Perhaps It Is Time for Government Oversight of Public Schools
If the government must regulate education, perhaps it should begin with the schools it already runs.
On May 13, 2026, The New York Times published an analysis of reading and math scores across every American school district for which data is available. The results were sobering. Compared with a decade earlier, reading scores were down in 83 percent of districts. Math scores were down in 70 percent. The declines crossed racial, geographic, and income lines. The headline called it a “generation-long decline.”1
The same week, the Connecticut General Assembly passed House Bill 5468, imposing that state’s first regulations on homeschooling families. Parents who teach their children at home will now face annual notices of intent, ongoing government scrutiny, and the bureaucratic apparatus of oversight that public schools have long operated under.2 Similar bills are under consideration elsewhere.
We read these two stories side by side, and we confess we are puzzled.
If the state wishes to regulate education, we would gently suggest that it begin with the schools it already funds, staffs, accredits, and certifies, rather than with the parents who have stepped outside that system precisely because they have lost confidence in it.
The Literacy Collapse
The Times data confirms what teachers, parents, and employers have sensed for years. American students are reading worse, not better, despite decades of reform, increased funding, and ever more elaborate standards.
More eighth graders than ever before are scoring below NAEP ‘Basic,’ the lowest benchmark on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and average reading scores have returned to roughly their 1992 levels after decades of intervening progress.3 The 2023 PIAAC results from the National Center for Education Statistics show that the share of U.S. adults scoring at Level One or below in literacy rose from 19 percent in 2017 to 28 percent in 2023, with declines across most educational attainment groups, including adults with more than a high school education.4 In some counties, more than 80 percent of high school graduates read at Level One or below.5
Level One literacy, for those unfamiliar, means a graduate can read simple sentences but struggles to integrate information across multiple paragraphs. These are not students who failed to finish school. These are students who received diplomas.
The problem does not end at graduation. In the November 2024 issue of The Atlantic, Rose Horowitch reported on a phenomenon that literature professors at elite universities are now describing openly. Nicholas Dames, who has taught Columbia University’s required great-books course since 1998, told her that his students have become overwhelmed by the reading. “Many students no longer arrive at college,” she wrote, “even at highly selective, elite colleges, prepared to read books.”6
Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. One first-year student told him she had never been required to read an entire book in her public high school. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover. “My jaw dropped,” Dames said.7
Anthony Grafton, a historian at Princeton, finds that his students arrive with a narrower vocabulary and less understanding of language than they used to have. Jack Chen, a professor at the University of Virginia, says his students “shut down” when confronted with ideas they do not understand. Daniel Shore, chair of Georgetown’s English department, told Horowitch that his students have trouble staying focused on even a sonnet.8
These are not students at struggling community colleges. These are the graduates of the most selective admissions processes in the world, arriving unable to finish a novel or parse fourteen lines of poetry. If the schools that produced them are the model of educational accountability, then accountability has come to mean something very different from what parents assume.
The Other Crisis
We turn now to a subject we wish we did not have to raise, but the data are impossible to ignore.
A 2004 report prepared for the U.S. Department of Education estimated that 9.6 percent of students experience some form of sexual misconduct, ranging from inappropriate comments to physical abuse, by school personnel such as teachers, principals, coaches, and bus drivers at some point during their school careers.9 A 2010 Government Accountability Office report confirmed that some districts engage in what legislators have called “passing the trash,” quietly transferring employees with histories of misconduct to other schools rather than reporting them to authorities.10
The problem has not receded. A 2023 report by the Defense of Freedom Institute analyzed federal data from the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights and found that between 2010 and 2019, complaints alleging sexual violence in K-12 schools more than tripled. The report, titled “Catching the Trash,” documented what it called an epidemic of sexual abuse in public schools and noted that the Civil Rights Data Collection covered 97,632 schools in its most recent publication.11 The GAO itself determined in its 2010 investigation of fifteen cases that eleven involved individuals who had previously targeted children, with at least six using their new positions to abuse more.12 These stories appear with such regularity that they have begun to blur together in the public memory, each one displacing the last.
We do not raise this to suggest that all public school teachers are predators. The vast majority are not. We raise it because the institutions that employ these individuals, that certify them, that supervise them in classrooms with children for seven hours a day, have failed repeatedly to police their own ranks. And yet it is the parent reading The Wind in the Willows at the kitchen table who is now told her home requires oversight.
The Credibility Problem
There is a principle in classical rhetoric that a speaker must establish ethos, credibility, before making a claim on the audience’s assent. Aristotle understood that argument is not merely a matter of logic but of trust. You cannot tell others how to live if your own house is in disarray.
