Public schools were America’s great equalizer. What happened?
Public education is one of America’s enduring social contracts with its citizens. The public funds the schools, and the schools educate the public’s children.
Something has gone wrong with that agreement, and more people are voicing their dissatisfaction with the public school system than they have in decades. Who’s to blame for what’s become of our public schools?
In the mid-1850s, states began requiring children to receive an education supervised by a trained teacher. This baseline of smarts provided a population of educated workers that powered the country’s industrialization. Beginning in the 1970s, the federal government took a more hands-on approach through the Department of Education.
Not since Southern schools desegregated more than half a century ago have schools been the source of so much political controversy. Controversial curriculum, parental rights and federal defunding are among the wedge issues eroding trust in one of the country’s pillars.
Gallup polling conducted last August found that just 7% of Americans are “completely” satisfied and 28% “somewhat” satisfied with K-12 education in the U.S. A majority — 62% — expressed shades of dissatisfaction.
While parents of public school students held the institutions in higher regard, those dissatisfied were at the highest percentages since Gallup began asking the question in 1999.
Gallup’s findings run parallel with PDK International’s annual survey. The teacher-focused nonprofit’s 57th annual poll found that only 13% of respondents gave the nation’s public schools an “A” or a “B” rating, a steep decline from 26% in 2004. Nearly 6 in 10 parents polled supported using public funding to send their child to a private or religious school.
Whether it’s a cause or an effect, students are leaving. A Brookings compilation of public school attendance found almost 1.4 million fewer students last year than in 2019. And empty classrooms can spur a financial crisis that’s only worsening outcomes.
Underlying it all is a shared concern that our nation’s classrooms are failing to adequately churn out students proficient in core subjects.
The kids aren’t alright
The National Assessment of Educational Progress is known as America’s report card. Every summer, it provides insight into the previous year’s reading and math scores for kids ages 9 and 13, based on a standardized test.
Test scores had been gradually increasing up to 2012, but then began to slide — before plummeting after the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
The latest reading and math scores released this June show modest improvements in reading and math for 9-year-olds, but those kids have yet to find themselves ahead of where their predecessors were before the pandemic. Thirteen-year-olds appear to have stopped the slide, but have not improved.
Meanwhile, American children remain far behind their international peers. The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in 2022 ranked the U.S. 33rd of the 38 OECD countries, which are described as the world’s economically advanced democracies.
President Donald Trump has used previously released “devastating” scores to justify returning federal oversight of education to the states.
And while most national assessments and standardized tests like the SAT and ACT have retained their difficulty, some states have moved the goalposts closer.
Seeing the evident learning losses that affected much of the country during the pandemic, several states — among them, New York, Wisconsin and Oklahoma — lowered proficiency levels in student testing.
One national test that became easier was the Advanced Placement exam. Conducted by the College Board, AP testing changed in 2025 to replace a panel of human experts with large-scale data analysis. Inside Higher Ed reported that the new methodology is based on recommended scoring distributions tied to students’ performance in comparable college classes rather than on individual expertise.
The changes resulted in high scores for hundreds of thousands more students on U.S. history, European history, government and politics and chemistry exams. While the changes may have improved proficiency numbers, they didn’t make students more prepared for college.
Universities have found it necessary to place freshmen in remedial courses, sometimes requiring middle-school math classes to bring incoming undergrads up to speed.
“Alarmingly, the instructors running the 2023-2024 Math 2 courses observed a marked change in the skill gaps compared to prior years,” a report from the University of California, San Diego, said. “While Math 2 was designed in 2016 to remediate missing high school math knowledge, now most students had knowledge gaps that went back much further, to middle and even elementary school.”
These dismal results have coincided with record spending in many K-12 schools.
School spending’s up but uneven
Taxpayer funding for public schools has consistently risen, but it hasn’t kept pace with inflation in many regions.
America’s largest teachers’ union, the National Education Association, estimated that school spending per student reached $17,840 by fall 2024. That average has steadily increased from $12,559 in 2018, according to the Education Data Initiative.
But rampant inflation during the pandemic meant schools’ spending power had remained flat, and may have declined slightly, as billions in COVID-19 aid funding dried up.
Furthermore, a 2025 Brookings study found that school spending doesn’t align with student performance: New York spent far more per student than any other state, but its students were solidly average in fourth-grade math scores from 2019. Performance wasn’t recorded in the early years of COVID-19, but scores slid significantly once testing resumed.
The issue might not be how much is spent but where it’s spent.
“There are some districts that are spending more than enough, and there are some districts that aren’t spending nearly enough,” Hilary Wething, an economist with the liberal Economic Policy Institute, told Straight Arrow. “High-poverty districts are under-spending relative to the needs of those students.”
Wething said all schools could benefit from an overall increase in spending, but focusing funding on high-poverty districts has shown real benefits.
Dismantling the Department of Education
Trump has made no secret of his intention to dismantle the Department of Education, which oversees roughly $120 billion in annual federal school funding distribution and coordinates certain tests.
In a March 2025 executive order, Trump said the “experiment” of federal regulation of the education system “has plainly failed our children, our teachers, and our families.” He ordered Education Secretary Linda McMahon to begin dismantling the agency, formed under President Jimmy Carter in 1979. The department’s closure, Trump said, would return authority to states.
While a judge temporarily stalled the plan, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed it to proceed, at least until lawsuits challenging Trump’s authority to close the agency are resolved.
