By Rob C.

TLDR: The United States deliberately defunded public education starting in the Reagan era, destroyed it further under Trump, and used that destruction as justification to privatize education through charter schools. Charter schools outperform public schools not because they’re better systems but because they cherry-pick students and slash teacher pay to sub-livable wages. Meanwhile, public schools are left with the poorest, most-challenged students and shrinking budgets. The result: A widening educational apartheid where wealthy families get quality education, poor families get corporate cost-cutting. Every other developed nation invests in public education and gets better results. America chose the opposite—and called it freedom.

We send our kids to school expecting them to learn. What we’re actually getting is a system optimized for profit extraction, not learning. America ranks 12th globally in education—behind Finland, Singapore, Canada, Germany, and most developed nations we consider peers. That should shock people. It doesn’t. We’ve normalized educational mediocrity. We look at crumbling inner-city classrooms, outdated textbooks, and burnt-out educators, and we sigh as if we are witnessing a tragic, unavoidable natural disaster. But this decline is not an accident of geography or history. It is a highly coordinated, multi-decade corporate strategy. Our public schools are not broken; they are being actively and deliberately murdered —and it’s been going on for forty years.

The Foundation of Apartheid

This corporate war on children did not begin yesterday. Ronald Reagan started this in the 1980s with a simple message: government can’t do anything right, especially public education. His solution? Defund it enough that it fails, then use that failure to justify privatization. It’s the same playbook used in healthcare, food, prisons—create the crisis, then sell the solution to people desperate enough to buy anything.

Reagan shifted education funding from federal to state and local budgets. Sounds reasonable. It was devastation. Wealthy districts could maintain strong schools through local property taxes. Poor districts collapsed. Suddenly, your child’s education quality depended entirely on your ZIP code. That wasn’t accident. That was architecture.

For forty years, this continued. Democrats and Republicans, though disagreeing on details, agreed on the fundamental principle: public education wasn’t a priority. Funding stayed flat or declined relative to GDP. Class sizes grew. Teacher pay stagnated. Buildings crumbled. Textbooks aged. Technology fell behind.

Then Trump took office in 2025 and stopped pretending.

The 2025 Sabotage

He appointed Linda McMahon—a professional wrestler and reality TV personality with zero education background—as Secretary of Education. He signed an executive order to eliminate the Department of Education entirely. Nearly 2,000 DOE employees were laid off. Federal grants were cancelled mid-year, mid-project, with no warning. Billions in congressionally approved funds were frozen. This isn’t budget cuts. This is sabotage. This is saying: we’re going to destroy the federal government’s capacity to oversee education, to collect data on educational performance, to enforce civil rights in schools. Then we’ll tell you public education doesn’t work and privatization is the answer. (Project 2025)

One federal official literally said we’re now “flying blind.” That’s the point. When you can’t measure inequality, you can’t prove the system is rigged. When you destroy data systems, you erase evidence of failure. When nobody’s watching, nobody can prove what you’re doing.

This is where the corruption becomes obvious if you’re willing to look at it.

The Illusion of Excellence

Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes conducted the largest education study in history. They matched nearly 2 million charter school students against 6.5 million traditional public school students across the nation. Result: Charter students showed 16 additional days of learning in reading, 6 additional days in math per year. By year four of enrollment, the gap widens to 45 days in reading, 39 days in math.

The studies are cited constantly. Charter schools work! Public schools are broken! We need to expand charters, cut public funding, let the market work!

But this entire comparison is a completely rigged casino game. Charter schools do not achieve higher average metrics because they possess superior teaching methods or more innovative curricula. They achieve those numbers because they are allowed to operate by a completely different set of legal and operational rules than traditional public schools.

The most profound, dishonest advantage in the charter playbook is the absolute power of student selection. By law, a traditional public school must take every single human being who walks through its front doors. A kid with behavioral issues? Public school has to take him. Charter school can discourage enrollment or push him out. A student with serious learning disabilities? Public school legally must serve her. Charter school can claim they “don’t have the resources.” A student who doesn’t speak English? Public school has to provide services. Charter school can tell the family to enroll elsewhere.

The Stanford study compared motivated charter students (who got selected) against the full spectrum of public school students (poor, disabled, struggling, dealing with trauma, language barriers—the entire human complexity of America). That’s not a fair comparison. That’s a rigged comparison designed to look fair.

If public schools got to cherry-pick their students the same way, they’d show identical results. The difference isn’t pedagogy. It’s population. But we use charter school data to justify defunding public schools further. That’s circular logic designed to collapse the system.

Extracting Wealth from the Classroom

Then there’s the money. Charter schools are publicly funded—they get taxpayer money just like public schools. So where do charter companies make profit? Teacher salaries.

Charter school teachers earn 10-20% less than public school teachers for the same work. Health insurance is worse or nonexistent. Retirement benefits are minimal. Job security is nonexistent—teachers are hired and fired at will. Some charter chains have executive compensation in the six figures while teachers qualify for food assistance. That’s how for-profit charter companies extract wealth from public education: they underpay workers, pocket the difference, and call it “efficiency.”

