The latest National Assessment of Educational Progress report card saw a worrying trend that has existed since President Obama gutted the successful No Child Left Behind educational program (at the request of education unions) and replaced it with the ill-advised Common Core. Reading scores for kids remain really low for as much as we spend on education. Reading, the most basic thing we do.

No one spends as much on education as wealthy Democratic states like California, where it consumes 40% of the state budget and K-12 has lower average classroom sizes than it's had since the 1960s. Yet Republican states in the bottom tier of wealth, like Mississippi and Louisiana, hold the top two spots in reading, especially when it comes to the underprivileged - poor children, if you are reading this in another country and not familiar with American progressive lingo. 

California has been consistently below most of the country in education despite paeans to its wealth and progressive culture. Ironically, they blame the poor and illegal immigrants they claim to care more about than Republicans. And they still blame the pandemic, even though they first denied COVID-19 calls to ban travel from China were anything more than Republican xenophobia and then closed schools far longer than any sane disease epidemiologist said was doing any good. If income or the pandemic was the problem, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee and Kentucky wouldn't be clobbering California and other wealthy progressive states like New York. 

Yet they are.



What Republican states do better than Democratic ones seems to be...educate. Republicans are a lot less likely to abdicate social upbringing of their children to government union employees and politically skewed (93% of union donations go to Democrats) bureaucrats. Successful Republican states - not Washington, DC - set a standard and tell school districts to act on it. Louisiana even streamlined bureaucracy, telling school districts there would be one, and one only, person who has to deal with state government. Compare that to the Department of Education in Washington, D.C., a group created in 1979 by Democratic President Jimmy Carter to fulfill a promise in return for education union support in the 1976 election, where over 4,400 people collect $68 billion from states and waste half sending it back to states.

No Child Left Behind isn't coming back but it did just what its name wanted to do and states that continue to do it even after President Obama gutted it for teacher's unions continue to succeed. It created a baseline for education, and the poorest kids showed dramatic improvement while girls achieved parity in math with boys for the first time ever. The US Army still does it well. Finland, where kids learn by rote and teachers do not get union jobs for life, does it well. Even China does it well.

They're not teaching social justice issues and grooming kids to believe one political party is awful, they are teaching. California would do well to get back to that.