Three decades ago, state leaders saw that public education was in peril and called on Americans to embrace change commensurate with the challenge. The 1989 Charlottesville Education Summit and the agenda it produced laid the groundwork for important progress in American education. By learning from this history, state leaders can establish a new foundation on which to stake the next generation of gains.

It is past time to refresh this agenda to respond to new challenges in education and society. The Aspen Institute has an important role in framing these issues: We convene leaders with different experiences and divergent perspectives so they can learn from others, challenge their own assumptions, and identify threats and opportunities on the horizon. We help leaders forge coherence across practice and policy and across programmatic silos, from capitals to classrooms.

Throughout this series, we’ve heard from eminent leaders from across the political spectrum about the valuable infrastructure of standards, assessments and accountability:

Governors need to … support good testing and accountability. The students who will suffer when we lower our standards are those who are already underserved. —Gov. Jim Hunt

If I were governor today, I would probably be doing exactly what I did in the 1980s, which is pushing for higher standards on the national goals and effective tests to measure progress towards the goals. —Sen. Lamar Alexander

Notably, school district superintendents charged with making these big ideas come to fruition also support this framework:

I can tell you that having a common set of standards that are grade level appropriate and rigorous changed the conversation about what should be happening in classrooms. It allowed administrators to push for needed change and rigor to occur in our classrooms. —Chicago Public Schools CEO Janice Jackson

[I]t is important to reiterate that it is only because of the movement toward standards and assessments that we are able to have thoughtful conversations about differences in student performance. This continues to be the most important outcome of the past 30 years. ��—former District of Columbia Public Schools chancellor Kaya Henderson

As we focus on the future, we would be wise to safeguard the important commitments and infrastructure for improvement that comprise the summit’s lasting legacy.

The leaders who shared their views in this series, however, also articulated important criticism of how this agenda has unfolded:

There is finally more energy and commitment to a conversation about the fact that the trauma of poverty is real, and therefore providing, or at least beginning to talk about providing, trauma-informed care to young people, is now on the table in a way it wasn’t [in 1989]. —Teach for America Vice President Brittany Packnett

As we became more accurate in measuring, we moved quickly into high-stakes testing that I think probably didn’t serve us very well because we assumed that the tests were more than just a snapshot in time, that they really could tell us more than what they actually could. —Gov. Tony Evers

It was a larger accomplishment than most people thought to say our goals are math, science, English, history and geography. That meant the school curricula across the country shifted in that direction, and that means there’s less time for music and art and less time for character education. —Alexander

While the [English learner] population has grown 60 percent over the past two decades, federal funds for ELs have increased by, wait for it, 1 percent since 2009. That’s just unacceptable. —Unidos US President and CEO Janet Murguía

There are many legitimate critiques worth addressing that can make standards-based reform more effective. Recalibration of the role of tests, targeted investments to help students who need more help, a broader and richer curriculum — all are good ideas that deserve attention.

But what is most striking is how current debates propose tinkering with the status quo when this is patently inadequate to prepare for the future. The demographics of public school students, the advent of school choice, disruptive technology — all this is very different in the past 30 years, but the same policy framework is applied.

Employability skills have shifted, and the media landscape has changed how news is consumed and politics are conducted, but accountability for schools hasn’t changed much at all. The architecture of test-based accountability contained a heavy tilt toward basic skills, which arguably was appropriate for getting a system to move from poor to fair. Nevertheless, different strategies are needed to go from good to great, and to prepare young people for college, work and citizenship opportunities of the future, not the past.

I’ve become a little more radicalized about this. I think the system we have is inappropriate for the world we live in. It’s not yielding lifelong learners. The idea that we have silos of pre-K, K-12, community college, university, to me, it’s increasingly irrelevant. We should turn the system on its head and make it student-centered. If I was convening a group of 50 governors, I would ask, “How do we get to a point where every child reaches their God-given abilities,” rather than “How do we increase the graduation rate?” ��—Gov. Jeb Bush

The world for which we are preparing students has changed dramatically in the past 30 years. We’re trying to ready a much more diverse set of students, not just to higher standards, but to become lifelong learners, adept at navigating adversity and change, and able to thrive in a pluralistic democracy and society. Yet, for better and worse, the standards-based testing and accountability agenda that was articulated in Charlottesville 30 years ago still dominates federal law and state policy. We haven’t really asked schools to address the challenges of the future, and we haven’t developed a policy framework that is aimed enough at innovation and transformation.

Just as governors did in 1989, state policymakers today have an opportunity, and a responsibility, to re-envision student and school success. They can use this vision to lay a new foundation for education policy.

The time for state leaders to lay this new foundation is now. The consensus that informed the 1989 Charlottesville Education Summit and animated education policy for the past 30 years does not currently exist. Americans are weary of federal overreach and ideological agendas that overpromise and underdeliver. There is a hunger for leadership that speaks to values, engages and really listens to stakeholders, attracts broad and durable support, and sparks collective action rather than preying on division and fear.

Public education is among the most important commitments we make to each other as Americans. States have primary responsibility for this enterprise, both historically and in our constitutional structure. We must envision a future in which all young people have the educational opportunities and experiences needed to develop into their best selves, to gain a foothold in the future of work and to participate actively in our democracy. That demands new goals and new policies to get there. In my interview with Hunt, he urged a new call to arms. We should heed his call.

Ross Wiener is vice president at the Aspen Institute and executive director of its Education & Society Program. Previously, he was vice president for program and policy at the Education Trust and a trial attorney in the U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, Educational Opportunities Section.

As a new generation of leaders strives to fulfill the promise of public education, we would be wise to celebrate successes and learn lessons from this history. To this end, the Aspen Institute Education & Society Program has engaged politicians, educators and equity advocates to interpret the legacy of the 1989 summit and to frame a future vision for state policy that advances educational excellence and equity. All Americans are involved in what comes next, and we hope you will build on these reflections to share your own ideas.

The 1989 Education Summit, held in Charlottesville, Virginia, was ground zero for standards-based reform. The summit was, in part, formed as a response to A Nation at Risk, the watershed 1983 report that warned that American education was lagging behind international peers and imperiling the nation’s economic security. Hosted by then-President George H.W. Bush and by Bill Clinton, governor of Arkansas and chair of the National Governors Association, the September 27-28 gathering at the University of Virginia sought to provoke concerted action on education standards. The leaders assembled there dared to insist that the nation needed measurable goals and accountability, but they placed responsibility for this system squarely in the hands of state leaders.

High stakes meant high ambitions.

The goals of the Charlottesville summit were intentionally lofty — too lofty, some critics contend — but it was these big goals set by state leaders that enabled many students of color to no longer be condemned to the dungeons of low expectations where for too long the floor was the ceiling.

Today, many more students acquire fundamental numeracy and literacy skills than they used to. In 1992, more than two-thirds of black fourth-graders scored at or below basic in reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and 78 percent of black eighth-graders scored below basic in math. In 2017, these figures had been reduced to 49 percent of fourth-graders and 53 percent of eighth-graders. Latino students made similar progress, decreasing the proportion scoring below basic dramatically over this time period. High school graduation rates are higher than ever, in every part of the country and for every group of students.

These achievements underscore that when political leaders commit to action in American education, real progress occurs. The clarity and focus created by standards-based reform supported teachers, principals and students to achieve more than was once thought possible.

While these achievements are real, persistent inequities squander precious human potential. There are missteps from which to learn and much left to be done. Aspirations for student achievement are now intertwined with vital questions of identity, access and civic discourse that were not in the room three decades ago. The gains public schools have made can serve as a foundation for even more progress, but doing better necessitates more state leadership.

The anniversary of the 1989 Education Summit arrives at an opportune juncture: State leadership in education policy is ascendant in a way it has not been in recent memory. States primarily led the push for standards through the 1980s and 1990s, but federal influence increased dramatically through No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. With the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015, there was a political consensus to empower state and local leadership while maintaining the infrastructure of standards-based reform: annual testing of all students in reading and math, public reporting of disaggregated results and accountability systems. States have more latitude now, and there are fewer mechanisms for the federal government to dictate specific courses of action.

Given that shift, and the disengagement in education policy by the current administration, states will set the course for the future of public education. The landscape looks very different than it did in 1989: Students of color now comprise the majority of public school students, and most public school students receive free or reduced-price meals because of low family income. Many students experience adverse conditions and trauma outside of school; across income levels, students are reporting heightened levels of anxiety, depression and suicidal thoughts. There has been an explosion in brain science and research on how learning happens, leading to new attention paid to social and emotional development and whole-child approaches. There has been a major shift in school governance with the advent of charters and school choice.

To seize this opportunity, state leaders must learn from the past and define the future. We at Aspen Education have asked an eminent group of educational and political leaders — Lamar Alexander, Jeb Bush, Tony Evers, Kaya Henderson, Jim Hunt, Janice Jackson, Janet Murguía and Brittany Packnett — to : What are the greatest accomplishments of standards-based reform? What are the lessons of the past 30 years? What are the dynamics that warrant the most attention to fuel even more progress in the years to come? (You can )

We began with leaders who, by virtue of working across politics, advocacy, legislation and civil rights, on top of education, have a vast expanse of knowledge that few can match. We hope you take as much away from their insights as we did. And we recognize that many others have valuable perspectives on what should come next. We encourage everyone to join this conversation with all the urgency and importance assigned to it in 1989.

The 1989 summit prompted politicians to check their partisanship at the door to work toward a common purpose of doing right by children across the nation. We are living in a time when Americans are suffering for leadership that inspires people instead of exacerbating their divisions. In education, this leadership is going to come from the state leaders who must forge a new education compact. To do so, they would do well to look at two days in September, 30 years ago, when such leadership was on full display.

Ross Wiener is vice president at the Aspen Institute and executive director of its Education & Society Program. Previously, he was vice president for program and policy at the Education Trust and a trial attorney in the U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, Educational Opportunities Section.

