One of education’s deep problems isn’t discovering success. It’s sustaining it. Again and again, we celebrate high-performing schools at their peak, only to watch — or, more pertinently, fail to notice — when they drift, decline or disappear altogether within a decade. This raises a significant and uncomfortable question: If the high-fliers we celebrate and seek to emulate don’t stay aloft, were they really that good to begin with?

When successful schools lose their momentum, the usual suspects are leadership turnover, staff churn, demographic change, political conflict or the quiet assumption that the success was fragile all along. But many of these factors, particularly staff and leadership changes, are not flaws in the system, they’re features.

The average superintendent typically little more than a single contract cycle. Principals tend to remain only about in a given school, with even shorter stints in high-poverty settings. Roughly of teachers leave the classroom within five years. Any school improvement model that works only if the adults stay in place isn’t a model; it’s catching lightning in a bottle. What ultimately distinguishes the schools that endure is not whether turnover happens, but whether effective practices have been institutionalized strongly enough to survive it.

Some analysts have begun to demonstrate this durability problem empirically. Chad Alderman recently asked a deceptively simple question: Do “good” schools stay good over time? He found that in Virginia, only half of the schools that were in the state’s top quartile of schools in 2004 remained there in 2024.

This suggests a thought exercise: If we wanted to predict whether a school’s success will last, what should we look for? Not test scores. Not a charismatic principal. Not a compelling origin story. Those things can tell us a school is working now but clearly don’t predict if it will still be working years from now.

Let’s start by acknowledging that schools are not stable organizations occasionally disrupted by turnover. They are — or ought to be — organizations built to function despite turnover.

What follows is best understood as a working hypothesis based on my observations and experience: an attempt to identify the institutional features that seem to appear, again and again, in the schools and systems whose results persist while others fade

Durable schools tend to share a clearly defined instructional core. Not a “philosophy.” Not a mission statement. An operating system. They use common materials, sequence content deliberately and define effective instruction in observable terms. New teachers are acculturated and trained into an existing model rather than invited to invent their own. Durability begins with instructional clarity as the foundation, with consistency as the structure.

Schools that sustain results minimize variation in the things that matter most, particularly foundational literacy and numeracy instruction. They monitor whether the curriculum is actually delivered. They coach toward specific practices. When drift appears, they correct it.

Fragile systems rely on great teachers. Durable systems assume ordinary teachers and build routines strong enough to support them. Durable systems assume turnover and design accordingly.

One of the more revealing lessons I took from my reporting on New York City’s Success Academy charter school network is that its results cannot plausibly be explained by stable staffing. Neither does it recruit from elite colleges and universities. Teacher turnover in the network has long been substantial, in part because the demands placed on staff are unusually intense. Yet it continued to produce unusually strong academic outcomes, even as it rapidly grew from a single school to more than 50.

As I wrote in :

The de facto model that has evolved is more like the U.S. Army or the Marines: a small and talented officer corps surrounded by enlisted men and women who do a tour, maybe two, then muster out, with new recruits reporting for duty. Teacher turnover, lack of experience and continuity, is widely assumed to be a problem, particularly in urban schools. But it’s never suggested that our military would be better if only soldiers stayed in uniform longer. So far, the relative inexperience of Success Academy teachers hasn’t seemed to compromise their effectiveness.

The lesson isn’t simply that this model works, but that its effectiveness depends on turning instructional expectations into organizational routines rather than individual discretion. In practice, this meant that first-year teachers were not improvising their own curriculum or instructional routines. Lessons were tightly sequenced, materials were standardized across the network and instructional leaders conducted frequent classroom walkthroughs to ensure the model was being executed as designed. Consistency was not aspirational. It was operational.

Nearly a decade after my reporting, Success Academy’s academic results remain consistently strong, suggesting the model was not a temporary reform-era peak but an institutional system capable of sustaining performance despite high staff turnover. That said, its founder, architect and culture-keeper, Eva Moskowitz, is still in place, meaning the ultimate test of its durability is still to come.

Moreover, I don’t think Success Academy’s model is universally portable. New York City is a magnet for ambitious young people willing to endure an intense professional environment for a few years. It’s far from certain that the same dynamic would apply in smaller or less attractive labor markets. Staff churn would likely be fatal in such places.

Looking back, education reform spent decades searching for the miracle school — the visionary leader, the transformative model, the “it’s being done” proof point that dramatic improvement was possible. We found many such schools. What we rarely built were institutions designed to sustain their promising results. Education has never lacked miracle schools and stories. The real challenge isn’t identifying successful schools but learning how to recognize whether their success is institutional or temporary.

Durable success, not temporary breakthroughs, is what the field most needs to find, study and emulate. In a piece, my pal Holly Korbey notes that Kobe Bryant studied Michael Jordan to raise his game, so educators should do the same. I agree, but give me John Stockton, Vince Carter, Cal Ripken or Lou Gehrig as models: guys who were not just good but managed to stay that way for a long, long time.