The worst part is it works. Idealistic young teachers take charter jobs thinking they’re part of something innovative. They get paid poorly, work hard, burn out in 2-3 years. Then the next cohort of idealistic young teachers arrives. It’s a system designed to prevent teacher professionalization and collective power. It’s designed to exploit good intentions.

The Re-Segregation of American Classrooms

Seventy years after Brown v. Board of Education declared separate inherently unequal, American schools are MORE segregated than they were in 2000. How is that possible?

Partly residential segregation—white flight to suburbs, racial redlining’s ongoing effects. Partly school choice policies that allow charter and magnet schools to cream the best-motivated students from public schools. A motivated student with engaged parents applies to charter school, gets accepted, leaves public school. A student with behavioral challenges, special needs, language barriers—they stay in public school because they have nowhere else to go.

Result: Public schools serving primarily poor students and students of color get worse funding (per-capita spending lags by 0-17%), worse teachers (experienced teachers flee to charter schools), worse outcomes. The research is clear and damning. Segregated schools predict lower test scores, lower graduation rates, lower college attendance, lower lifetime earnings, worse health outcomes. Segregation in childhood correlates with health disparities twenty years later—infant mortality rates, life expectancy, violent crime rates. This isn’t just an education problem. This is a public health crisis manufactured by policy.

And it’s not incidental to school choice. It’s the feature, not a bug. In many cities, charter schools are overwhelmingly white or overwhelmingly minority. Magnet schools serving wealthy neighborhoods peel off talented students. The rhetoric is “freedom of choice.” The reality is resegregation wearing a patriotic mask.

Finishing Last Against the World

Every developed nation that invests in education gets better results. Not complicated. Not mysterious. Just straightforward cause and effect.

Finland, Singapore, Canada, Germany—they spend 5-7% of GDP on education. They prioritize teacher quality, requiring master’s degrees. They focus on student well-being, not test prep. Result: They rank higher globally than the U.S., their students have lower stress, their outcomes are better.

The U.S. spends roughly 3.5% of GDP on education. We’ve been cutting since Reagan. We’re doing the opposite of what works. Not because we don’t know better. Because we’ve chosen a different priority: profit over learning. Corporate extraction over student success.

Teachers are leaving the profession in droves. Why would anyone stay?

The War on The Working Teacher

The pay is low—many teachers qualify for food assistance or government housing programs. The respect is gone, politicians use teachers as political punching bags. The workload is crushing—larger classes as budgets shrink, unfunded mandates from state and federal government. The blame is constant—when students fail, teachers failed. When schools struggle, teachers are responsible. When a society defunds education deliberately and it collapses, somehow it’s the teachers’ fault.

Charter schools made this worse by creating a race to the bottom on teacher compensation. They attract idealistic young teachers, work them hard for poverty wages, and burn them out in 2-3 years. Then repeat. It’s exploitation disguised as disruption.

Meanwhile, countries that treat teachers as professionals—requiring master’s degrees, paying them well, respecting their expertise—have better education systems. The connection is obvious. We’re choosing not to make it.

The Shareholders’ Sandbox

Public education was supposed to be the great equalizer. The thing that gives poor kids the same shot as rich kids. It was never perfect. But the vision was sound.

Now we’re actively dismantling it in the name of “freedom” and “efficiency.” The freedom to flee public schools if you can afford it. The efficiency of paying teachers poverty wages while executives extract six-figure salaries.

What we’re left with is educational apartheid. Wealthy families in wealthy districts with well-funded schools, experienced teachers, college-prep curriculum. Poor families in underfunded districts with struggling schools, teacher turnover, test-prep curriculum. Different countries. Same ZIP code.

This is corporate corruption of democracy in its purest form. Education companies profit from defunding public systems. Textbook companies profit from standardized testing. Charter management companies profit from teacher labor exploitation. Real estate developers profit from gentrification that follows “school choice” policies. The system isn’t broken. It’s working exactly as designed. For shareholders. Just not for students.

The Ideological Endgame

What would actually fix this? Invest like other nations do—5-7% of GDP. Prioritize teacher quality and pay. Desegregate schools or fund them equitably. Reduce standardized testing. Focus on student well-being alongside academics. Expand public education (universal preschool, expanded school services). End charter school cherry-picking. Regulate for-profit education companies.

None of this will happen under Trump or Republican control. They’re moving in the opposite direction: more privatization, more charter expansion, more defunding. The ideology is pure: government bad, private good. Evidence doesn’t matter. International comparisons don’t matter. Student outcomes don’t matter. Ideology matters.

This is “Our Broken Systems” in its purest form. Start with a public good—education. Systematically defund it across decades (Reagan to Trump). Use the resulting failure as justification for privatization. Profit extraction begins. Inequality grows. Tell people it’s their fault or their choice. Repeat.

The food system did this. Healthcare did this. The legal system does this. Now education. Eventually, every public good will be gone, replaced by corporate versions available only to people who can afford them. That’s the endgame. And we’re watching it happen in real time.

F*CK ICE. RELEASE ALL THE FILES!

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Robert Cain, author of “Democracy for Sale: How Corporate Greed Is Corrupting Democracy and Endangering the Planet.” Available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and booksellers everywhere.