In the country’s most progressive cities, K-12 public schools are becoming more expensive, less effective, and increasingly unsafe.
From spiraling per-student costs and crumbling infrastructure to weakened discipline and a flight from academic standards, many of America’s blue strongholds are watching their education systems buckle under the weight of ideological governance.
Recommended Stories
- Newsom says he'll yank funding for California schools that 'sell out' to Trump
- Gavin Newsom signs bill that reverses Kamala Harris's anti-truancy law
- White House offers funding advantage to colleges that sign 'Compact for Academic Excellence'
Chicago may be the clearest case study. The nation’s third-largest school district now spends more than $10 billion annually, or roughly $30,000 per student, yet fewer than a third of students are proficient in reading or math. At the same time, nearly a third of Chicago Public Schools buildings are half-empty, with some schools enrolling just a few dozen students while employing full administrative teams. As test scores tumble, political leaders eliminate academic rankings and roll back measures of accountability, citing concerns over racial equity and student well-being.
“We’re returning to a time when inflated grades and social promotion hide the lack of achievement,” said Paul Vallas, former CEO of CPS. “The campaign to stop keeping academic score is in full swing.”
That campaign isn’t limited to education metrics. Across a growing number of blue cities, teachers, parents, and policy experts are sounding alarms over school-based violence, the removal of campus police, and the proliferation of “restorative” and “positive behavior” discipline models that have left many educators feeling helpless — and endangered.
Jonathan Butcher, chairman of the South Carolina Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, told the Washington Examiner that Chicago’s per-pupil costs and low proficiency rates reflect “a system that’s being propped up for political interests — not student success.”
“Enrollment in Chicago has been declining for years, and I think that’s evidence families are not happy,” Butcher said, noting the city’s school system remains one of the largest in the country. “They’re not interested in being forced to stay in a city where they have few alternatives for how their children are learning each day.”
High spending, declining performance
The gap between inputs and outcomes in blue-state school districts has grown increasingly stark in recent years. In Illinois, per-student education spending now tops $21,700, placing the state among the 10 most expensive in the country. Yet the returns on that investment have deteriorated rapidly.
Despite a $9 billion increase in funding since 2019, the state’s latest National Assessment of Educational Progress results show continued declines in reading and math proficiency. Gov. JB Pritzker (D-IL) nevertheless declared the results “a testament to the great strides Illinois students are making academically.”
Vallas responded bluntly in a February essay for the Chicago Contrarian. “Only in Illinois … can such numbers be considered ‘great strides.’”
In Chicago, this paradox is even more pronounced. Graduation rates have hit historic highs, topping 80% for black and Latino students, but standardized test scores have collapsed across all demographics. According to the Illinois Policy Institute, just 11% of black CPS students are proficient in reading, and only 8% in math. Latino students score marginally better, with 18% reading and 15% math proficiency despite boasting an 84% graduation rate.
“The abandonment of standards and grade inflation appears to be public schools’ answer nationally to increasingly worsening student performance,” Vallas wrote. “There is a deep disconnect between teacher evaluations and student test performance.”
His statement isn’t an exaggeration. In 2021, 100% of CPS teachers were evaluated as “excellent” or “proficient,” even as the district recorded steep declines in achievement and chronic absenteeism. In pre-pandemic 2018, the figure was 85.6%, suggesting that the bar has lowered steadily, even as student outcomes worsened.
Enrollment collapse, political paralysis
While academic performance has deteriorated, student enrollment in CPS has plunged, from 430,000 in 2010 to under 325,000 today. That decline, driven by the outmigration of black families, low birth rates, and public dissatisfaction with traditional schools, has left the city with hundreds of underused facilities.
Yet political leaders, largely aligned with the Chicago Teachers Union, have rejected school consolidations or closures outright.
According to a June ProPublica investigation, 47 CPS schools are now operating at less than one-third capacity — nearly double the number identified before the city’s controversial 2013 wave of closures. The most extreme example is Frederick Douglass Academy, which has 28 students and a per-student cost of $93,000.
At the historic DuSable High School building, once home to over 4,000 students, only two tiny schools remain: Bronzeville Scholastic Institute, with 115 students, and Williams Preparatory School of Medicine, with 70 students. Both maintain full administrative staffs, gym teachers, counselors, and office space despite the districtwide budget deficit and declining enrollment.
Still, CPS and Democratic Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson have refused to discuss consolidation until at least 2027, when a new fully elected school board will take over. Former CEO Pedro Martinez, ousted in a power struggle with the CTU, said he had little choice.
“Every time somebody wants to address this issue, you see at all levels of politics, nobody wants to do it,” Martinez told ProPublica. “Our footprint is too large.”
However, Butcher emphasized that the quality of education isn’t necessarily affected by the size of classrooms while underscoring the importance of providing enough individual attention to students. But one of the most “damaging” moves Chicago made was to “block the creation of new charter schools entirely.”
“By forcing families into failing assigned schools, you’re eliminating their only real escape route — and parents know it,” Butcher said.
From standards to subjectivity
As the city’s schools lose students, they’re losing academic rigor. In 2023, the Chicago Board of Education voted to eliminate CPS’s long-standing School Quality Rating Policy, which had previously used student test scores, attendance, and graduation rates to rank schools.
The new system prioritizes softer, more subjective criteria: emotional development, student climate surveys, and “social-emotional learning” benchmarks.