Two recent national surveys underscore this point and provide sobering data.

A poll of conducted in June by Atomik Research and commissioned by Agency Inc. makes the stakes clear: 65% of parents say they would vote outside their party over education, and 62% said education influenced their vote in the most recent statewide election. Parents are not only paying attention, they are prepared to make education their ballot-box priority.

This sentiment is bipartisan. The same survey found that 67% of Democrats, 67% of Republicans and 70% of independents would cross party lines based on a candidate’s education stance. At a moment when the nation’s politics feels hopelessly polarized, education is one of the rare issues with the power to realign coalitions.

But what parents are demanding is not more of the same. A July by Brilliant Corners, commissioned by The Freedom to Choose Schools, found that 71% of respondents rated U.S. public schools as fair or poor, and more than half said they were dissatisfied with their 2024 ballot choices. These voters, too often treated as afterthoughts, are sending a message: Give us elected leaders who prioritize our children’s education, or we will vote for candidates who do.

The data is clear about what worries families most. According to the same poll, 68% said political interference in schools is a bigger threat to quality education than funding gaps or teacher shortages. Black voters in particular are alarmed: 81% cited efforts to erase Black history and bans on diversity, equity and inclusion as major obstacles to a good education.

Parents are not standing still. They are moving their children to new schools, trying homeschooling or seeking tutoring and enrichment to supplement what their schools cannot provide. According to , nearly 1 in 4 parents have switched school types in recent years. This poll, as well as the one commissioned by Agency, reveal that  almost 60% of parents have considered or started homeschooling within the past five years.

At the same time, according to the EdChoice/Morning Consult poll, the appetite for real options is overwhelming: 74% of parents support education savings accounts, 67% favor charter schools and 69% believe in open enrollment across school districts. Families are not asking for one solution; they are demanding the ability to choose what works best for their children.

What does this mean for political leaders? The lesson is simple: Parents are loyal to their kids, not to parties. If neither major party fully represents families’ priorities today, the one that presents a bold plan will win their trust and their votes.

There is also a warning embedded in this data. When asked what they would do if the education system doesn’t improve, Black and Latino parents said their most likely action was not to opt out of public schools, but to vote for candidates who prioritize school reform and equity. In other words, the door is wide open for bold leaders who put forward credible, family-centered education plans.

So far, too many elected officials have focused on the wrong things. Parents are telling us they want schools that are safe, academically strong and respectful of their children’s identities and histories. They want leaders who expand educational options.

The politics of education are shifting. Parents are frustrated, mobilized and ready to act. The question now is whether political leaders will listen.

If they do, they will find parents ready to support them at the ballot box. 

The national conversation about education, to the extent that one is actually happening, tends to come in two dialects today. The first involves a lot of appropriate hand-wringing about the that started about 10 or 12 years ago, before the sent it over a cliff. This has been particularly acute for the lowest-performing students, who are disproportionately poor, Black and Hispanic.

The more hopeful discussion is about Mississippi and some of its Southern peers, which have bucked these trends, or at least made more progress against the headwinds than the rest of the country. That has, in turn, spurred some excellent journalism about why , and other states and regions have allowed themselves to fall so far behind.

But what’s hardly ever said in either of these conversations is that the declines since 2013 or so came on the heels of two decades of remarkable progress. Perhaps my fellow ed-policy wonks understand that, but I doubt the general public does. And we can’t say it often enough.

That’s for two key reasons. First, as Kant said, the actual proves the possible. It’s important to give people hope that we can turn around today’s challenging circumstances because we did it before, not so long ago. And second, some of the same policies and approaches that worked last time around might work again today. The conventional wisdom might be that education reform failed, but that is factually and historically incorrect.

Which is what made all the more praiseworthy. He noted that Republicans “are now kicking Democrats in the butt” on education policy — but more importantly, he reminded readers about the huge progress made during the reform era:

Student achievement test scores in reading, math and most other academic subjects shot upward between the mid-1990s and about 2013. In 1990, 48% of America’s eighth graders scored below basic competency in math. But by 2013, that was down to just 26%. The best part of this progress was that the scores of the most disadvantaged students shot up the most. Among Black students, the share of those scoring below basic in math fell from 78% to 48%. Among Hispanic students, it fell from 66% to 38%.

Student outcomes are rarely just about what happens in the schools. The policies of that so-called neoliberal era helped, too. Economic growth was strong; income inequality decreased. Between 1983 and 2010, the child poverty rate fell from 30% to about 17%.

Those are enormous gains, amounting to two to three grade levels of progress over the course of a generation or two of students. We would love to see that kind of progress today!

But to Brooks, I would say: It wasn’t just test scores. It was also educational attainment. The proportion of young people graduating from high school and completing two- and four-year college degrees also increased dramatically during this period. That’s true on average, but particularly for Black and Hispanic students.