“The administration has certainly taken a very antagonistic stance toward public schools,” Wething said. “These actions are leading to an erosion of trust. Public education is one of the backbones of our democracy. When we are threatening to defund public schools, what we’re saying is we’re threatening to pull away a public good that has huge spillovers to our society in the form of thoughtful, curious young adults who go into our workforce successfully.”
Red v. Blue
The overall disapproval of American education is anchored by Republicans, but increases when a Republican is in the Oval Office.
Gallup polling over the years has found that partisan opinion about public education ebbs and flows with the figurehead responsible for the Department of Education.
COVID-19 bucked that trend, with Democrats and independents both souring on K-12 education even though President Joe Biden took the helm almost a year into the pandemic.
With hot-button issues such as book bans and gender restrictions for bathroom use decided at the local school board level, the cultural clashes also drew the gaze of the nation’s political warriors, who saw a new battleground to be won.
The fights resulted in a trend of partisan elections for school board seats no longer seen as positions of civic responsibility, but rather as a new front in the battle between Democrats and Republicans.
Moms for Liberty, a parental rights organization, began recruiting like-minded candidates for local school board elections nationwide in 2023. Its platform largely aligned with Republican talking points critical of how racism and gender issues are taught in public schools. The group also sees public education unions as a threat, not an asset, to students.
In the opposite corner lay groups such as Run for Something and the School Board Project. The latter group describes itself as a “nationwide network of experienced campaign staffers” who support “school board candidates that reflect our core progressive values.” Run for Something focuses on young progressive candidates for various offices.
More than half the candidates endorsed by Moms for Liberty won their elections in 2022. Brookings estimated that 54 of the group’s 166 preferred candidates won their elections in 2023.
Run for Something launched its “50 State School Board Strategy” in 2023, but doesn’t list any metrics of its candidates’ success. The School Board Project said 59% of its endorsed candidates won, picking up 37 school board seats and flipping five school boards in 2023.
A union endorsement has long held electoral weight, and teachers’ unions have begun to put more focus on school board positions as a foil to conservatives and allied groups.
In November 2025, the NEA touted wins by “pro-public education” candidates at multiple levels, including school boards. The union did not respond to Straight Arrow’s request for comment.
Caught in the middle of these political battles are students who aren’t staying in the schools.
Where are the kids going?
Beyond adults having fewer children and the nation’s growing truancy issue, more states are adopting programs that allow parents to choose a school outside of their designated public school district.
In Florida last year, more kids attended an alternative school than the public option they were zoned for — a first in the state’s history. Arizona’s universal school choice program has surpassed the state’s largest public school district. The state’s Empowerment Scholarship Account program had more than 102,000 enrollees in March, according to the Arizona Department of Education.
“The idea that a traditional public school is the bedrock of a local community is not always the case anymore,” said Robert Enlow, president and CEO of EdChoice. “I think that framing might be a framing for the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s.”
Enlow’s nonprofit, which advocates for school choice programs nationwide, regularly surveys parents about educational options.
“Most of them report they’re tired of the child getting bullied or having anxiety,” he told Straight Arrow.
For parents in states without these programs, homeschooling is another option.
“There are between three-and-a-half and 4 million homeschooled K-12 students in the United States right now, which is probably the highest in modern history,” said Will Estrada, senior counsel with the Home School Legal Defense Association.
Homeschooling “exploded,” Estrada said, after governors across the country closed schools in March 2020 because of the pandemic. But he said some parents were withdrawing their kids entirely instead of following public school curricula at home. Be it a newfound comfort with homeschooling or an antipathy toward how public schools handled remote learning, Estrada said, many of those students never returned to their districts.
When a parent takes a child out of a public school, the district loses more than a student. The federal government pays around $2,500 per public school student — more if they qualify for grants such as Title I funding. State and local governments send multiple times more to districts, but the amount of funding a school receives is largely based on student headcount. Fewer students, less funding.
Teachers are leaving, too
The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights cites excessive workloads, administrative burdens and stagnant pay for pushing many teachers out of the profession.
The federal government doesn’t keep a database of nationwide teacher shortages. But the Learning Policy Institute estimates that 31 states and the District of Columbia had 45,582 unfilled positions as of June 2025, while another 365,967 employed teachers were “not fully certified for their teaching assignments.”
Not only does the institute show interest in entering the education profession at its lowest level in decades, but it found that attrition accounts for nearly all of the reported shortages.
“Less than one-fifth of teachers leaving their profession are retiring,” it noted. Other reasons included “pursuing other careers, needing a higher salary and dissatisfaction with teaching or their specific position.”
How do we fix it?
With falling attendance, growing competition and political attacks from the highest levels of government, how do the nation’s 13,000 public school districts regain their position as a pillar of American society?
To some, the answer is more funding, but also better-directed funding.
“Increase funding for public schools, particularly for public schools in low-income and historically disenfranchised communities,” Wething said. “The academic evidence shows, dollar-for-dollar, that money improves student achievement, labor market outcomes and reduces behavioral problems.”
For others, it’s more accountability and tailoring educational environments to the student.
“I would be doing everything I can to attract kids to quality and belonging,” Enlow said.
Round out your reading
- America at 250: Straight Arrow’s week-long look at the pressures testing modern America.
- Ketamine is booming in America. The reasons go beyond drugs.
- Cluster of AI news sites suddenly goes dark after human reporter starts asking questions.
- A 79-year-old, obese, well-connected man gained exclusive access to a new weight loss drug. Is it Trump?
- Newsom pushes national wealth tax after opposing California billionaire tax.
Ella Rae Greene, Editor In Chief
