The Real Story Behind Why Our Children Are Underperforming in Schools.

The Room Where It Happened

In the early 2000s, I sat in a luncheon as the president of my children's PTO. Indiana State Senator Ron Alting had invited parent leaders from across the state to deliver news that would reshape every public school in Indiana. The state was cutting $310 million from the education budget.

I pushed back. I asked why. I asked what this would mean for our children.

Senator Alting looked at me and said something I have never forgotten: "You and I are the only ones who care about where our children go to school. Other families care about business opportunities. This cut will help incentivize more people to come to Indiana."

He said that out loud. To a room full of parents.

Senator Sheila Klinker, a Democrat, sat in that room as well. She held no power in the Republican-controlled Senate to stop what was coming. She came anyway — to listen, to gather data directly from the parents on the ground, and to bear witness to what her colleagues had decided. Her presence that day told its own story: the people with the power to stop the damage made their choice, and the people without that power showed up to document it.

That moment taught me something essential. The defunding of public education in this country has never been accidental. It has always been a choice. And the people making that choice have told us exactly who they serve.

What Happened Next

The consequences arrived immediately and compounded over years.

Our school counselor, who served over 1,100 students in a single K-5 building, began splitting her time across four schools. We saw her once or twice a month. Field trips disappeared — reduced to one out-of-city trip and one in-city trip per year. Class sizes grew beyond manageable levels. Special education services shrank. Occupational therapy, speech therapy, and physical therapy sessions shortened. Students with the highest needs absorbed the deepest cuts.

Teachers with seniority bumped younger colleagues from their positions through RIF (reduction in force) procedures. Those with the least seniority lost their jobs entirely. Morale collapsed. The educators who remained carried heavier loads with fewer resources, less support, and no promise that the following year would be any better.

Parents filled the gaps that policy created. We held fundraisers. We donated supplies. We volunteered hours. And still the cuts continued.

Peer-reviewed research confirmed what parents across Indiana witnessed firsthand. In their study published in Current Issues in Education, Del W. Jarman and Lori G. Boyland of Ball State University examined budget cuts across 127 Indiana school corporations and documented that in 2009-2010 alone, Indiana schools eliminated approximately 2,608 teachers and 1,357 instructional assistants statewide. That represents a mean of 8.9 teaching positions cut per school corporation in a single year. Fine arts programs disappeared. School counseling programs disappeared. Extracurricular options vanished. And when state funding held at reduced levels the following year, every loss compounded.

Jarman and Boyland captured the impossible position Indiana schools occupied: "Schools are attempting to maintain their educational programs and improve their students' achievement. Difficult and often controversial choices will need to be made." Those difficult choices always landed hardest on the students who could least afford them.

The University Presidents Sounded the Alarm

The damage reached far beyond K-12 classrooms. On March 20, 2002, the presidents of six Indiana public universities sent a joint open letter to Governor Frank O'Bannon. Lloyd W. Benjamin III of Indiana State University, Bryan K. Blanchard of Vincennes University, Myles Brand of Indiana University, Blaine Brownell of Ball State University, H. Ray Hoops of the University of Southern Indiana, and Martin C. Jischke of Purdue University signed their names together to a document that read, in part:

"Statewide, for fiscal years 2001 to 2003, Indiana's seven public colleges and universities are reeling from $67 million in budget cuts. These are real. They have already happened. As grim as that is, we fear we may lose even more. We cannot sustain these losses without significant injury to our institutions. The effects of this damage will reverberate in the state for years."

They warned that buildings would go unrepaired. Equipment would go unreplaced. Top faculty would leave for states willing to invest in education. Students would graduate without access to the technology the modern workforce demanded. They urged the Governor to reconvene the General Assembly and find a compromise before the damage became permanent.

Six university presidents. One letter. A unified warning from the highest levels of Indiana's academic leadership.

The state made the cuts anyway.

I Entered the Classroom Through a Door That Should Not Have Existed

I began teaching 5th and 6th grade in 2014. I want to be precise about how I got there, because the circumstances matter.

I entered public school teaching because pension changes forced four teachers to retire simultaneously, creating openings that the budget environment had otherwise eliminated. The door opened through attrition, not investment.

Every year I taught from 2014 to 2020, I worked inside a system still absorbing the weight of decisions made in that luncheon room years earlier. Referendums remained the financial backbone of our schools. Class sizes reflected the losses Jarman and Boyland had documented. I moved from parent advocate to diversity specialist within the same district, and the pattern I witnessed never changed. The underfunding was not a temporary crisis. It was the operating condition.

This Was Designed. Decades Ago. By Specific People.

What happened in Indiana did not happen in isolation. It happened within a deliberate national framework built over five decades by specific people with specific intentions.

In 1971, economist James Buchanan developed what became known as Public Choice Theory. Buchanan argued that government programs, including public education, serve the self-interest of bureaucrats rather than the public good. He believed that dismantling public institutions and returning control to private markets represented the highest expression of democratic freedom. His framework provided the intellectual architecture for systematically defunding public education, weakening teachers' unions, and redirecting public dollars into private institutions through voucher programs.

His ideas found their most powerful and well-funded benefactors in Charles and David Koch. As journalist Nancy MacLean documents in exhaustive detail in Democracy in Chains, the Koch network invested billions of dollars over five decades into think tanks, foundations, legislative campaigns, and political organizations built to execute Buchanan's blueprint at every level of American government. The goal was never to improve public schools. The goal was to dismantle the principle that education belongs to the public at all.