At the same time, the district has dismantled selective admissions programs, capped charter school enrollment, and eliminated external performance ratings for magnet and public choice campuses.
That trend mirrors a broader shift across blue states. In Oregon, the legislature eliminated graduation standards in 2021, calling them racially biased. California expanded bans on suspensions for “willful defiance” to middle and high schoolers. Cities such as San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland now prohibit grading based on behavior, deadlines, or attendance.
“It’s not just the soft bigotry of low expectations — it’s a retreat from education itself,” Vallas wrote.
Urban schools as soft targets
The crisis isn’t only academic. Teachers, parents, and legal experts say school safety is deteriorating in many blue cities — driven by political decisions to remove school resource officers, relax disciplinary enforcement, and restrict police involvement.
“Many of the city’s schools are in very high-crime areas, and a lot of that crime spills over into the school,” said Zack Smith, a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation. “Unfortunately, what you’ve seen where school resource officers have been removed … is that soft targets are being created.”
A growing number of progressive cities — including Chicago, Portland, and Washington, D.C. — have reduced or eliminated school-based law enforcement in recent years. In many districts, administrators now discourage suspensions or arrests for disruptive behavior. The result, critics say, is increased disorder and teacher burnout.
In Washington, the city council voted to phase out school-based police despite pushback from teachers and students. “Several high-profile stories have shown students being mugged for their shoes or phones just after school lets out,” Smith noted.
Chicago has followed a similar path. Local school councils may vote SROs out of buildings, a move the CTU has strongly supported. Meanwhile, progressive prosecutors have pulled back from charging juveniles for school-based offenses, and teachers say complaints are frequently ignored.
“If you’re walking into a high-crime neighborhood every day, the danger doesn’t stop at the school’s front door,” Smith said.
Butcher said the solution isn’t removing police but training them better. “SROs need more preparation to work with minors, not less presence,” he explained. “Just having officers visible in the school setting can deter misbehavior.”
PBIS and the collapse of discipline
One of the most popular but controversial frameworks in progressive school districts is PBIS, or Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports. PBIS discourages traditional discipline and emphasizes “restorative” practices, pressuring administrators to reduce suspensions even in the face of violent behavior, and has been pushed in largely Democratic-leaning and urban school districts.
In a City Journal exposé, education analyst Neetu Arnold found that PBIS is often used to excuse classroom misconduct and avoid parental confrontations.
One PBIS executive admitted, “Restorative practices don’t yet have their own evidence base. So the idea is to kind of put them within the evidence base of PBIS.”
Critics say that approach allows serious behavior problems to go unaddressed.
“Banning suspension obviously reduces suspensions,” Arnold wrote. “But it doesn’t reduce bad behavior.”
Butcher likened PBIS programs to “punishing every other child in the room” for the sake of keeping a violent or disruptive student in the same classroom as well-behaved peers. He pointed to Broward County’s approach to restorative justice as a possible factor in the Parkland school shooting and other school tragedies over the last two decades.
Obama and Biden-era federal policy under fire
According to Gail Heriot, a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, misguided federal policies on school discipline have contributed to the rising classroom disorder seen across blue-state public schools.
“Student behavior — or rather misbehavior — is a clear and unequivocal contributor to the problem of teacher attrition,” Heriot wrote in a study released in late September. She cited a 2022 survey showing that more than half of departing teachers blamed poor student conduct as their top reason for leaving the profession, compared to just 22% who cited salary.
Heriot linked the breakdown in discipline to a federal initiative launched under President Barack Obama and revived under President Joe Biden by Assistant Secretary of Education Catherine Lhamon. That initiative warned schools that suspensions and expulsions could trigger federal investigations if they resulted in racial disparities, even without evidence of discriminatory intent.
“Schools were warned that their federal funding could be jeopardized if their school discipline practices were found to be in violation of Title VI,” Heriot wrote. “But they were further told that they must eliminate not just ‘different treatment’ based on race … but also any ‘unjustified’ ‘disparate impact.’”
In Heriot’s view, those policies created perverse incentives: “Schools ignored or covered up — rather than disciplined — student misconduct in order to avoid any purported racial disparity in discipline numbers that might catch the eye of the federal government.”
Heriot praised President Donald Trump’s April executive order repealing Biden-era school discipline guidance and reinstating what the White House called “common sense” standards. “The Trump administration’s recent efforts have been a step in the right direction,” she wrote. “With luck, this time it will stick.”
A partisan divide — and a warning
As blue states retreat from accountability, red states are embracing reform.
A January report by Harvard’s Paul E. Peterson and Boston College’s Michael Hartney found that students in red states experienced less learning loss post-pandemic than those in blue states and now outperform them in both fourth-grade reading and math.
States like Mississippi and Alabama have implemented phonics-based reading curricula, banned failed instructional methods like “three-cueing,” and empowered teachers to restore classroom order.
“We’re seeing real results in red states that have embraced phonics and rejected failed models like whole language and three-cueing,” Butcher said. “Meanwhile, places like California are still fighting efforts to bring phonics into classrooms. That should tell you everything.”
When asked what he would describe as the underlying problem for cities like Chicago, Butcher emphasized that school choice matters and that the rising rate of homeschooling students in Illinois points to a trend of parents seeking to improve the overall education of their children despite officials celebrating otherwise mediocre scores.
As Vallas put it: “Rather than sound the alarm, those in charge are further strengthening the teacher union’s monopoly while characterizing Illinois’s dismal results as a great success.”