NEWNow you can listen to Fox News articles!
Twitter/X CEO Elon Musk and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy caused a debate in December when they advocated allowing more legal immigration for high-skilled workers—for example, through H-1B visas—to make America more competitive. President-elect Donald J. Trump supported the policy in a statement to the New York Post shortly after the dispute erupted.
Conservatives on both sides of this debate should be able to agree on one thing: We shouldn’t bring in as much talent as possible if we had a more efficient education system.
The latest data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as “national notebook,” shows that less than one in four eighth graders are proficient in math and less than a third are proficient in reading. The latest international assessment shows us ranked 24th in maths – middle of the pack – despite spending nearly $20,000 per public school student each year, more than any other country in the world.
MANDATORY TEST OF BASIC READING AND WRITING SKILLS FOR TEACHERS TO BE ABOLISHED IN NEW JERSEY
4th grade math scores in the U.S. have fallen 18 points since 2019 – a drop greater than all but three countries: Azerbaijan, Iran and Kazakhstan.
America’s broken education system should be one of the first places to address our immigration crisis. (iStock)
We can begin to solve the education crisis by improving the efficiency of the distribution of educational resources. Mountains of empirical evidence in economic research show that misallocation is one of the biggest obstacles to the economic growth of the nation, as well as the education services sub-sector. To this end, improving the effectiveness of public education can go a long way in creating multiple effects for the nation as a whole.
Trump appointed both Musk and Ramaswamy to head the newly formed Department for Government Efficiency (DOGE) in November. In his statement announcing DOGE’s new leaders, Trump said his administration would “dismantle the government bureaucracy, cut redundant regulations, cut wasteful spending and restructure federal agencies.”
It’s no secret that waste plagues our public school system. The US spends over $900 billion a year on underachieving education. The current system is not serving students and making life difficult for teachers, so now is the time to start thinking about getting more bang for our buck at the Department of Education. We need to take stock of where current resources are going and what results they are driving – plain and simple.
But tackling this seemingly low-hanging fruit can only do so much to reduce waste. After all, about 90% of all public school funding comes from state and local sources, not the federal government.
That’s why we need to understand the root cause of increasingly poor student results. A major potential factor is the administrative overload of American education. The latest data from the National Center for Education Statistics show that student enrollment has only increased by about 5% since 2000, but the number of teachers employed in the system grew twice as fast as the number of students, by about 10%, in the same period. The school district’s administrative staff increased by about 95%, or 19 times the rate of student enrollment growth.
We’ve increased inflation-adjusted per-pupil spending by more than 160% since 1970, and teachers aren’t seeing any money. In the same period, teachers’ salaries rose only 3% in real terms.
CLICK HERE FOR MORE FOX NEWS OPINIONS
The problem is that the public school system operates as a monopoly with less incentive to spend money wisely. But public school unions have a strong incentive to advocate for hiring more people, especially in states without right-to-work laws. Additional recruitment means more dues paying members and a larger voting block.
Our just published study provides the first evidence that unions encourage administrative increases in education. Using data from the National Center for Education Statistics and the American Community Survey between 2006 and 2024, we find a strong positive relationship between union density and staff-student ratios, and negative effects of right-to-work (RTW) laws on these ratios. These effects were largely driven by the expansion of administrative and support roles rather than teachers. Furthermore, these effects were concentrated in the non-RTW conditions.
It’s no secret that waste plagues our public school system. The US spends over $900 billion a year on underachieving education.
Specifically, we find that a 10-point increase in teacher union density is associated with a one-point year-over-year increase in tenure.
In Chicago, the union’s stronghold, staff numbers have increased by a staggering 20% since 2019, even as student enrollment has fallen by 10%. In Texas, one of six states that bans collective bargaining for public employees, headcount increased by 8%—much closer to the 2% increase in student enrollment—over the same period. Our results in the study show that these examples are not anecdotal – they happened in large numbers.
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE FOX NEWS APP
Injecting competition into the K-12 education system would put pressure on school districts to redirect otherwise wasteful spending into the classroom. Trump can help make that happen by getting congressional Republicans on board with school choice. The Children’s Education Choice Act already passed the House Ways and Means Committee last September, and President-elect Trump has said he will sign it.
Improving government efficiency should be a nonpartisan issue, especially in a sector that is so close to home for every American—education. Now it’s up to Congress to do it for the parents who put them in office. Allowing parents to direct their children’s upbringing is the right thing to do, but it will also make America more competitive and make education great again.
