Over the past several decades, American public schools have become dramatically more focused on equity and inclusion — and yet reading and math proficiency among disadvantaged students has stagnated or declined. This paper explains why. And what we can do about it.
Over the past several decades, American public schools have become dramatically more focused on equity, inclusion, and student wellbeing. Diversity training is mandatory. Grading policies have been softened. Discipline has been reformed. Students are no longer failed. Zero has been abolished as a grade in many districts. The language of compassion and social justice pervades curriculum, professional development, and administrative policy.
And yet: reading and math proficiency among disadvantaged students — the students these policies claim to help — has stagnated or declined across the same period. The 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress showed the largest drop in fourth-grade reading scores since the assessment began. Eighth-grade math scores fell to 1999 levels. The gaps between advantaged and disadvantaged students, between white and Black and Hispanic students, remain stubborn and in some cases have widened.
This is the paradox that demands an explanation. If the policies are designed to help these students, why aren't they helping? The purpose of this paper is to answer that question honestly — using the documented evidence of economists, researchers, and educators who have studied what actually works.
8th grade math proficiency, 2022 NAEP — lowest since 1999
U.S. Dept. of Education4th graders reading at grade level — down from 40% pre-2020
NAEP 2022Per-pupil spending doubled since 1970 (inflation-adjusted) — with declining outcomes
NCESWe have spent more money, hired more administrators, written more equity policies, and produced fewer literate graduates. At some point, the compassionate response is to ask whether the compassion is actually helping.
Economist Thomas Sowell has spent five decades documenting what happens when institutions prioritize the appearance of progress over actual progress. In Inside American Education (1993) and Charter Schools and Their Enemies (2020), he identifies the specific policy mechanisms that produce declining outcomes while appearing compassionate:
Sowell's most powerful empirical contribution is his detailed analysis of high-performing urban charter schools. In New York City, Success Academy serves a student body that is overwhelmingly Black and Hispanic, overwhelmingly from low-income households, and selected by lottery — meaning there is no selection advantage of motivated families or gifted children. And yet Success Academy students consistently outscore students from wealthy suburban districts on state assessments.
The same pattern holds at KIPP schools nationally, at Uncommon Schools in Newark, at Democracy Prep in Harlem. The variable that differs is not demographics, not funding, not ZIP code. It is institutional culture: specifically, whether the school maintains high academic standards, builds knowledge systematically, holds students accountable for mastery, and refuses to accept underperformance as inevitable.
These results demolish the most common excuse for low achievement among disadvantaged students: that their backgrounds make high performance impossible. The evidence proves the opposite. Given institutions that believe in them enough to hold them to real standards, these students achieve at the highest levels.
Thomas Sowell, Charter Schools and Their Enemies (2020)Sowell's analysis of why these policies persist despite their documented failures is structural rather than conspiratorial. The institutions that run public schools — district administrations, teachers' unions, schools of education — are measured by metrics that do not capture learning. Graduation rates go up when promotion is automatic. Grade point averages rise when minimums are imposed. These numbers are reported to legislators and parents as evidence of success.
The administrators who report these numbers receive credit for improvements that are illusory. The politicians who fund these schools can point to rising graduation rates. The unions whose members face less pressure when standards are lower benefit from the status quo. None of these actors needs to coordinate or intend harm. The incentive structure produces the outcome automatically — and insulates it from reform by making the reformers appear cruel.
Daniel Buck taught in public schools and writes from inside the classroom that Sowell documents from the outside. In What Is Wrong With Our Schools, Buck identifies the specific pedagogical fashions that have displaced direct instruction and knowledge-building in American classrooms:
Buck documents something Sowell's institutional analysis leaves partially open: how the perverse incentive structure became morally acceptable to the people inside it. The answer is that schools of education — the institutions that train every teacher who enters a public school classroom — have been substantially captured by an ideological framework, drawing primarily on the critical pedagogy of Paulo Freire, that explicitly treats traditional academic standards as instruments of oppression.
In this framework, requiring a Black or Hispanic student to master standard English grammar is cultural imperialism. Grading on a curve that produces failure is violence. Direct instruction is authoritarian. High-stakes assessment is racist. These are not fringe positions — they are the explicit claims of mainstream education scholarship, published in peer-reviewed journals, assigned in teacher certification programs, and enforced through professional development requirements in school districts across the country.
