A New Golden Age
Six years after the COVID-19 pandemic closed America’s schools and opened parents’ eyes as to what was really going on in their children’s classrooms, the United States is in the midst of a golden age of K-12 education reform.
Across the country and at every level of government, Americans are turning away from the failed policies and woke politics that broke our education system. More than a dozen states have adopted universal school choice. Phonics and traditional math instruction are replacing failed fad curricula. Screen-based Ed Tech is being reconsidered as an instrument of education. The Trump Administration is forcing school districts to dump their un-American Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) agendas. Parents are reclaiming their rights as their children’s primary educators, and teacher unions are finally being held accountable for their decades of incompetence and partisan indoctrination.
As Americans celebrate this winning streak for families and kids, we must not let up. Standardized test scores are still abysmal. Smartphones, and now artificial intelligence, still present enormous challenges to student learning. And even if our elementary and secondary curricula are being stripped of their Marxist politics, they’re still doing a poor job of preparing American children for citizenship and work. Woke teachers and bureaucrats checked by Trump Administration policies remain in place, ready to relaunch their classroom Culture Wars as soon as the White House changes hands.
So the job now for families, taxpayers, and reformers is to keep up this momentum, to build on the reforms of the last few years, and to take back America’s classrooms for America’s kids.
Decades of Decline
For those who have not paid close attention to American education over the last few decades, it’s difficult to comprehend just how bad things have gotten. The failures are many, but they boil down to three.
The first Big Problem is that students stopped learning. Standardized test scores have been falling across the country for more than a decade. Scores in math and reading started declining well before the COVID pandemic shut down schools for at least a year, and they have continued falling since.[1],[2] Across the country, college freshmen now arrive on campus incapable of doing college-level work. Even at elite universities, students lack basic reading comprehension skills and require remedial instruction in middle school math.[3],[4] Frustratingly, as test scores and college preparedness collapsed, students’ grades nonetheless rose, proof of a nationwide scandal of grade inflation and falling expectations.[5]
The second Big Problem is that schools replaced academic instruction with political indoctrination. A 2023 survey of young adults found that 93 percent of them heard about “white privilege,” “systemic racism,” “patriarchy,” or transgenderism at school.[6] Over the last decade, as student learning has cratered, America’s schools have been turned into woke re-education camps. Kids today get too little of the “Three Rs” and far too much anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Western propaganda, from land acknowledgements to “privilege walks” to drag queen story hours.
The third Big Problem with our schools is the lack of accountability. Over decades of failure, the education system, the teacher unions, bureaucracy, and allied interest groups, blocked reform proposals at every level of government. Prior to 2021, school choice programs were extremely limited. Taxpayers gave school boards and administrators plenty of money, close to $1 trillion per year or $15,000 per student, but we got less and less for those investments. Between 1992 and 2024, total student enrollment grew by a modest 17 percent while per-pupil spending grew by 68 percent, and with that additional money the system expanded non-classroom staff more than twice as fast as it added teachers.[7]
This was the status quo until a few years ago: 90 percent of U.S. parents were forced to give their children to a greedy, partisan bureaucracy hostile to their values and indifferent, at best, to student achievement.[8]
A Season of Reform
In 2020, the System’s embrace of woke fanaticism and then the COVID school closures finally exhausted the patience of the American people.
Voters and policymakers tuned out the special interests and embarked on a campaign of education reform unprecedented in American history. Between 2021 and 2025, 18 states passed universal school choice laws.[9] In those states now, students can use Education Savings Accounts (ESA), at least partially funded by the government, to attend public or private schools, including religious schools. In many states, like Texas, families can use their children’s ESA funds to pay for homeschooling, test prep, private tutoring, or to cover any other education expenses.
This is a home run for American families. Just a few years ago, no Americans had access to universal school choice. Now more than 100 million do. And contrary to the teacher unions’ fear mongering, the programs are flourishing. Arizona’s program is fully subscribed.[10] In Texas, lawmakers budgeted for 100,000 student applications; they got 274,000.[11] In Iowa, the ESA program grew from 16,000 students in 2023[12] to 41,000 two years later.[13]
School choice is proving so successful at the state level that in 2025, President Donald Trump signed the first-ever federal tax credit scholarship program worth up to $1,700 per year.[14] Soon after his inauguration in 2025, the president signed an Executive Order ending woke indoctrination in public schools.[15] He has also laid off thousands of Deep State bureaucrats at the Department of Education, part of his ongoing plans to shut down the agency once and for all.[16]
Then there is the “Mississippi Miracle.” For generations, Mississippi, the poorest state in the union, had some of the worst-performing schools, too. Lacking the resources to throw money at the problem, Mississippi policymakers went “old school.” They dumped fad curricula and brought back basic phonics, high standards, and regular testing. Today, Mississippi’s public schools are demonstrating strong academic performance and making notable gains in student achievement [Ami Butle1]
Finally, schools and school boards are at last answering parents’ pleas to spend less time on screens in the classroom. Over the last decade, Ed Tech has taken over K-12 curricula to a degree most parents would not believe. Today, millions of children spend most of their school days staring at a screen, and it’s doing nothing to improve student learning.[17] In recent years, both red states like Alabama and Utah[18] and blue cities like Los Angeles have followed the data and started imposing strict limits on classroom screen time.[19]
Ten years ago, these reforms would have been considered impossible. Teacher unions, politicians, and special interests’ control of the education system, it was assumed, could not be challenged. But today, not only are parents, taxpayers, and reformers fighting the system — they’re winning.
