Seeking to answer that question, and do so fairly, the national group U.S. Parents Involved in Education said it zeroed in on five central issues: government involvement; colleges of education; teacher certification; standards and assessments; and teachers’ unions.
The short answer, the group concluded, is no, public education is not the answer for educating K-12 children.
The longer answer, it explained in an 18-page report, is those issues are “insurmountable," at least in the near future, for the 84 percent of American children who sit in a public school classroom.
To draw its grim conclusion, PIE went far back in U.S. history to the beginning of taxpayer-funded public education in the late 1800s. Moving ahead 100 years, PIE pointed to a report in 1983 warning public education was failing, which set off an effort at numerous reforms at the federal and state level.
Studying the 1980s since those reforms, PIE looked at 40 years of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP. That annual test of fourth graders and eight graders shows very little improvement, or an overall retreat, in math and reading scores, PIE concluded.
Elsewhere in its report, PIE said today’s school children are being taught by teachers who are less smart overall than their predecessors, but those teachers are backed and protected by the powerful teachers’ unions. Those teachers’ unions also pour millions of dollars in political campaigns - the NEA spent $254 million in 2024 – in the name of defending “public education" and children. In reality, politicians are lobbied to support liberal teachers and their left-wing activism disguised as classroom instruction.
Melanie Kurdys, president of the Michigan branch of PIE, told American Family News the education group worked on the report over an 18-month period because PIE is aware of its ongoing critique of modern-day public education.
“We're trying to be a responsible organization in terms of finding ways to solve problems, not just to complain,” she told AFN.
The conclusion by PIE and its report is rather blunt, however. Parents who want their children to excel in education should remove them from public school, then be responsible for their education through homeschooling or finding a reputable private school.
“Our conclusion is that government schools are not redeemable in the near future. In order to recover government schools, it would take a concerted effort to solve all of these problems,” Kurdys explained. “And so, and we don't think that would happen very quickly."