Senator Alting's words in that luncheon room — prioritizing business incentives over children's education — did not emerge from thin air. They emerged from a decades-long ideological project that had successfully reshaped how Republican legislators understood the purpose of public investment.

No Child Left Behind Built the Crisis Walberg Now Cites

House Committee Chair Tim Walberg recently stood before Congress and declared that fewer than one-third of 8th graders read or perform at grade level in math. He presented this as evidence that the Department of Education has failed and deserves elimination.

What Walberg omitted: his party engineered that outcome.

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 passed under a Republican president and a Republican-led Congress. It tied school funding directly to standardized test performance, creating a system that punished schools serving low-income students, majority Black and Brown communities, and children with disabilities at the precise moment those students needed the most support. The schools with the greatest need received the harshest penalties when scores fell. The achievement gaps Walberg now cites as evidence of government failure trace directly to the punitive funding architecture his party built, defended, and refused to adequately repair for over a decade.

For Black students, the consequences compounded at every level. Schools in majority-Black districts entered No Child Left Behind already carrying the accumulated weight of decades of underfunding rooted in property-tax-based school financing — a structure that guaranteed wealthier, whiter neighborhoods better-resourced schools regardless of student need. No Child Left Behind did not create that inequity. It accelerated it, codified it, and attached federal penalties to its outcomes.

The Student Loan Crisis Has Authors Too

Walberg also cited 9 million borrowers in default within the Department's $1.7 trillion student loan portfolio as further evidence of institutional failure.

For Black borrowers, that failure cuts with particular precision. Black bachelor's degree graduates carry an average of $25,000 more in student loan debt than white graduates four years after graduation, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Default rates for Black borrowers run significantly higher across every income level — a direct reflection of the racial wealth gap that redlining, discriminatory lending practices, and the systematic exclusion of Black veterans from GI Bill benefits deliberately constructed over generations.

Every meaningful effort to provide debt relief during the Biden administration faced Republican-led legal challenges designed to dismantle those programs before borrowers could access them. The borrowers did not fail the system. The system — methodically stripped of every relief mechanism Republicans could reach through legislation and litigation — failed the borrowers.

Now They Are Banning the Words

The current administration has banned specific words from use in federal agencies and federally funded institutions. According to PEN America, that list includes: DEI, diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility, disabled, transgender, gay, Black, and Latinx — terms that describe the actual human beings those institutions exist to serve.

Read that again.

The federal government banned the word "Black" from official use.

Frederick Douglass understood exactly what this kind of erasure means. He wrote that once an enslaved person gained literacy, they became unfit to be a slave — because knowledge produces the capacity to imagine and demand freedom. Anti-literacy laws followed the Stono Rebellion of 1739 precisely because South Carolina's slaveholding class recognized that an educated enslaved population represented an existential threat to the system of bondage. They did not ban literacy because it was ineffective. They banned it because it worked.

Banning words operates on the same logic. You cannot legislate away the existence of Black people, disabled people, or LGBTQ+ people. You can make it harder for institutions to see them, count them, serve them, and protect them. You can remove the language that makes their experiences legible within systems of power. And when those systems then fail to serve those populations, you can point to the absence of data as evidence that no particular harm occurred.

That is the strategy. Name it clearly.

According to PEN America, 6,870 instances of book banning occurred across the United States during the 2024-2025 school year alone. The US Department of Education recently published a post celebrating the importance of literacy starting at home. They illustrated that post with an image of Charlotte's Web — a book that has appeared on banned book lists across this country. The federal agency championing literacy used a book with a history of censorship to make their point. That level of disconnection from what actually happens in classrooms and libraries reflects an administration that has never prioritized the children it claims to serve.

Who Does This Serve?

Senator Alting answered that question directly in a room full of parents two decades ago. Business interests. Economic incentives. The priorities of people who view public education as an inefficient government program rather than the foundation of a functioning democracy.

Jarman and Boyland documented the human cost in precise terms: thousands of teachers gone, counselors stretched impossibly thin across multiple schools, fine arts eliminated, therapy services cut, and student achievement left to absorb every blow without adequate support.

Walberg calls this failure. I call it the intended outcome.

The people who designed this system knew exactly what they were building. Senator Alting told us. The Koch network funded it. Buchanan theorized it. No Child Left Behind codified it. And the current administration — banning words, banning books, dismantling the Department of Education itself — represents the final stage of a project that began long before any of us sat in that luncheon room.

What You Can Do Right Now

Your children sit in classrooms shaped by these decisions. The oversized class, the counselor who appears twice a month, the book missing from the library shelf, the therapy session cut to fifteen minutes — these outcomes trace back to specific votes, specific budgets, and specific people who made specific choices about whose children matter.

The policies reshaping American education right now carry your children's futures inside them. Your voice belongs in that conversation. The people writing these policies made their calculations based on the assumption that most families will stay quiet, stay confused, and stay home.

Prove them wrong.

Contact your representatives at every level — local school boards, state legislatures, and the federal Congress. Tell them you see the pattern. Tell them you know the history. Tell them you understand who built this crisis and who profits from its continuation. Tell them the children in your community deserve representatives who put their futures ahead of business incentives.

Because literacy does start at home. And it starts with knowing exactly this.

Sources: Jarman, D.W. & Boyland, L.G., Current Issues in Education, Ball State University | Benjamin et al., Open Letter to Governor O'Bannon, March 20, 2002, purdue.edu | MacLean, N., Democracy in Chains | PEN America Banned Words List, pen.org/banned-words-list | PEN America Book Ban Report 2024-2025, pen.org/banned-books-list-2025 | National Center for Education Statistics