Over the past few years, a wave of activism has galvanized the nation, and Brittany Packnett, vice president of national alliances and engagement at Teach for America, stands with many others at its epicenter. In 2014, Packnett, a former teacher, garnered national media attention for protesting the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and became one of the country’s most outspoken activists. She co-founded Campaign Zero, a policy platform to end police violence, and is a co-host of the podcast Pod Save the People; her has been viewed more than 2.5 million times. Here, Packnett speaks about the “pendulum swings” of education reform, the moral judgment behind poverty and the false choice between democracy and innovation.

What do you see as the greatest accomplishments from the 1989 Education Summit and the standards-based education agenda that emerged from it?

A standards-based approach to education is clearly the most, in my opinion, important thing to come out of that, and the thing that has been the most pervasive. I remember entering the classroom in 2007 and it being a foregone conclusion that everything I’m doing should be standards-based and data-driven. Knowing that that was not always the case struck me, as a brand new teacher, as odd. Why wouldn’t this approach exist?

Recognizing the importance of some standardization across the board for the sake of equity is really important, because otherwise, we allow a permissiveness to exist where certain kids are justified being held to one standard and other kids are just fine being held to another, and never the two shall meet.

Thinking about that and the lessons from the past 30 years in education, is there anything that we could have, or should have, done differently? 

Naming equity as not just an aspiration, but as a deeply held value that should guide our behavior at all times, is the place we have to move into within the next 30 years. Standards-based practices matter deeply. I also remember those standards not always translating, not because the standard was wrong, but because the tools that were built around the standard, the ones that we had access to, were limited. They were not culturally relevant. They were not culturally responsive. Therefore, they didn’t assist or aid in helping students reach the standard because they were irrelevant to students.

I taught third grade in Southeast D.C., and I’ll never forget getting the textbooks. The first story in the reading textbook was about a kid and his father going rock climbing. My students didn’t understand how somebody could climb a rock because the only rocks that they saw were on somebody’s lawn or pebbles from the playground. It lacked cultural relevancy. I had a limited amount of tools with which to fill in the gap.

We have to be willing to continue to refine the approaches that we’re taking. Too often, we are pendulum swingers. There are trends. One day, it’ll be all about standards and data. The next day, it’ll be all about technology in the classroom. Five years after that, it’s all about personalized learning. What we should actually be doing is looking at each of these practices and asking, “What can be pulled from all these things to create equitable and excellent experiences for all kids in all classrooms?”

Could you say a little bit more about what you mean by equity as a value, and what is the work we need to be doing in education to better meet the goals of these standards that were passed?

Equity is everybody getting what they need — not the same thing. I think for too long, we’ve been giving people the same thing. We’re like, it worked in Massachusetts, so it’ll work in D.C., or it worked uptown, so it’ll work downtown, or it worked for the Latino kids over here, who are first-generation Americans, so it’ll work for the immigrant kids who just got to our shores.

We know these things are not true, yet we don’t invest the effort, or the time, or the energy, or, frankly, the money to differentiate in ways that are culturally responsive. The tool of cultural responsiveness is a technical fix, but the spiritual piece is that people actually have to believe it is worth our investment to train teachers, principals and school leaders in culturally responsive practices. We’re not seeing that across the board.

Operating with a value of equity means we should be able to look at not just outcomes, but our inputs, and they themselves should be equitable. Right now, we know that they are not, in terms of literal dollars and cents, in terms of manpower, in terms of research, in terms of who is conducting the research, in terms of the nonprofits that are being funded and the ones that aren’t, the innovations that are being funded and the ones that aren’t.

We can look at the data about our inputs and investments across this industry and see very clearly that we are not operating equitably. That’s what I mean by operating at a value of equity.

Acknowledging that the work that arose from Charlottesville responded to the context of 30 years ago, what you would say are the priorities that should animate our work going forward for the next 30 years? 

There is finally more energy and commitment to a conversation about the fact that the trauma of poverty is real, and therefore providing — or at least beginning to talk about providing — trauma-informed care to young people is now on the table in a way it wasn’t then.

I also know that there are far too many corners of our work where the mindset of moral impropriety being the cause of someone’s poverty is pervasive, that there are still too many people who think poor people caused their poverty through poor judgment, instead of taking a systemic view of what causes poverty and therefore looking at what we need to do to nullify its effect in the classroom. There are still too many people who think that poverty is a moral judgment.

“I don’t think closing the achievement gap should be the goal. I think closing the equity gap should be the goal, because if there’s not equity in the first place, there’s going to be an achievement gap.”

I say that knowing in 1989, especially in poor communities of color, we were standing in the shadow of the crack epidemic. Oddly, we are standing in the shadows of an opioid epidemic right now, which is very connected to the context of education in this moment. But there are far more resources, and there’s a very different conversation happening about it because the vast majority of the victims, at least the ones who are discussed, are white and live in suburban areas. The context of the proliferation of drug use is not different. The amount of resources in the conversation around it is different in all the ways that affect young people and tear apart families.

Certainly the school choice context is very different. We’re having a different conversation about school governance models than we ever have in history, a different conversation about resources, access in democracy in schools in a very different way. What’s also really important to the context now is that we do have much more access to strong research and scholarship on culturally responsive teaching. That was an underresourced research area. A lot of people just thought it was kind of bunk during that time. It was also pretty new then. It may not have even been described in that way.

What would you say about the role of state policy and state leaders, given this new context, given what we’ve learned from previous years? What should state leaders be thinking about when it comes to educational improvement? 

State leaders should be thinking intentionally about how we stand at the intersection of innovation and democratic engagement. I think we situate those as binaries. We say, you can innovate, but that means that you’ve got to be in a charter model, which means that there is a level of opaqueness about who’s on the board, where the money comes from, what decisions are being made about the content and the culture of the school, etc.

Or, we say, you can have a fully democratic process where you can come to a school board meeting and shout your head off, but those will be places where you can’t innovate. That’ll follow this standard, that you have to follow this practice, and that there’s little room for maneuvering. Not only do I not think that those two are mutually exclusive, it’s deeply unhealthy for us to treat them as mutually exclusive.

I hear from parents all the time who are essentially saying, “I want the innovation. I want my kids to have access to the latest and greatest and best ideas about what works in the classroom, and not be stuck with 1970s, 1980s, 1990s models of education that we know have been bettered.” I hear parents saying they want that kind of innovation, but they don’t want to lose their voice in order to get the innovation. They don’t want their democratic rights to be sacrificed.

This is what this continues to boil down to. Nobody’s saying it that way, but the adults at the table have to be willing to say, “This is actually the crux of the issue.” People want the best of what there is, but they don’t want to lose their voice and their rights in the process. I think it is wise, for state leaders in particular, to be thinking about how their state departments of education set the conditions for both of those things to be true at the same time.

There are all kinds of levers that are being pulled. The one that I’m not seeing being pulled is the one that says, “How do we respect democratic voice and choice, and promote innovation at the same time?”

What role do external partners play to support the work of state leaders?

I think they have more importance than we currently give them, because right now what is happening is state departments of education, school districts, nonprofits and nonprofit leaders are creating a plan and then going and requesting community support for it instead of understanding what the community’s desires are, co-creating the plan with the community and having the community express the role that they would like — especially with nonprofits — for that entity to play in accomplishing said vision.

I frankly think we’re doing it backward. This is what I mean about voice. All these plans get put out, and then members of the community are asked to support it. But I wasn’t involved in the creation of the plan in the first place, therefore I’m not invested in seeing it be executed.

So here we are trying to fix a train while it’s already moving on the tracks, which is basically impossible to do. People are not willing to stop. They’re not willing to go back. They’re not willing to say, “We did it wrong.”

People want to move full steam ahead because they don’t want to admit their mistakes. I believe that the role of advocacy organizations, but most importantly the role of members of the community and the consumers of the products that we are putting out every single day, is essential throughout the entire process.

What issues beyond closing achievement gaps are important for education policy to consider in order to make progress on equity and educational excellence?

I don’t think closing the achievement gap should be the goal. I think closing the equity gap should be the goal, because if there’s not equity in the first place, there’s going to be an achievement gap. Also, I think that understanding what the achievement gap looks like has been very helpful in us more correctly identifying what the problems have been, but it can move into this very scary territory of being incredibly Euro-normative, and normed around a level of wealth that our kids should not necessarily have in order to experience an excellent education.

It’s fascinating — when I started running Teach for America in St. Louis, all our slides, all our presentations, all the things that we used to communicate with the outside world were about how we were trying to make kids from North St. Louis do as well as white rich kids from a school district called Clayton. We changed all that language, because if we are consistently positioning low-income black and brown kids from the North Side in competition with rich white kids from West County, and not only in competition with them, but we’re positioning those white children as the black children’s aspiration, then we’re setting up the wrong system and it will cause us to make some perverse choices.

For me, the goal is about establishing a standard of excellence and equity across the country in every classroom, such that every child is set up to thrive. To me, that’s the whole ballgame.

Ross Wiener is vice president at the Aspen Institute and executive director of its Education & Society Program. Previously, he was vice president for program and policy at the Education Trust and a trial attorney in the U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, Educational Opportunities Section.

The son of educators, Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee has spent decades advancing education policy. He served as governor of Tennessee, president of the University of Tennessee and U.S. secretary of education, and he is now chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. In 2015, he, along with Democrat Patty Murray, shepherded the development and passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act, which replaced the No Child Left Behind Act. In this interview, Alexander reflects on how the 1989 Education Summit set the template for current federal education policy, the leadership of Southern governors during the event, the “Christmas miracle” of the Every Student Succeeds Act’s passage and the parallels between kindergarten and politics.

What were the most significant accomplishments from the 1989 Education Summit and the standards-based agenda that emerged from it?

The combination of the summit in 1989 and President [George H.W.] Bush’s strategy for implementing the goals established at the summit created the federal education policy we have today. The summit didn’t even invite members of Congress because they didn’t want the members of Congress involved in telling the states how to rate the schools.