The question is, where does K-12 education reform go from here?
Common Sense Solutions
The most important priority for K-12 reform today is to keep up the momentum of the last six years. Today, 18 states have universal school choice; it should be all 50. School choice is not just common sense; it’s common decency. Parents are their children’s primary educators, and they should have as much authority as possible in deciding where and how their kids learn.
Similarly, reformers should build on ongoing efforts to restrict screen time in the classroom. Smartphone and screen addiction is destroying our children’s attention spans and concentration skills. Classrooms should be low tech. Handwriting should not be replaced with a keyboard, particularly for young learners. School, where students spend nearly seven hours a day, should be a place where they interact with real human beings.
Congress, state legislatures, county councils, and school boards should permanently ban ideological indoctrination in our classrooms. And they should look to examples from states like Mississippi, which have strengthened early literacy instruction through evidence-based approaches while maintaining high expectations for student achievement and educator effectiveness.
States and communities looking to go even further should look at three more areas ripe for reform.
First, they should expand their definition of parental choice. Right now, “school choice” means letting parents choose which schools their children attend. But parents should also be able to choose what kind of education their children get.
Education Savings Accounts should be allowed to pay for vocational training, technical programs, apprenticeships, certifications, and other non-traditional paths. High schools[Ami Butle2] today often steer their highest-achieving students toward the college-prep track, while too many other students are allowed to fall behind without a clear, meaningful pathway to success after graduation. [20] Jobs in the skilled trades pay very well these days, and people don’t need college degrees or student loans to get them. State and local governments should invest in vocational education again, and education reformers should include vocational ed in any definition of “school choice.”
Second, as we purge classrooms of woke politics, we should reintroduce traditional American civics education. Teaching children how to be citizens, to be sovereign voters and responsible leaders in their communities, was one of the reasons Americans created public schools in the first place. Today, civics education is an afterthought. Children are not taught about the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, or America’s heroic history. That needs to change.
Third, schools need to get ahead of the AI revolution. Many of the technical tasks public schools think their students need to learn will soon be automated. What young people today will really need in years ahead are things AI can’t do for us. They will need to be ethical, honest, patriotic, empathetic, and creative. They won’t learn those habits and virtues through screens, let alone from AI chatbots. They will need authentic human connection with their families, teachers, classmates, and with the great works of Western civilization from the Bible to The Iliad to Shakespeare to Michelangelo. As technology disrupts the world around us, our schools should reprioritize art, the humanities, and the classics to prepare our children to face the uncertainties of the future with the hard-won Truths of the past.
That’s how parents, taxpayers, and policymakers can help turn today’s momentum for K–12 education reform into lasting change for generations of American students.
[1] https://time.com/article/2026/05/16/student-test-scores-reading-math-us/
[2] https://www.npr.org/2025/09/09/nx-s1-5526918/nations-report-card-scores-reading-math-science-education-cuts
[3] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-elite-college-students-who-cant-read-books/679945/
[4] https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/university-california-sat-requirement-reinstate-c3e32712
[5] https://www.texaspolicy.com/study-k-12-grade-inflation-making-american-kids-dumber-costing-them-millions/
[6] https://manhattan.institute/article/school-choice-is-not-enough-the-impact-of-critical-social-justice-ideology-in-american-education
[7] https://www.edchoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Fiscal-Factbook-2025.pdf
[8] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cgc
[9] https://americansforprosperity.org/blog/states-with-school-choice-a-comprehensive-guide/
[10] https://commonsenseinstituteus.org/arizona/research/education/esas-in-arizona-q3-2025-report/
[11] https://educationfreedom.texas.gov/newsupdates/lottery-update/
[12] https://educate.iowa.gov/press-release/2024-01-26/certified-enrollment-2023-24-holds-steady-16757-esa-participants-enrolled-iowa-accredited-nonpublic
[13] https://educate.iowa.gov/press-release/2025-12-19/certified-enrollment-2025-26-slightly-declines-consistent-national-trends
[14] https://www.ed.gov/media/document/education-freedom-tax-credit-fact-sheet-113147.pdf
[15] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/ending-radical-indoctrination-in-k-12-schooling/
[16] https://apnews.com/article/layoffs-education-department-special-education-shutdown-3c066e2b1799c96a50e14dd63f46cd96
[17] https://archive.ph/pchix#selection-1253.0-1262.0
[18] https://www.npr.org/2026/05/01/nx-s1-5791657/states-schools-restricting-screen-time
[19] https://www.npr.org/2026/08/11/nx-s1-5913745/screen-limits-begin-la-schools
[20] https://educationdata.org/education-attainment-statistics