A recent report from the American Enterprise Institute summarizes results from the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress — also known as the nation’s report card.

The test, given every two years, reports scores of our nation’s children in reading and math at the fourth grade and eighth grade levels.

AEI characterizes the most recent results as a “five-alarm fire.” I call it simply pathetic.

In 2024, 40% of fourth graders scored below “basic level” in reading. This is 25% worse than 2013, when 32% scored below “basic level.”

NAEP rates scores at three levels: basic, proficient and advanced.

It defines “basic” as “partial mastery of the knowledge and skills that are fundamental for proficient work.”

Among Black fourth graders, 56% scored below “basic.”

In eighth grade math, 39% were below basic. Among Black eighth graders, 56% were below basic.

Not only are scores horrible, but performance over the years has gotten decidedly worse.

One of the beauties of America’s free enterprise system is failure is punished and purged, and success is celebrated and rewarded.

But this doesn’t happen in socialism. It doesn’t happen when markets are controlled by politics and not by business and the desires of consumers freely expressed.

Only in markets where competition does not exist, where products are sustained and perpetuated by political power and not by the desires of consumers, is failure perpetuated.

How can we possibly be allowing this to happen in our most precious product — education?

Columbia Law School professor Philip Hamburger wrote recently about how, early in the last century, one of the great advocates of federal control of education was the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan wanted control of our culture and wanted our schools to become factories for their bigoted view of the world.

Today the massive teachers unions — the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers — aspire to the same control over education as the Klan did in the 1920s.

Except rather than wanting all Americans to be white Protestants, which is what the Klan wanted, the teachers unions want a culture purged of the Bible, purged of biblical truth, purged of the traditional values of households headed by a mother and father with children educated to look to the Ten Commandments for their rules in life. Teachers unions want a culture defined by woke ideology.

Although the NAEP measures reading and math to score our education system, education is about more than reading and math.

Education is about the transmission of values, transmission of what one generation understands as true and false, good and evil, right and wrong, to the next generation.

We cannot, in our free country, force the Bible and Christianity. But we also cannot have a reality, as we have today, where every parent does not have a choice to send their child to a school that teaches these truths.

The Wall Street Journal recently ran an article headlined “American Women Are Giving Up on Marriage.” The article reports that in 2023, 51.4% of women 18-40 were single, compared to 41.8% in 2000. In 2024, per the article, 39% of women 18-29 identified as liberal, up from 32% in 2014.

This is a great success story of teachers union-controlled public education.

President Donald Trump is 100% on the right track to want to shut down the teachers union-inspired enterprise called the United States Department of Education.

The Department of Education has some 4,000 employees and a discretionary budget of around $80 billion. The 4,000 should be immediately terminated. There are some 50 million children in public schools K-12. The $80 billion could provide a $1,500 scholarship voucher to each of these children to attend whatever private school their parents choose.

Let’s end socialism and start a free market in America’s most precious product — education.

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