At the end of January 2025, America received an abysmal annual report card from the National Center for Education Statistics, documenting a trending decline in reading and math proficiency of the nation’s fourth and eighth graders. Astonishingly, only 31% of fourth-grade students and 30% of eighth-grade students are reading proficiently, according to the samples in the latest report. The billions of dollars the government dumps into education each year do not educate children, but they certainly pay for what is seemingly an increase in administrative positions, social justice consulting, and social-emotional learning, aimed at developing the “whole child.” Politicians pride themselves on “investing in education” because repeating the slogan rewards them with more votes in the future, coupled with an evasion of the consequences of irresponsible spending of taxpayer money. Funding for education is increasing while performance is decreasing. American education has been compromised.

National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) scores noticeably declined for the nation’s lowest-performing and most vulnerable students a few years after the Every Student Succeeds Act was signed into law by President Obama in 2015. ESSA is the latest version of the decades-old Elementary and Secondary Education Act, and with its bipartisan passage came a preoccupation with soft skills, propelling social-emotional learning into a multi-billion-dollar industry. 

ESSA opened the door for Social Emotional Learning (SEL). The Collaborative for Academic Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL) teamed up with public and private schools to deliver educational services as defined in the ESSA. Federal grants for social-emotional learning have reached a staggering $87 million dollars. Teachers are meddling with the cognitive and emotional well-being of students without professional licensing to practice mental healthcare. Lawmakers allowed it to happen. Bureaucrats perpetuate it to the detriment of children and families.

Currently, programs such as Second Step (promoted by CASEL) partner with Learning for Justice to provide schools with supplemental materials to teach children that they are inherently inferior or superior to others based on the color of their skin. This is a primary example of what parents fought to remove, root and stem, from their children’s schools for the last four years. Public and private schools have taken public money to implement these programs, and it all traces back to ESSA. The devil is always in the details.

Parents’ fundamental right and authority to choose educational environments best suited to their principles and beliefs will be stifled if ESSA is not repealed. It is the responsibility of parents to instill and cultivate soft skills in their children. It is the family’s job to teach morals and principles. It is the education system’s job to teach children to read. The numbers do not lie. The system has not been doing its job effectively and therefore should not continue to be rewarded by legislators, using our taxpayer money, to fund initiatives that do not educate the nation’s children.