The agenda from the summit created the goals, the standards and the tests to see whether anyone was reaching the goals. It involved the nation’s governors in a continuing effort to implement all that and created a federal education policy which, in my opinion, is about the right balance. We’ve settled back to about where we were when Bush left office, which was, No. 1, national education goals, which the governors agreed on in 1989, and No. 2, an expanded so that you could have reliable state-by-state comparisons of whether students were succeeding.

Since the summit, we’ve had the rise and fall of the “national school board,” an overactive U.S. Department of Education. We moved toward that with President Bill Clinton’s , which Bush objected to. Then we had [President] George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind, which arguably was more like a state education law; it was more prescriptive. And then, President Barack Obama and [his education secretary] Arne Duncan went even further with implementing No Child Left Behind through the use of waivers to try to tell states what to do about how to evaluate teachers, how to fix schools that were falling behind and what standards they needed to have.

All that led to the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015, which was a collective effort that included governors, teachers unions and Congress saying we’re tired of Washington telling states and local school districts so much about what to do with their schools. It restored the level of autonomy and state responsibility that existed at the end of President George H.W. Bush’s term. That’s why I would argue that the effect of the summit was to create the federal education policy structure that exists today.

Southern governors stepped up to prioritize education and in some ways created the architecture of the 1989 summit. Why were Southern governors such leaders in this work?

Two reasons. First, a number of us were all elected on the same day. Bill Clinton, Bob Graham, Dick Riley and I all were elected in November 1978 in states that adjoined one another or were close together. William Winter in Mississippi was already in office. We were similar in age and beginning our governorships at about the same time. Second, and probably more important, we all had a common problem to solve. Our states were economically behind, our family incomes were much lower than the rest of the country and all of us came to the conclusion about the same time that better schools meant better jobs. We began to work together through the governor’s associations and our friendships on different ways of improving teacher quality, setting higher standards, what to do about schools that were falling behind, how to have better tests.

About the time we were elected to our second terms, the Nation at Risk report came out during President Ronald Reagan’s administration in 1983 and produced more of a national response for the need to improve schools. But we were already well along by the time that came. Then, in 1985 and 1986, I was chairman of the nation’s governors, and Bill Clinton was the vice chairman, and we agreed that the governors would spend the entire year on one subject, and that was education, and that hadn’t been done in a century, just spending it all on one subject.

That state-by-state initiative and then our National Governors Association effort, called , led toward the summit. The summit never would have happened if so many governors, especially Southern governors, hadn’t been working in their own states on the same issues.

On shaping the national conversation, I think it’s fair to say the discussion in the 1970s on elementary and secondary education was about racial justice, social inequity and economic equity. In the 1980s, the focus didn’t leave those issues behind, but it shifted attention to accountability, results and that low-income states and low-income students were best served by helping them actually learn something so they could succeed in the world.

In 1984, Tennessee became the first state to pay teachers more for teaching well, but Florida was right behind us trying to do the same thing. And Arkansas was focusing on improving teaching, too. The focus shifted from equity to results, and the governors were leading that charge.

You’ve written about the importance of education for citizenship and for character development. Was there an unintended consequence of shifting focus and attention away from those areas as the standards-based accountability movement gained steam?

It was a larger accomplishment than most people thought to say our goals are math, science, English, history and geography. That meant that the school curricula across the country shifted in that direction, and that means there’s less time for music and art and less time for character education.

As far as civics education goes, that was gradually being replaced by social studies, which I never agreed with, because I liked [former teachers union chief] Albert Shanker’s definition of a public school, “A public school is for the purpose of teaching immigrant children reading, writing and arithmetic, and what it means to be an American, with a hope that they would go home and teach their parents.”

Shanker was an old-school, old-fashioned, anti-communist, liberal patriot who believed that one important purpose of a public school was to help students understand what it meant to be an American, what is distinctive about our country. By the 1990s, the worst-performing subject in high school Advanced Placement tests was not math or science, it was U.S. history.

Can you articulate what the federal role ought to be relative to state leadership? What is the role of state leadership relative to community leadership?

The federal role should be, No. 1, bully pulpit. For example, in 1984, Reagan came to Knoxville to Farragut High School in Tennessee to say that the master teacher program I had proposed would be good for the country. He didn’t arrive with a pot of money or with a federal mandate to make anybody do it. But he was a big help in getting the state to adopt it. The bully pulpit, pointing out what goes well or, as when [Education] Secretary [William] Bennett went to Chicago and said, “These are the worst schools in the country,” pointing out what’s not going well, that can be enormously powerful.

No. 2, I think during the last 30 years we’ve agreed that it’s useful to have the state tests that were required by the federal No Child Left Behind law of 2002 that disaggregated student results so we can see if children are actually being left behind in the core subjects. We should keep that, and we agreed to do that with the Every Student Succeeds Act.

“If you want something to have broad acceptance and to last a long time, you need buy-in from all parts of the community, and that usually includes some of your political adversaries. The work that we did in the 1980s as governors was completely bipartisan. We checked our politics at the door.”

But a third example of the federal role should be restored to states, which is what we did when we fixed No Child Left Behind, and that is the major responsibility for figuring out what to do about the test results. What does that mean in terms of evaluating teachers? What does that mean in terms of adopting accountability systems? What does it mean in terms of coming up with ways to turn around schools that are having a hard time?

If I were governor today, I would probably be doing exactly what I did in the 1980s, which is pushing for higher standards on the national goals and effective tests to measure progress toward the goals. I’d be trying to reinstitute the master teacher program.

We’re living through a time of polarization that has made its way into education policy debates. You’ve led political processes that have created bipartisan consensus. Do you have any advice for governors and state leaders about how they might grow a bipartisan spirit in education policy making?

I don’t think it’s that complicated. If you want something to have broad acceptance and to last a long time, you need buy-in from all parts of the community, and that usually includes some of your political adversaries. The work that we did in the 1980s as governors was completely bipartisan. We checked our politics at the door.

One of my favorite examples is Florida and Tennessee were competing to see who could be the first state to create a master teacher program, where some teachers were paid more than others based upon their excellence. Yet Bob Graham, the governor of Florida, stopped in Nashville in 1984 on his way home and met privately with the Democratic chairman of the state Senate who had the decisive vote on whether Tennessee would succeed with its plan. He helped persuade her to do it and then went on back to Florida.

That Democratic governor advocated for an issue that was heavily opposed by the National Education Association, which was an important constituent in Democratic politics then and now. He was willing to do that in a bipartisan way to help children. But we still see that today. When we fixed No Child Left Behind in 2015, a lot of people said it couldn’t be done, that the world of elementary and secondary education was too partisan and too difficult. I remember Duncan told me he thought the odds were 10 to 1 we wouldn’t succeed.

But when we marked the bill up in the Senate committee, which included 22 senators ranging from Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders to Rand Paul, the vote was 22 to 0. It was unanimous. When we eventually passed the Senate, it attracted 85 votes, and when Obama signed it in December, he called it a Christmas miracle. It’s very possible to work in a bipartisan way. In fact, the only way to create a lasting result that everyone buys into is to do it that way.

It still could happen, but it happens by lessons you learn in kindergarten. I work a lot with Patty Murray, the Democratic leader of our committee. She used to be a kindergarten teacher, and you learn to work well together, you don’t surprise one another, you learn to trust one another, and then you work on the things that you can agree on. If we follow a fairly simple formula, like the governors were able to do in the 1980s, we senators can do it 30 years later if we just put our minds to it.

We had the teachers unions, as well as the National Governors Association, in strong support of what we did to fix No Child Left Behind. As a result, I think classroom teachers in 100,000 public schools can know that federal education policy isn’t going to change for eight, 10 or a dozen years because we hammered out the differences of opinion, came to a consensus and got a result.

Ross Wiener is vice president at the Aspen Institute and executive director of its Education & Society Program. Previously, he was vice president for program and policy at the Education Trust and a trial attorney in the U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, Educational Opportunities Section.

Janet Murguía is president and CEO of UnidosUS, formerly named the National Council of La Raza, the largest Hispanic civil rights and advocacy organization in the United States. Before joining UnidosUS, Murguía served as deputy assistant to President Bill Clinton and was executive vice chancellor for university relations at the University of Kansas, her alma mater. She is the child of Mexican immigrants. Here, Murguía talks about why setting goals is not enough, the need to expand early childhood programs for Latino children and how she would like the business community to stand up for Latino students.

What were the most significant accomplishments from the 1989 education summit and the standards-based agenda that emerged from it?

There was a sense of stronger accountability at the federal and state levels to ensure that there would be equitable education for all students, and especially historically underrepresented and marginalized students, including Latinos and Latinas and our Hispanic cohorts.

How would you characterize the impact of a standards-based agenda on Latino students’ education over these past 30 years?

Building off the momentum from Charlottesville at the time, the National Council of La Raza led a coalition to petition the George H.W. Bush administration to issue an executive order focused on Hispanic education. For us, this was monumental. It was the first time that the federal government created a mechanism to hold itself accountable for the performance of Hispanic students and Latino students.

There’s no question that we were inspired by and moved by that gathering where we saw such interest in accountability. It’s also fair to say part of that impact we’ve had since that gathering was that we helped to shape the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, and that was the first piece of major education legislation to hold states and schools accountable for how well they educate Latino children.

That kind of engagement, for us, has continued, and we’ve seen it build since that time. I’m very proud that in the most recent authorization of the 50-year-old Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which was then changed to the Every Student Succeeds Act, we were instrumental in ensuring that schools would be held accountable for the academic progress of the nearly 5 million English learners.

We have seen Latino students experience major gains since Charlottesville. One is the high school , which was 36 percent in the 1990s — twice as high as for African-American students and four times as high as for whites. Now, the dropout rate for Latino students is less than 10 percent.

In 2017, 23 percent of Latino eighth-graders scored at or above proficient in reading, compared with 45 percent of their white peers, and in eighth-grade math, 20 percent of Latinos scored proficient, compared with 44 percent of their white peers. We have to continue to strengthen the accountability systems we have in place in order to measure how well schools are serving all students.

