The Daily Chart: Incompetent at Education

It may have been the late great Jesse Helms who first joked back in the 1980s that by all means we should encourage public schools to teach sex education because then nobody would know how to do it. And in fact teen pregnancy has been falling over the last generation—one of the few happy trends among youth these days.

But the inability of the public schools to teach basic reading has reached scandal proportions—and let’s recall who dominates our public school: the teachers unions and the educrats, both wholly-owned subsidiaries of the Democratic Party. The latest public school achievement scores ought to be a national scandal, but with so much government incompetence on display, who can keep up:

American Kids Are Getting Even Worse at Reading

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.

Guess where students do best at reading?

One other exception: Louisiana public schools reported much better reading numbers. Perhaps one reason why is that when Hurricane Katrina destroyed so many schools or dislocated so many people, the state turned aggressively to new charter schools and private school scholarships. Another reason to smash the public school monopoly into little bits.

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