By: Ted Dabrowski
The national political class is going crazy over several of President-elect Donald Trump’s cabinet picks. Matt Gaetz, Trump’s pick for Attorney General, and Pete Hegseth, chosen to head the Defense Department, come to mind. Now comes the latest controversial pick: Trump’s choice of Linda McMahon for Secretary of Education.
They bemoan her lack of experience and expertise in education, but is “expertise” at the DOE really what the country’s students need?
We have no particular insight on McMahon and she doesn’t have a deep education record for us to review. But what we do have is the record of the experts that have been running education for decades. And the record is a disaster anyway you cut it – at the national level, the Illinois level, and the city level, namely Chicago.
Total nationwide federal, state and local spending on K-12 education hit $878 billion in 2022. That’s up 80% vs. 2005. $390 billion more.
Yet all those billions have accomplished nothing. 35% of 4th graders nationwide could do math proficiently in 2022, same as in 2005, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Reading scores have moved little.
And for all the “efforts” of our experts, results for minorities nationally remain tragic per the NAEP scores on the “Nation’s Report Card.”
In Milwaukee, just 5% of 4th-grade black students are proficient in reading. In Philadelphia, it’s just 7%. In Houston, Atlanta and New York City, only 11% are. And in Chicago and Dallas, it’s 13%. The results for 4th-grade Hispanic student results are only slightly better.
It’s not just a minority or an inner-city problem. Only 40% of white students nationwide are proficient in reading. That sounds a whole lot better until you realize what it means – that the other 60% aren’t proficient.
A look at Chicago Public Schools mirrors what’s been going on nationally, only that the failure is just supercharged. Over the past decade, per student spending has grown 84% since 2017 and yet reading results on the SAT – already dismal – have only collapsed further for minority students. Just 12% of black students and 18% of Hispanics read proficiently.
The math results are even worse. Only 8% of CPS’ blacks are proficient in math.
What may best capture just how pervasive failure has become under the so-called education “experts” is a look at a map of Illinois and what reading proficiency on the SAT looks like. It’s an absolute indictment of the educational industrial complex and it should be dismantled.
In Rockford, just 4% of black students can read at grade level. In Peoria, it’s 5%. In Decatur, only 1%.
It’s gotten so bad that the public schools in the city of Decatur have effectively achieved “equity” in reading proficiency. For blacks, 6% read at grade level. For Hispanics it’s 10%. And for whites, 14%.
Does anybody care anymore about how bad it is?
We can’t forget to mention this one fact that Illinois’ Gov. J.B. Pritzker has been so proud to brag about. Illinois just reported a record graduation rate of 80% for the state’s minority students. Never mind that our kids can’t read.
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You won’t hear us complaining about any DOE pick that is willing to disrupt the current system. America’s children deserve massive disruption at the national, state and city levels. Nothing less.
Let’s hope that McMahon leads that effort and that universal school choice is the impetus for that change. It’s not a silver bullet, but it should be the start of what disruption looks like. Strip the bureaucrats of their power and put it back where it belongs, with parents.
Read more from Wirepoints:
- Poor student achievement and near-zero accountability: An indictment of Illinois’ public education system – Wirepoints Special Report
- Politicians’ five-step guide for making parents think all’s well in Illinois schools
- Fresh data: Illinois officials graduate record 88% of students despite tragic literacy, numeracy rates
- One big reason Chicago Public Schools is facing a billion-dollar deficit
- Chicago Public Schools is in dire financial straits, yet Chicago Teachers Union blocks closing of near-empty, failing schools.
Audio and summary 
If this bill passes, say goodbye to local control over all Illinois parks and expect to see open drug and alcohol use, needles, no sanitation and fire hazards, but no ordinary park users.
Depends on where you live. I live in Central Illinois and sent my schools to public schools. So far they are not too WOKE in my area and I would continue to send my kids there if they were of that age.
Would I send them to Peoria, Decatur, Springfield public schools? NO WAY!
The education business is a con. Daycare, Transportation and food service. Everything in between is luck. The results measured in any way you look at it, is poor and extremely expensive.
School Choice is a good first step. Allow tax payers to chose where their tax dollars go and allow parents to chose the school their kids and taxes go.
The education business has no checks or balances built into it and is simply a con.
Won’t Trump try to reduce the role of the Federal government in public education? Likely he will reduce federal assistance and send many issues back to the states.
For Illinois, we face a bad to worse situation. The “silver lining” may be that urban schools will fail utterly for lack of funding and other resources.
Teachers, administrators and parents may move from Woke to awakened and begin to revise or reform the system. There’ll be a different sort of chaos but one hopes it will be of shorter duration than the current perpetual chaos.
Massive increases in expenditures producing dismal results make it clear that education must be totally reformed. Even educators don’t try to dispute or defend the results. They are just intent on blaming others for the problem. Enough. Advocate for real change, or get out of the way. Nobody buys your “poor me” excuses any more.
Finland, has a different approach to improving education, they only allow the smartest people to become teachers, must be well in the top 25 % IQ
As Norm MacDonald once asked of a seventh grade teacher, “I guess that means you only had to get an eight grade education, right?”.