Stephen Moore: It’s Now or Never for School Choice Everywhere

This story may bring you to tears. Baltimore, Maryland has 23 schools where not one student has been tested. “proficient in math.”

Can we all admit that these are schools where students aren’t proficient? Teaching math — or just about any course, for that matter?

Fox News’ investigation found Baltimore spending an average of $21,000 per student. How can teachers unions spend so much money, and achieve almost no learning?

Baltimore’s record is so bad that it would be easy to assume they have the worst schools in America. Perhaps not.

Things could get worse in Illinois.

Wirepoints, an investigative journalism centre, has reviewed data from Illinois State Board of Education. Wirepoints found that 30 schools, 22 of which were in Chicago, failed to lift even one dollar last year. One Grade-level reading for students

But wait, it gets worse. In the state, there are more than 50 schools where not one student has achieved grade-level mathematics.

Isn’t it the right thing to do?

Not in Illinois. In fact, the state educators rated the performance of several of these abysmal schools — are you ready for this? — “commendable.” This is grade inflation at a new level of absurdity.

Teachers unions and education officials decided to close down schools for at least a year. However, test results from many schools in these areas were worse before the pandemic. Don’t blame the lack of funds. These Chicago schools spend up to $30,000 per student.

We have a case for widespread child abuse in education.

In every part of the country, public schools are failing to produce good results. Test scores nationwide dropped to an all-time low of 71 points last year. Catholic schools had far higher test scores than the public schools in nearly every state.

Think about this for a second. If we truly care about the future of our children’s children, wouldn’t we simply contract out our thousands of dysfunctional school systems to Catholic dioceses across the country? Or throw in Jewish schools, charter schools, Montessori schools, home schools — or whatever works?

In most highly populated inner-cities where public schools are especially deficient, the mostly minority children can receive a better education in Catholic schools — at roughly half the cost of the public schools.

There is a silver-lining in this situation. Some states have quickly expanded their school option programs, allowing education dollars and student support to go wherever the families choose. Arizona, Florida and West Virginia already have. Texas, Tennessee, and Utah are considering bold steps toward universal school choice for those families who can’t afford private alternatives.

A 40-year-old national study about the state of America’s schools found that there was a significant problem. “crisis of mediocrity” in education. Today, the situation is so dire that mediocrity could be considered an improvement. “commendable.”

University of Chicago economists estimated that the nation’s loss of education from COVID-19 shutdowns alone will result in a loss of productivity and income of trillions of US dollars due to the reduced earning potential of our children over their entire lives.

It is terrible to waste a mind. And public schools are losing millions of minds each week while they spend billions upon trillions of dollars on, well, God only knows what. We need bold new ideas. There are thousands private and religious schools who have shown they can teach children. They don’t achieve 0% math and reading proficiency. It is easy to reform education: Let our children, the nation’s greatest asset, go to these schools.

Stephen Moore is an economist at FreedomWorks and a senior fellow with the Heritage Foundation. His most recent book is “Govzilla: How the Relentless Growth of Government is Devouring our Economy.”

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