Forty percent of American fourth-graders cannot read at a basic level of proficiency. In Chicago, only 15 percent of high school students read proficiently, yet three out of four still graduate. In Atlanta, just 27 percent of students meet reading benchmarks, but more than 90 percent walk across the stage on time. The gap between what diplomas promise and what students actually know has become a chasm, and the Nation's Report Card keeps widening it.
Rep. Burgess Owens, the Utah Republican who sits on the House Education Committee, told Just the News that the data points to a system that has abandoned the students it claims to champion.
"These ideologies promise to liberate oppressed minorities, but the data doesn't lie. The Nation's Report Card shows the decline. And in a cruel twist, the students who are supposed to benefit the most from these woke agendas are hurt the most by them."
The numbers from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the federal benchmark known as the Nation's Report Card, paint a grim picture at every grade level. About 33 percent of eighth- and twelfth-graders also perform below basic proficiency in reading. Those figures represent real children leaving school without the ability to comprehend a simple text, let alone compete in a modern economy.
How do graduation rates keep rising while literacy collapses? A Fordham Institute survey offers one answer: roughly half of American teachers have now adopted at least one "equitable grading" practice. These policies, most common in urban, majority-minority school districts, include "No Zero" rules, no penalties for late work, and unlimited retakes on assignments and tests.
The theory behind equitable grading holds that traditional standards disadvantage "historically disadvantaged" students. The practice, critics say, simply inflates grades and GPAs until the numbers look good on paper while the students behind them fall further behind in reality.
Owens did not hold back about what the rising graduation rates actually represent.
"We are not witnessing a miracle. Instead, we're witnessing social promotion."
The congressman, who grew up in the segregated South, framed the issue as a betrayal of the very communities these policies claim to serve. Black graduation rates rose roughly 10 percent between the 2011, 2012 and 2021, 2022 school years. Hispanic graduation rates climbed about 14 percent over the same period. Yet the NAEP data shows literacy heading in the opposite direction.
Erika Sanzi of the education watchdog group Defending Education put it bluntly: "The fact that graduation rates continue to rise is not surprising because it's a completely bogus metric in an age of social promotion and lack of enforced standards."
She added: "We lie to students about their preparedness by giving them a diploma and then take zero responsibility for the consequences of that deception."
The disconnect is sharpest in the nation's largest urban districts, places where progressive education leadership has held sway for decades. Chicago Public Schools, where roughly 80 percent of the student body is Black and Hispanic, reports a 75.8 percent graduation rate. But only 15 percent of its high school students can read at grade level. That means the vast majority of Chicago graduates receive a credential the data says they have not earned.
Atlanta tells a similar story. Its public schools also serve a population that is roughly 80 percent Black and Hispanic. The district boasted an on-time graduation rate above 90 percent in 2025. Reading proficiency? Twenty-seven percent. The progressive establishment running these cities has had decades and billions of dollars to close the gap. The gap grew instead.
Angela Morabito of the Defense of Freedom Institute connected the failure directly to the political interests that dominate urban education. "Union bosses enjoy the most power over schools in the big blue cities, where they purposefully prevent families, many of them Black and Hispanic, from exercising school choice," she said. "Meanwhile, all the billions spent on so-called equity and gender ideology hasn't helped students to learn to read, write and think."
The pattern she describes, massive spending, ideological programming, declining outcomes, is not new. Fox News reported that nearly 45 percent of high school seniors scored "below basic" in math on recent NAEP assessments, the highest share since the current test version was introduced. Education Secretary Linda McMahon called the situation a "national emergency," noting that the federal government has spent $3 trillion since the Department of Education was established "only to see scores continuing to decline."
The spending argument cuts even deeper when pandemic-era relief is factored in. The Washington Examiner reported that $189.5 billion in federal ESSER emergency relief funds failed to reverse learning loss. Research showed that higher per-pupil spending did not correlate with better NAEP scores. Reading scores for fourth- and eighth-graders fell to their lowest levels in over two decades.
NCES Commissioner Peggy Carr acknowledged the failure plainly: "The Nation's Report Card is out and the news is not good. Overall, student achievement has not returned to prepandemic levels, so the struggle continues." The U.S. Department of Education itself stated that "despite the billions of dollars that the federal government invests in K-12 education annually, and the approximately $190 billion in federal pandemic funds, our education system continues to fail students across the nation."