That’s a lot of information to absorb, so let me highlight some of the best news depicted in these figures:

• The percentage of young Americans with no high school diploma dropped by more than half from the class of 1997 to the class of 2016 — from 14% to 5%.
  
• For Hispanic students, it dropped by a factor of three, from 37% to 12%.
  
• For young men, it dropped from 15% to 6%.
  
• The percentage of young Americans with a two-year degree or higher shot up from 37% (Class of 1997) to 51% (Class of 2016). A majority of young Americans now have a college degree of some sort.
  
• The percentage of young Black Americans with at least a two-year degree shot up from 27% to 42%; for young Hispanic Americans, it more than doubled, from 17% to 36%.
  
• The percentage of young women with at least a two-year degree rose from 41% to a remarkable 57%.

There’s a debate in academe about how much these attainment gains amount to real progress versus “degree inflation.” I’ve certainly been skeptical of some increases in the high school graduation rate, given all the games we’ve seen at the state and local levels, such as the adoption of , It’s arguably never been easier to graduate from high school in America than it is today.

But that doesn’t mean all these improvements in the graduation rate are fake. Doug Harris at Tulane University dug into this a few years ago and that most of the progress was real. It helps that student achievement and attainment were moving in the same direction.

Education reform shouldn’t get all the credit for this remarkable progress in achievement and attainment. — and Brooks wrote last week — schools enjoyed strong tailwinds back then thanks to a booming economy, sharply declining child poverty rates and big increases in spending. All that mattered, too.

It’s also worth noting that college-going has declined significantly in the last few years, partly because of the pandemic and partly because of rising doubts about the value of higher education. That will surely translate into flatlining or even decreasing college attainment rates soon.

But here’s the bottom line: Young people made huge gains from the mid-1990s to the mid-2010s, when education reform was at its zenith. We need to celebrate that success more often. Most importantly, we need to get back to making that kind of progress again.

Fordham Institute research intern Jill Hoppe contributed to the data collection and analysis for this post.

Two decades after Hurricane Katrina, the legacy of New Orleans’ radical education experiment is still contested. Was it a success? The final episode of Where the Schools Went grapples with this question head on.

Doug Harris, chair of Tulane University’s Department of Economics and founding director of the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans, has led the team studying the city’s schools for years. Their findings show both real progress and persistent gaps: higher graduation rates, more students going to college, stronger test scores, but uneven results and questions about whether the momentum can last. 

We talk with Doug about how to make sense of this data and what lessons other cities might take from it:

But of course, data can only go so far. In the second half of this episode, we return to voices you’ve heard from throughout Where the Schools Went to test those findings. 

Chris Stewart reflects on how New Orleans became the center of a national fight over education policy, with critics and champions battling on social media and in statehouses over whether the “system of schools” model would spread. 

Former principal and school founder Alexina Medley, who led a school both before and after Katrina, describes her pride in how far the city has come, but also cautions that the impact of COVID means it now faces a new crossroads. 

Dana Peterson, CEO of New Schools for New Orleans, calls accountability the city’s greatest legacy while cautioning that progress should not be mistaken for success. 

And John White, the former state superintendent, argues that the deepest lesson is about the importance of coherence and its ability to empower educators, hold them to clear standards, and resource schools fairly.

Finally, I share some of my own reflections. As a veteran of the education wars who left school leadership burned out, I found that reporting for this series helped me to reconnect with the purpose of schools and the people who run them. This story, and the city of New Orleans more broadly, offers a lesson not only in how to build better schools, but also in how to practice a better kind of politics.

Listen to the final episode above. 

Where the Schools Went is a five-part podcast series from The Branch, produced in partnership with ����Ӱ�� and MeidasTouch. Listen at or .

After Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans dismantled its public school system in a way no other American city had tried. Neighborhood zones disappeared. The elected school board was stripped of most authority. What emerged was a patchwork of independent charters with near-total autonomy. In the early years, there was energy and innovation, but also chaos. Families had to navigate dozens of separate enrollment processes. Students with disabilities could be turned away or underserved. Discipline practices meant that the city’s schools were ranked among the highest in the nation in suspensions and expulsion rates.

Over time, a new approach began to take shape. Leaders in the state-run Recovery School District started to ask which parts of a school system truly needed central oversight. Guided by principles of equity, accountability, and parent choice, they began to stitch together a more coherent structure. OneApp, a single citywide enrollment process, replaced the maze of school-by-school applications. A centralized expulsion system curbed abusive discipline practices.

Perhaps the most significant change came in special education. After a lawsuit from the Southern Poverty Law Center, the city overhauled how it identified and served students with disabilities. Funding was restructured so schools taking on the highest-need students received more resources. That shift made programs like Opportunities Academy possible, a groundbreaking school for young adults with intellectual disabilities that combines life skills classes with student-run businesses.

