The latest Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) scores confirm what parents have been living for years: the United States is falling even further behind academically. American 15-year-olds just posted among the lowest reading and math results this country has recorded in a generation. Reading dropped another 14 points and math sits near historic lows. The and the one-size-fits-all government school monopoly have produced an international embarrassment.
Worse â and tellingly â that collapse followed a historic spending binge. According to the Census Bureaus latest data, we now outspend every country on Earth: over $21,000 per student. Yet new Gallup polling shows satisfaction with at an all-time low, with a whopping 67% of adults reporting dissatisfaction with the system.
School-choice momentum helps explain why so many people are finally willing to call the system a disaster. We knew it all along. Families have more options than ever, so they no longer have to live with the cognitive dissonance of pretending they were sending their kids to good schools. They are breaking free from their captors, and the Stockholm syndrome is going away.
NUMBER OF K-12 PUBLIC SCHOOL STUDENTS HAS DECLINED IN MORE THAN HALF OF STATES, REPORT INDICATES
Staffing trends show who the monopoly actually serves. Since 2014, government schools have added about 620,000 employees while student enrollment has dropped by about 775,000. The government school system has become more of a jobs program for adults than an education initiative for kids.
Take Frederick Douglass Academy High School in Chicago, which is about 97% empty. Built for more than 1,000 students, it now enrolls 27 children and employs 28 adults. Nearly two-thirds of those students are chronically absent. The school spends more than $90,000 per pupil and enjoys a better than one-to-one staff-to-student ratio, yet not a single child was tested as proficient in math or reading.
New York City runs the same model at industrial scale. Some 43% of kids in NYC public schools are stuck in failing campuses where more than half the student body is not proficient in math, reading or both. The city is spending north of $40,000 a kid, more than half a million dollars for each childs 13-year K-12 “education,” and still cannot get the basics right.
Parents started waking up to the teachers union insanity during COVID-19, and 18 states have passed universal school choice policies in the past six years as a result. Reopening the buildings did not restore trust. The political indoctrination has only worsened, and the unions learned nothing from the backlash. They doubled down and leaned into ideological warfare, using kids as pawns to advance their socialist agenda.
GOV HOCHUL’S PLAN TO OPT NEW YORK INTO FEDERAL SCHOOL CHOICE PROGRAM DRAWS UNION OPPOSITION
