Another year, another disastrous National School Report card, the annual checkup on American students’ test scores. Yes, it’s bad. After predictably plunging during the COVID school-shutdown years, scores show no signs of snapping back. This is child abuse on a national level.

Our good friends at the Committee to Unleash Prosperity succinctly summed up the past five years: “The massive, unprecedented infusion of federal funds into schools under the guise of COVID recovery has abjectly failed to improve outcomes – but it has enriched the teacher unions.”

Yep. And the test scores remain abysmal, with no improvement. Average reading scores for 8th graders (America’s future workforce, mind you) have fallen from 263 in 2019 to 258 in 2024, erasing 33 years of slow improvement in reading.

Math is just as bad, if not worse. True, the 274 level is the same as in 2022, but it’s way below the level five years ago.

Worst of all, those at the bottom of the education performance race are getting worse, while a small cohort at the top are improving. This continues a trend, which began during the Obama administration.

“In 2011 and 2012, the Obama administration began issuing waivers to release states from the most onerous requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act,” explained Chad Aldeman, an education writer at The 74 website. “Congress made those policies permanent in the 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act.”

“No Child Left Behind”? Try “Most Children Left Behind.” Lower standards equals lower test scores. It’s that simple. You can expect the future gap between rich and poor to widen.

“If students can’t catch up, the learning loss may impact their future earnings and even become a drag on the U.S. economy,” noted a CNN piece in 2023.

This is a deadly serious problem. One calculation, made early in the COVID era, forecast a $2 trillion cumulative loss of income for America’s 50 million schoolkids; another more recent report estimated that “(s)tudents on average face 2 to 9 percent lower lifetime income depending on the state in which they attended school.”

Our schools are failing, despite massive spending. What a surprise. Apart from wringing our hands in despair, what can be done about this?

First, recognize we have a problem, and it isn’t the Wuhan virus. It’s bad public school administrators and even worse teachers unions, who have turned once-model institutions of learning into academies of woke propaganda and academic failure.

This has been going on for a while, but its most severe effects are being felt acutely right now, in the wake of the COVID shutdowns, which stranded millions of kids at home doing “online” instruction from remote teachers.

Despite the massive, unprecedented infusion of $190 billion in federal funds into schools under the guise of COVID recovery, outcomes have worsened – but the spending has enriched and empowered teachers unions while also giving inept school administrators greater power over students’ learning.

Parents are fleeing the system (but still pay taxes for it), while the teacher-administrative complex wants even more. Not surprisingly, since 2019, the National Center for Education Statistics shows, the number of children attending U.S. schools has dropped by 1.3 million, while the number of teachers and administrators has surged 351,000. That’s doubling down on failure.

Second, the Education Department, despite its name, has failed to fix education, despite its huge budget. For the first 200 years of this nation, we had no Education Department at all. Yet we led the world in innovation, Nobel Prizes, arts and letters, scientific research, and economic growth during that time.

So why do we have a now-$90 billion-a-year education bureaucracy? As Reason put it a while back, “Creating the DoED (in 1979) was (President) Carter’s fulfillment of a 1976 presidential campaign promise, when he earned the endorsement of the largest labor union in the United States — the National Education Association (NEA).”

The Education Department’s function has little to do with education and a lot to do with disbursing money under various laws passed by Congress. It educates no one. The most successful secretary of Education will be the one who shuts it down.

Third, from a policy standpoint, it’s time to move forward with meaningful school reforms that reinstate the supremacy of parents and the local community and lessen the influence of teachers and administrators.

That means more charter schools, Education Savings Accounts, vouchers, and school choice for parents. Only by creating a functioning marketplace for the consumers of education (parents and their kids) can our dysfunctional educational system ever be fixed. We’re spending far too much money on education to have diminishing returns.

A good first step was taken just this week in both the House and the Senate, a welcome start to the freeing of our public schools from the shackles of bureaucracy and leftist dogma by boosting school choice and making it easier for parents to pay for kids’ schooling.

And even the Education Department, under Trump, is doing one thing that should have been done long ago: It’s “begun dismantling diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies within its halls,” the Daily Caller wrote.

So let’s keep the changes coming. America’s future depends on the quality of our children’s education. That’s too precious to leave in the hands of the leftist teachers unions and administrators who have done such damage to our once best-in-the-world schools.

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board