We’ve seen some of the positive impacts coming out of the Charlottesville convening, but we still have a lot more progress to make. We’ve seen significant demographic changes occurring in the country since that time that mean there should be a more urgent imperative to address accountability as it relates to students of color and, in particular, Latino students.

Since the 1989 Education Summit, what are the lessons learned? What are the unintended consequences that we can see more clearly in hindsight? 

It’s not enough to declare goals in education. You do need a North Star, and setting high standards is part of the equation, but a system of supports and investments also needs to be in place to ensure progress. We have to prioritize education funding and ensure that resources are equitably allocated to benefit students with the highest needs and the schools that serve them. I think Title I grants for local education agencies provide crucial support, and that helps ensure low-income children can meet challenging state academic standards.

But while the Latino public school population has doubled over the past 20 years, three-fourths of Latino students are with fewer resources, less access to advanced coursework and lower high school completion rates. So we’ve got to make sure we’re setting goals and making sure we’re clear about the standards that we want to meet, but we also need investments targeted in the right ways and in the right places so that these students can be fully able to participate in education.

“We need a rising tide, so we need the investments and the resources, but we also need to recognize that a rising tide by itself doesn’t always lift all boats. We have to be very intentional about how we’re going to connect best with the students who need to be served.”

In addition, we could do more to support teacher preparation in the education of English learners (EL), because we know that most teachers are going to encounter an EL student in their classroom at some point, and while the EL population has grown 60 percent over the past two decades, federal funds for ELs have increased by — wait for it — 1 percent since 2009. That’s just unacceptable.

In 2016, not having enough qualified teachers to teach English learners. There are red flags being waved left and right, and yet we still haven’t seen the response that we should.

In terms of lessons learned: One, we need a rising tide, so we need the investments and the resources, but we also need to recognize that a rising tide by itself doesn’t always lift all boats. We have to be very intentional about how we’re going to connect best with the students who need to be served.

The other lesson is we need to invest in our students well before they enter the K-12 system and expand access to high-quality early-childhood education.

Although Latino children are the fastest-growing segment of the child population, they have the lowest enrollment in early childhood education programs. Something’s really wrong when you have a fact like that. We need to expand Head Start and school readiness programs that provide early childhood education, health and nutrition programs that would help us reverse that trend. Nationwide, 37 percent of Head Start students are Latino, but there are many more who are eligible who lack access due to limited slots.

Coming out of 1989, there was not just bipartisan support, there were also interesting alliances built across civil rights organizations and the business community. It feels like there’s less of that consensus right now. Do you agree? What do you think it will take to reinvigorate that kind of coalition?

There’s no question that there are some fractures. Strong leadership and someone who can unify the country around a common vision for education goals that include everyone would help a lot.

These needs and inequities across our education system are tough, and it’s hard enough to figure out how we can come together, but when you have someone who’s exploiting divisions and not creating a common vision for how we can get on a path to an inclusive education system that provides a quality education for everyone, you’re going to have folks who are going to retreat to their corners and fight for themselves.

You have a unique role of having a network of local community-based organizations, governors’ offices, and state and federal policymakers. What do you wish local community leaders and families understood better about education policy? What do you wish policymakers understood better about the aspirations and realities of the families that you’re trying to serve?

Where I feel like we have the greatest potential is in making sure that our community is engaged and knowledgeable about where they can weigh in on behalf of their children. So, parental involvement, educating community leaders about who makes decisions where, about better using the policies that affect how their children are educated, and the resources that are tied to them, are important levers for us. Advocacy, I think, is emerging as the most important tool in our toolbox to use in reinforcing accountability.

One of the tensions that continues to play out that we also saw during No Child Left Behind is the push and pull between federal and state government and who has more control over education. The fact is, education requires a partnership between states and the federal government. Both are responsible in serving our students.

We can make sure that our parents and community leaders know where they can play a role in that, whether it’s making sure they have the right information to know how they can engage at the local level, and to know where candidates stand on education. Are they going to put a stake in the ground to create a vision for an education system that will be supported at the federal level and complement what folks can do at the state and local levels? Can they demand that of candidates who are running for president today and use information to share about what should be included in commentaries by any of the candidates?

If you could convene a summit to focus on the most important issues facing us in the future, what you would organize? Whom would you invite?

It was great that we had the 49 governors and that state governments really put a stake in the ground when we last convened, but I do think the future solutions that are going to be created for our country, and this is true at the state and local levels, are going to require public-private partnerships. We have to have not just governors invested and not just even a president, which would help a lot, but the private sector has to play a bigger role.

Many of them came out and embraced a lot of the efforts to create standards, and many, as a result, endorsed the charter school movement. We need to make sure the voice of the private sector is engaged on behalf of all our students.

There could be more done by the private sector and leaders to bridge a set of policy goals that would advance all our public education system. As much as you hear CEOs advocate for tax reforms that benefit their companies, they have a future workforce that they need to be focused on and they need to be doing more to advocate for policies that will impact all their future workers — and that means all our students.

I would like to hear a stronger voice by CEOs and leaders in the private sector on behalf of access to early childhood education, and when folks are testifying on behalf of expanded Head Start, when their lobbyists are on the Hill advocating for any kind of tax reforms or tax cuts, it’d sure be nice for their list to include — and high on their list — access to early childhood education, access to tech-based STEM and STEAM.

I’d like to see a convening that reflects community leaders, state and local education players, higher education. We’re seeing our Latino students not having the success they need to have now that we’ve reduced the high school graduation dropout rate to less than 10 percent. They’re not being retained and they’re not succeeding at college. We need to make sure that the private sector’s invested in that, as well as states and the federal government.

We’re all going to have to rely on these students and make sure that they’re getting the right investments and the access to the quality education they deserve, not just because it’s going to benefit our communities, but because it’s going to have an integral impact on the economic success of our country. That point is not being made enough by individuals outside of ourselves today, outside of leaders who represent these constituencies.

We need more leadership at the federal level, more leadership at the state level, and the private sectors to step up and think about the role that they can play, not just in enhancing a part of our education system, but how can they really help and weigh in on policy reforms on behalf of all of our education system.

Ross Wiener is vice president at the Aspen Institute and executive director of its Education & Society Program. Previously, he was vice president for program and policy at the Education Trust and a trial attorney in the U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, Educational Opportunities Section.

When Janice Jackson applied to graduate school, she stated that her long-term goal was to become CEO of Chicago Public Schools. Fourteen years later, in 2017, Jackson made good on her aspiration. She is rare among urban superintendents — she is not an outsider but has spent nearly her entire life at CPS. She attended the district’s schools until college and rose through the ranks as a teacher, principal and administrator before assuming the top job.

Jackson is a stabilizing force for the scandal-plagued district, which has been under mayoral control since 1995. She is the seventh CEO in the past decade; her two predecessors were ousted. Recognizing her leadership, newly elected Mayor Lori Lightfoot asked Jackson to remain in her role instead of installing her own superintendent.

In Jackson’s first year alone, she created an office of equity to address achievement gaps, confronted the painful aftermath of a sexual abuse crisis, released an unprecedented data-centered analysis focused on academic offerings and briefed communities across the city on the findings, and managed community blowback around school closures. Despite all this tumult, coupled with declining enrollment, a 2017 Stanford study found CPS to be one of the fastest-progressing districts in the nation for children in grades 3 through 8.

Jackson’s impact has been as swift as her professional ascent. Here, she talks about why she was a big proponent of the Common Core, how CPS redefined principals’ roles and the need for curriculum equity.

What do you think are the greatest positive accomplishments that come from the 1989 Education Summit and subsequent standards-based reform agenda?

The thing that’s most powerful to me is that leaders from across the country came together, and the goal was not only to establish education standards, but it was also around how we reach those goals, which was a shift in the conversation. Based on what I know about the history of education reform, it was a turning point. I’m not just talking about what kids should be learning in every classroom and every part of the country, but how we teach them.

It eventually laid the groundwork for Common Core. The rollout of Common Core got mixed reviews, but from my vantage point, having been educated in, and working for, Chicago Public Schools, I can tell you that having a common set of standards that are grade-level appropriate and rigorous changed the conversation about what should be happening in classrooms. It allowed administrators to push for needed change and rigor to occur in our classrooms.

What parts of the agenda didn’t get enough attention in the past 30 years?

Two things I would point out that could have been stronger is first, the focus on competency at benchmark grades and making sure that every kid met a particular standard by the year 2000. I think it was commendable that they wanted such an aggressive goal, but it wasn’t realistic given the starting point, as well as the state of school funding. In hindsight, people could have pushed a little bit harder on what would it take to do this. We’ve learned a lot around the role of social and emotional learning and wraparound supports that kids who come from impoverished communities need in order to be successful.

We’ve learned that it’s not just access to a highly qualified teacher and rigorous coursework — it’s all these other things that students need to be successful. But I’m happy to say we’ve learned a lot more over the past 15 to 20 years that’s got public education to a better place.

What have been the lessons learned in standards-based reform?

The next phase beyond equity is getting our students in school a lot earlier. There is a lot to be said about early childhood education, and there’s a debate around once you get kids in early childhood programs, what they should be doing. But I believe that we can use those programs to help students develop social-emotional skills and habits.

The language acquisition piece that many kids, in particular middle- and upper-class kids, get by virtue of their economic station in life, I think we’ve got to focus on that in our school systems. In CPS, we’re making pre-K universal for 4-year-olds, no matter their background or social class. Programs that get students in school earlier and keep them in there longer are needed to make sure kids can access standards.

We’ve come a long way, but now that we’ve made it to this level, we’ve got to narrow the gap between students of color and their peers.

There’s been a lot of attention paid to being one of the fastest-improving school districts in the nation. What are the secrets to CPS’s success that has allowed it to make those gains?

