America’s public education system is in crisis — and not the crisis the education establishment wants you to see.
Nationwide, K-12 schools spent nearly $1 trillion in 2024, with average per-pupil spending approaching $18,000. Inflation-adjusted education spending has risen dramatically over the past decade — in Kansas and across the country.
The results? Reading scores for 12th graders are 10 points lower than in 1992, the first year they were measured. Math scores are falling. Nearly a third of 12th graders missed three or more days of school in a single month. And graduation rates — long held up as a success story — have been quietly hollowed out by credit recovery programs that let failing students regain credit through watered-down online coursework.
The education establishment’s answer has been, without fail, the same: spend more and more.
The evidence that this prescription is wrong is now overwhelming.
Oregon increased education spending far ahead of inflation over the past decade, reaching over $17,000 per pupil. The result: Oregon ranks at the bottom of the nation in academic outcomes, with fewer than half of students proficient in English and less than a third proficient in math.The
The Los Angeles Unified School District ran a $1.6 billion budget deficit while fewer than half its students meet basic standards in reading and math.
Illinois spends lavishly — yet only 41 percent of its students read at grade level, and just 31 percent of 11th graders are proficient in reading.
Florida, by contrast, ranks 47th in the nation in per-pupil spending at roughly $12,700 per student. Its English language arts proficiency is 57 percent. Math proficiency is 59 percent. Both are rising year over year.
Florida is not spending its way to success. It is competing its way there.
As Ryan Walters of the Teacher Freedom Alliance put it: “We don’t have an education funding problem. We have an education spending problem.”
Increased funding has flowed overwhelmingly toward administrative overhead, rather than teachers and students. The system has grown more responsive to the adults within it than to the children it is supposed to serve.
The core problem is the absence of accountability. When a family has no choice but to send their child to a failing school — when that school faces no competitive pressure, no consequence for poor performance, no risk of losing students to better alternatives — there is no incentive to improve. Administrators optimize for metrics that protect the institution. Standards erode. Spending climbs. Achievement falls.
School choice breaks that cycle. When parents can direct education dollars toward the school that best serves their child — public, charter, private, or homeschool — schools must compete for students by delivering results. Schools that perform earn enrollment. Schools that fail lose it. This is not a radical idea. It is how accountability works in every other sector of American life.
Arizona has embraced this model, committing $1 billion in school choice funding within a $10 billion K-12 budget and ranking second in the nation in education freedom. Arizona Superintendent Tom Horne states the logic plainly: “School choice will improve public education, because competition makes everybody perform better.”
He is right. Florida and Arizona are proving it.
Kansas spends roughly $19,000 per pupil annually on a system where far too many students cannot read or do math at grade level. That investment deserves results. Results require accountability. And accountability requires competition.
School choice is not an abandonment of public education. It is the only realistic mechanism for saving it — by forcing it to do what every institution that serves the public must do: earn the trust and resources it receives, one family at a time.
The views expressed in this opinion article are those of their author and are not necessarily either shared or endorsed by the owners of this website. If you are interested in contributing an Op-Ed to The Western Journal, you can learn about our submission guidelines and process here.
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