It does depend on what we mean by read and write. I don't mean just recognizing letters and being able to reproduce them. An adult should be able to read and understand an article from a decent newspaper (say the Financial Times), and write a 5 line summary. Definitely not all 12 year olds can to do that and, I'd argue, a large fraction of adults can't either.

Most people never retain much of anything past that anyway, in my experience. I’d guesstimate that fewer than 20% of undergraduate school graduates are actually well educated in any meaningful sense of the term.

Yeah, by this metric, school should stop when kids are 12.

It raises the question, what are we getting for our money (in the US)?

> In 2017, the United States spent $14,100 per full-time-equivalent (FTE) student on elementary and secondary education, which was 37 percent higher than the average of Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) member countries... https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd

Part of this is in having schools bearing the brunt of other failures in society or by having schools be the ones trying to solve those issues.

Schools are often the safety net for youths with a wide range of problems. While schools are the catch all for such problems, they're more expensive than fixing other issues like fair wages for the parents of the students (e.g. having hischoolers needing to get a job to support the family rather than study for school).

This high price tag is the result of shifting around other issues to the place where they're inefficiently handled.

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The flip side of this is the "schools are often funded by property taxes and areas that are able to collect more taxes are able to spend significantly more per student even if it doesn't result in a better outcome." Many of these areas already have good student outcomes and the money is spent on on... whatever.

Palo Alto spends $24.5k/student ( https://nces.ed.gov/ccd/districtsearch/district_detail.asp?I... ).

Wyoming county schools spends $11.5k ( https://nces.ed.gov/ccd/districtsearch/district_detail.asp?S... ).

When looking at those, compare the breakdown of revenue sources.

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So, I'll say "no, we're not - but it's not the fault of the schools."

It used to.

I guess it depends what you classify as being able to read, write and use basic math operations because in my opinion a large majority of 13 year olds can't do these things well.

Most adults don't seem to be able to do these things well though, so I obviously have a skewed perspective.