In all the explanations for the Trump victory, don’t forget the mess we’ve made of our educational system. Our K-12 public schools perform poorly, relative to the rest of the First World. As for our universities, they’re great fun for the kids, but many students emerge on graduation no better educated than when they first walked in the classroom door. The left ignored this, but the voters didn’t.

In the most recent OECD Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) rankings, which provide a snapshot of a 15-year olds’ knowledge and skills in math, science and reading in 65 countries, the United States placed 30th in math and 23rd in science. In reading it placed 15th. Sadly, our best students are only as good as their average students.

America’s top 5 percent of students come in at just a little above the average First World country in literary proficiency and second from the bottom in numerical proficiency.

So what gives? It’s not the lack of money. There’s no correlation between education funding and student performance in America, and pleading money problems is just an excuse to enrich political allies in the teachers unions. Nor is there an immigration or racial explanation. On immigration, Canada has a far higher proportion of foreign-born residents (20 percent for them, 15 for us), and on PISA tests it beats the pants off us.

What’s the way back? Real simple: competition. Vouchers that parents can use to pay the tuition at the public, charter or parochial school of their choice.

Then again, progressives are apt to tell you that the difference comes down to underperforming minority students. But only 41.8 percent of white American 15-year-olds are proficient in math, compared with 49.5 of all Canadians, including their immigrants.

So what’s the way back? Real simple: competition. Vouchers that parents can use to pay the tuition at the public, charter or parochial school of their choice.

That’s the difference between America and most of the other countries that beat us on PISA tests. Canada, for example, gives government support to parochial schools, allowing parents who can’t afford tuition a choice, and a chance to escape public schools that fail them. This system also pulls up public schools by their shoelaces when they see their students exiting to other kinds of government-supported schools.

Trump has a similar fix. He’s proposed offering vouchers which would pay the full tuition at charter or religious schools, and the Supreme Court has blessed this provided there is a public school alternative. It’s a proposal that drives the left nuts, which simply proves that all they care about is a Democratic interest group and not the students.

You want to tell me that there’s something scary about Trump’s proposal to mimic Canada’s much superior K-12 system? That’s fine, but now could you please explain why Lena Dunham wants to move there?

Trump also wants to do something about the student loan program that has turned too many millennials into debt slaves. When people graduate with a student debt load of $100,000 or $200,000, whatever they earn will go to pay off their loans and they’ll have lost their incentive to look for work. That goes a long way to explaining their sense of alienation from America. What Trump has proposed is student debt relief, in the form of a bankruptcy discharge, where the universities will bear a portion of the loss. That’s crucially important, because when universities have skin in the game they’re going to be a lot less ready to offer the kinds of politically correct courses that, in the minds of employers, make a student look unemployable.

The tougher nut is what to do about how US universities have turned themselves into boorish factories of hatred. Let’s leave that for another time.

F.H. Buckley teaches law at George Mason University. His most recent book was “The Way Back: Restoring the Promise of America.”