It’s the end of another school year. Is it the end of American public schools?

Some in Texas think so, following the recent passage of a statewide voucher program. Starting in the 2026-2027 school year, parents will be able to use vouchers to offset tuition costs at participating private schools.

Despite the dire predictions of critics, who accuse the programs of draining taxpayer money from public schools, research shows that the programs deliver on their promises. At the same time, after decades of advocacy from conservatives, perhaps it’s time to admit that they are no educational elixir. More is needed on questions of funding and curriculum, especially these days, given how far American students have fallen behind.

In a comprehensive review of the academic literature, voucher programs correlate to higher standardized test scores and lower rates of absenteeism and suspension — including, perhaps surprisingly, for the students who remain in public schools. A 2020 NBER study of private vouchers in Florida found particularly sizable benefits for students from comparatively lower socioeconomic backgrounds in the public schools facing the highest levels of competition. Similarly, a 2024 NBER paper found that the creation of charter schools increased reading scores and attendance rates of students who remained in the traditional public school system.

But cultivating more school options is not the end-all-be-all. As of 2019, 25 states had voucher programs of some type in place, but only 2% of K-12 students are in private school with public vouchers. Only 7% of public school students are in charter schools.

The reality is that most kids end up staying in the public schools they are zoned for a variety of reasons: some private schools don’t take vouchers and some charters are oversubscribed or on the other side of town. School choice is particularly ineffective in rural environments, and vouchers can hurt outcomes when parents perhaps inadvertently choose lower performing private schools, as a recent AEA study showed.

Worse, school choice can become an excuse for policymakers to skirt hard and immediately needed conversations about an ineffective public-school curriculum, classrooms that have morphed into screen zombies, or unaccountable teacher and student performance.

Here, there’s much work to do.

Indeed, the most meteoric change in student achievement this last decade wasn’t from vouchers. It was from a statewide investment in the basics.

Since 2013, Mississippi has gone from one of the worst elementary school literacy rates in the country to above average from investing in third-grade reading. That included better training for teachers, using a phonics-based curriculum and hiring reading coaches.

These investments have been paired with steep accountability: if kids are not literate, they repeat third grade. Instead of falling behind, those kids were further ahead academically by 6th grade for having gotten the basics right.

We need more of this, shoring up the foundation. Instead, our education system functions the other way around. Higher education arguably commands too much — roughly a third — of the government’s cumulative spending on education. This makes little sense considering that the majority of kids cannot read or write at grade level by the time they hit double-digits.

The Trump Administration is exploring tweaking this ratio, floating the idea of diverting money from Harvard to trade schools. But taking resources from top-tier research institutions seems ill-advised. (Might I suggest the colleges that churn out dropouts instead?)

And if anything, the investment is needed much earlier than trade or vocational school during high school. Consider that in 2025, only 1 in 3 students are able to read or write proficiently in fourth grade, according to the most recent Nation’s Report Card. Among students who are poor enough to qualify for free lunch, less than 1 in 5 are proficient. By 8th grade, a third of all students are unable to identify basic elements in a text, such as the order of events or the main idea.

A third of all 8th graders qualify as “proficient” in math. It’s down to 1 in 8 if you’re eligible for free lunch. In 8th grade, being “proficient” means understanding the difference between parallel and perpendicular lines, for example. This isn’t just the pandemic’s lingering scars; the decline in student learning — especially for our most vulnerable kids — was happening long before.

The way we are educating our children isn’t working. A generation of kids unable to do basic math and reading bodes poorly for our nation and economy, irrespective of what happens with the rest of public policy.

More school choice helps, but we should also be committed to getting the basics right — regardless of where kids end up.

Half of American adults — the largest share this century — are “very dissatisfied” with the quality of public education in the nation, according to Gallup. One-quarter of kids no longer feel the need to attend school: According to one estimate by the American Enterprise Institute, 25% of students were considered chronically absent in 2022-23, up from 13% in 2019-2020.

Those who fear vouchers are the end of public school should look again. Based on student scores in 2025, public education is already flailing. The question is what we will do to fix it.

Abby McCloskey is a columnist, podcast host, and consultant. She directed domestic policy on two presidential campaigns and was director of economic policy at the American Enterprise Institute. She wrote this column for Bloomberg Opinion.

