American education facing an undeclared emergency with some scores reaching 30-year lows

The annual release of the nation’s education report card has become a predictable and self-flagellating ritual. Education wonks run down the depressing details, the teachers’ unions make excuses, and experts natter on about “resiliency” and tweaks that might help — if only the system is given even more funding. The budgets always go up, but America’s students continue to suffer.

The latest scores from National Assessment of Educational Progress , out Wednesday, are unsurprisingly catastrophic. A generation of painfully slow progress was swiftly wiped out during the pandemic thanks to teachers’ union-driven school closures , and reading scores for our lowest-performing students fell to the lowest levels in the NAEP assessment’s 30-year history — despite an additional $190 billion from the federal government for K-12 in the last few years, on top of its usual massive outlays. Trillions of dollars across the decades down the drain, and millions of kids robbed of a quality — or even basic — education.

Some of the lowlights of this year’s NAEP results: For K-12 students, America is in an undeclared state of emergency. And learning loss compounds over time, as students struggle to catch up while lacking foundational skills. Put simply, this will not be the last time we see devastating NAEP scores.

It should be the last time we accept them. This week’s scores are another reminder of why so many states have passed or expanded school choice in the last few years — and why bringing real competition in education nationwide is a moral imperative. The data on school choice outcomes is clear: It not only leads to dramatically better results for beneficiaries — who are likelier to graduate high school, go to college, and participate in civic life, while being less likely to commit crimes — it also improves public schools by injecting sorely needed accountability and competition.

For families whose schools do not improve — or simply don’t meet their unique needs — school choice offers a chance to find a better fit, such as in the nation’s high-quality Catholic schools, where the pandemic learning loss did not happen . Unfortunately, Democratic legislatures in blue states like New York, California and too many others stay in lockstep with the teachers’ unions, refusing to allow any options for families whose students are being failed in the public schools. In New York alone, according to Georgetown’s Edunomics lab, spending on education has increased 61% since 2013 — yet reading and math scores have only trended down.

Fortunately, there is a remedy on the horizon: I recently wrote a letter urging the US Senate to confirm Linda McMahon as secretary of education , because she is committed to advancing the centerpiece of President Trump’s education agenda, the Educational Choice for Children Act. This nationwide school-choice tax credit would unlock education freedom in all 50 states. It’s widely popular among voters , and has over 180 co-sponsors in Congress.

And it can’t come soon enough, as the new NAEP results attest. There is a desperate need to right the ship, but the system has no incentive to fix itself. Expanding school choice — at scale, and across every state — is a critical solution going forward.

In 2025, lawmakers should resolve to do something that will upend the NAEP ritual we’ve all gotten used to, and pass nationwide school choice to help break this gloomy cycle. It will fulfill a critical campaign promise from a president who pledged to look out for forgotten Americans — our students foremost among them. Tommy Schultz is CEO of the American Federation for Children and AFC Victory Fund, the nation’s largest school-choice advocacy and election organizations.

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