Latest test results show that the public school status quo is unacceptable.
P resident Donald J. Trump’s executive order titled “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K–12 Schooling” is both necessary and timely.
National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) test results released last week show that our public education system is in dire straits. As public school teachers and administrators increasingly have taught divisive and highly political topics in classrooms across the country, young students’ ability to read has depreciated significantly.
Regarding the test results, Dan Goldhaber, an education researcher at the American Institutes for Research and the University of Washington, said, “I don’t know how many different ways you can say these results are bad, but they’re bad. I don’t think this is the canary in the coal mine. This is a flock of dead birds in the coal mine.”
The situation is even worse than the adage that public schools are not teaching children “how to think, but what to think.” In addition to the provable and obscene abuse of taxpayer dollars going toward a politicized public education, children can barely read and do math. In 2024, for example, only 31 percent of fourth-graders and 30 percent of eighth-graders performed at or above the proficient level on the NAEP reading assessments. Meanwhile, 39 percent of fourth-grade students and 28 percent of eighth-grade students performed at or above the proficient level on the NAEP math assessments.
In other words, the vast majority of children who took the NAEP math and reading assessments are performing below proficiency level. The NAEP, also called the Nation’s Report Card, clearly is giving our public education system an “F.”
Americans are left wondering what public education institutions did with their federal Covid-19 money. Despite an extra $189 billion in public funds from Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER), meant to combat learning loss promulgated by Covid-era policies such as closing schools under teachers’ unions’ demands, children fared even more poorly on the NAEP reading assessment in 2024 than they did in 2022.
Many schools used at least some of their ESSER funds for purposes that had nothing to do with addressing student learning loss. For example, some of these schools, according to Parents Defending Education, used ESSER money to rent a Major League Baseball stadium, update athletic fields, pay for athletes’ accommodations at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, expand a city-owned nature center, and purchase an ice cream truck. Clearly, simply throwing more money at public schools does not yield better results for students.
Many districts further used the funds toward an explicitly political agenda. In Fairfax County, Va., for example, the district allocated nearly $80 million in 2021 to support efforts such as equity professional development for school teams and $23.3 million for social-emotional learning initiatives. The district’s total budget also notably increased from $3 billion in fiscal 2020 to $3.7 billion in fiscal 2025.
Meanwhile, the percentage of students in Fairfax County Public Schools who failed the English reading and English writing standardized tests over that period also increased. In a continued tragicomedy for both taxpayers and children, that indisputable fact does not stop district administrators from demanding an additional $300 million in fiscal 2026, up to a $4 billion budget despite declining student enrollment.
Most of Fairfax County’s residents know that the school district’s problems stem from irresponsible leadership and flagrant spending, but the superintendent and school board members continue to cry that they just don’t have enough money. At the same time, district leadership refuses to answer questions about whether they intend to abide by Trump’s executive orders.
In districts such as Fairfax County Public Schools that prioritize the political indoctrination of students, including un-American equity lectures and unconstitutionally mandated pronoun usage, more funding is arguably counterproductive. Rather, such districts need an external budget audit and to be forced to abide by Trump’s executive orders to end political indoctrination and DEI initiatives. Perhaps states’ departments of education could be helpful to this end.
We are at a crossroads in the public education system at which 69 percent of fourth-grade students read below proficiency. This is a problem that has a few clear solutions and requires all hands on deck. Americans need to advocate school choice, eliminate political indoctrination and DEI policies from our public schools, and evaluate public education spending based on student outcomes. Maybe then, American children will have a chance to succeed.