The solution is early childhood education.

Year in and year out, America gets a report on the failures of education. The latest results from the National Assessment of Education Progress show American students struggle with science. Less than half of them are proficient, and the ability of our country to produce leaders in the field, according to a test administrator, is “seriously in danger.”

What is it that other countries are doing to beat the United States? Are they passing laws that strip funding from poor-performing schools or laws that require tests that have the end result of forcing schools to make teachers to teach to tests. No.

What they are doing is investing in early childhood education, aka preschool. They also have a shorter school breaks over the academic year so children lose less of the knowledge, unlike in the U.S., where kids are out of school all summer.

President Barack Obama said this in his State of the Union address: “Maintaining our leadership in research and technology is crucial to America’s success. But if we want to win the future — if we want innovation to produce jobs in America and not overseas — then we also have to win the race to educate our kids.”

We can continue to create unattainable standards. We can continue to hire highly educated teachers, then force them into a government-mandated box that doesn’t allow them to use their skills fully. We can continue to cut funding. But these politically motivated steps have not proven successful. We need to see what is working in other countries, and do more of what they are doing.

For starters, we need to do more to teach children before kindergarten. That’s where the road to success begins. Then we need to find ways of getting them into more classrooms and less goofing off from kindergarten on.

Don’t blame the teachers for the state of American education. That’s not working either. Blame the politicians who make the big decisions.