New FBI Stats Show Teachers Do a Good Job Despite Myriad Challenges

The American right blames teachers unions for “failing schools”, low test scores, the damage caused by COVID school closures, and much more. However, it never occurred to me that we were also accountable for crime in schools. 

School choice advocate Corey DeAngelis details a recent FBI report that found that between 2020 and 2024, law enforcement agencies reported 540,000 assaults occurring on school property nationwide. This figure only includes the 9,000 law enforcement agencies out of 18,000 nationwide that submitted data to the FBI. 

DeAngelis is correct to be alarmed, but in the face of this problem, the only culprit he points to is – teachers unions. By opposing school choice, including the school choice tax credit program in President Trump’s new One Big Beautiful Bill Act, he claims it's teachers unions that keep kids “trapped in dangerous” and, of course, “failing” public schools.

That our unionized public schools are failing is a bedrock belief of modern conservatism. President Trump says that in education, “they rank the top 40 countries in the world, we are ranked 40th.” His Education Secretary, Linda McMahon, says “the education system [is] failing our students.

House Education and the Workforce Committee Chairwoman Virginia Foxx (R-NC) tells us that “teachers unions drag student test scores even lower." Jonathan Butcher, acting director of the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy, says teachers unions ask taxpayers for a lot of money but don't deliver on test scores.

Yet, in detailing crime in schools, DeAngelis unwittingly undercuts the idea that unionized public school teachers aren’t doing their jobs properly. He denounces the “violence, abuse and chaos” in schools that are “turning hallways and classrooms into battlegrounds” – does he imagine that this somehow doesn't drag down student test scores? That it doesn't increase student absenteeism? Do conservatives think it is easy to teach in such environments? 

Yet despite all this and much more, our schools are not failing. 

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a group comprising the vast majority of the world’s most advanced economies, studies the educational performance of its member nations. The US doesn't rank “last” in any OECD ranking, and generally ranks in the middle.

In 2022, for example, out of 37 OECD countries, American students ranked sixth in reading, 13th in science, and 28th in math.

Yet McMahon claims our system is failing because “70% of 8th graders in the U.S. can’t read proficiently.” Why would she and other critics believe we’re doing so poorly? She bases her claim on the National Association of Educational Procurement scores – known as “The Nation's Report Card” – but she’s misinterpreting the scores.  

Education historian Diane Ravitch, who served for seven years on the governing agency for NAEP, says critics treat “NAEP Proficient” as if it means “grade level,” when the NAEP itself explains that it does not. Ravitch says:

“NAEP Proficient represents mastery of what was tested, which I would characterize as an A or A-.”

Education researcher Tom Loveless explains “proficient” is a “much higher” standard than grade level, and that “The highest scoring nations of the world would appear to be mediocre or poor performers if judged by the NAEP proficient standard.”  

In fact, James Harvey, former executive director of the National Superintendents’ Roundtable, says, “Sophisticated analyses between 2007 and 2019 demonstrate that not a single nation can demonstrate that even 50 percent of its students can clear the proficiency benchmark in fourth-grade reading.”

He explains that it is the “basic” benchmark that indicates how many American students are performing at grade level, and that grade-level (or above) performance in “reading and mathematics in grades 4, 8, and 12, is almost never below 60 percent and reaches as high as 81 percent.”

According to Furman University education professor Paul L. Thomas, “in almost every state, ‘grade level’ proficiency on state testing correlates with the NAEP’s ‘basic’ level,” not the NAEP’s "proficient" level. 

There certainly is a lot of room for improvement in our education system, but the fact that our schools' performance is at the same level as that of the world’s most advanced nations, despite our generally higher rates of crime and poverty, is an achievement. And the most direct explanation for that achievement is the work of talented, dedicated teachers.

For conservatives, the solution to “failing”, crime-ridden schools is “school choice.” DeAngelis cites the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program--which he calls the “gold-standard” – explaining that “Students who won the lottery to attend a private school were 34% more likely to report being in a ‘very safe’ school compared to their peers who remained in public schools.” 

It is this issue that lies at the heart of the long-running battle between teachers unions and school choice advocates. Supporters of school choice seek to get some students out of struggling public schools, leaving the rest behind. Teachers unions, by contrast, fight for safe, quality education for all students. Not just for the students who “won the lottery.”