has tripled in the last 25 years, we must insist that there are not enough teachers and presidents must commit to hiring a lot more. (1) We can't talk about how much more scientifically knowledgeable people are, we must talk about how 'abysmal' things are. 

Prof. Don Prothero wrote a great book on evolution but he can sure be a buzzkill when it comes to culture. Under the guise of skepticism, he hammers American kids and adults for how dumb they are despite those improvements from a generation ago. He shows little skepticism about facts that have been framed to lead people to reach a narrow cultural, agenda-driven conclusion. Prothero is a scientist and has done a wonderful job in science outreach - so this is not about him as an individual, it is about an issue, he is just the latest who leaves behind critical thinking when it matches a personal belief outside his expertise.

The issue is American illiteracy and to prove it he presents a bunch of ways in which Americans failed to know facts.  Here is what a skeptic should look at; in a culture where we consistently say we should focus on 'how to think' rather than teaching facts to pass a test, why are so many in media willing to jump on the 'Americans do poorly on test questions' meme? Why the focus on facts when it comes to berating students (and adults) while the rest of the time when we fill out surveys we dutifully say it is more important that people know how to think?

It doesn't make a bit of difference how many people know where the Civil War is fought - if we teach American kids how to think, they don't need to memorize facts. They can go to Google and find out in 15 seconds where the Civil War was fought - on their phones. American kids who did poorly on international standardized tests a generation ago made that technology.

This 'Americans don't know facts' thinking has been prevalent for decades. 
To such an extent that a law called No Child Left Behind passed in overwhelming bipartisan fashion in 2002, with Sen. Ted Kennedy and Rep. John Boehner hugging it out to claim a victory for children.  It passed by a startling (for a major piece of legislation) 91-8 in the Senate and 384-41 in the House because everyone knew education was flawed. Everyone said the same thing Prothero says in his piece; kids and adults did not know the kind of basic facts that immigrants had to learn to pass a citizenship test. 

Yet shortly after it went into effect the charge became that we were 'teaching to the test' and that was wrong.  President Obama gutted the program, saying that teachers should have the flexibility to teach and not have to 'teach to the test'. But now kids won't do well on tests and we will get the same goofy claims about American kids being dumb because kids in other countries learn facts.

Do we want to be more like other countries? China, for example, does far better on international standardized tests but if we we are going to be like China, teacher's unions are going to be even less happy than they were about having performance standards - teachers make $400 a month, kids learn by rote and duties include having to clean the bathrooms in the school. They teach to the test and their teachers have no unions.

The reality is - and skeptics should know this - America is not doing any worse on tests than it ever has, we stopped 'teaching facts' and started teaching how to think 80 years ago.  For as much as we hear about how America does poorly on testing recently, it just isn't true. The first international standardized test was given in 1964 and America placed 11th - out of 12 countries. Who in science outreach is going to claim that American science has been terrible since then? It would be a crazy assertion, America produces 32% of the world's science with 5% of the world population, and leads the world in Nobel prizes.

Prothero advocates Finland, due to their success on one test; he credits their free health care and lunches for why kids did well, which does not mass skeptical muster at all. He doesn't realize that he is endorsing their pedagogical conservatism rather than their economic collectivism - decentralization and subjective grades is exactly the system that modern American education and its 'how to think' mentality replaced. Finland was the last country in Europe to even institute compulsory education, that is how conservative they are in their culture. Teaching is a prestigious profession there because they hire the best ones and fire the bad ones - something not possible in America - and they do not focus on 'nurturing' kids culturally or framing education through social justice issues, they teach facts that do well on standardized tests.
(2)

You can't credit free health care for good grades there and then ignore lack of a progressive stranglehold on their education system by lobbyists, unions and special interest agendas that impact what gets taught.

The president just wrecked the program that had started to fix the 'taking tests' problem (3) and, thanks to the persistent 'American kids are dumb' coverage, what are American parents now advocating again?

Teaching to the test.

An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll found that 72% of the public want to fire poorly performing teachers and 93% want to use standarized tests to know where kids are falling short.

Only 30% of households that had a relative in teaching agreed that student performance should matter in teacher evaluations.

NOTES:

(1) In reality, there is no teacher shortage that can easily be fixed by hiring. As I noted in Science Left Behind, the last two presidents have committed to hiring even more outrageous numbers of teachers. What they are not being told is that the same number of teachers quit as are hired, for reasons that had nothing to do with teacher salary or students and everything to do with union and administrative control and micromanagement of teaching. Not teaching to the test, teaching as a profession.

(2) Why the newfound rush to worry about averages and aggregate scores anyway? I don't much care what my electrician knows about evolution - I also know that if I poll 1,000 members of a skeptic society what they actually know about adaptive radiation could dance with an angel on the head of a pin, even though presumably they have memorized more facts.  

(3) Girls and boys achieved parity in math for the first time in world history and minorities across the board all improved substantially. Detractors of the program insisted that those improvements would have happened anyway.