Education consultant Keri Ingraham shared the bad news at Daily Wire late last month:

According to the NAEP [National Assessment of Educational Progress] results provided by The Nation’s Report Card, 69% of fourth-grade students and 70% of eighth-grade students aren’t proficient at reading — that’s only 3 out of 10 schoolchildren learning to read soundly. When students can’t read at grade level, it significantly hinders their other academic learning.

The NAEP math scores similarly confirm that a change of course in K-12 education is desperately needed. An astonishing 61% of fourth-grade students and 72% of eighth-grade students aren’t proficient in math.

As a nation, we can no longer justify restricting children to these failing schools for their education. Nor can the ever-increasing astronomical spending — well over $850 billion annually — on the public education system continue to support the status quo. 

“New National Test Scores Make Undeniable Case For School Choice,” Jan 29, 2025

She thinks that school choice — giving parents the choice to opt out of public schools in favor of charter schools or vouchers for the school of their choice — would help. But so would more flexibility around public schools:

Beyond private school choice and homeschooling, parents must also have choices within the public school system. That should come in the form of states passing open enrollment laws allowing students to enroll in a different public district school within (intra-district) and outside of (inter-district) their residential assignment as space allows. Zip code must not bind a student to a certain public school. That’s not how other taxpayer-funded government services, such as public parks and libraries, work. “For School Choice”

But then parents must also be wise choosers for their children

Charter schools, for example, don’t always succeed. A 2024 analysis showed that more than 25% close within five years. Some states do not have a simple pathway for identifying and shutting down failing charter or voucher schools.

Thus parents must select the school carefully and monitor what is happening, just as they would be wise to do at the local public school. One difference that may matter a great deal though is that at one of the newer charter school models, reforming the system may be much easier than it would be in a vast education bureaucracy.