The government spends roughly $16,280 per pupil per year on public education, according to the most recent figures from the National Center for Education Statistics.13 It employs armies of administrators, curriculum designers, assessment specialists, and compliance officers. It certifies teachers, accredits schools, and mandates standards. And the result of all this oversight, measured by the government’s own tests and reported in the nation’s most prominent newspaper, is a generation-long decline in the most basic skills.
Homeschooling families, by contrast, spend an average of roughly $600 to $2,500 per student per year and produce graduates who, according to multiple studies, perform comparably or better than their public-schooled peers on most measured outcomes, including standardized achievement tests and first-year college GPAs.14
The state regulating education in the name of protecting children and ensuring competence sounds good in principle. The welfare of children is a legitimate public concern. But we would ask that the state first demonstrate that its own regulatory apparatus produces the outcomes it claims to value. A system that graduates students who cannot read a book, that employs personnel who abuse the children in their care, and that responds to failure with calls for more oversight of everyone except itself, has a credibility problem.
What Education Is For
We do not write this as a polemic against public schools or the teachers who labor in them. Many public school teachers are heroic, and many public school students flourish despite the system. We write it because the current conversation has the question backwards.
The classical tradition has always held that the purpose of education is the formation of virtue, not the production of test scores. But even by the metrics the modern state has chosen for itself, the system is failing. And rather than turning inward, it is turning its gaze toward the kitchen table.
If the government wishes to oversee education, we welcome an honest accounting. Let the inspectors begin with the schools that already answer to the government, that already receive its money, that already operate under its rules. Let them publish the literacy rates of high school graduates, the reading loads of college freshmen, and the disciplinary records of the teachers in their charge. Let them compare those results with what homeschooling families achieve without that oversight.
And then, if the state still believes that the real problem lies at home, it may make its case.
We will be listening.
Francesca Paris, “Why U.S. Test Scores Are in a ‘Generation-Long Decline,’” The New York Times, May 13, 2026, https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/13/upshot/test-scores-school-districts-us.html.
Keith M. Phaneuf, “Homeschool Bill Passes Over GOP Objections,” CT Mirror, May 4, 2026, https://ctmirror.org/2026/05/04/homeschool-bill-passes-over-gop-objections/; Home School Legal Defense Association, “H.B. 5468,” https://hslda.org/post/hb-5468.
National Center for Education Statistics, “National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) 2024 Reading and Mathematics Assessments,” U.S. Department of Education, 2024, https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/.
National Center for Education Statistics, “Highlights of the 2023 U.S. PIAAC Results,” U.S. Department of Education, December 2024, https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/2023/national_results.asp.
Beth Hawkins, “Many Young Adults Barely Literate, Yet Earned a High School Diploma,” The 74, https://www.the74million.org/article/many-young-adults-barely-literate-yet-earned-a-high-school-diploma/.
Rose Horowitch, “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books,” The Atlantic, November 2024, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-elite-college-students-who-cant-read-books/679945/.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Charol Shakeshaft, “Educator Sexual Misconduct: A Synthesis of Existing Literature,” prepared for the U.S. Department of Education, Office of the Under Secretary, Policy and Program Studies Service, Washington, D.C., 2004, Document No. 2004-09, https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/educator-sexual-misconduct-synthesis-existing-literature.
U.S. Government Accountability Office, “K-12 Education: Selected Cases of Public and Private Schools That Hired or Retained Individuals with Histories of Sexual Misconduct,” GAO-11-200, December 2010, https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-11-200.pdf.
Defense of Freedom Institute, “Catching the Trash: A Systemic Failure by Federal, State, and Local Authorities to Prevent Sexual Abuse of Students in Public Schools,” 2023, https://dfipolicy.org/catching-the-trash/.
U.S. Government Accountability Office, “K-12 Education: Selected Cases of Public and Private Schools That Hired or Retained Individuals with Histories of Sexual Misconduct,” GAO-11-200, December 2010, 8, https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-11-200.pdf.
National Center for Education Statistics, “Public School Expenditures,” Condition of Education, U.S. Department of Education, 2020-21 data, https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmb/public-school-expenditure.
Brian D. Ray, “Research Facts on Homeschooling,” National Home Education Research Institute, 2024, https://www.nheri.org/research-facts-on-homeschooling/; Robert Kunzman and Milton Gaither, “Homeschooling: A Comprehensive Survey of the Research,” Other Education 9, no. 1 (2020): 1–64; Michael Cogan, “Exploring Academic Outcomes of Homeschooled Students,” Journal of College Admission 208 (Summer 2010): 18–25.