The epiphany of common sense came late in an otherwise tedious congressional subcommittee hearing, and from a Democrat, Representative Jim Costa. He gets that Republicans and the administration of Donald Trump take pride in exerting “maximum pressure” on Iran, Costa made clear. But at this “seminal moment in American and world history,” he asked, “what about maximum pressure on Russia?”

What about it indeed? The greatest puzzle (among many) about MAGA foreign policy is why Trump refuses to get tough with Russian leader Vladimir Putin, who shows no interest in good-faith peace negotiations and is cynically stringing Trump along — “playing this president like a fiddle,” in the words of Jeanne Shaheen, the ranking member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

There is Trump’s worrisome history of indulging or even admiring Putin, while showing contempt for his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Then there’s his shocking failure to distinguish between aggressor and victim in the conflict, and his bizarre negotiating tactic of giving away the West’s best bargaining chips — security guarantees for Ukraine, a path to its NATO membership — before talks have even begun.

And whenever Putin responds by bombing more Ukrainians, Trump does nothing beyond venting on Truth Social. This is minimum pressure.

The obvious explanation for how Trump has so far gotten away with such weakness is that Republicans control Congress and he controls Republicans. The MAGA faction, which includes neo-isolationists and Putin apologists, has largely succeeded in cowing Republicans in the hawkish mold of Ronald Reagan, a tradition that believes in American exceptionalism and leadership. Too often the effect has been to make the GOP put lipstick on defeatism.

But the MAGA takeover of the GOP is not complete, and Republicans ready to stare down Russia — though their numbers are unclear — are waiting for their moment to change course. That should provide a glimmer of hope not only for Ukrainians but also for America’s allies as they gather in the coming weeks, first in the Group of Seven and then at the NATO summit in The Hague.

Take Don Bacon, a Republican congressman from Nebraska who spent almost half his life in the Air Force and has been a Reagan Republican since he was 16. He is one of the few in the GOP who stands with Ukraine and against Russian aggression whether that stance is in vogue or not. On various occasions he and his wife received profanity-laced threats.

Yet here he still is. “I just see it so clearly that we have a leadership role in the world to help Ukraine prevail, and I’m willing to take someone’s anger over this because I think it’s so right,” he told me. By Bacon’s count, Russia has changed borders by force nine times since 1991, and to him it’s clear that if Putin were allowed to prevail in Ukraine, he’d go on to add a tenth or eleventh, perhaps in Moldova or Georgia.

What he wants from his colleagues and the administration is simple: First, he told me, “I would love to have moral clarity. Who is the bad guy? Who’s the good guy?” Peace talks only make sense once that is clear, because “you got to negotiate with truth.” Even then, he thinks, Trump already sabotaged his and Kyiv’s negotiating position by making concessions in advance. All the more reason to dial up the economic and diplomatic pressure on Russia to the absolute maximum.

A bipartisan bill to that effect is already waiting in the Senate. If it becomes law, it will punish countries, including giants such as India and China, with prohibitive tariffs and other measures if they continue to buy Russian oil, gas or uranium, thus sinking the shadow fleets and ending the gray-market transactions that have sustained the Kremlin’s war effort despite Western sanctions.

The legislation hasn’t gone to the floor yet because Republican senators such as Lindsey Graham, a co-sponsor, want to move forward with rather than against Trump. But a growing group of other legislators is raring to go.

That’s becoming clearer in almost every hearing. In one Senate session this week, Mitch McConnell, the committee chairman (and former majority leader), confronted Trump’s defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, with the same moral and strategic clarity that guides Bacon. “Who’s the aggressor and who’s the victim?,” McConnell pressed Hegseth. “Russia is the aggressor,” Hegseth admitted. “Which side do you want to win?,” McConnell pursued. “This president is committed to peace in that conflict,” Hegseth tried to evade.

That caused cringing in the room. “We’re in the midst of brokering what appears to be allowing the Russians to define victory,” McConnell harangued; “America’s reputation is on the line. Will we defend democratic allies against authoritarian aggressors?” Twisting a rhetorical knife into the cabinet member of an administration that claims to Make America Great Again, McConnell lectured his Republican witness that “we don’t want a headline at the end of this conflict that says ‘Russia wins and America loses.’”

McConnell is in the dusk of his career and has relatively little to lose from speaking out. For others in Congress, though, it takes courage. Bacon told me that many like-minded Republicans don’t yet dare step out of the closet. One high-profile colleague — whom he won’t name — keeps coming up to him saying “Don, thank you for speaking up on Ukraine, we need more of it.” Bacon chuckles: “I’m like, it’d be helpful if you spoke up.”