The decline, notably, did not begin with COVID-19. As the New York Post reported, scores had already been sliding before school closures accelerated the collapse. Only 35 percent of high school seniors scored proficient in reading, the lowest since NAEP assessments began in 1992. Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana warned that "we are at risk of having an entire generation of children fail to become productive adults if classroom proficiency does not improve."
The trajectory has been visible for over a decade. As far back as 2013, NAEP data showed only 26 percent of twelfth-graders scoring at or above proficiency in math and 38 percent in reading, with experts warning that adoption of Common Core standards was undermining previously successful state-level programs.
What the education establishment has delivered, in other words, is a generation of rising costs, rising graduation rates, and falling competence. The institutions that progressive leaders defend most fiercely are the ones producing the worst results for the students who can least afford failure.
Not every district is moving in the wrong direction. The data from Houston and New Orleans suggests that when leadership prioritizes academic rigor over ideological compliance, students, including Black and Hispanic students, actually learn more.
Houston ISD Superintendent Mike Miles shifted the district's focus to "rigorous academic instruction" and the "science of reading" rather than DEI-driven programming. Between the 2022, 23 and 2023, 24 school years, literacy rates among Black third-graders rose 3 percent and among Hispanic third-graders rose 5 percent. Those are modest gains, but they moved in the right direction, the opposite direction from districts that doubled down on equitable grading.
New Orleans offers the most dramatic turnaround. In 2005, 61 percent of the city's schools were classified as failing. After Hurricane Katrina forced the system to rebuild from scratch, the city adopted a charter school model. Taxpayer education dollars followed students. Schools operated independently, free of the bureaucratic and union constraints that define traditional urban districts.
Former New Orleans Recovery School District superintendent Paul G. Vallas, writing in City Journal, described the competitive dynamic that emerged: "Schools had to attract families, keep them, and show results."
The results speak for themselves. Louisiana rose from 50th to 16th in the nation in fourth-grade reading scores. It was the only state in 2024 to outperform its pre-pandemic literacy levels. The state resisted equitable grading policies, raised standards, and steadily increased proficiency cut scores on state tests. Today, the district reports no failing schools.
Owens pointed to these examples as proof that school choice works, and that the resistance to it is political, not educational.
"Every child, regardless of race, income, or zip code, deserves access to a school that works for them, not one assigned by government bureaucrats."
He added: "Parents know their children and know how they learn best, and they should not be forced to remain in a failing school district simply because of their zip code." Owens champions the Educational Choice for Children Act as a vehicle for expanding those options nationwide.
The debate over American education often gets framed as a funding question. But the Nation's Report Card data demolishes that framing. The federal government has poured trillions into public education. States and districts have received nearly $190 billion in emergency pandemic relief alone. Chronic absenteeism doubled from 13 percent in 2019, 2020 to 28 percent in 2021, 2022. Scores kept falling.
The problem is not money. The problem is a system that rewards compliance with ideological mandates, equitable grading, DEI programming, social promotion, while punishing the families who want something better for their children. The teachers' unions that progressive voices rush to defend are the same unions that block school choice in the cities where students need it most.
Owens described the diploma itself as a broken promise: "A diploma should be a ticket to opportunity, not a false promise handed out by schools more focused on ideology than instruction."
The lowest-performing students are falling further behind than at any point in modern testing history. Matthew Soldner, acting director of the Institute of Education Sciences, noted that "scores for our lowest-performing students are at historic lows, continuing declines that began more than a decade ago." Those students are disproportionately Black and Hispanic, the very populations that equitable grading and DEI spending were supposed to help.
Meanwhile, the districts that rejected the ideology and embraced competition, standards, and parental choice are the ones posting gains. Houston moved the needle with phonics-based reading instruction. New Orleans rebuilt an entire city's school system on the principle that schools should earn their students, not simply receive them by default. Louisiana outperformed every other state in post-pandemic literacy recovery.
The pattern is not complicated. Where accountability and measurable standards drive the system, students improve. Where ideology and institutional self-interest drive the system, students get a worthless diploma and a reading level that won't carry them through a job application.
Morabito framed the stakes plainly: "The achievement gap is proof that public education needs to change."
The evidence says she's right. The question is whether the people running these failing systems will ever be forced to answer for the children they left behind, or whether another generation of students will graduate unable to read the diplomas they're handed.