There’s no secret sauce. As soon as you say “secret,” I’m like, “There are no silver bullets.” I’m an educator to my core, so I know this work is hard. As a large school system, we prioritize and empower school leaders in a way that I’ve not seen throughout the country. We work closely with the Chicago Public Education Fund to provide innovative principal development and retention and leadership opportunities, and the fund has engaged more than 250 principals last school year. Additionally, the Bush Institute has been a leader in this space for their innovative framework for effectively recruiting and retaining principals. Through this partnership, CPS was one of the school districts that they identified as a model.

“The focus has to be on equity and equitable opportunities for kids, and that means a lot of different things. In short, it means giving students what they need in order to be successful. And that can’t be kind of a lofty thing that we say; it has to be backed up with funding and resources and human capital.”

Principal leadership played an important role because we couldn’t leverage the type of change that we needed at the central office for 660 schools. We developed our principals to be instructional leaders; we shifted that role from command and organization of the school and made it much more focused on instructional leadership.

We also made college the North Star in CPS. We’re at a point now where our views around that have evolved, because one unintended outcome was that we didn’t pay as much attention as we should have to career and technical education, which we have recommitted to. But I would say, as somebody who has spent my entire life in CPS, we didn’t have a college-going culture at all, or we had it for a select group of students. Because of some of these changes and increases in standards, we make that a goal for everybody, knowing that some kids choose not to go to college, but they should at least be prepared.

The third thing was the use of Common Core and aligned standards. This was one of the best rollouts of an initiative that I’ve seen. Our teachers were interested in getting guidance on what to do at every single grade level to make sure kids were successful. The standards, in my opinion, provided a baseline of what was grade-level appropriate and took the debate away, which was needed.

The last piece is data. We are a very data-rich school system. We got much better at analyzing that data to inform practice.

Are there other aspects where you think the state either ought to be doing more, or other areas where the state is trying to assert its authority in a way where local leadership is more appropriate?

We’ve been lucky that there’s been a lot of alignment. One example I can give is around graduation requirements, where in both Chicago and the state of Illinois, we require students to take a college entrance exam in order to graduate. It used to be the ACT, now it’s the SAT. I can imagine for some districts that could be seen as problematic. There were people who worried that it would make the average SAT or ACT score go down for the district, but that didn’t happen. We saw consistency, and in some cases, increases in those scores. But more importantly, we saw more children going off to college and postsecondary who didn’t bubble up naturally as college-ready students, but because they had access to these exams, they saw it was a possibility.

Speaking as a district chief executive, what do we need to be doing differently in education policy?

It is imperative to have people who are on the ground informing policy as it’s being created and having a role in co-creating it. The last thing we want to do is spend a lot of time researching and learning and then codify a policy that goes absolutely nowhere because folks on the ground think it misses the mark in some way.

We’re trying to make our practitioners see that they are a part of that process. We believe that’s going to create more ownership and increase the likelihood of implementation being successful, and them owning the work and moving it forward.

When I was a principal, one of our superintendents came to a meeting and he said, “If you have an issue around policy, it only takes 45 days to change policy.”

Of course, he was exaggerating; we know it takes longer than that. But it made me think, “You don’t have to sit around and hope things change. As a practitioner, you have something to say and something to offer.” So a lot of my colleagues and I took him up on that.

When I became a central office leader, I wanted to institutionalize that so it’s not just a principal who has a connection with a decisionmaker that has an opportunity to share their thoughts.

We created the Chicago Fellows, which is a program for distinguished principals, and it’s a retention strategy. Each year we invite 25 or 30 of those principals to get executive training, and the other piece is, they do a year-long policy project with me, and I meet with them monthly. They introduce policies; some of them actually become real board policies. We have close to 100 leaders in our schools, among our 660 schools, who not only better understand policy formation and implementation, but they also feel like they’re a part of some of these things that we have introduced. It makes announcing and implementing those things easier because you have true believers on the ground.

Let’s look ahead. What do you think about the future of work and democracy? What do we need policymakers to focus on going forward?

The focus has to be on equity and equitable opportunities for kids, and that means a lot of different things. In short, it means giving students what they need in order to be successful. And that can’t be kind of a lofty thing that we say; it has to be backed up with funding and resources and human capital.

I think the other piece is we have to make sure that students are challenged in every school and every classroom, and unfortunately that still isn’t the case. We can talk about a lot of different inequities, but the biggest one to me is the expectation around what students should do in class every day.

A lot of reforms are innovative and attractive and get people excited, but what happens in the classroom every single day is what’s most impactful on the child’s learning. We have to make sure they have access to high-quality curriculum and teachers who are certified and know what they’re doing — teachers can’t be burdened with doing 10 different things, like curriculum design.

Schools and systems have to be organized in a way where we support teachers so that they can focus on presenting lessons, assessing students’ learning and intervening when appropriate.

In CPS, what we’re focused on next is curriculum equity. We’ve tried adopting various textbooks and creating curricular standards, but what I saw from roles that I’ve had at district leadership levels is you can go to two classrooms in different parts of town, using the same textbooks, yet have students doing very different things.

There’s no explanation aside from the expectations are different, which is wrong, and in some cases, the teachers don’t have the tools. They don’t know whether a book is typically read at the seventh-grade level, as opposed to 12th grade. There are skills and standards students should have mastered, but if they haven’t, teachers have to remediate, but that can’t be the core curriculum because the core curriculum at 10th grade is X.

Those are the kinds of conversations we’ve started to have and unpack in the district. By creating a full library of resources, pre-K through 12, we will be able to point back and give examples of what kids should be doing in classrooms that is appropriate for their grade level. We think that’s going to help us close the achievement gap, which is the single most important thing in public education that we can focus on.

Ross Wiener is vice president at the Aspen Institute and executive director of its Education & Society Program. Previously, he was vice president for program and policy at the Education Trust and a trial attorney in the U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, Educational Opportunities Section.

Jim Hunt, Democrat of North Carolina, served as governor from 1977 to 1985 and from 1993 to 2001. He is known as the nation’s first education governor, having been an early proponent of teaching standards and early childhood education. The Hunt Institute, in Durham, N.C., was established in his honor to inspire and support elected officials and policymakers to improve education. Here, he discusses the importance of leadership, increasing teacher pay, why testing and accountability matter and why governors should care about education.

What do you think are the greatest accomplishments that stem from the 1989 Education Summit and the agreements that were reached around standards-based education reform?

The 1989 Education Summit did not come out of nowhere — governors across the country, including many in the South, had been focused on education. These governors knew they needed to commit themselves to building the economy of their states and providing more high-quality jobs for their people. The key to doing this is education.

At the 1989 Education Summit, the nation’s governors presented their ideas about the importance of education and agreed to set higher standards for education and measure the performance of their schools. Without rigorous standards and strong tests, we don’t know how well our schools are performing and won’t be able to make meaningful and equitable improvement.

When you think about public education in North Carolina, or as you look across the country, how would you characterize the results for students and schools that came from the summit’s commitments?

The states increased their focus on their schools and education progress as the way to improve their states. The National Assessment of Educational Progress had existed for a while, and governors became aware of its availability and started to really use it. We started focusing on how our students were doing and had the advantage of NAEP.

After the Charlottesville summit, the president and the governors came out of there realizing that if we are not to be a nation at risk, then we had to improve education. The governors decided, “I want my state to be a leader. I’ve got to go home and have us improve education, and I, as the governor, have to lead it.”

It eventually became a race to the top — each state wanted to be the best. The governor had to be the main leader and coordinating force because they had the bully pulpit.

A lot of analysts would say we’ve made some gains based on that agenda, but we’ve hit a plateau. In recent years, progress has not been as dramatic as we saw earlier in the standards-based reform era. How do we re-energize the agenda for educational improvement?

I think we need a new call to arms. Let’s do this thing again.

We need to rediscover the energy behind the Charlottesville summit, which must start at the state level. We need to sharpen our focus on the economic importance of education, to understand that we are living in a highly competitive global economy and that America’s well-being depends on schools. This has to start at the state level, with governors and legislators understanding the importance of this work, committing themselves to high standards and reliable tests that give us accurate information about how our schools are performing.

But we have to use the information that comes from those assessments to improve education and invest the resources needed to improve instruction and learning. This won’t happen in a vacuum — states need to collaborate and share ideas, but they also need to be ready to compete with one another. In the years before and after the 1989 summit, our governors all wanted to be the best, and that led to real progress on education across our states.

We are living through polarized times when education issues have been very politicized. Can you offer advice to governors and other state leaders about how to recreate the bipartisan spirit that animated the earlier years of standards-based reform?

I think we get the bipartisan spirit and leadership by seeking out partnership from the business community to advocate on behalf of education reforms. Education is the most important thing we can do to improve our economies, and business leaders know that. State leaders also need to listen to teachers, principals and parents and engage directly with schools. As governor, I regularly convened teachers to help inform the policies I was crafting.

We need a network of leaders on both sides of the aisle who are committed to education and make it a priority, and who are willing to learn from other states. As governor, I met regularly with my peers in other states, such as Gov. Tom Kean in New Jersey, and we shared the best programs and replicated them in our own states. Kean and I established the Hunt-Kean Leadership Fellows program to help a bipartisan group of future governors understand the most important ways to improve education and equip them with the tools and knowledge to drive real progress in their states.

Standards-based reform has become very contentious among teachers, leading to very public and very political issues. What do we need to do to create greater support again among teachers? 

Teachers are our most important school-based asset. We need to identify ways to continue to support them. One of the things that came along after Charlottesville, when Bill Clinton served as president, was the formation of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. I led the group that formed the [board] and chaired it for its first 10 years. It was primarily made of teachers but included administrators, business leaders, parents and other key stakeholders. We focused on setting high standards and then on encouraging states and localities to increase the compensation of those who met those high standards. It was an important way to show teachers that we supported them.

Teachers have other concerns, but I think low salaries is the driving force behind the teacher strikes we’ve seen. States need to raise teacher pay to be competitive and get the best people in classrooms.

