NEWT GINGRICH: How Education Fraud Is Crippling America

For more than 40 years, Americans have spent innumerable tax dollars on education in big city schools – and got frighteningly bad results. This is a disaster for the lives of the young people in these schools, who enter adulthood without skills and knowledge to get good jobs and be good citizens.

Taxpayers get robbed through educational fraud, and children are crippled through educational incompetence.

This disaster is vividly explained in a stunning new book by Fox45 Baltimore Reporter Chris Papst titled “Failure Factory.” It is based on eight years of investigative reporting into Baltimore City Schools – one of the most expensive, destructive, and failure-dominated school systems in the country. I spoke with Papst on my latest episode of Newt’s World.

Papst’s stunning book may be to education what Lincoln Steffens’s “The Shame of the Cities” was for urban reform in 1904. After Steffens’s book, people learned local governments were out of control and had to be reformed. Similarly, after Papst’s book, people will never look at big city school bureaucracies the same way.

Papst, the lead investigative reporter for Fox 45’s Project Baltimore, exposes the corruption, dishonesty, methodical cheating, and just plain fraud which the school bureaucracies and teachers’ unions use to keep tax dollars coming even if they are failing totally. Papst connects the dots which prove that education is the least important item on the Baltimore City School bureaucracy’s priority list.

As a former high school and college teacher, I have been actively engaged in education reform for my entire public life. I was at the press conference announcing President Ronald Reagan’s 1983 report: “A Nation at Risk.” It outlined how dangerous the failure of our education system is to the entire country.

Unfortunately, things have gotten steadily worse since then. I worked in the early 1990s with then-Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson and Democratic State Legislator Polly Williams to create the school choices program. This has gradually taken root across the country. Yet, children in many big city public schools continue to be cheated and have their futures crippled. At the same time, their friends and neighbors do well and learn in charter and religiously affiliated schools.

For years, I have tried to understand how we could spend so much money on big city schools and get such terrible results. I could never understand why the education bureaucracies and teachers’ unions could tolerate terrible outcomes for millions of children (most of them poor and minority) and do nothing to fix the system. Then I read “Failure Factory.” Now, I see the corruption clearly. Papst has done the entire country an enormous service by exposing this astonishing record of failure.

Baltimore City Schools spent $1.7 billion in 2024 (up from $1.3 billion in 2017). That year, only 10 percent of the students scored proficient in math. In 2017, 11 percent of students met mathematics proficiency requirements. Further, student enrollment dropped from 82,354 in 2017 to 75,811 in 2024. So, taxpayers paid $400 million a year more for 6,543 fewer students – and math scores got worse.

Local reformers have no hope of getting real change, because the unions who make a living off the school system wield the power. Virtually every administrator (730 administrative staff) and most of the teachers (4,930) form an army for defending the indefensible. They care about their paychecks, not educational achievement.

Papst reported many students did not come to class. In Maryland, there were a reported 6,126 so-called ghost students in 2019. These are students who are registered but cannot be found. That year, the taxpayers paid $15,000 per ghost student. The school systems were getting $92.9 million for students who were not even in the classrooms.

In health care, welfare, or any other service, we would clearly identify this situation as fraud. Yet, in big city education, fraud, waste, incompetence, and failure flourish.

Through all this, Papst proved the education bureaucracy in Baltimore is focused solely on money – and will lie and cheat to keep the money flowing. The Baltimore City Schools CEO receives nearly $500,000 a year in total compensation while presiding over a failing, virtually collapsing system.

Papst’s long years of research have given us a set of insights which can be applied to every big city school system in the country. Unfortunately, there are many failure factories in big city education. We owe it to our children, the taxpayers, and the country to find, expose, and fix them.

For more commentary from Newt Gingrich, visit our website or Substack. Also, subscribe to the Newt’s World podcast.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.

(Featured Image Media Credit: Screen Capture/PBS NewsHour)