It’s cheap and easy to put up a sign saying “School” on the front of a building. It’s entirely another thing to run a functioning school. Many of our schools are among our institutions that are being rotted out on the inside. This is permanently hurting millions of people and threatening America’s future. From City Journal:

No issue is more pressing in California than education. In late October, the state released scores for the first post-Covid-shutdown state standardized test, conducted earlier last year. The results were horrendous. Less than half of all students who took the Smarter Balanced test—47.1 percent—met the state standard in English language arts, down 4 percentage points from 2018–19. One-third of students met the standard in math, down 6.5 percentage points. Only 16 percent of black students and 9.7 percent of English learners met standards in math.

Not only did test scores plummet; the state’s chronic absenteeism rate has also skyrocketed. The no-show rate leapt from 14.3 percent in 2020–21 to 30 percent in 2021–22. (California defines chronic absenteeism as students missing 10 percent of the days they were enrolled for any reason.) But amazingly, during the 2021–22 school year, data showed that the state’s four-year high school graduation rate climbed to 87 percent, up from 83.6 percent in 2020–21.

How is this possible?