No Child Left Behind destroyed this country far more effectively than I ever would have suspected.

The culture was fucked long before no child left behind to be fair. Anti intellectualism was rampant, since before most of us were born, gangster culture and drug prohibition and The Fear made a solid percent of the population criminals and authorized a police state.

City schools are better now than they were in the 80s and 90s, things got real bad in the crime waves.

Since we’re talking sci-fi, this is Asimove in 1980:

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.