In many parts of the US, if teaching about Birth Control, discrimination and what slavery really like was not illegal, you would find get more applications. In some places teachers where even brought up on criminal charges.
These days, no smart person would even think about teaching is many regions of the US, and maybe Canada too.
Hence given the federal ED is prohibited from meaningfully measuring student outcomes, their metrics focus on other things which are worse proxies and more gameable.
I wonder if any study has ever quantified the economic cost to the US of not having nationally-standardized measurements of educational outcomes for all HS students, and what that cost is. (Even the ones who never apply to college. Especially the ones who never apply to college. Also the ones who don't graduate.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elementary_and_Secondary_Educa...
Here are two people from the Cato Institute [0] cheerfully expounding their ideological belief that the US Constitution doesn’t give the federal government any power over education (not even the "promoting the general welfare" clause of Article I, Section 8 which has been held to cover tax collection, public health, Social Security), and that in their opinion the rot set in with FDR in the 1930s.
(Of course the Constitution doesn’t say anything about things like federal air traffic control, either, but few advocate mounting a constitutional challenge to strike down the overreaching government tyranny of the Federal Aviation Act of 1958, which established the FAA by statute.)
[0]: https://www.cato.org/policy-report/november/december-2007/sc...