Americans agree on little today — except their growing fury with public education.
For the first time in the 27-year history of the Gallup/Walton Family Foundation survey, public-school approval hit a record low — with just 32% satisfied nationwide, down 11 points in just two years.
The truth is sinking in as test scores confirm the failures, with the National Assessment of Educational Progress exams showing nationwide drops in proficiency.
And now Programme for International Student Assessment testing showsUS 15-year-olds nearing their worst reading scores in a quarter-century, down sharply from 2022 to 2025; American teens’ math scores also were among the lowest since PISA testing launched in 2000.
Yes, some challenges are common across the globe: Excess social media use plainly hurts.
But American public schools are particularly plagued by teacher unions and other vested interests that put adult wants far above children’s needs.
From New York to Chicago to Los Angeles, unions fight against sidelined standardized testing and the pursuit of academic excellence, instead favoring political indoctrination and irrelevant-at-the-very-best DEI initiatives.
These schools repeatedly pass students along to higher grades without equipping them with essential knowledge or skills, graduating them with worthless diplomas.
Parents are voting with their feet, fleeing those cities (which spend insane amounts of taxpayer funds on their failing schools) and embracing homeschooling, quality public charter schools (where available — the unions try to keep them out) and private schooling (if they can afford it).
Some public-school systems get it: Mississippi, once a notorious laggard, now leads the nation in teaching reading, for example.
Then again, Mississippi has no all-powerful unions to block its miracle.
The power of unions and other toxic special interests has grown so huge that higher public-school spending now correlates with worse results across the nation: The parasites are eating their hosts.
All this is why every form of school choice — from vouchers to scholarships to all-charter systems — is growing in popularity.
Ever since the farce of “remote learning” opened parents’ eyes to what so much pubic education had become, the fury has been building.
It won’t ease until students have ready access to schools that truly teach, meaning that public systems that don’t deliver face extinction.
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