By the late 2010s, New Orleans had built a system that left most day-to-day decisions to schools but took a firm hand where fairness and access were at stake. Enrollment became more transparent. Suspension and expulsion rates dropped. Special education services improved dramatically.

In this episode of Where the Schools Went, we hear from the architects of these changes and the educators who made them work. Their story is not one of rebuilding the old district, but rather deciding which levers to pull, which to leave alone, and how to make the few things a system must do work uncommonly well.

Listen to episode four above, and watch for the final chapter debuting Sep. 9. 

Where the Schools Went is a five-part podcast series from The Branch, produced in partnership with ����Ӱ�� and MeidasTouch. Listen at or .

Before Hurricane Katrina, teaching in New Orleans was more than a job. It was a pathway to the middle class; a profession led by veteran Black educators with deep roots in the city and protected by one of the South’s most powerful teachers’ unions. The United Teachers of New Orleans had fought for higher pay, stronger benefits, and job security. But those protections also made it hard to remove ineffective teachers and left principals with little control over who worked in their buildings.

After the storm, the entire teaching force was dismissed. More than 7,000 educators lost their jobs in a single stroke, many learning the news from the evening broadcast. 

The layoffs wiped out decades of experience and dealt a heavy blow to the city’s Black middle class. Some of those educators came back, determined to reopen their schools under extraordinary conditions. At Warren Easton Charter High School, staff taught on the second and third floors while the first floor remained under water. Still, the majority of dismissed educators never taught in the city again.

Into the gap came a wave of new recruits, many in their twenties, many white, and often from outside Louisiana. Programs like Teach For America promised energy and results. Principals could now hire quickly, replace teachers just as fast, and push for immediate improvement. 

Some schools thrived under the new flexibility. Others struggled with constant turnover and cultural gaps between teachers and the communities they served.

Today, the city’s teaching force is more diverse and more local than it was in the years after the storm. Yet a new challenge looms: how to attract and keep enough teachers willing to do the hard, often unglamorous work of helping students succeed. In the third episode of Where the Schools Went, you will hear from veteran educators, school leaders, and newcomers about how the city rebuilt its classrooms, what was gained, what was lost, and why the question of who teaches still shapes the future of its schools.

Listen to episode three above, and watch for the next chapter debuting Sep. 2. 

Where the Schools Went is a five-part podcast series from The Branch, produced in partnership with ����Ӱ�� and MeidasTouch. Listen at or .

To better understand that disconnect, I spent months in New Orleans interviewing more than 50 people about their experience over the past two decades. I heard from both critics and champions of the city’s Katrina recovery reforms: parents, students, teachers, principals, administrators, activists, academics, and common citizens. Their stories are important and illuminating. I even created a whole podcast about them, called Where the Schools Went. 

But it’s easy to fall into the tyranny of the anecdote when reporting on fraught education debates like those over the meaning of the New Orleans reforms. So let’s start with the data instead. Hard numbers are more useful than speculation. And the hard numbers from New Orleans are overwhelming.

There’s no one better at parsing the data than Doug Harris, who chairs Tulane’s economics department and directs the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans. Harris has spent years analyzing these outcomes with the kind of methodological rigor that usually prevents education researchers from ever saying anything definitive about anything. His team of advisors includes both reform advocates and skeptics, yet when I spoke with him, Harris offered something virtually unheard of in education research: . “If you look at any of the typical things that we measure — test scores, high school graduation, college going, college persistence, ACT scores — all of those things are not just better, but quite a bit better than they were before.”

The fine print is striking. When Katrina hit in 2005, roughly 60% of New Orleans schools were by the state. Today, that number is zero. High school graduation rates have soared from 54% to 78%. College enrollment has jumped by 28 percentage points. Students across all demographics — Black, white, low-income, students with disabilities — have that would be the envy of almost any school system in the country.

Harris’s team anticipated and tested the obvious objection: that the student population must have changed after such a massive displacement like Katrina. Perhaps the student body became more affluent? Less needy? They worked with the U.S. Census to track who actually returned, and deflates the skeptics’ favorite excuse: “The demographics of the district changed for families that had school-aged children… almost not at all.” Even more compelling, when they tracked individual students who attended school both before and after Katrina, those same children were learning at faster rates in the new system.

Yet if you scan the national education discourse today, you’d be hard-pressed to find any major elected leaders talking about New Orleans. This represents a dramatic shift. A decade ago, President Barack Obama himself the city’s progress, telling a New Orleans audience in 2009 that “a lot of your public schools opened themselves up to new ideas and innovative reforms,” and that “we’re actually seeing an improvement in overall achievement that is making the city a model for reform nationwide.” 

But that early attention has given way to virtual silence. This silence isn’t accidental — it’s the result of a success story so politically inconvenient that it threatens the foundational beliefs of both sides of America’s education debate.

