Moscow schools spend heavily while too many students still struggle with basic math and reading, repeating the mistake my father corrected when I was a boy.
This editorial ran in the Tuesday 22 September 2026 edition of the Moscow-Pullman Daily News.
When I was in elementary school in the 1960s, I was taught “New Math.” The name alone should have been a warning. How can math be “new”?
I couldn’t figure out how to divide using New Math. My father (who barely finished high school) sat down with my textbook to help. He had learned long division 40 years earlier. After wrestling with the book, he threw it aside and taught me the old school method.
It worked, and I even went on to major in math in college.
Reading was not much better. My elementary school adopted the “see-say” approach rather than phonics. Instead of learning how letters and sounds fit together to decode unfamiliar words, I had to recognize whole words. I was a terrible reader. I was expected to recognize every word on sight, but I couldn’t memorize the entire dictionary.
Those methods were part of an educational revolution. The problem was what schools taught and when children were expected to learn it. Classical education gets the sequence right: grammar before logic, logic before rhetoric. First learn the facts, rules, vocabulary, multiplication tables, spelling, and basic tools. Then learn how those facts fit together. Finally, learn to reason, explain, and argue from them.
New Math pushed abstract reasoning into elementary school before the basics were learned. It wanted children to understand sets, number systems, and abstract properties of arithmetic, including the distributive property. Understanding those things is not wrong. The problem was asking grammar-stage children to reason abstractly before reaching the logic stage in junior high.
The experts wanted me to understand the theory of arithmetic. My father wanted me to be able to do arithmetic. Once I could do it, understanding could follow.
Sixty years later, the results from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) show we still have not learned that lesson. Phones, AI, and absenteeism cannot explain the pre-pandemic decline.
In 2025, only 65% of American 15-year-olds reached baseline proficiency in mathematics and 74% in reading. Both were the worst U.S. results since 2000. In other words, 35% failed to reach baseline in math and 26% failed in reading, hardly the results of a successful system.
The problem appears closer to home. Moscow School District’s 2025 Idaho Standards Achievement Test results show 61.3% of tested students proficient in math and 71% in English language arts. The result is the same: too many students are not proficient.
Moscow may compare well with Idaho districts, but so what? A system that gets only 61% of tested students to proficiency in math is failing, and 71% proficiency in English is nothing to applaud.
The usual answer: more money.
From 2000 through 2023, inflation-adjusted public-school spending per student rose about 25%. Yet the share reaching the passing level fell from 74% to 65% in math and from 82% to 74% in reading. We spend substantially more per student and get worse results in both subjects. More spending appears to produce worse outcomes.
And Moscow is not operating on chump change. Its 2025-26 budget shows about $35.8 million in budgeted revenue across funds. With roughly 2,175 students, that works out to about $16,450 per student annually.
Brian Rhoades: The government numbers are here: https://www.msd281.org/page/financial-informationand https://www.msd281.org/page/about-msd. Call me if you need help with the math.
Failure forces correction. A business that sells what customers do not want goes bankrupt. A mechanic who cannot fix cars loses business. But government education works in reverse: failure becomes the argument for more funding, more programs, and another reform. While the system gets another reform and another budget increase, the child gets a failed education.
The deeper problem is that we keep trying to fix something that was not broken.
100 years ago, when my father entered elementary school, education centered on the three Rs: reading, writing, and arithmetic. These were not quaint preliminaries. They were the foundation on which everything else rested.
That is where education should begin again: phonics, grammar, writing, multiplication tables, fractions, and long division. Children should master those basics before being asked to reason abstractly about them.
My father simply knew I could not divide. So he discarded the failing method and taught me long division the way he had learned it 40 years earlier, a method generations had relied on for centuries.
What American education needs is fewer theories cooked up by education “experts” and inflicted on somebody else’s children.
It needs to go back to the basics.
With $16,450 in annual revenue per student in Moscow, the basics should not be too much to ask for.