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each year. That is economically unsustainable and morally unacceptable. High school dropouts today are basically condemned to poverty and social failure. One of the more unusual and sobering press conferences I participated in last year was the release of a report by a group of top retired generals and admirals that included General Wesley Clark and Major General James Kelley. They were deeply troubled, as I am, by the national security burden created by America’s underperforming education system. Here was the stunning figure cited in the generals’ report: 75 percent of young Americans, between the ages of 17 to 24, are unable to enlist in the military today because they have failed to graduate from high school, have a criminal record, or are physically unfit. So, to borrow a phrase from the space race era—yes, Houston, we have a problem.

In a follow-up essay in Foreign Affairs (November–December 2010), Duncan added that young Americans today have almost identical college completion rates as their parents. In other words, we’ve made no improvement. The numbers tell the story.

“Currently,” Duncan wrote, “about one-fourth of ninth graders fail to graduate high school within four years. Among the OECD countries, only Mexico, Spain, Turkey, and New Zealand have higher dropout rates than the United States.” The numbers do not improve as American students move through the educational system.

College entrance exams suggest that merely one quarter of graduating high school seniors are ready for college, and 40 percent of incoming freshmen at community colleges have to take at least one remedial class during their first semester. In June, the Center on Education and the Workforce projected that by 2018, the U.S. economy will need about 22 million more college-educated workers, but that, at current graduation rates, it will be short by at least three million. With not enough Americans completing college, the center warned, the United States is “on a collision course with the future.”

American colleges and universities, Duncan added, still have one of the highest enrollment rates in the world—“nearly 70 percent of U.S. high school graduates enroll in college within one year of earning their diplomas. But only about 60 percent of students who enroll in four-year bachelor’s programs graduate within six years, and only about 20 percent of students who enroll in two-year community colleges graduate within three years.”

Much of what Duncan described is taking place in middle-class communities, but the picture that emerges from more challenged areas is breathtakingly bleak. A May 2011 study by the Detroit Regional Workforce Fund found that 47 percent of adult Detroit residents, or about 200,000 people, are functionally illiterate—which means that nearly half the adults in the city can’t perform simple tasks such as reading an instruction book, reading labels on packages or machinery, or filling out a job application. Depressingly, about 100,000 of those functionally illiterate adults have either a high school diploma or the GED equivalent. You can stimulate the Detroit economy all you want, but even if jobs come back, people who can’t read won’t be able to do them.

We as a country already pay staggering sums to fund remedial education for students who enter the workplace with high school and college degrees—degrees that were supposed to prepare them for jobs but did not. A 2004 study of 120 American corporations by the National Commission on Writing (a panel established by the College Board) concluded that a third of the employees in the nation’s blue-chip companies wrote poorly and that businesses were spending as much as $3.1 billion annually on remedial training. The New York Times’s education writer, Sam Dillon, reported (December 7, 2004) that

R. Craig Hogan, a former university professor who heads an online school for business writing [in Illinois], received an anguished e-mail message recently from a prospective student: “i need help,” said the message, which was devoid of punctuation. “i am writing a essay on writing