The race hustlers and money grubbers must go, while the importance of intact families, rewarding the best teachers, closing failing schools, and phonics must be stressed
Public education in our country is struggling, and many proposed solutions are of no help whatsoever. First, too many people in the field are fixated on race. For example, many education schools partner with the Racial Justice in Early Math teaching fellowship, whose one-year program “helps kindergarten teachers better understand the intersection between racial justice and early math.”
Sung Yoon, who teaches kindergarten and first grade in Washington, participated in the program in 2023-2424. He said the fellowship changed his approach to teaching. Yoon reported that when he told friends and colleagues about the fellowship, a typical response was, “So you think math is racist?” He would clarify, “No, that’s not what this is about. It’s about how we teach math and dismantle the white supremacy that has been embedded since the dawn of time.”
On the other side of the country, New York City might elect a race-obsessed mayor in November. Currently a New York State Assemblyman, Zohran Mamdani has supported legislation to eliminate the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test—the only merit-based standard used to admit students to Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and Brooklyn Tech, three of the top high schools in the country. These schools have graduation rates above 99% and college placement rates over 90%. Mamdani and his allies say they want to boost diversity, but replacing merit with subjectivity doesn’t fix inequality—it just lowers standards. The real problem isn’t admissions tests; it’s the K-8 schools’ failure to prepare students properly.
Mamdani has also co-authored a bill that allocates $8 million in taxpayer money to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) teacher hiring programs. These funds prioritize demographic quotas over merit. Meanwhile, New York’s teacher workforce is already diverse: a 2023 report showed that 42% of teachers identify as Black and 29% as Hispanic—figures that exceed those communities’ representation in the city’s overall population.
And then there are the money grubbers, and no one is better at this than Vermont’s socialist Senator Bernie Sanders. He has introduced legislation to address the “teacher pay crisis in America,” and ensure that all public school teachers earn a “livable and competitive wage that is at least $60,000 a year and increases throughout their career.”
This is nonsense. Just Facts examined teacher pay data and found that, in the 2021–22 school year, the average school teacher in the U.S. earned $66,397 in salary and received an additional $34,090 in benefits, including health insurance, paid leave, and pensions, totaling $100,487 in overall compensation.
Also, importantly, full-time public school teachers work an average of 1,490 hours per year, including time spent on lesson preparation, test construction, and grading, providing extra help to students, coaching, and other activities, while their counterparts in private industry work an average of 2,045 hours per year, or about 37% more than public school teachers.
Instead of an across-the-board raise, why not pay talented teachers more?
The teachers’ unions fiercely oppose this sensible idea from becoming a reality. The most recent example was in late July, when the Houston Federation of Teachers filed a lawsuit against the Houston school district over its decision to distribute state-funded teacher raises based on performance rather than experience. The lawsuit was filed shortly after the Houston school district released its 2025-26 compensation plan, which included performance-based teacher pay raises.
Regarding salaries, unions ignore teacher quality and insist that the number of years on the job should be the main factor in determining teacher pay. The union regimen also allows teachers to increase their salaries by taking “professional development classes,” which rarely improve student learning.
But what about spending more on students?
Despite the wails from teacher unionistas and others in the education establishment, spending more on education doesn’t result in better-educated students.
For example, New York State’s schools spent $36,293 per student, nearly double the national average. But in 2024, its students ranked in the middle nationally for overall performance in 8th-grade reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress—the “Nation’s Report Card.”
Texas, Florida, and Mississippi excel in achieving strong student outcomes despite spending significantly less than New York.
The same holds for schools worldwide. On the 2022 PISA, an international assessment of 15-year-olds’ academic achievement, the U.S. ranked near the bottom in achievement despite spending nearly the most. The poorest students in Japan scored significantly higher than the average American pupil, even though Japan spends about 40% less per student than the U.S. average.
So, what would create a positive difference?
Fathers.
A recent study found that children raised in Virginia without a father at home are only about half as likely to earn good grades in school. The researchers also noted that children with less engaged fathers are “about 2 times more likely to have parents contacted about school problems and 3.7 times more likely to be diagnosed with depression.”
Furthermore, the report found no significant difference in school grades among demographically diverse children raised in intact families. Black and white students living with their fathers earn mostly similar grades and are equally unlikely to face behavioral problems at school. In other words, the achievement gap is not about race but rather family structure and stability.
It’s essential to recognize that the government has played a significant role in the decline of the American family. As the late Walter Williams often stressed, the welfare state, especially programs introduced after the 1960s, caused more damage to the Black family than the long history of slavery and Jim Crow laws. He highlighted the sharp rise in single-parent households among Black Americans after these programs were implemented. In 1960, 78% of Black children grew up in two-parent families, but this figure dropped significantly in subsequent decades.
Another education improvement would involve closing low-performing, underenrolled schools, and expanding the high-performing, in-demand schools.
Cities like New Orleans, Denver, and Indianapolis have experienced great success doing this. It’s also been a key ingredient behind Florida’s climb up the state achievement rankings.
Chad Aldeman explains that over the past twenty years, Florida has gained about 230,000 students, closed 214 schools, and opened 1,011 new ones. This churn has undoubtedly led to tough decisions at the local level, but it has also boosted the overall quality of schools across the state. He asserts that in 2024, “Florida gave 1,299 of 3,451 public schools an A on their state report card. Of those A-rated schools, 192 didn’t exist ten years ago, and 483 didn’t exist twenty years ago. Last year, 47%of schools that predated 2004 received an A or B, compared with 69% of those that have opened since then.”
Also, we need to return to phonics. After mandating the traditional method of teaching reading, Mississippi now outscores New York State, even though it is outspent by almost 3-1.
In conclusion, we must focus on effective solutions: restoring phonics, closing ineffective schools, rewarding the best teachers, and emphasizing the importance of strong families. At the same time, it is imperative to oppose the race-hustlers and the belief that spending more money is essential.
First Published at For Kids & Country.
