The Nation’s Report Card, released last week, shows the K-12 school system as bad and getting worse. A record 32% of high school seniors cannot read proficiently, and almost half cannot do basic math. Fourth and eighth-grade math and reading scores also fell, continuing a collapse that began before the COVID-19 school closures. 

The new National Assessment of Educational Progress numbers should spur leaders to abandon harmful diversity, equity, and inclusion curriculum and discipline policies that distract from education fundamentals and cause chaos in classrooms. Collective bargaining should also be rolled back because unions raise pay for employees but harm student performance, especially among those who need the most help.

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If there was a silver lining in the latest NAEP numbers, it was that scores for reading and math for the top 10% of students held steady rather than falling. The best students are still doing well. But what this means is that declines concentrated in the bottom 20% of students are widening the performance gap between the top and bottom. Huge and growing education gaps between top and bottom at high school graduation will get bigger as these students progress in life and enter the workforce. In today’s knowledge economy, people who can read and do math make more money than those who cannot. 

Growing inequality should concern everyone, as it fosters political instability. It should be particularly worrisome for conservatives worried about falling birth rates. As these pages have detailed before, declining birth rates are driven almost entirely by a decline in marriage, and those with the least education and the lowest incomes are least likely to marry. Couples with college degrees are getting married and having children just as they did in the 1950s. But if we are going to fix the fertility crisis lower down the education ladder, we are going to have to make public schools work again.

For a decade after President George W. Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act, students improved substantially in reading and math, with the largest benefits coming to those at the bottom. But substantial pushback against testing and woke diversity, equity, and inclusion injected poison into urban schools, and it has been a disaster.

Curriculum changes pushed by DEI consultants in conjunction with the Black Lives Matter movement prompted Chicago Public Schools, for example, to mandate time on “racial justice” topics, including “police torture.” New Jersey mandated climate change propaganda in every subject, including physical education. California made all high school students pass an “ethnic studies” class to graduate. Every minute spent on racial justice, climate change, and ethnic studies is wasted and could have been spent teaching students to read and write.

Perhaps worse were DEI-inspired discipline policies to reduce suspensions of racial minority students. Instituted in urban schools across the country, these “succeeded” in reducing suspensions, but school violence and disruptions have risen as a direct result. A 2025 Teachers Pay Teachers study found that most teachers reported that student behavior has worsened over the past two years, while a 2024 Rand study found that “managing student behavior” was the No. 1 stressor for teachers in classrooms. Even the National Education Association found 80% of teachers believed student behavior was a “serious problem,” with many citing it as a reason for leaving the profession.

Then there is the rise of teachers unions, including the NEA itself. There is a long line of research showing that while teacher union collective bargaining leads to higher pay and lower turnover among teachers, it also causes worse outcomes for students, particularly the worst performing and boys.

A SADLY NECESSARY RULE CHANGE IN THE SENATE

School choice is great. Conservatives should keep fighting to allow parents to send their children to the school of their choice. But we cannot abandon children whose parents want to send them to the local public school. Conservatives need an agenda for public school success while also demanding teacher accountability. We can’t just abandon public schools and let teachers unions indoctrinate half the population with anti-American propaganda. We need to fight for high-quality public education.

Like immigration, we know what works. We just need the political will to impose it. Phonics, race-blind discipline, testing, and accountability. Louisiana and Alabama are two states that have defied the recent reading and math decline. Republicans need to take those successful models and import them to other states.