As war consumes eastern Europe and so much of the planet, and the administration gropes fecklessly for America’s proper role in this world, it’s easy to despair, especially if you’re Ukrainian.

But the struggle is not yet lost, either within Congress or within the party of Trump, which also remains the party of Reagan. The right texts are drafted, and the voices of courage are audible, if still few. All that remains is for others to heed their conscience, and to pass the test of history by finally letting Putin feel America’s maximum pressure.

Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering US diplomacy, national security and geopolitics. Previously, he was editor-in-chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the Economist.

For those of us of a certain age and sensibility, Ronald Reagan is the quintessential American conservative. He not only vanquished the Evil Empire and restored business’s animal spirits. He rode a horse, wore a cowboy hat and, when his wife came to visit him in hospital after he survived a 1981 assassination attempt, quipped “honey, I forgot to duck.” By comparison, President Donald Trump is an interloper as well as a yahoo.

But does this view survive forensic analysis? In a recent column on Sam Tanenhaus’ new biography of William Buckley, my colleague, Toby Harshaw, makes it clear that Trumpism is deeply rooted in the American conservative tradition. And, as I made my own journey through Tanenhaus’ thousand pages, I was struck by a heretical thought: The real interloper in the conservative tradition was not Trump but Ronald Reagan (and, by implication, his great imitator, George W. Bush).

Reagan was the ultimate double agent: Beneath his cowboy hat, he smuggled two ideas that were anathema to movement conservatives, neoliberalism and neoconservativism, into the heart of Republican policymaking.

Reagan certainly campaigned as a movement conservative. He first became a conservative hero when he delivered a powerful televised speech on October 27, 1964, explaining why he endorsed the presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. During the 1980 campaign, he told a meeting of religious conservatives that, even though they couldn’t endorse him, he endorsed them. At the 1981 Gridiron Dinner in Washington (two days before the assassination attempt), he quipped that “sometimes in our administration, the right hand doesn’t know what the far right-hand is doing.”

Yet in office he disappointed his most dedicated followers on the things that mattered to them most, from banning abortion to cutting spending, and instead put in place the foundations of both neoliberalism and neoconservatism. He appointed a rising generation of neoconservatives such as Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz to his administration. James Baker, his chief of staff and then treasury secretary, and Paul Volcker, his chairman of the Federal Reserve until 1987, and Volcker’s successor, Alan Greenspan, were regarded as heroes by the sort of people who are invited to Bilderberg and Davos.

Reagan took the traditional conservative beliefs in anti-Communism and deregulation and transformed them into faith in globalization. He believed in the assertion of both American power and American values abroad — a belief that owed more to Woodrow Wilson than to Calvin Coolidge.

In the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall, he even enthused about “a standing UN force — an army of conscience — that is fully equipped and prepared to carve out humanitarian sanctuaries through force if necessary.” He adopted a laissez-faire attitude to immigration, a motor of the economy of his native California, and eventually signed the 1986 immigration act offering amnesty to 3 million workers. He concluded the last remarks he delivered as president with a paean to immigrants as the most important source of American greatness.

In 2008 Lou Cannon, Reagan’s best biographer, teamed up with his son, Carl, to publish a book on George W. Bush’s presidency, “Reagan’s Disciple.” Bush followed the Reagan script to the letter in campaigning as a movement conservative and then governing as a neoliberal-neoconservative. His presidential campaign included speaking at Bob Jones University, a Baptist institution that banned same-sex dating. His campaign manager, Karl Rove, repeatedly invoked (and later wrote a book about) President William McKinley, a protectionist. He promised a “humble but strong” foreign policy that would eschew foreign entanglements.

But in office he relied heavily on a group of neoconservatives and market fundamentalists who had got their start under Reagan and who were now ripe with experience: Wolfowitz was number two in the Pentagon, Perle was a ubiquitous wire puller, and Bill Kristol, the son of the man who gave neoconservatism its name, edited the administration’s favorite magazine, The Weekly Standard.

Bush pursued a policy of cutting taxes and deregulating the economy unrestrained by either spending cuts or government discipline, with Vice President Dick Cheney declaring that “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.” He floated the idea of a comprehensive guest worker program early in his presidency and later proposed giving legal status to 8-10 million illegal immigrants, half of them from Mexico. After Sept. 11, he pursued an ambitious policy of spreading democracy to the Middle East, through a mixture of regime change and evangelization for liberal values.

