Merriam-Webster calls “grift” a kind of confidence game, a swindle. The American public school system, characterized by escalating costs and declining academic outcomes, extracts vast resources from taxpayers while failing to deliver promised results. The people who trained us to think (trained us how to think—specifically, about them) have accelerated their failure to provide quality education to our youth by virtue of their ability to manipulate the outcomes (and ultimately our emotions regarding the same).
But now, it seems, the jig is up! Not long ago, almost 200 teachers and administrators across 44 schools in Atlanta appeared to have systematically altered student answers on standardized tests to inflate their scores and make themselves look better. The teachers were cheating on the test. Superintendent Beverly Hall, previously named 2009 Superintendent of the Year and then indicted on racketeering and other charges, allegedly earned hundreds of thousands in bonuses for fraudulent gains. One school’s scores jumped 45% in a year.
This corruption wasn’t isolated to Atlanta. Similar issues surfaced in Texas, New York, and Virginia. A 2010 New York Times report exposed flaws in tying teacher pay and school survival to test scores—because schools are the singular place exempt from the normal “compensation for performance.”
It should make us question teacher competence, at least. In 2024, “five people [were] charged in Texas with organizing and participating in an illegal cheating scheme that certified more than 200 unqualified teachers,” while the organizers raked in over $1 million.
Perhaps the fault lies in a system that teaches money as the highest value, devoid of morality, the golden rule, and just plain virtue.
The financial scale of public education in the United States is staggering. In 2019, per-pupil spending averaged $13,187, with total K-12 expenditures reaching $739 billion. This figure exceeds the GDP of many nations, yet the allocation of these funds raises serious questions. A significant portion goes to administrative overhead, infrastructure projects, and external consultants, rather than directly benefiting classrooms. A report from the Center for American Progress underscores tremendous funding disparities. The Economic Policy Institute promotes an overhaul to prioritize equity and accountability, two non-academic things that defy quantification. The economic swindle is fully baked in at this point.
Bumbling financial mismanagement, compounded by poor academic performance, reveals the scheme’s true cost. The 2023 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reported that 8th-grade reading and math proficiency rates remained stagnant, with only 25% of students proficient in reading and even fewer in math. A score of 25% on a standard test is a failing grade, but no one has the stomach to “fail” the schools! These historically low scores have remained unchanged since the 1970s, despite increased spending, and represent a steep erosion of the definition of proficiency. The eighth-grade reading level of a century ago was much more advanced than today’s.
The deception lies in the disconnect between promises and outcomes. Policymakers and education officials assure taxpayers that increased funding will yield better results, but it never does. Instead of addressing this inconsistency, they prioritize initiatives with questionable efficacy, such as trendy pedagogical frameworks, over foundational skills like literacy and numeracy. Race to the Top and Common Core are two examples of such ill-advised but expensive policy shifts. Whole Word Reading was another boondoggle that forced costly new book acquisitions with disastrous results. Someone made money, and someone got political capital, but the children experienced a tremendous drop in reading ability as a result. According to APM Reports, the corrective “Reading Recovery,” which uses techniques derived from the failed whole language approach, has helped further cripple children’s ability to read.
This pattern suggests a system designed to sustain and enrich itself rather than serve students. Like a confidence scheme, it exploits the public trust to secure ever-increasing budgets while delivering diminishing returns. It is a race to see if they can dumb us down enough that we stop noticing their subterfuge. Perhaps they’ve already won.
The grift extends beyond finances to the educational mission itself. Curricula increasingly emphasize ideological objectives over academic rigor, diverting resources from proven instructional methods. This misalignment betrays the trust of parents and taxpayers, who expect schools to prepare students for productive lives. The result is generations ill-equipped for the demands of the modern economy, with declining literacy and critical thinking skills, despite record-high university tuition.
Addressing this requires transparency in budgeting to ensure funds reach classrooms rather than administrative coffers. Parents and community members should review ledgers showing where the money is spent. Personal, individual investment in oversight is the only remedy to bureaucratized burglary. New policies must prioritize measurable outcomes over unproven initiatives. Expanding parental voices through increased involvement on school boards and in classrooms introduces invested oversight, incentivizing efficiency and innovation.
The government school system’s performance exposes an official Ponzi scheme of epic proportions. As our nation’s stakeholders, despite our training to obey our schools, we must assert our authority to dismantle this fraud. Lawmakers can work toward more local control for improved results and more character-building pedagogy. Parents must step up, sit on school boards to hold their local schools accountable, and turn them around.
Our children’s future and the integrity of our society depend on transforming this system from a grift into a genuine engine of opportunity.
Sam Sorbo, author of Parents’ Guide to Homeschool: Making Education Easy and Fun.