The Battle of Carver High

To understand why this success story became politically radioactive, look no further than . Originally built in the 1950s as one of the city’s first high schools for Black students, Carver embodied the flawed promise of separate-but-equal education. By the 1990s, it had become what historian Walter Stern called an “educational Soweto” — a in a neglected neighborhood with graduation rates hovering around 50% and repeated failing grades from the state.

Then Katrina destroyed both the school and its surrounding Ninth Ward community. Karl Washington, a Carver alumnus, remembered the aftermath: “That area received eight, nine feet of water. It wiped out everything: the community footprint, businesses, spirit.” But the alumni were determined to rebuild Carver. 

The state agreed, but then came the question of who would run it. The alumni community had their vision: a return to the Carver they remembered, with its proud traditions of football, marching band, and community connection.

The state had different ideas. Instead of awarding the charter to community leaders, officials chose Collegiate Academies, an organization founded by Ben Marcovitz, a Harvard graduate from Washington, D.C., who had achieved remarkable academic results at his Sci Academy charter school campus. Marcovitz’s schools were data-driven, disciplined, and relentlessly focused on college preparation. They were also run primarily by young, white outsiders through programs like Teach for America.

This staffing approach was particularly inflammatory given what had happened to New Orleans teachers after Katrina. When the district ran out of money, all 7,500 employees — including every teacher in the city — were . Most were never rehired. Many of these teachers were Black women who had been pillars of the city’s middle class for decades. They had deep roots in the communities they served. To see them replaced by young, college graduates, many of them white, with minimal teaching experience (and no union contract) felt like salt in an open wound. I explore this painful history in Episode 3 of .

The backlash to the state’s Carver plans was immediate and fierce. Chris Meyer, a state official tasked with explaining the decision, recalled arriving to find “a human chain in front of the building” and protesters blocking the entrance. After managing to get inside, “I get two words, maybe three outta my mouth, and the whole meeting just erupts in chaos.” When Meyer left the meeting, he found his car windows smashed, with glass scattered across his child’s car seat.

Jerel Bryant, the Yale-educated principal chosen to lead the new Carver, walked into this firestorm. His team quickly produced strong academic results, posting some of the best algebra scores in the city. But the achievement felt hollow amid growing community resistance.

The breaking point came in December 2013, when 60 students . They were frustrated by what they saw as excessive discipline: having to walk on taped lines in hallways, getting suspended for chewing gum or wearing the wrong shoes. One student : “You get suspended for coughing. You get suspended for sneezing out loud.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center the school’s suspension rates. Three parents publicly withdrew their children, though the vast majority stuck with the program. Local newspapers published side-by-side graphics showing Carver’s academic gains alongside its suspension statistics, as if to ask: At what cost?

For critics of education reform, this was the perfect story: test scores rising through harsh discipline and cultural suppression. For supporters, it was proof that change inevitably faces resistance, even when it’s working. The battle lines were clear, the rhetoric heated, and the national media seized on the drama. The Atlantic ran not one but on Carver’s discipline policies. called it “the painful backlash against ‘no-excuses’ school discipline.”

But then something unexpected happened.

The Quiet Revolution

Had I visited Carver 10 years ago and stopped my reporting there (as many national outlets have), this would be a very different story — one that fit neatly into our national education wars. But over the past decade, something remarkable happened. 

By 2014, Carver’s principal and his team began to listen more carefully to their critics. “Even when I didn’t agree with their tone or tactics or priorities,” Bryant reflected, “I didn’t doubt that they wanted the school to be great. And finding that common ground—that’s the challenge, and the opportunity.”

The school began implementing what educators call “restorative practices”—mediations and healing circles instead of suspensions. They trained staff differently, built new programs, funded the marching band, and hired more teachers from the community. Most importantly, they connected these changes to their core mission rather than treating them as distractions from it.

This version of “Flowers” by Miley Cyrus is so powerful! George Washington Carver Highschool Marching Band from New Orleans level up! : dright.the.king.of.oneself

“Strong sports teams help with suspension rates,” Bryant explained. “Engaging lessons help with suspension rates. Connecting before you correct, that helps too. A kid has to really believe: I want to be part of this. Otherwise, we lose a powerful lever to change behavior.”

The results were dramatic. Suspension rates by nearly two-thirds in a single year. But rather than hurting academic performance, the changes seemed to enhance it. Last year, Carver for academic growth from the state and ranked second among all open-enrollment high schools in New Orleans for students achieving mastery on state exams. The year before, they had the highest academic growth in the state. Oh, and their boys’ basketball team? They’ve been to three straight state championship games and won in 2022 and 2023. 

When I visited the school this spring, the transformation was evident everywhere. The trophy case displayed sports trophies and homecoming photos alongside college acceptance letters. The staff was older, more rooted in the community, and included several Carver alumni who had returned as teachers and coaches. Even Sandra, who works in the cafeteria, glowed when talking about the school: “The teachers? Marvelous. The principal? Excellent. Everybody here is loving and kind.”

