“I think we can all agree that it’s been a little sad seeing the reading and writing scores of some of these students and just where our education has gone,” said Kim on a Whim host Kim St. Onge this week. “I’m not blaming all the teachers. There are some phenomenal teachers out there. I don’t really know who or what to blame, but it’s not… whatever we’re doing is just simply not working.”
While it’s true that reading scores are down in many parts of the country, the education story in the U.S. isn’t as bad as some might think. At the same time, there have been big moves in the Department of Education under the new administration of President Donald Trump that are poised to change things.
Will these changes be for the better? Opinions on that differ. Here’s what we know.
As St. Onge and Marc Cox of KMOX discussed the state of education in the U.S., they pulled up a copy of an eighth grade test that Bullitt County History in Kentucky said was administered in 1912. They were impressed with the difficulty of the questions and the range of topics asked.
Of course, since 1912 our educational needs have changed. We have new tools at our disposal, which have taken away old challenges and brought us new ones.
“Finding it out in eight seconds and learning it are two different things,” said Cox. “I mean then [in 1912] you had to study it and be tested on it and you wouldn’t be able to do that with a computer, you’d have to have the knowledge.”
St. Onge also brought up the impact of artificial intelligence, which students have been using to complete assignments.
Test result data released by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) this January did show that reading scores for fourth and eighth graders were down compared to 2019 and 2022. Scores have especially slipped since the COVID-19 pandemic, which disrupted in-person education. Still, the NCES said that, compared to the first reading assessment in 1992, the average score last year was not significantly different.
Both U.S. News & World Report and FactCheck.org noted that Trump has repeatedly claimed that the U.S. ranks poorly or “dead last” in education compared to other counties. Neither could find evidence to support that claim.
“An international assessment contradicts Trump’s claim,” said U.S. News & World Report.
“We could find no international ranking of education outcomes that has the U.S. dead last, as Trump claimed,” said FactCheck.org. It also said that Trump’s claim that the U.S. spends the most per pupil is also false.
Per FactCheck.org, the president appeared to be talking about 37 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development countries that participate in the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA with his comment that the U.S. was last out of 40 countries. The NCES conducts the assessment in coordination with the OECD every three years in reading, math and science for 15-year-old students and the latest results covered 2022.
“In no PISA category, however, does the U.S. rank last,” said FactCheck.org. “Rather, the U.S. scored above average among OECD countries in reading and science (subjects in which the U.S. ranked 6th and 12th, respectively). The average U.S. score in math was lower, but not significantly, than the OECD average. The U.S. ranking in math was 28th.”
Last April, the Pew Research Center noted that while “most Americans believe K-12 STEM education in the United States is either average or below average compared with other wealthy nations,” recent standardized tests scores from around the world showed that U.S. students were doing better than average in science compared with pupils in these other countries. They were however, lagging behind students in other wealthy nations in math.
So, there is work to be done.
According to FactCheck.org, Trump has “made no secret of his desire to dismantle the federal Department of Education,” and has said that he wants states to run schools. It explained that states basically do run schools, with the Education Department acting as an “emergency response system” to fill in gaps when the need arises and to support state education departments. Audacy reported on the history of the department here.
This Wednesday, Audacy also reported on Trump’s comment that he wants the new U.S. Secretery of Education, Linda McMahon, to “put herself out of a job.” Since he took office, staffing at the Education Department has been cut in half. On Thursday, Audacy reported that “a coalition of Democratic-led states is challenging the Trump administration’s sweeping layoffs across the Education Department, saying it amounts to an illegal dismantling of an agency created by Congress.”
Some have slammed the moves.
“Yesterday, the Trump Administration slashed half of the U.S. Department of Education’s workforce when it laid off approximately 1,300 career staff and 600 probationary employees. A nation’s strength is built on the strength of its public education system, and these actions purposely weaken not only American education but America itself. Mass layoffs also undermine the economy and, if left unchecked, will lead to higher unemployment,” said a statement from the Center for Law and Social Policy.
Some have greeted the changes with open arms.
“President Trump made it clear that he intended to shutter the Department of Education and advance school choice across the country, and Secretary Linda McMahon will waste no time reining in one of our country’s greatest failed public policies, the centralization of American education,” said a statement this week from Tommy Schultz – CEO of the American Federation for Children, an organization that advocates for school choice. “For a generation, our nation’s education system has been held hostage by bureaucrats and schooling unions who care only about preserving their own power, not the needs of American students.”
School choice has long been a focus of Republican education platforms said Newsweek in a Friday article. It said that 15 U.S. states currently have at least one universal private school choice program. These programs allow families to use taxpayer-funded education money to attend private schools, be homeschooled or seek options other than local public schools.
None of those 15 states were among the states that had top ACT scores last year, according to data from the ACT Education Corp. However, not all students are required to take the test.
In fact, Education Week noted that “measuring the effects of private school choice on outcomes like student-test scores is no easy task,” because “many states either don’t require students accepting funds from these programs to participate in state exams that public school students take, or they don’t report test-score data from private schools.”
“Studies that examine the early days of private school choice programs, from the 2000s, show that participating students – largely low-income students from urban areas – modestly outperformed their public school peers on standardized tests. More recent peer-reviewed studies, looking at programs that are newer and larger, have shown the opposite,” said the outlet.