America’s K-12 schools are failing students. Understanding the problem is the first step toward fixing it.
![5 Hard Truths Democrats Must Face on Education: America’s K-12 schools are failing students. Understanding the problem is the first step toward fixing it.]()
Credit: Associated Press
There is a crisis afflicting American K-12
schools. Thousands and perhaps millions of students fell behind during
and after COVID and have not caught up to grade level. There’s a
ballooning teacher shortage. Test scores are down.
As a public high school teacher, I am dumbfounded by the lack of
serious national discussion about public education. As an active member
of the teachers’ union, I am especially troubled by this complacency.
Democrats seem to have taken their long-time reputation as the
“education party” for granted, even as their policies during and since
the pandemic have sometimes made matters worse. In 2022 and 2023, polls
briefly showed that, for the first time in over 20 years, Americans
trusted Republicans more than Democrats on education. Democrats have
recently regained their polling advantage over Republicans, but it is
still smaller than what they enjoyed during the 2000s.
To regain trust in public education, Democrats need solutions. The Washington Monthly has offered many, including promoting tutoring to close learning gaps, Thomas Toch and Liz Cohen call them Public Education’s Reinforcements. Earlier this year, Toch
proposed six education reforms to strengthen public schools, including
promoting phonics, increasing community involvement, and using bonuses
to spur teacher recruitment.
To come up with still more ideas to fix public education, Democrats
must first confront five hard truths that they have often willfully
ignored.
1. Students stopped learning during COVID. We’ve failed them.
During the pandemic, reading and math skills dropped more sharply than in any year since measurements began. Five years later, they have not recovered; in fact, reading scores have fallen even further since 2022.
No wonder 73 percent of Americans are dissatisfied with public education quality, up from 62 percent in 2019. Just 43 percent
of Americans would give their local public schools an “A” or “B” grade,
a 57-year low. Parental trust in both local public schools and charter
schools is down.
National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and ACT scores are at historic lows, and schools in blue states and cities are more racially segregated and saw worse post-pandemic learning losses
than in red states, as pandemic-era remote and hybrid learning (which
was more common and longer-lasting in blue states and cities) dramatically widened educational achievement gaps. For five years, blue states have seen lower student achievement than red states, a stunning reversal from a generation ago.
The pandemic hit poor students and students of color especially hard.
Decades of progress in reducing the racial and economic achievement
gaps were erased
in less than two years, despite federal aid mitigating the damage in
poor districts. Racial and economic achievement gaps in math have
continued to widen since the pandemic.
I have asked my students whether they learned anything during
pandemic-era “remote learning,” and the answer is always a unanimous
“No.” Many schools remained closed for longer than needed, which
disproportionately hurt vulnerable students that Democrats claim to
champion, and for which their party bears responsibility.
2. Democrats have too often responded to learning loss by lowering standards.
Rather than confronting COVID learning loss head-on, Democrats have
too often responded by lowering the bar. Even the term “learning loss”
has come under fire from some Democrats and educators. Cecily
Myart-Cruz, president of the L teachers union, said
in 2021 that, “There is no such thing as learning loss. Our kids didn’t
lose anything. It’s OK that our babies may not have learned all their
times tables.”
Most liberal education leaders haven’t been as blunt as Myart-Cruz,
but many have given in to a quieter version of denial. In Wisconsin, the
Superintendent of Public Instruction is technically a nonpartisan
statewide elected official, but the current state superintendent, Jill
Underly, is a Democrat. Like every state, Wisconsin saw historic learning loss during the pandemic, and our students still have not recovered. Rather than boldly addressing this crisis, Underly lowered
the proficiency benchmarks (known as “cut scores”) for reading and math
on the statewide Forward exam and removed the terms “proficient” and
“below basic” from its results. Democratic Governor Tony Evers initially
criticized
the changes, but this spring, every Democrat in the legislature voted
against a bill to repeal the lower cut scores, and Evers vetoed it.
Blue states from New York to Illinois also recently lowered their reading and math cut scores. Some red states, like Oklahoma, have done the same (although Oklahoma recently announced that it would revert to higher cut scores that were in place from 2017 to 2023). The latest
NAEP test results show that 35 percent of high school seniors are
proficient in reading, and just 22 percent are proficient in math. While
NAEP proficiency benchmarks have often been criticized for being unrealistically high, the data are precise: reading proficiency on the NAEP is lower than at any point since 1992. It has been declining since before the pandemic. ACT scores are at a 30-year low, and 1 in 5
U.S. adults’ literacy skills are insufficient to “complete tasks that
require comparing and contrasting information, paraphrasing, or making
low-level inferences.” Yet despite countless indicators of declining
student learning, high schools are graduating students at much higher rates and awarding better grades than a decade ago.
Every semester, I struggle to motivate my students because they know
it is nearly impossible to fail a class or get held back. They know that
they can attend a summer credit recovery program and supposedly “learn”
a semester or even a year’s worth of content in a few weeks. It’s no
wonder that absenteeism has skyrocketed since the pandemic. Students know they can pass their classes and get a diploma without actually being in class.