Eric French, the band director and Carver alumnus, broke down crying when describing what it meant to return to his alma mater: “It was like a dream come true. When I walked into the interview, I almost broke down. I knew if I could just get my foot in the door, it would be up from there.”

Nell Lewis, the school’s director of culture, had lived through the entire transition: “The community didn’t believe at first. They saw white folks, outsiders, people who didn’t understand. But now they see the results. We didn’t used to have academic success here. We had championships, but not college. Not like now.”

Of course, cafeteria workers praising their workplace and band directors getting emotional about their alma mater don’t generate the same headlines as student walkouts and community protests. Collaboration doesn’t click like conflict. Which helps explain why the current New Orleans story — technocratic problem-solving, gradual improvement and former adversaries working together — has been largely ignored by those who thrive on drama and division.

The Systemwide Evolution

What happened at Carver was part of a broader evolution occurring across New Orleans. In the immediate aftermath of Katrina, the city had operated what could charitably be called an “anti-system” — dozens of autonomous charter schools with little coordination or oversight. This approach produced impressive academic gains but also created chaos for families trying to navigate wildly different enrollment processes, discipline policies and academic calendars.

By 2012, state leaders began implementing what they called “systems building.” They created , a centralized enrollment system that gave families one application for all schools citywide. They established common discipline policies and centralized expulsion hearings to prevent schools from pushing out challenging students. They developed a that sent more resources to schools serving students with greater needs.

Most importantly, they approached these changes collaboratively. Rather than mandating from above, the Recovery School District convened school operators to build consensus around shared systems. The result was something unprecedented in American education: a system that preserved school-level autonomy while creating citywide coherence around the functions that mattered most for equity and access. Schools could still choose their own curriculum, pedagogical approach, and staffing model. But they couldn’t cherry-pick students, ignore due process for discipline, or operate in isolation from families’ needs.

The Uncomfortable Truth

This evolution produced a model that should theoretically appeal to both sides of America’s education debates. It delivered the academic results that reformers promised while addressing the equity and community concerns that critics raised. It proved that choice and accountability could coexist with collaboration and local input.

Instead, it has been met with bipartisan silence.

For progressives, acknowledging New Orleans’s success would require confronting some uncomfortable truths. The Katrina recovery transformation was built on the elimination of teacher tenure, the dissolution of union contracts and the replacement of neighborhood school assignments with choice-based enrollment (subjects we cover at length in episodes 3 and 4 of Where the Schools Went). These are precisely the policies that national Democratic leaders now oppose.

President Joe Biden has called himself “.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren warns that charter expansion “strains the resources of school districts and leaves students behind.” The party has increasingly embraced a defensive posture that treats any deviation from the traditional district model or unequivocal support for teachers’ unions as an attack on public education itself.

But the old, pre-Katrina New Orleans had all the elements that progressives now champion as essential: a powerful teachers’ union, centralized administration, neighborhood school assignments and an elected school board. It also had some of the worst educational outcomes in the country.

For conservatives, the New Orleans model presents an equally uncomfortable problem. The city’s success came not through pure market forces but through a limited but aggressive government intervention. The state stepped in to close failing schools, coordinate enrollment, standardize discipline policies and redistribute resources based on student needs. They also relied heavily on government-mandated standardized testing to gauge school quality. This is hardly the small-government, laissez-faire approach that conservative education reformers typically champion.

Moreover, if more districts could become as responsive and effective as New Orleans, there would be less demand for the private school vouchers and education savings accounts that have become conservative orthodoxy. Why abandon public education if it can actually work?

The media, meanwhile, has moved on to more sensational stories. The current New Orleans narrative doesn’t generate clicks or cable news debates. It’s the educational equivalent of reporting on a well-functioning water treatment plant: critically important but insufficiently dramatic for our attention economy.

The Lessons We’re Ignoring

This silence comes at a significant cost. New Orleans offers genuine lessons for other cities struggling with educational inequity, not as a perfect model to replicate but as proof that dramatic improvement is possible when leaders are willing to experiment, listen and adapt.

The city’s approach suggests a middle path between the extremes that have dominated education debates: neither the rigid centralization that characterized many urban districts nor the unchecked autonomy that marked early charter experiments. Rather it demonstrates what former state superintendent John White called “coherence” — clear communication and a well-articulated philosophy around what government should control and what schools should decide for themselves. 

“You attracted some great people, many from within the system, many from without,” White explained. “You held them very accountable for doing their jobs. You resourced them proportionate to the challenges, and you set very clear boundaries around what you were gonna be involved with and what you weren’t gonna be involved with.”

This approach could work in districts with or without charter schools, with or without choice programs. It’s fundamentally about governance: being strategic about where to centralize and where to decentralize, building systems that support both equity and excellence, and creating space for both innovation and accountability.

A Model for Politics

Perhaps most importantly, New Orleans demonstrates something that feels almost impossible in our current political moment: the capacity for opposing sides to actually listen to each other and change course based on what they learn.

