Red States Are Choosing Educational Excellence While Blue States Choose Decline
Caroline MolloyAmerican education is in a free fall. Math test scores among nine-year-olds recently saw the largest drop in 50 years, and reading scores are declining as well. Despite the United States ranking fifth in K-12 spending and second in higher education spending among OECD countries, our students are in the middle of the pack in international math and science assessments. Even at elite American colleges, professors report that their students can’t read books.
In response to this crisis, reform-minded states across the country have responded with bold and innovative policies to completely transform the education system, while many Democrat-run states have accepted decline.
Let’s start with the bad news. Despite the growing crisis in American education, states like Illinois and California have resisted reform, choosing to dump more money into public schools instead of fixing the structural problems.
The good news is that red states across the country have firmly rejected the failed status quo and are promoting educational excellence through school choice, improved literacy programs, and reforming higher education.
By far the biggest impact on student outcomes will result from the successful expansion of school choice, giving families the freedom to leave failing schools and choose a private, classical, alternative public school, or other option that fits their needs.
While families have advocated for school choice for decades, 2025 has been a watershed moment. Thanks to leaders like Governors Greg Abbott and Bill Lee, Texas and Tennessee, respectively, are now the latest states breaking the local public-school monopoly. Altogether, 17 states have universal school choice programs, including Governor Jeff Landry’s LA GATOR education savings accounts in Louisiana and Governor Kevin Stitt’s tax-credit-based system in Oklahoma. More than a dozen other states have more limited forms of school choice.
But state leaders didn’t stop there. Reformers have also enacted thoughtful policies to increase education quality. For example, Louisiana State Superintendent of Education Cade Brumley led the Let Teachers Teach initiative that proposed 18 reforms, such as cutting unnecessary trainings and paperwork, granting new authority to remove continually disruptive students from classrooms, and directing students in need to mental health professionals instead of forcing teachers to act as impromptu psychiatrists.
Along with these solutions that allow teachers to spend more time teaching, Louisiana will also soon implement the “Grow. Achieve. Thrive” accountability framework to measure the performance of public schools using an A-F grading scale. The framework increases standards and transparency, providing administrators, teachers, and parents a clear view of what’s working and what isn’t.
Perhaps the most glaring problem schools must address is literacy, the building block of almost all other learning. From 2017 to 2023, the percentage of American adults ranked at the lowest levels of literacy increased from 19% to 28%.
Thankfully, some states recognize the crisis and are rejecting the ineffective “whole language approach” based on context clues and “meaning-making” in favor of the tried-and-true science of reading focused on phonics, vocabulary, and comprehension.
