Just how much longer will American parents, their kids, business leaders and the political class tolerate the dreadful performance of our public schools? It’s arguably the greatest threat to our nation’s economic health and our national security.
The latest Nation’s Report Card test scores are dismal and heartbreaking. The crash that started with inexcusable COVID-19-era school closures has continued over a cliff in almost every state.
The top 25% of eighth graders have seen math scores rebound a little bit from 2022, but they’re still below 2019. The other 75% of kids’ scores have remained the same or dropped.
The reading scores were even worse. Johnny can’t read.
What’s especially troubling is that scores for the lowest-performing students from disadvantaged families have fallen the most. Anyone concerned about income inequality should be protesting from the rafters.
But Washington responded with a giant yawn. The teacher unions predictably called for more money. Per-pupil funding is up by more than 50% after adjusting for inflation in most states since 1980, yet test scores are flat or falling.
Former President Joe Biden added $175 billion in federal education spending, and look what we got for the money. Nothing.
President Donald Trump should call for a national education emergency. Forty years ago, the federal report card on education warned that our schools were facing a “crisis of mediocrity.” Four decades later, mediocrity would be an improvement.
Trump has already taken important steps. He held an education summit last week that I and many of the nation’s governors attended. He has issued an executive order on school choice that would allow parents whose kids attend failing schools to have federal funds to attend higher-performing private and Catholic schools.
There are signs of real progress in some states. Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee just signed into law the most ambitious school choice program in the nation. Texas — with its 5 million schoolchildren — is likely to follow suit in the months ahead.
Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry is also committed to choice, and his state was one of the few that actually recorded improved test scores. Louisiana has done a wholesale makeover of its learning with a program called “evidence-based curriculum.” Do what works. What a concept.
It used to be that the education crisis in America was mostly restricted to the inner cities with low-income residents, crime, drugs and mostly uneducated female-headed households. But now even many middle-class suburban areas are falling behind as well. The infection of failure is spreading, and more money is only buying worse results.
Meanwhile, other nations like China and India are focusing their schools on science, technology, engineering and math, and graduating many more math and science majors into the workforce than we are.
It’s being called our 21st-century Sputnik moment, and we’d better win the education race if we’re going to stay the global superpower.
Stephen Moore is a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation. He is also an economic advisor to the Trump campaign. His new book, coauthored with Arthur Laffer, is “The Trump Economic Miracle.”
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As far as COVID is concerned, the Obama/Biden driven democrat corrupters of our American educational system’s activities as part of their Alinsky taught tactics to “Overwhelm the system” to create weak malleable citizens who are easier to control,,,,,they really showed how their extremists party leaders are able to NEVER let a crisis go to waste, let alone create a crisis when none are available the take advantage of sane strong workable citizenry, made DEI woke weak and impotent in social dependency. The were able to drop the average intelligence of American students at least 20 I.Q. points or about a full grade lost in student efficiency, and they gained a decade of indoctrination in the spread of individual socialist government dependency, and divisive woke entitlement beliefs indoctrinated, that will and has created a lost American generation, lost in the ability to SELF-govern their own lives individually, that collectively kills our national ability to sustain the founders gift of freedom to self-govern ourselves as a nation.
Knowledge is power, and Democrats are true believers that to gain the power, they must degrade and eliminate the knwoledge which becomes the Democrat Party’s most feared enemy when THE PEOPLE begin to spread the truth, obtain clarity of thought and ability to grasp reality that alone is the power that sets them free of Democrat party promoted mind enslaving delusions.
Will americans trust the public education system any more? HELL NO I don’t think so.