The reformers who dismissed community concerns about culture and representation gradually recognized that academic success without community buy-in was unsustainable and immoral. The community leaders who initially rejected any changes to traditional approaches came to appreciate that good intentions weren’t enough if children weren’t learning.

This wasn’t compromise for its own sake but genuine evolution based on evidence and experience. Today, many of the harshest critics of early reform efforts acknowledge the system’s improvements while continuing to push for better. Many reform leaders have become more sophisticated advocates for equity and community engagement.

As education advocate Chris Stewart, who grew up in New Orleans, put it: “We want to be transparent, but not loud. New Orleans should keep doing what they’re doing. They should keep winning and improving. But it doesn’t help to nationalize their story anymore.”

Perhaps Stewart is right that New Orleans benefits from flying under the national radar. But the rest of the country pays a price for ignoring what’s happened there. In an era when Americans seem incapable of finding common ground on any contentious issue, New Orleans offers a rare example of adversaries becoming collaborators, of ideology yielding to evidence, of a community choosing pragmatic progress over perfect ideological purity.

That’s a lesson worth learning, even if it makes everyone a little uncomfortable.

After Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans faced two urgent questions: Which schools would be rebuilt, and who would run them? In the Ninth Ward, few fights were as big as the one over George Washington Carver High School, a community anchor with deep history and proud traditions.

When the state chose Collegiate Academies, a high-performing charter network led mostly by people from outside of the city, the pushback was swift. Alumni rallied. Students staged a walkout during Collegiate Carver’s first year. The arguments weren’t primarily about academics, but about who gets to shape the future of a place like Carver, and whether a model built for results could ever feel like home to the people who had kept the school’s spirit alive. 

For many, the fight over Carver came to represent a larger fight over what kind of New Orleans would rise after the flood.

In time, the picture shifted. 

In this episode, you’ll hear from alumni, educators, and advocates about what can happen when people who once saw each other as opponents realize they’re fighting for the same thing. As Carver began pairing academic gains with a return to the traditions that had long defined the Green and Orange, something beautiful began to grow. “Episode Two: The Battle for Carver” traces that bumpy path and draws lessons that extend far beyond one school.

Listen to episode two above, and watch for the next chapter debuting on Aug. 26. 

Where the Schools Went is a five-part podcast series from The Branch, produced in partnership with ����Ӱ�� and MeidasTouch. Listen at or .

When Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans in August 2005, it destroyed homes and flooded neighborhoods. Eighty percent of the city was submerged, 1,800 people were killed, and hundreds of thousands of people were displaced. It also upended a public school system already collapsing under the weight of decades of failure. 

In the years that followed, the system was not just rebuilt; it was radically reimagined.

The debut installment of revisits the years leading up to the storm and the questions New Orleans was already grappling with. Crumbling buildings, failing academics, and deep corruption had eroded trust with the public — so much so that the FBI had even set up shop inside the school district’s central office. The below episode explores the question: What happens when a public institution fails the people it was built to serve? 

And what should come next?

We hear the story from the people who lived it, like former school district employee Ken Ducote, who used code names and classic cars to pass documents to the FBI. We learn about the students who had to leave school to use the bathroom at Taco Bell, because the ones in their building were constantly broken. And we meet the valedictorian who was barred from graduating after failing the math exit exam — for the fifth time.

In episode one, we talk about what loss really meant after the storm and the rituals and routines that helped bind communities together. We hear from a child who couldn’t find his mother for more than a month, a teacher who sheltered with her family in a room in a church basement and the students who, even in new classrooms in new cities, hid under desks every time it rained.

But this isn’t just a story about what was lost or broken. It’s about what people built in the aftermath. Just days after the storm, a team of New Orleans educators reunited with their students in Houston, many of them living in the Astrodome, and opened a school for them. This new campus quickly grew into a community for kids who had lost nearly everything in their lives.

The episode doesn’t settle the debate about what came next. But it begins to unpack the competing beliefs surrounding New Orleans’ post-Katrina school reforms. Some hail the transformation as miraculous, a turnaround that turned one of the nation’s worst-performing districts into a national model. Others view it as a betrayal: a dismantling of community control, the displacement of Black educators, and the erasure of local identity. This episode is the first of five chapters that will help you decide which, if any, of those narratives is correct.

Listen to episode one above, and watch for episode two debuting on Aug. 19. 

Where the Schools Went is a five-part podcast series from The Branch, produced in partnership with ����Ӱ�� and MeidasTouch. Listen at or .

While other countries, including Canada, Germany and Finland, have created systems to help support young families, the U.S. remains at a decades-long standstill with most of the conversation focused solely on economics, including how expensive a universal system would cost and the role it plays in bringing more people into the workforce.

