The secret weapon to fixing our broken immigration system is right in front of us
Twitter/X CEO Elon Musk and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy sparked a debate in December when they advocated allowing more legal immigration for high-skilled workers – for example, through H-1B visas – to make America more competitive. President-elect Donald J. Trump endorsed the policy in a statement to the New York Post shortly after the dispute broke out.
Conservatives on both sides of this discussion should be able to agree on one thing: we would not need to import as much talent if we had a more effective education system.
The latest data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as the "nation’s report card," shows that fewer than one-in-four eighth grade students are proficient in math and less than a third of them are proficient in reading. The latest international assessment shows that we’re ranked 24th in math – in the middle of the pack – despite spending nearly $20,000 per public school student each year, more than just about any other country in the world.
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U.S. 4th grade math scores have fallen 18 points since 2019 – a decline larger than all but three countries: Azerbaijan, Iran, and Kazakhstan.
We can start fixing the education crisis by improving the efficiency of educational resource allocation. Mountains of empirical evidence in economics research indicate that misallocation is one of the greatest impediments to economic growth for a nation, as well as the educational services sub-sector. To that end, improving the efficiency of public education can go a long way in producing multiplier effects for a nation as a whole.
Trump appointed both Musk and Ramaswamy to head the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in November. In his statement announcing DOGE’s new leaders, Trump said his administration will "dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies."
It’s no secret waste runs rampant through our public school system. The U.S. spends over $900 billion per year on education for lackluster results. The current system is not serving the students, and makes teachers’ lives more difficult, so now is the time to start thinking about how to get bigger bang for our buck in the Department of Education. We need to inventory where current resources are going, and what outcomes they’re driving – plain and simple.
But tackling this apparent low-hanging fruit can only do so much to cut waste. After all, about 90% of all public-school funding comes from state and local sources, not the federal government.
That’s why we have to understand the root cause behind the deteriorating student outcomes. A major potential factor is administrative bloat in American education. The latest data from the National Center for Education Statistics show that student enrollment has only increased by about 5% since 2000, but the number of teachers employed by the system has grown twice as fast as students, by about 10%, over the same period. School district administrative staff has increased by about 95%, or 19 times the rate of student enrollment growth.
We’ve increased inflation-adjusted spending per student by more than 160% since 1970 and the teachers aren’t seeing the money. Teacher salaries have only increased by 3% in real terms over the same period.
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The problem is that the public school system operates as a monopoly with weaker incentives to spend money wisely. But public-school unions do have a strong incentive to advocate for hiring more people, particularly in states that do not have right-to-work laws. Additional staffing means more dues-paying members and a larger voting bloc.
Our just-released study provides the first evidence that unions are driving administrative bloat in education. Using data from the National Center for Education Statistics and the American Community Survey between 2006 and 2024, we find a robust positive relationship between union density and staff-to-student ratios, and negative effects of right-to-work laws (RTW) on these ratios. These effects are largely driven by the expansion of administrative and support roles rather than teachers. Furthermore, these effects are concentrated in non-RTW states.
Specifically, we find that a 10-point increase in teachers union density is associated with a one-point increase in year-to-year staffing growth.
In Chicago, a union stronghold, staffing has increased by a whopping 20% since 2019 even though student enrollment has plunged 10%. In Texas, one of six states that outlaws collective bargaining for public employees, staffing has increased by 8% – much closer to their 2% growth in student enrollment – over the same period. Our results in the study show that these examples are not anecdotal – it’s been happening at scale.
Injecting competition into the K-12 education system would put pressure on school districts to redirect otherwise wasteful spending into the classroom. Trump can help make this happen by getting congressional Republicans in-line to pass school choice. The Educational Choice for Children Act already passed out of the House Ways and Means Committee last September and President-elect Trump said he would sign it.
Improving the efficiency of government should be a non-partisan issue, especially in a sector that hits so close to home for every American – education. It’s now up to Congress to deliver for the parents who put them in office. Allowing parents to direct the upbringing of their children is the right thing to do, but it will also make America more competitive and make education great again.