“States need to collaborate and share ideas, but they also need to be ready to compete with one another. In the years before and after the 1989 summit, our governors all wanted to be the best, and that led to real progress on education across our states.”

The pay of administrators also needs to be increased, and we need more paraprofessionals in the classroom to help. When I first ran for governor, I pledged to make sure every child learned to read, and in the first budgets that I put through the legislature, we provided funds for a teacher assistant in every classroom in grades 1, 2 and 3 across the state. That was an immense commitment, but it provided the kinds of classroom support we needed to have, especially helping kids in underresourced communities.

The resources are there if we decide we’re going to put them into education and have great schools and be a great nation. Assessment is also extremely important, and I am concerned about the movement to opt out of testing or reduce the assessments that provide critical feedback to state leaders, the business community, parents, schools and teachers about how our children are growing and achieving. Learning will decrease instead of increase, and those parents who are concerned about the tests and telling their students not to take the test are selling their students short — their students can pass those tests. And parents need to have confidence that their students are learning. You can’t have that confidence unless they are measuring what they’re learning. It takes that to get into college, it takes that to have a good career.

We’re in a moment when state leadership is ascendant in a way that recalls the compact that was created out of Charlottesville. The federal role has been decreasing with the passage of [the Every Student Succeeds Act at the end of the last administration and with the way the current administration approaches enforcement and oversight. You’ve talked about the need for more funding and the need for testing and accountability. States in the past 10 to 15 years have become much more invested in teacher evaluation and school improvement. How would you advise governors and state leaders to approach their role in leading education improvement?

Their role is the primary one. I would advise the governors in every state, and those who aspire to be governor, to focus on education. I would encourage every governor to work with their state board of education to make sure the standards are rigorous. Governors need to be strong leaders who support good testing and accountability. The students who will suffer when we lower our standards are those who are already underserved.

I would advise the governors in every state to do what we did by making education their main priority. To be successful, they will need to be the driver of support across the state by connecting with stakeholders and making sure all of them are focusing on results.

Governors should convene their own state conferences — include business, policymakers, parents, educators and students — to discuss real ways to improve their schools. And then governors need to be committed to putting additional resources into the schools. If the ESSA plans are inadequate, the governor needs to be involved in making sure that they are fixed and that strong plans are put in place with the necessary funding. And if it means changing the tax system so that we have additional funds, that’s exactly what we ought to do.

What will it take to create real opportunity for students of color and for students who are growing up in low-income families?

In every state, we know that we are not doing enough to help our students and schools most in need of additional support. If I were president today, I would double or triple Title I funding immediately. But in addition to increased resources, we need to focus on high standards and how to accurately measure learning so that we know how we are doing. We must use that information to focus on how we specifically, tangibly, are going to help lower-income students.

What we did with No Child Left Behind and the things we have done since then have helped, but there is another dimension. We also need to stop the resegregation of our public schools. Segregation hurts our students, our communities and our democracy; it is unacceptable, and we must find solutions to ensure our public schools reflect what makes America so special.

Critically, we are now seeing states focus on investing in early childhood education. We know now that the first three years of life are the most important. Those who are in the toughest circumstances ought to have the best and the most support.

Ross Wiener is vice president at the Aspen Institute and executive director of its Education & Society Program. Previously, he was vice president for program and policy at the Education Trust and a trial attorney in the U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, Educational Opportunities Section.

Kaya Henderson is the head of community impact at Teach for All, the international counterpart to Teach for America (both organizations were founded by Wendy Kopp). From 2010 to 2016, Henderson was chancellor of DC Public Schools, succeeding Michelle Rhee. Under Henderson, DCPS had the biggest growth of any urban district on the National Assessment of Education Progress, graduation rates increased, student satisfaction improved and enrollment climbed. She is also a member of the Aspen Institute’s Board of Trustees and a co-founder of Education Leaders of Color.

Here, Henderson discusses how leading by fear does not work, the missing piece of student accountability and why she thinks schools alone cannot be responsible for closing the achievement gap.

What do you think are the most positive accomplishments that came from the 1989 Education Summit and the standards-based reform agenda that it helped to propel?

Over the past 30 or more years, we have learned a lot about the condition of our education system. In 1983, A Nation at Risk sounded the alarm on the problem — that our schools were not preparing our students for the future. But we still didn’t know enough about what it would take to transform our schools. In 1989, the Education Summit helped us understand the need for rigorous standards, assessments and data to measure our educational progress.

The summit reminded us that what it meant to graduate from high school in Massachusetts was very different from what it meant to graduate from high school in Mississippi. In a world that has increasingly fewer borders and more work opportunities across different geographies, it was important for a standard to be a standard across the country. I know people have concerns about standardized testing, but the desire to measure our performance and our progress, and to hold people accountable, is important. One of the things that the summit did was say, “We are responsible for everything — from pre-K to adult literacy.”

Every place in the world that I know of that has made broad, transformative educational change has made that change because of a strong government commitment. The Education Summit reminded us of this governmental role. We shouldn’t forget that the next three presidents all placed a premium on education, and the role the government could play in improving student outcomes.

What are the most important lessons you take from these 30 years of standards-based education reform? What could we have done differently?

While there is a lot that we all could have done better, it is important to reiterate that it is only because of the movement toward standards and assessments that we are able to have thoughtful conversations about differences in student performance. This continues to be the most important outcome of the past 30 years.

That said, one of the things that I’ve learned over the years is that the people closest to the problem usually have the best solutions. The co-creation of solutions by people who have educational expertise and the people close to the problem usually gets you to better outcomes. Broadly, we just didn’t take this approach in standards-based education reform.

The biggest example is the Common Core Standards. I am a huge supporter of the Common Core Standards. I aligned all our work at the school district around the standards.

Common Core didn’t work because most districts and states didn’t do the work to connect the high-quality standards with the work that was happening on the ground. There was a belief that if there was an assessment in place, it would drive all the downstream things that needed to happen. By downstream, I mean the development of curriculum that’s aligned to the assessments, the creation of good professional development to help teachers move from what they had been doing to the new standards and systems to create ongoing professional development that is rooted in the new content, not rooted in pedagogy. This was a huge shift from the teaching and professional development that was happening before.

There was a belief that if people had this high-stakes test, that they would do all the other things necessary to make the tests and the standards effective. What happened was, some people did some of those things; most people did not.

Without thoughtful implementation, high-stakes tests hit, and kids freaked out because this wasn’t content they had been taught. Teachers freaked out because they hadn’t been teaching this material. Parents freaked out because their children were not performing as well as they expected. Everybody was freaked out, so the test must have been bad. Therefore, the Common Core must be bad. The truth was that the tests and the standards were fine. It was how we implemented them that was bad.

“It is only because of the movement toward standards and assessments that we are able to have thoughtful conversations about differences in student performance. … My worry is that the backlash against standards and accountability is going to push us all the way back to no accountability. … We have to find a happy medium.”

We can see specific examples of how poor policy implementation risked overall dissatisfaction with high-quality standards. At DCPS, we were one of the first districts to use student achievement data as part of our teacher evaluation system. We relied on our assessments to be fair measures of the progress. Our work was lauded by many, including the U.S. Department of Education. However, when DC changed assessments to the PARCC [Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Career], I decided that we should suspend the use of value-add data as part of teacher evaluation for a year.

I was initially chastised by Arne Duncan’s Department of Education for this decision. I said, “You’ve just got to be mad at me, but this is not how things work in school districts. I can’t put people’s jobs on the line for a test they’ve never seen before and a curriculum that we are just beginning to use. At some point, this is a human endeavor and I’ve got to manage change in a way that makes our teachers able to implement.” With the market-driven, business-oriented philosophy underlying some reforms over the last 30 years, we lost some of what we know needs to happen in schools and school districts in order for things to work.

You are doing a lot of work outside of the United States right now and seeing a lot of different contexts. What should we be drawing from other countries to inform American policymaking? How do you see student success defined in different countries?

What I see happening abroad is very similar to what I see happening here: Policymakers and people are disconnected from one another. Governments, policymakers and businesspeople have one set of ideas on what the goals of schools should be. Parents, students and teachers, sometimes, have a different set of ideas. In the case of the former, the goals are very closely tied to work and the ability to be employed. For the latter, it is about economic security for sure, but also happiness, freedom, choice and opportunity. It is about self-actualization. These two sides feel in tension more and more these days.

I worry that we have swung so far in the direction of focusing on jobs, STEM and alignment to work that we haven’t tempered that with well-being, happiness and the things that make you a person, not just a worker.

My worry is that the backlash against standards and accountability is going to push us all the way back to no accountability, which was not good, either. We have to find a happy medium.

Are there ways in which we need to shift our frame about how to think about the role of accountability?

We need to rethink the overall approach to accountability and engagement. In a high-functioning system, all the stakeholders should be both accountable and engaged. Currently, while there are a few stakeholders who are both accountable and engaged, too many are accountable and not engaged, or neither accountable nor engaged.

Here’s what I mean: We made a big push to make teachers and principals accountable without making all the people who are around them accountable as well. For example, unions should not get to sit on the sidelines and scream and holler without answering the question, “What’s your role in this and how are you helping?” In my experience, teachers unions are neither accountable nor engaged.

Students are an interesting case as well. In many systems, even systems like mine that had robust teacher, principal, central office and personal accountability for me as a superintendent — we probably had more up-and-down accountability than a lot of other places — students were not accountable and often were not engaged.

Our intent was to implement assessments that would help students and their parents understand if they are on track for success — to provide them useful information to hold themselves accountable and to help them engage. However, we got so invested in the strict accountability for teachers and for schools that we forgot to engage with parents and students and we forgot to help them understand how they are also accountable.

We also must remember that fear is not the thing that makes people do their best work. I think about how we talked about teachers when Michelle Rhee was chancellor versus how we talked about teachers when I was chancellor.

