The stock market panicked at the end of January on news that the Chinese start-up DeepSeek had made an artificial intelligence model that is more efficient than anything American companies have produced thus far. In response, former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy posted to X, “Sputnik-like moments are a good thing,” referring to the episode that kicked off the Space Race in 1957, when the Soviet Union was able to outcompete America by launching the first-ever satellite into space. “We don’t need to freak out; we just need to wake up,” Ramaswamy continued.
“If our schools fail, it will not be because we care too much for our ideals but because we care too little.”
A few days later, another piece of news broke that confirmed Ramaswamy’s intuition: last year’s results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress revealed that American eighth graders’ reading skills have fallen to the