The result is a system in which a teacher who holds students to high academic standards can be reprimanded for being culturally insensitive, while a teacher who passes every student regardless of performance is rewarded for being trauma-informed. The incentives are precisely inverted from what student outcomes require.
Daniel Buck, What Is Wrong With Our SchoolsThe downstream consequence of graduating students who have never been required to master difficult material, overcome genuine failure, or develop the discipline that sustained effort produces is now visible across multiple domains. Employers document entry-level workers who cannot accept critical feedback, who escalate interpersonal conflict rather than navigate it, and who lack the basic tolerance for frustration that complex work requires.
Psychologists document a generation with historically elevated rates of anxiety and depression — not only because of social media and economic stress, but because the developmental experiences that build psychological resilience were systematically removed from their formative environments. You build resilience by overcoming obstacles. When institutions protect children from all difficulty rather than from unjust difficulty, they produce adults who cannot deal with a world that will not offer the same protection.
This is not a cultural complaint. It is a predictable, documented outcome of specific institutional policies — policies that can be identified, named, and changed.
The argument in Part One leads to an inescapable conclusion: the current public education system, as structured and governed, will not reform itself. The institutions that need to change control the mechanisms through which change would occur. The unions that benefit from low standards fund the politicians who set education policy. The schools of education that train teachers in failed pedagogical frameworks certify the teachers who will staff the classrooms. The administrators who are rewarded for rising graduation rates will not voluntarily adopt policies that reduce graduation rates in the short term by enforcing real standards.
External pressure — organized, sustained, and applied at multiple levels simultaneously — is therefore not optional. It is the only mechanism that has historically moved entrenched institutions. The civil rights movement did not wait for segregationists to reform themselves. The labor movement did not wait for corporations to voluntarily raise wages. The pressure has to come from outside the system, from the people the system is supposed to serve.
Here is how to build and apply that pressure.
The single most powerful tool available to reformers is data transparency. Most parents do not know what their children's schools actually produce in terms of measurable outcomes — because schools have strong institutional incentives to obscure this information. The first priority is to change that.
The most powerful argument for reform is not a critique — it is a demonstration. High-performing urban charter schools have proven that the students the current system is failing can achieve at the highest levels when given institutions that believe in them. The strategic priority is to make that proof visible, accessible, and politically irresistible.
As long as every teacher who enters a public school classroom has been trained in the failed pedagogical frameworks Buck documents, classroom-level reform will be continuously undermined by the pipeline that produces new teachers. The teacher training system is where the ideology is reproduced. It must be targeted directly.
The single greatest strategic error that education reformers have made is allowing this issue to be framed as a conservative culture war attack on public schools. It is not. The evidence of harm falls most heavily on the students that progressive institutions claim to champion. The demand for high standards and genuine accountability is most urgently expressed by Black and Hispanic parents whose children attend the schools with the lowest standards. Framing matters enormously.
Policy changes are necessary but not sufficient. The deeper problem Buck identifies is cultural: a school culture that has come to treat effort, mastery, and high expectations as oppressive. Policy can change what teachers are required to do. It cannot, by itself, change what students, parents, and teachers believe about the purpose of education.
The long game is cultural — rebuilding the understanding, across communities and political lines, that high standards are an expression of respect, not cruelty; that genuine failure is a more honest and ultimately more helpful response to underperformance than a passing grade that disguises it; that the grit, resilience, and capability that high expectations develop are not abstract virtues but specific, documented predictors of adult success and wellbeing.
This is work that happens in conversations, in writing, in the testimony of students who experienced both kinds of school and can speak honestly about the difference. It happens through organizations like ONOV that are committed to finding common ground across political lines in service of what actually helps people. And it happens one school board meeting, one legislative testimony, one parent conversation at a time.
The students who are being failed by the current system are not failing because of who they are or where they come from. They are failing because the institutions that are supposed to serve them have been captured by incentive structures and ideological frameworks that prioritize the appearance of compassion over the reality of achievement.
The evidence that these students can achieve at the highest levels — given institutions that hold them to real standards — is overwhelming and replicable. The argument for change is not ideological. It is empirical.
Education reform is one piece of a larger fight. When campaign money corrupts the political process, it blocks every reform that has broad public support — including this one. Join One Nation One Voice and add your name to the movement demanding accountable schools, accountable government, and elections that belong to citizens.