The Trump administration risks losing American companies by making it costly to hire foreigners.
President Trump fired the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics in August for allegedly manipulating jobs data to make him look bad. Is the president likewise suspicious of student progress reports from the Education Department?
The latest results from the National Assessment of Education Progress were released earlier this month, and they weren’t pretty. High-school seniors recorded the worst reading scores since 1992, and math scores were the lowest since the current test began two decades ago. Elementary-school students have also lost ground. Just 31% of eighth-graders scored at or above the proficient level on the science assessment.
The teachers unions that control our public-education apparatus like to blame these failures exclusively on factors outside the classroom, while liberals in general blame a supposed lack of resources. Nevertheless, school spending has steadily grown over the decades, even as enrollment has shrunk. School districts with some of the poorest children now have the highest per pupil spending. And although it’s true that larger numbers of students from lower-performing groups can bring down average scores, even top students are struggling.
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Jason L. Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and a Fox News commentator. Follow him on Twitter here.
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