3. We’re losing our best teachers. Lawmakers aren’t doing enough about it.
It has become common
for liberals to bash teachers’ unions. But these critics are typically
silent on how to recruit and retain teachers without competitive
compensation, collective bargaining, and professional respect. In 2019, 50 percent of teachers said they had seriously considered quitting teaching in the past few years. This year, that figure stands at 78 percent.
Many more have moved beyond consideration: Fifteen years ago, about 1 in 5 new teachers left the profession within their first five years; today, it’s nearly 1 in 3. To make matters worse, legions of veteran teachers retired early during the pandemic. Considering that teachers generally become more effective the longer they teach, this was a blow to students.
The teacher shortage is so dire that many states are lowering the bar, allowing people into classrooms without teaching certificates or any formal training. In 2021, 1 in 5 new teachers in Texas were allowed to skip the certification process. Other states are ordering
National Guard troops to serve as substitute teachers. Policymakers
must listen to teachers rather than scapegoat them, and pair high
expectations with equally high support.
4. Public schools are as segregated and unequal today as they were before Brown. The problem is worse in Northern and blue cities.
And yet, in 2025, America’s schools are not only as racially unequal
as they were 71 years ago, when the Supreme Court outlawed public school
segregation in Brown v. Board of Education, they’re also just as racially segregated.
In the 1960s and 1970s, and then more slowly in the late 20th
century, students of color saw significant gains: Black high school
graduation rates and post-graduation incomes increased, and the Black-white achievement gap in reading and math decreased. But by the turn of the century, injustice was making a comeback.
According to the Stanford Segregation Explorer, Black-white school segregation increased by 35 percent between 1991 and 2020. Economic
school segregation, segregation of K-12 students by household income,
increased by 47 percent. Decades after Brown, schools attended
predominantly by students of color still suffer many of the same
“tangible differences” that the Supreme Court identified as afflicting
segregated schools in 1954: lower per-pupil spending, larger class sizes, crumbling and unsafe school facilities, fewer certified teachers, and fewer opportunities to take advanced, college-prep courses. The Black-white achievement gap in reading and math was larger for students born in 2001 than for those born in 1976.
These inequalities are a stain on Democrats’ report cards. There is
no doubt that Republican policies have not helped matter. The No Child
Left Behind Act produced, at best, ambiguous results. And punishing cuts
to K-12 education funding after the Great Recession were a real blow to
public school students then and now. But schools in blue states and
cities are more segregated and unequal than those in red states and
towns. New York has the most racially segregated schools in the U.S. California comes in second. Barring a few outliers, all of the most segregated school districts
in the country—Chicago, Detroit, New York City, and Los Angeles—are
anchored in blue cities and run by Democrats at the local and state
levels. The reasons for racial and school segregation are myriad and
it’d be wrong to blame the separation entirely on local officials.
Nonetheless, the failure of Democrat-run schools to offer equal
opportunity contributes to the last hard truth.
5. The parents of students of color and working-class kids who attend failing schools increasingly blame Democrats.
In the 1970s, Charlotte, North Carolina, was considered a national model of effective busing and school desegregation. However, following a series
of policy changes and court decisions (from, it must be underscored,
GOP-appointed judges) in the 1990s, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools
(CMS) rapidly re-segregated. Today, CMS is the most racially segregated district in the state. It saw severe learning loss during COVID, and declines in reading and math scores since 2020 have disproportionately been experienced by Black, Hispanic, low-income, and multilingual students.
Public schools are supposed to be engines of social mobility, but Charlotte ranks dead last among the 50 largest cities in helping poor kids escape poverty. Eight of the nine current CMS school board members are Democrats.
Many schools run by Democrats are failing, and families—mainly
working-class, predominantly non-white families—are taking notice. Among
parents of school-age children, 60 percent
give their local public schools an “A” or “B” grade, but that figure is
over 70 percent for white and Asian parents and below 50 percent for
Black parents. These discrepancies are starting to hurt Democrats at the
ballot box.
Wisconsin can offer a recent example. In April 2025, Wisconsin held
elections for the State Supreme Court and the State Superintendent of
Public Instruction. Susan Crawford, the de facto Democratic candidate
for the Supreme Court, defeated her Republican opponent with 55 percent. Underly, the superintendent who lowered the bar for proficiency in math and reading ran two points behind Crawford.
The local results were much more revealing. In Milwaukee County, Underly’s margin of victory was 16 points smaller
than Crawford’s. Underly also trailed Crawford by seven points in Dane
County (home to liberal Madison) and by three points in Brown County
(which includes Green Bay). Those counties all contain majority-minority
urban school districts with larger-than-average
declines in reading and math scores in the past five years, and those
school districts are all run by Democrats. A Democrat has been the
Wisconsin Superintendent of Public Instruction since 2009, and the state
has had the widest Black-white achievement gap in the nation for virtually that entire period.
Many Democrats (especially white, educated, affluent ones who can
send their kids to good schools) seem willfully ignorant of these
cruelties. Democrats cannot afford to take voters of color or their
reputation as the pro-education party for granted. Parents have growing,
well-founded doubts about our public schools. If Democrats want to win
back their trust, they must offer real solutions to improve the
education of children who, for too long, have had too little.
A version of this article appeared in the Substack, Wicked Good Policy.
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