I'm with stupid, the poor version

why isn't education the top priority

Looking over data like this, you get a sense of why economists consistently put education at the top of the list of national priorities. It corrects for all sorts of other problems by itself.

You want health care, well under the current system the only reliable way to get it is to have a decent job and employer who gives you health insurance benefits. And to get that, you need a decent education. Obviously we have other problems with health care that aren't addressed this way, but those are longer and more systemic problems than access problems. You say you want energy independence, well education helps there because we'd have a bigger pool of scientists working on alternative energy research. And presumably a population with some association with energy efficiencies and cost savings.

Budget constraints are about the only thing that's not tackled immediately by educational concerns, and they're a problem that has a few decades to resolve and can still be tackled immediately. Even there, a better educated population could have at least a cursory association with delayed gratification or the idea that we should resolve problems as they surface rather than when the entire iceberg pokes up out of the water and into the boat.