This post was originally published on this site.
t was so long ago that the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed prayer in public schools that most Americans have forgotten what a public uproar that caused back in 1962.
Two public schools. Eight hundred miles apart. And a contrast so stark it tells you almost everything you need to know about what is wrong — and what is right — with American education today.
In Chicago, the Frederick Douglass Academy High School was built to serve over a thousand students. Today it enrolls twenty-seven. It employs twenty-eight full-time staff members — more adults than children. In 2024, the school spent over ninety-three thousand dollars per student. And according to state data, not a single eleventh grader tested proficient in math or reading. Not one. Nearly half the students don’t even show up with any regularity.
This is not an outlier. More than half of Chicago’s public schools are underutilized. Eighty schools citywide reported zero students proficient in math in 2024. Twenty-four schools had zero proficiency in reading. Since 2019, enrollment has dropped ten percent while staffing ballooned twenty percent. Billions of dollars. Zero results.
And through all of it, the Chicago Teachers Union has fought every common-sense attempt at reform — blocking school closures, capping charter schools, killing a scholarship program that was giving nine thousand low-income children access to school choice. The union calls these reforms attacks on public education. The children and their families call it another year without learning to read.
Now travel eight hundred miles southwest to Lewisville, Texas. The Founders Classical Academy is a public charter school where fourth graders recite the Preamble to the Constitution from memory. Where the school motto — Knowledge, Virtue, and Liberty — isn’t a slogan but a curriculum. Where students study classic literature, Latin, primary sources, and Western civilization. Where the goal isn’t just to teach facts but to pursue wisdom.
The students aren’t privileged. Median family income runs slightly below the national average. The student body is diverse. And the results are solid and improving year over year.
Classical education is growing nationally at about five percent annually — in charter schools, Catholic academies, microschools, and private institutions. Parents across the country are voting with their feet, choosing schools that teach children how to think rather than what to think.
The contrast between Chicago and Lewisville isn’t complicated. One system serves the state, the bureaucracy. The other serves the child and his family. That’s the choice in front of every American parent today.
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