It had to pull its sales reps in from the field, paying their travel, food and lodging while it gave them the fundamentals of a high-school education. At the same time, the company was losing business to the competition while its field force was back in the company classrooms. Similar stories came from employer after employer. It's losing money hand over fist. Employees don't know how to do even the simplest jobs.
Customers are dissatisfied.
The way out of America's educational dismal swamp is not to pour even more billions into a failed education system. All that will do is produce only more of the same, make a bad situation still worse and merely postpone the inevitable at a cost far greater. Nor is it to tinker here with precious pilot projects and dabble there with sweet corrective experiments that nibble away at the edges of the problem while leaving the core to rot all the more. None of those nostrums will do one bit of good, only higher harm. The replacement system is the overriding issue.