WSJ: Why Can’t Even More of Our Johnnies Read?

The Department of Education has existed for 45 years. In that time, federal spending for the org has gone from $14 billion in FY1980 to $90 billion in FY2024, almost twice the pace of inflation over the same period. What has the Dept of Ed delivered to American taxpayers with this massive bureaucracy?

Failure upon failure, as the data shows. Today the Wall Street journal reports that “American kids are getting even worse at reading,” at both the 4th and 8th grade levels. The efforts to federalize and wokify pedagogy and curricula have produced succeeding generations of children without the basic necessities for success in life — or even functional literacy:

The reading skills of American students are deteriorating further, according to new national test scores that show no improvement in a yearslong slide.

The 67% of eighth-graders who scored at a basic or better reading level in 2024 was the lowest share since testing began in 1992, results from a closely watched federal exam show. Only 60% of fourth-graders hit that benchmark, nearing record lows.

The declines started before the pandemic, continued during it and have persisted since. While the lowest-achieving students fell further behind everyone else, the slides were broad, affecting students across different states, school types, races and economic backgrounds. 

Those are the worst numbers in over 30 years. In 1995, we spent $32 billion on the Dept of Ed, or roughly equivalent to $65 billion in 2025 dollars. We increased real-dollar federal spending at the Education Department by 50% over those 30 years, only to wind up where we started. 

So how can it be that we’ve thrown more resources at the problem, only to see it get worse? Don’t ask the “experts” at the department whose job it was to improve matters by federalizing education policy:

Federal officials and researchers say there are no definitive explanations for the latest scores. They also caution that the reading results don’t speak to the effectiveness of recent changes.

Forty-five years and a couple of trillion dollars later, and all we get is a shrug and a plea to wait and see? As if we haven’t heard that before?

Education policy is local policy. School boards accountable to parents need to make those decisions, and teachers and administrators need to be accountable for results. For that matter, students need to be accountable too; federal intervention has forced too many schools to keep disruptive students in classrooms rather than expelling them, and too many teachers from assigning honest grades rather than get accused of “bias” when Johnny won’t do the work. 

It is long past time to end the federal encroachment into education policy, and not just in higher ed either. We have more than a half-century of abject failure with this experiment if one counts the old days of Health Education and Welfare before Jimmy Carter broke out Education into its own department. That was supposed to reverse years of failure in the HEW era, some readers will recall. Instead, it has created an entire culture of failure, one that the rest of the federal bureaucracy rushes to defend when challenged.

Recall what the Department of Justice did with parents who dared to object to curricula choices over the last few years? Merrick Garland’s Stasi labeled them as “domestic terrorists” for daring to challenge the progressive indoctrination agenda that has gripped American education for the last couple of decades, and turned kids into functionally illiterate foot soldiers for radical causes. 

End the Department of Education now. Empower parents and local communities to control education policy. At the very least, provide parents with school choice and follow-the-student funding so that they can choose schools that work rather than the progressive indoctrination centers that bureaucrats and the unions have created in the US public-school system.