Furious parents give US schools a big, fat F as approval plunges dramatically

Parents are giving American schools a big, fat F, according to a new survey — with a record low number of people saying they’re satisfied with the quality of education.Just 32% of adults surveyed by Gallup and the Walton Family Foundation said they are “completely” or even “somewhat” satisfied with the US education system this year.That’s the worst satisfaction schools have received in the 27 years of the survey.Those dreadful marks also reflect a staggering 11-point drop in satisfaction in just two years, with 43% of US adults saying they were satisfied with the school system in 2024.It’s an even sharper decline from before the pandemic — when a majority 51% of American adults approved of the K-12 schools in 2019, the poll released Tuesday found.And approval has been nosediving since then.It slid to 51% in 2020, 46% in 2021, 42% in 2022 and 36% in 2023 before briefly rallying in 2024 and then plummeting again.Dissatisfaction with schools, meanwhile, has steadily increased in opposite proportion over that time — spiking to a record-high 67% this year and prompting experts to issue stark warnings about the state of education.“It’s terrifying.

We’re on the precipice of the dissolution of the public education system as we have known it,” said Jack Schneider, Center for Education Policy director at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.Exactly what is causing the dissatisfaction is unclear but, experts pointed to years of national test score declines as an obvious culprit.Reading scores have particularly stagnated among American school kids, with a May study from Harvard, Dartmouth and Stanford University academics finding just five states in an assessment of 38 had meaningful improvement on tests from 2022 to 2025.And nationwide, students’ reading scores are about a half-grade level behind where they were before the pandemic, with math scores faring only mildly better.“We’ve had a drumbeat of bad news about test scores and other soc...