Bush’s overreach put an end to the GOP’s flirtation with both neoliberalism and neoconservatism. The debacle of the Iraq War, triggered by the pursuit of Saddam Hussein’s illusory weapons of mass destruction and links to al-Qaeda, infuriated young conservatives such as JD Vance (who served for six months in Iraq in 2005 as a military journalist). Bush’s irresponsible financial management led to the worst financial crisis since the 1930s.

But even before these twin disasters, the relationship between Beltway conservatives and what John Micklethwait and I once called The Right Nation were under strain. Globalization — and particularly China’s admission into the World Trade Organization in 2001 — devastated the hometowns of the blue-collar workers who had turned to Reagan in 1980. Regular workers found that their wages were stagnating even as a tiny elite reaped the fruits of the global economy. Many movement conservatives, particularly on the religious right, worried that they had been “played” by a Washington establishment that had a very different view of conservatism from them.

The collapse of the House that Reagan built has inevitably led to the reassertion of an older type of conservatism: a conservatism that had flourished in its purest form in the 1920s, that emphasized protectionism and immigration control, that had only reluctantly made its peace with an active foreign policy because of the threat of Communism, and that was rooted in Alexander Hamilton’s enthusiasm for tariffs and George Washington’s suspicion of foreign entanglements.

This tradition was preserved by Patrick Buchanan who made a surprisingly strong run against George Bush senior for the presidency in 1992 and promised, in his address to the Republican National Convention, to take back American culture block by block, just as “our boys” in the National Guard had taken back Los Angeles “block by block” after the Rodney King riots. It was gilded by dissident intellectuals such as Sam Francis, who argued that American conservatism was fueled by “Middle American Radicals” who wanted protection from disorder, not free trade, and Samuel Huntington, who insisted that the most important question in politics was not an economic one but a cultural one, Who Are We?.

Trump’s presidency may lead to political disaster for the Republicans, given his propensity for piling up debt, shifting the rules of trade and picking fights. But anybody who thinks that a post-Trump Republican Party will revert back to Ronald Reagan’s policies will be disappointed — much as those of us of a certain age and temperament might hope to the contrary.

Adrian Wooldridge is the global business columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former writer at the Economist, he is author of “The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World.”

Big River Pizza, which started as a mobile wood-fired pizza shop and opened its brick-and-mortar pizzeria in Lowertown in 2015, is closing this month.

Owner Steve Lott has chosen not to renew the restaurant’s lease, saying in a social media post that “the current political and policy landscape in St. Paul has made it increasingly difficult to ensure the safety of our employees.”

The pizzeria’s last day is expected to be June 29, though “possibly beyond.”

Lott said in the post that he “won’t be elaborating further on the local political landscape at this time.” In response to an interview request, he replied via email with a few lines from the Grateful Dead song “Terrapin Station.” (“The storyteller makes no choice, soon you will not hear his voice / His job is to shed light, and not to master / Since the end is never told, we pay the teller off in gold / In hopes he will come back, but he cannot be bought or sold”)

In a previous conversation with the Pioneer Press, he had expressed concerns over apparent increases in burglaries, drug use and gun presence in Lowertown. Light-rail stations and homeless service centers that have been added to the neighborhood contribute to these challenges, he said in February.

“I think elected officials have good intentions,” Lott said at the time. “But some of the policies have negatively impacted the business community.”

In closing, Big River Pizza joins a string of other restaurants in and around the area, including Saint Dinette in Lowertown and the Apostle Supper Club across from the Xcel Energy Center, whose owners have cited changing demographics as reasons for shutting down.

However, from new restaurants and event centers to commercial leasing successes, there appears to be new life ahead for some downtown and Lowertown spots. Specifically on the pizza scene, Prince Coal-Fired Pizza is set to open next month on Robert Street. Plus, the Palace Pub is now open next to the Palace Theater, and after announcing a closure, Dark Horse in Lowertown is set to reopen next month.

Big River Pizza is located within the Lofts at Farmer’s Market, an apartment building that is now privately owned but was originally developed by the city’s Housing and Redevelopment Authority in 2012. Of an approximately $304,000 buildout for Big River Pizza in 2015, $180,000 came from the city, per Pioneer Press reporting.

“Thank you for your unwavering support, your patronage, and for making our human experience in St. Paul so memorable,” Lott wrote in the pizzeria’s farewell post. “We will truly miss you all.”

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