The Education Industry Is a Failure

The only clear correlation we can find in education is this: as spending goes up, student results go down.

Our local school system just had its budget rejected for the second time in five years. They’re already talking about “what to cut,” as if the budget was slashed. It wasn’t. They simply didn’t get the increase they wanted. This happens every time the public pushes back.

Meanwhile, our high school has a math competency rate of 15 to 30 percent. At best, only three out of ten kids are performing at grade level in math. Reading is better but still unacceptable. For comparison, my old high school currently posts 90% in math and 95% in reading. The difference is night and day.

This shouldn’t surprise anyone. The education industry has largely stopped functioning as an education system. When you ask them “What is it that you do?”, you get soft, nebulous answers that mean nothing. They’ve become expensive, glorified babysitters who speak in jargon and resist any attempt to pin them down on results.

Look at how they train teachers. I sat through some of my wife’s online education courses. The instructors treated grown adults — many with advanced degrees — like children. The lectures were repetitive and shallow. Any reasonably intelligent person could ace them without much effort. We are not training teachers to teach. We are training them to manage classrooms.

The system has also abandoned fundamentals. I remember the first time I was told homework was useless. The kids who didn’t need it got penalized for not doing it, while the kids who needed it most had parents doing it for them. Some of those parents were getting failing grades themselves.

We desperately need to start over. Forget last year’s budget. This year we should build the budget from the ground up with one simple question: *What is it we do?*

The answer should be clear: Teach kids to read, write, and do math. Everything else comes after. If they can’t read the textbook, they can’t learn science. If they can’t do basic math, they’ll never manage a household budget. Yet we have people claiming it costs more to shop and cook at home than ordering Uber Eats.

I don’t know if this can still be fixed. This may be the first generation to graduate high school less skilled and more ignorant than their parents. We might have crossed the tipping point.

But if we’re going to try, we start with the basics. No more vague mission statements. No more throwing money at failure. When someone can’t explain what they do in clear terms, they shouldn’t be running our schools.

That’s what Elon did when he took over Twitter. He asked, “What is it that you do?” Some good people got fired by mistake and he hired them back at higher pay. But the ones who couldn’t explain their job stayed gone. Schools need the same clarity of purpose.

We owe our kids at least that much.