I came in saying, “I have the best teaching force in the country. We might still have more professional development to do, but I would put my teachers up against anybody.” When people feel motivated, inspired, and that you believe in them, they’ll climb a mountain. I believe that’s part of the reason why we were able to see such significant results. People do their best work when they are not fearful. That was not how I did my best work, so I ignored the people who were trying to scare the bejesus out of me — the federal government and the state — and I did my work differently.

We have to think about accountability and engagement in a very different way.

When you say we haven’t embraced student-level accountability, what should that look like?

Some places have end-of-course exams, where student accountability means you don’t graduate if you don’t pass the test. Of course, these places face their own set of challenges with ensuring tests are sufficiently rigorous and that instruction still emphasizes the joy of learning. In my ideal system, there would be skin in the game for students and the ability to recognize students when they succeed.

So much of what’s animated the standards-based agenda in terms of rhetoric is around the need to focus on equity. You celebrated the commendable gains in DCPS, but gaps persist in significant ways. Talk about what needs to happen to make extra gains in equity.

I have never talked about closing the achievement gap. I know we as a movement do, but I don’t believe that schools alone can close the achievement gap. The achievement gap is an economic gap that schools didn’t create. I think schools are one of the best chances to help narrow the gap, but in D.C., a city that has the largest socioeconomic gap of any major metropolitan area in the country, the fact that you expect schools alone to close the achievement gap is unrealistic to me.

Also, I have observed that if a parent’s own kids are achieving, they don’t actually care about the achievement gap. They may care intellectually, but it’s not going to make them do anything different. Every parent wants their kid to have every advantage possible. The truth is that in order to give every kid every advantage possible, we need all parents working together as part of the solution.

How we thought about it at DCPS was from an equity perspective: What do we want for all kids, not just the kids who are struggling? We want them to master reading and math. Sure, that’s the low bar, but we also want them to speak a foreign language, play an instrument, excel at a sport, do community service, have internships.

We had to put different supports in different places in order to get people to that, but when everybody wants their kid to study abroad, you just get a different level of people working together than if you were trying to get some kids up to a certain standard. I worry, frankly, that the fragmentation that has happened because of our desire to celebrate our differences has perhaps made us lose the notion that what we have in common actually makes us work together and gets us to better results. When we are pitting parents against each other, when parents don’t see that their kids need the same thing as other people’s kids, then I don’t know how you get to equity.

When I first got to DCPS, I saw principals who were used to doing whatever they wanted to do because school-level autonomy ruled the day. What I saw was that at places that needed the most, there was a stripping away of everything. In places that needed the least, I saw additional resources. The truth of the matter is, if everybody is out charting their own goals, then you don’t get to a common level of rigor and you don’t get to see progress across all fronts. Black kids are not just competing against white kids in the United States — black, white and every other kid in the U.S. is competing against kids around the world.

The governors were right in trying to set a common education agenda. I understand the tensions in trying to do something nationally in a staunchly federalist environment, I understand why some of these questions didn’t get answered, but I think we have shown that by focusing on the important things we have in common, we make progress.

If you were convening a governors’ education summit today, how would you approach that? What issues would you focus on?

I have two answers to that question. First, when I left DC Public Schools, I committed to myself that I would never just work on education because without health care, housing and jobs, education is one leg of a four-legged stool that will fall down — it can’t stand on its own. I have seen too many kids who have housing insecurity and food insecurity, too many people for whom a sickness can wipe out the whole family, too many people for whom even if they work, they don’t make enough to support their family. That stuff gets in the way of the work that educators do. That does not mean that we shouldn’t do what we, as educators, are paid to do and try to knock down every barrier. It also doesn’t mean that educators shouldn’t be held accountable. It forces us to clarify what we expect educators to accomplish. I would ask the governors to think not just in terms of education, but in terms of young people. Governors have a real opportunity to change the future for youth by addressing all these concerns in a more integrated and aligned way.

My second answer is that this just might be the wrong question. Maybe governors, as important as they are, are simply not the right people to solve the real challenges facing our young people. I have seen young people around the world do some pretty amazing work on issues from gun control to climate change to education. Maybe the right answer is that we should stop asking governors for their thoughts and start listening to kids.

Ross Wiener is vice president at the Aspen Institute and executive director of its Education & Society Program. Previously, he was vice president for program and policy at the Education Trust and a trial attorney in the U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, Educational Opportunities Section.

Tony Evers is a career educator who was elected the 46th governor of Wisconsin in 2018, the first state superintendent in the United States to have become a state’s chief executive. A lifelong Wisconsin resident, Evers served as a teacher, principal, district superintendent and deputy state superintendent, as well as president of the Council of Chief State School Officers.

In this interview, he emphasizes the need for education leaders to pay attention to the out-of-school aspects of education — including poverty, affordable housing, health care and mass transit, and the effects they have on student learning — what the federal government’s role should be and how the growing consensus around social and emotional learning gives him hope for the future of American public education.

What do you think are the greatest accomplishments — relative to your career and your leadership of education in Wisconsin — that stem from the 1989 Education Summit and the standards-based reforms that resulted?

I was a school superintendent at the time, and I remember it was quite extraordinary. Public education as a state responsibility is, for all intents and purposes, silent in our federal constitution. To bring 49 out of the 50 governors together for this purpose was quite an important event. States coming together talking about expectations not only for our schools, but for our kids, and part of the discussion was about early childhood education, which hadn’t had much conversation ever at the national level.

Bringing people together and developing consistent expectations for states and for kids was a great start. It was responding to A Nation at Risk, and there was an opportunity for governors and others across the country to think about what public education was supposed to look like. Having people and states working together on these issues is important. If kids never moved from state to state or from district to district, it might not have been necessary, but the fact of the matter is kids do move, and having some consistency is an important thing.

What have you seen as the practical implications? Are there positive consequences that have been created by the standards-based policy agenda for Wisconsin?

Yes. It goes back to the idea that if you’re in Milwaukee or if you are in Cadott, Wisconsin — some of our largest school districts or smallest school districts — there should be the same expectations for kids and high standards, based on what we know about what children are able to developmentally deal with at different grade levels and age levels. That makes sense, and parents expect it and kids expect it. Having 49 out of the 50 states working together on these issues was a really important outcome. Certainly, there’s some things that we could have done differently, but at the end of the day, having some consistency in what our expectations are was a huge step forward.

Recognizing that those consistent expectations across communities created some essential infrastructure for improvement, what are the most important lessons you take away from these 30 years of standards-based education reform, and are there any unintended consequences that are important to address?

I would say the good around assessments was that we increased our acuity in measurement, and I think tests have become more meaningful going forward. It drove the technological aspect of testing. The downside is as we became more accurate in measuring, we moved quickly into high-stakes testing. I think that probably didn’t serve us very well, because we assumed that the tests were more than just a snapshot in time, that they really could tell us more than what they actually could. Therefore, we were making decisions about labeling kids in schools where that was kind of a shaky connection. That was something that we didn’t do very well.

In addition, there’s always been the issue of resources. There are places in our state where resources were slim to begin with, and as we added more responsibilities to local systems, they didn’t have the capability financially and otherwise to take this on. Federal contribution to schools is not very high — certainly, it’s important, but it’s not the most important resource. Those are the things that we could have done differently that would have helped.

Over time, we’ve also forgotten about things that also impact educational outcomes. The good news is that we’re morphing toward a different place around that, whether we talk about poverty or other issues that impact learning. Clearly, we are in a better place now because at least we understand that impact, whereas we were somewhat clueless about that in the past.

As you think about education and political leadership, what is it going to take to pursue educational excellence and equity moving forward toward the next 30 years?

First of all, we have to acknowledge what equity actually means. It doesn’t mean equality. It’s quite simple in the educational arena — if the kid needs an extra lift because of some circumstance in their lives, they should get it, and if it costs more, we should pay for it. That is something we’re beginning to understand. In addition, we’re beginning to understand how poverty and other issues, such as race, impact kids negatively, especially when they’re little. We are beginning to understand the social-emotional learning needs of kids better than we ever have before. It’s not that I believe that educators and education systems can’t do more and do it better, but I’ll tell you just as being governor: The issue of housing plays a role, the issue of health care plays a role, the issue of transportation plays a role. We have to connect the dots as to what the basic theory of action is, including criminal justice reform. How does that issue impact kids? It impacts kids very directly.

That includes making sure our teachers are culturally appropriate in their teaching. Then we have to have high-quality resources that address issues of culture and race in a proactive way. All that stuff has to be in place on the educational side, including resources. But if we don’t address issues that I mentioned, that for the most part have been viewed outside the realm of kids learning, we will not succeed.

We have a strong tradition of local leadership in education. How did you frame the role of state leadership and state policy in improving educational outcomes? What is the state uniquely positioned to do? 

Well, I think it’s huge. That’s one of the reasons I ran for state superintendent. Frankly, one of the reasons I also ran for governor is that the state has a large part. Do I think we have to be partners with local education agencies? Absolutely. Do I believe that we have to be attuned to what a teacher and 20, 30 kids in a classroom are doing? Yes, we have to be attuned to that.

“If the kid needs an extra lift because of some circumstance in their lives, they should get it, and if it costs more, we should pay for it.”

But unless we provide some leadership at the state level, I just don’t believe we’re going to be able to create a future where all kids are learning at a high level. There are some things that transcend local leadership.

Having affordable housing does rely on the federal government being an active participant. Making sure that we do have good health outcomes for all people in the state of Wisconsin, especially our kids, that does have a federal impact, as do mass transit and criminal justice reform. All those things probably have a larger federal footprint than education does.

As state leaders, whether we’re state superintendents or governors or legislators, we should understand how important it is to connect the dots, making sure that we have affordable housing so that kids aren’t being evicted from their homes with their parents three or four times a year and going to three or four different schools. If we don’t understand how important that is, if we don’t understand how violence affects certain communities, or how abject poverty impacts learning, we will not succeed either.

What gives you the most optimism in this work?

The good news is there are some issues that are nonpartisan that impact the lives of children and allow them to succeed at a better level. I felt extraordinary confidence talking to teachers all across the state during the campaign and subsequent to that. They are still fired up and want to make sure that all kids learn at a high level. I also see people beginning to understand what connecting the dots actually means and how it impacts kids.

