“The most popular nonfiction book of 1957 was an attack on American education standards called Why Johnny Can’t Read, warning us that we were falling dangerously behind the rest of the world..”

From The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson

From this data point we can either deduce that the crisis in American education is continuing or that the perception that there is a crisis in American education is continuing.  Since America did quite well in the last fifty years I have to conclude that the issue is one of perception.  Which leads me to believe that the current set of worries about education are at best overstated.