American education is in a free fall. Math test scores among nine-year-olds recently saw the largest drop in 50 years, and reading scores are declining as well. Despite the United States ranking fifth in K-12 spending and second in higher education spending among OECD countries, our students are in the middle of the pack in international math and science assessments. Even at elite American colleges, professors report that their students can’t read books.
In response to this crisis, reform-minded states across the country have responded with bold and innovative policies to completely transform the education system, while many Democrat-run states have accepted decline.
Let’s start with the bad news. Despite the growing crisis in American education, states like Illinois and California have resisted reform, choosing to dump more money into public schools instead of fixing the structural problems.
The good news is that red states across the country have firmly rejected the failed status quo and are promoting educational excellence through school choice, improved literacy programs, and reforming higher education.
By far the biggest impact on student outcomes will result from the successful expansion of school choice, giving families the freedom to leave failing schools and choose a private, classical, alternative public school, or other option that fits their needs.
While families have advocated for school choice for decades, 2025 has been a watershed moment. Thanks to leaders like Governors Greg Abbott and Bill Lee, Texas and Tennessee, respectively, are now the latest states breaking the local public-school monopoly. Altogether, 17 states have universal school choice programs, including Governor Jeff Landry’s LA GATOR education savings accounts in Louisiana and Governor Kevin Stitt’s tax-credit-based system in Oklahoma. More than a dozen other states have more limited forms of school choice.
But state leaders didn’t stop there. Reformers have also enacted thoughtful policies to increase education quality. For example, Louisiana State Superintendent of Education Cade Brumley led the Let Teachers Teach initiative that proposed 18 reforms, such as cutting unnecessary trainings and paperwork, granting new authority to remove continually disruptive students from classrooms, and directing students in need to mental health professionals instead of forcing teachers to act as impromptu psychiatrists.
Along with these solutions that allow teachers to spend more time teaching, Louisiana will also soon implement the “Grow. Achieve. Thrive” accountability framework to measure the performance of public schools using an A-F grading scale. The framework increases standards and transparency, providing administrators, teachers, and parents a clear view of what’s working and what isn’t.
Perhaps the most glaring problem schools must address is literacy, the building block of almost all other learning. From 2017 to 2023, the percentage of American adults ranked at the lowest levels of literacy increased from 19% to 28%.
Thankfully, some states recognize the crisis and are rejecting the ineffective “whole language approach” based on context clues and “meaning-making” in favor of the tried-and-true science of reading focused on phonics, vocabulary, and comprehension.
This past year, Governors Kim Reynolds in Iowa, Henry McMaster in South Carolina, and Glenn Youngkin in Virginia all enacted or expanded science of reading programs to improve literacy. It was South Carolina along with Florida and Mississippi that pioneered the science of reading statewide, with Mississippi especially seeing a dramatic increase in National Assessment of Educational Progress (NEAP) reading scores as a result. Meanwhile, groups like Excel in Education are popularizing the science of reading in red and blue states alike, ensuring students’ educational outcomes aren’t determined by arbitrary partisan lines.
Yet innovative education reformers aren’t stopping with K-12. Though politicians have sat on the sidelines for generations as universities were transformed from centers of learning into hotbeds of radical political activism, the tides are finally turning.
In March, Governor Mike DeWine of Ohio signed the Advance Ohio Higher Education Act into law, which, among other reforms, requires colleges to make course syllabi public, commit to free speech, promote intellectual diversity, and end mandatory left-wing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) training.
But Ohio is not alone. Texas State Senator Brandon Creighton’s SB37—just sent to the governor’s desk—would create a new state-led committee to review curricula, reject clearly ideologically charged courses at public universities, and cut funding from schools that continue to use taxpayer dollars to promote far-left ideology in the classroom.
Additionally, Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Secretary of Education Jacob Oliva spearheaded the Arkansas ACCESS Act, which not only ends mandatory DEI programs, but also eliminates barriers to scholarships, increases access to college-level coursework in every public high school, and requires public universities to adopt standardized testing choice, accepting the Classic Learning Test (CLT) alongside the SAT and ACT for admissions and aid eligibility (full disclosure: I am the founder of CLT).
After experiencing decades of educational decline, state leaders across America are finally shaking things up. Thanks to their recent victories, the education system from kindergarten to graduate school is now at the beginning of a long-awaited renaissance.
Jeremy Wayne Tate is the founder and CEO of the Classic Learning Test (CLT), a humanities-focused alternative to the SAT and ACT tests.