The whole issue of social and emotional learning has changed the dialogue around how we want to make sure kids are ready for school. That’s playing out in a positive way. We understand that early childhood education is a way to turn that around in a way that allows kids to be more ready for school. We’ve learned a lot more, and it’s not just all about this is what is going to be taught at this grade level.

For example, Common Core created an opportunity for teachers to be more creative and have more ownership in the classroom. It didn’t quite turn out that way, but for the most part, I think it did. That was a good stepping stone, but the next-best stepping stone is understanding how social and emotional learning impacts little kids and, frankly, adults also.

We’re learning a lot more and we know a lot more. I have a really talented group of cabinet members that are in charge of all these areas. They understand how important it is to connect the dots in order to have kids learn at a higher level. People that are not educators in these positions get it, and they are also advocating on our behalf and on the kids’ behalf.

Ross Wiener is vice president and executive director of the Aspen Institute’s Education and Society Program.

Jeb Bush, who served as governor of Florida from 1999 to 2007, is one of education reform’s most passionate and aggressive advocates. His interest is natural, given the Bush family’s prominence in education leadership. As president, his father, George H.W. Bush, convened the 1989 Education Summit and set forth the America 2000 strategy outlining six ambitious national goals for raise student achievement. His brother George W. Bush championed education reform as governor of Texas and signed the No Child Left Behind law when he was president, expanding the federal government’s role in holding schools accountable for student success.

When Jeb Bush began his tenure as Florida governor, nearly half of the state’s fourth-graders read well below grade level. Twenty years later, in part due to the A+ Plan for Education he introduced, Florida’s fourth-graders are now ranked fifth in the nation for reading achievement.

Bush looks back at the legacy of his father’s summit, why he’s become “radicalized” by what he sees as the irrelevance of the American educational system and his belief that bipartisanship is not a relic of the past.

What are the greatest accomplishments that arose from the 1989 Education Summit?

I’d say two principal things from the policy perspective. The accountability movement, which has waned a bit, in my mind, in the last few years, was spawned by the summit. There was a bipartisan consensus that it was important to do. States embraced that in different ways. No Child Left Behind took it to a new level in terms of accountability. The data shows that when fully implemented, there was a significant improvement in learning, in reading and math, particularly for low-income kids. That’s a meaningful legacy, for sure.

The second one was that it’s a lesson in civility and bipartisanship. Not so much in the states, but in Washington: when people agree they can’t agree. It’s reached a point of ridiculousness. Here’s an example of 49 governors and a president reaching consensus on what the goals should be and continuing to work on it. It’d be nice to see that happen once in a while in Washington.

How did the framework of standards-based reform influence your leadership as governor of Florida? What were the most important things that you saw as the governor’s role or the state’s role in improving education?

First of all, it’s policies driven by the states. It’s never been otherwise. Clearly, Washington’s role ebbs and flows, but it’s always been secondary.

The idea of standards-based reform — not necessarily national standards, but high standards that are assessed faithfully where there’s a consequence that’s different between failure, mediocrity, improvement and excellence — there weren’t many states to emulate in 1998 when I ran.

We took the work that Jim Hunt did in North Carolina and my brother did in Texas. I proposed the in 1998 as a candidate and then implemented it in 1999.

The ideas that were discussed in Charlottesville, states took different approaches. But the ones that I think pushed the envelope the most were North Carolina, led by a Democrat, and Texas, led by a Republican. We took it and put it on steroids, but the ideas of how to put standards and accountability into policy were modeled after Texas and North Carolina.

What are the negative lessons that you’ve taken away, or are there unintended consequences that we can see more clearly in hindsight?

Again, the Charlottesville initiative created a national awareness, similar to A Nation at Risk. It created aspirations for raising student achievement and focused on the achievement gap that continues to persist. I think it’s important that policy is state-driven, implemented locally and empowered by parents. But it’s a national priority — that doesn’t mean the federal government has to have an overarching role in this. I think the Charlottesville experience was important because it heightened the awareness of the need for education improvement, and the only way to do that is to reform.

I think the lesson learned is you’ve got to create an aspiration. It’s got to be a high priority. That’s the positive. I don’t see much negative in creating goals. I’d say as it relates to accountability, and standards, and testing, and all that, there’s lessons learned, for sure. Tests need to be diagnostic as much as accountability tools. Parents need to be aware of where their child stands, in terms of how they’re doing. The tests should be easy to understand. There ought to be feedback given to the next year’s teacher. You shouldn’t have to test to prepare for the test.

“I think the system we have is inappropriate for the world we live in. It’s not yielding lifelong learners. The idea that we have silos of pre-K, K-12, community college, university, to me, it’s increasingly irrelevant. We should turn the system on its head and make it student-centered.”

This whole idea of teaching to the test and all the drills, there’s no evidence that that actually improves results. But that seems to be what many school districts have implemented. I would argue we should probably limit that by state policy changes. Testing ought to be something that is a really useful tool for a parent over the summertime to say, “Here’s where my child has deficiencies. Here’s how I can help.” They ought to be empowered with that information, given tools to continue to be the first teacher of their child. The next year’s teacher ought to have this information as well. There are very few places where that exists today. I think the lesson is that you have to embed it, make it more relevant for improvement, rather than just measuring where a child is at a particular time.

If we could convene a similar summit today, what are the issues that need the most attention to propel gains in the next 30 years?

I’ve become a little more radicalized about this. I think the system we have is inappropriate for the world we live in. It’s not yielding lifelong learners. The idea that we have silos of pre-K, K-12, community college, university, to me, it’s increasingly irrelevant. We should turn the system on its head and make it student-centered. If I was convening a group of 50 governors, I would ask, “How do we get to a point where every child reaches their God-given abilities,” rather than “How do we increase the graduation rate?”

We’ve had big gains in graduation. I’m not critical of it, but the reality is that most students graduating from high school are not career-ready. They haven’t earned a certificate that they could have easily earned if we changed the system that gave the world a signal that this person was capable of an entry-level job that would lead to a meaningful wage. They’re not college-ready, either. We lower the standards for graduation. We lower the standards for entering college.

The result of this is, a full-time student is 12 credit hours rather than 15. We measure four-year degree completions in six years. This is the world of reacting to a governance model that is no longer relevant. I think we should stop organizing ourselves the way we did in 1950 and maybe try a different approach that is focused on lifelong learning, making learning relevant, making sure that children are not just socially promoted year after year and making sure that kids could learn faster and learn more meaningful things, given the access to do it.

If 25 percent of all juniors in high school are capable of taking college-level work and only 2 percent do, why? Why do we do that? Why do we allow that to happen? If a third of our kids are truly college- and/or career-ready, why do we accept that?

I think we need to have a bigger conversation about governance today, because I think the system we have today, 13,000 politicized and unionized government-run school districts, is probably not the best governance model.

A handful of Southern governors from both parties forged the path that the 1989 Education Summit coalesced around. Which states are now the trendsetters?

Florida is definitely one. Utah does a lot of innovation. was pretty forward-leaning in connecting schools to industry credentials. Massachusetts has the highest standards and has maintained them, which is pretty important. Mississippi is now showing significant improvement in learning gains because they’ve begun to transform their system. I’d say Tennessee’s a great example under Gov. [Bill] Haslam, as it relates to teacher preparation.

But there’s not one place that you could look at and say, “Wow, this is what the world’s going to look like in 2029.”

It makes me wonder whether after these three decades of increasingly proactive and prescriptive federal leadership, what it’s going to take to have really visionary state leadership around improvement come forward.

The leaders have to be passionate about it. If you have a big idea in education and you want to implement it, there’s a lot of ways for people to oppose it and there’s a lot of misinformation.

If you’re a governor who wants to transform your education system, you’ve got to be all in. You have to be willing to lose your election. It has to be your highest priority, because the system won’t change. Monopolies don’t go quietly into the night. They just don’t go away saying, “OK, I think you’re right. Maybe we ought to move to a different system.” That’s not how they operate. You have to use whatever political power you have and have the dogged determination to implement something that’s going to take more than a year. It’s going to take more than one election cycle.

The lesson in Florida is that we’ve had governors who have embraced the reform agenda and legislatures that have done the same, with stops and starts. It’s certainly not perfect.

There’s a climate for reform, but reform is not transformation. It’d be great to have a president that could redirect resources from Washington to advance the reforms, rather than just have all these silos that people get in line to get money from without much meaning behind it.

We’re living in a very polarized time, and that politicization has entered education policy debates. What is your advice to governors about how to rekindle the bipartisan spirit of the summit within education policy?

I think there is more bipartisanship, if you will, in the state capitals, depending on the makeup of the legislatures and who the governor is. One of the things that requires some consensus-oriented political activity is the requirement of a balanced budget. You can’t leave without doing that one thing every year. That forces the conversation toward compromise and building consensus.

The forces that push people apart in Washington don’t seem as strong at the state level. There are rewards for getting things done at the state level, whereas in Washington, temporarily at least, it doesn’t appear like that’s really relevant. It’s more how you push back against someone else who disagrees with you where you’re rewarded.

I’m more optimistic about what’s going on in the state capitals. If you look at the approval ratings of governors, they’re rewarded. [Maryland] Gov. [Larry] Hogan is rewarded for acting with civility, and trying to forge consensus, and working in a bipartisan way. Gov. [Charlie] Baker in Massachusetts is lights-out popular. They’re doing this in states where their party isn’t in power in the legislature.

I’m not sure how Washington changes, but it requires the kind of leadership where you’re as inclusive as possible. You don’t personalize everything. You don’t demonize people who disagree with you. It might be they’re just wrong, but that doesn’t mean they’re bad people. That attitude right now is not in vogue in Washington, and it’s dangerous for our democracy. But outside Washington, it’s not nearly as bad.

Ross Wiener is vice president and executive director of the Aspen Institute’s Education and Society Program.