“We’ve lost the child from child care in a lot of ways. It’s only and all about the parents and the parents attachment to the workforce – and this is on both sides of the political aisle,” Haspel said in an interview with ����Ӱ��’s Jessika Harkay ahead of his book release. “One of my fundamental problems with the economic case, while I think it is valid and it can be useful, is that it is morally impoverished. It has no particular claim on any values or deep human morality. I do think that that’s something that we can recenter if we talk about it like that.”

A universal child care system wouldn’t solve all problems for families, but would be “a massive strike in the right direction,” Haspel said. 

Haspel said all Americans, even those without children, are stakeholders in the mission to reframe child care from just an economic or social issue to a crucial element of community building and one that supports the American value of personal liberty.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

You open your book by quoting Bill Clinton back in the 90s, and use several examples of the history of American child care throughout the country’s history. Give a brief summary of the fight for child care, how it’s changed throughout the years and why it’s more important than ever now.

America has a checkered history with child care, and particularly this question of what’s the government’s role in child care, what society’s role and what’s the family’s role. … We actually have these pretty early examples of communities stepping up to help provide external child care: the infant school movement in Massachusetts in the 1820s and 1830s; the federal government sets up a child care center in Philadelphia during the Civil War for women who are working in hospitals and making clothes. … But, it often has this countervailing force that goes along with economic pressures, gender pressures, and part of that is because none of these are really resting on the core idea that child care is essential to the American experiment or an American value in the same way that public education and various other things are.

That thread is there, and I think that’s important to understand, because sometimes today we’re like, ‘Oh, this is the way it’s always been,’ … but, that’s not the case. 

In the modern era, kind of post 1970s when we’ve seen the majority of mothers of young children enter the labor force, we’ve kind of been fighting on the same terrain. At the same time, the problem is so acute right now. The pandemic, I think, shed a very bright spotlight on that. But, child care is a pain point that crosses every line of difference you can think of: It crosses ideology; it crosses geography, it crosses gender, it crosses race and class, so it is a really massive need that remains unresolved.

How has child care become the victim to politics? How has government mistrust contributed to this and are attitudes toward universal child care changing?

The 1960s and 70s were a really pivotal time in the US and across the western world where you’re seeing these tectonic shifts in the global economy, where manufacturing jobs are going down and it was really hard to run a family on one income basically. 

The debate that was happening here and abroad was what is the role of government? What’s interesting is this happens, and it’s a really historical quirk in some ways, that the battles over child care in the US coincide with the breakup of the New Deal coalition, the Vietnam War, the rise of religious fundamentalism in response to changing roles of women. This is also the same era when we’re seeing the rise of the birth control pill and Roe v. Wade and women getting many, many more rights than they had before. 

It really comes together in 1971 with President Nixon’s veto of the Comprehensive Child Development Act, and it took this issue that was a problem everywhere, that wasn’t particularly politicized … and it made it this article of culture war.

By the time that bill comes back a few years later, there are chain mail pamphlets going around about how if Congress passes this bill, it’s going to let children sue their parents for asking them to take out the trash – literally. It’s written up in most major newspapers in the country, just about how wildly inaccurate this kind of smear campaign was, but it gives you this evidence of this free market family idea, that deep distrust of the government, people turn to the free market and it becomes much, much harder to have the debate because you can’t get past the first step of is this even something where the government has a role? 

I think sometimes, if the Comprehensive Childhood Development Act had just gone five years earlier, if you think about when Medicaid and Medicare were passed, we would have been fine. But by the vagaries of history, it happened to be going through at the time when there was really this political terrain that was shifting and, unfortunately, American families became a casualty of those shifts.

Another thing you talk about in your book is equity. How does the lack of child care affect equity, particularly for women of color, and concentrations of poverty?

It’s really important to say we’ve had a racialized child care system since the very beginning of this country, and some of the first child care providers were enslaved Black women and girls… There was always this two track view of ‘Women shouldn’t work outside the home when they have kids, except for if you’re a Black woman, or a woman of color, or immigrant, in which case that’s actually OK. And in fact, we’re going to put in work requirements and make sure that you have to jump through all sorts of hoops in order to get assistance with child care,’ and that is a two tiered legacy that absolutely shapes attitudes today. 

Many of the contemporary debates, and I mean the 2020 debates around child care, often hinge on Head Start, which is a program that is explicitly concentrated to low income populations and the Child Care and Development Block Grant, which is explicitly limited to families making below 85% of the state median income. So even today, we still have welfare terrain for child care, and it is a huge problem, and the ways in which it wraps into poverty and continues inequality are manifold.

We know that the lack of child care, when you combine that with low income backgrounds, typically have to work jobs with less job security, with more unpredictable hours, shift jobs, and often not unionized, target breakdowns that can easily start a cascading effect of negative consequences. I mentioned in the book the story of one woman and how child care was the reason that she was thrust into poverty. 

The other side of the coin is that the providers of child care are almost all women, and they’re disproportionately women of color and they’re disproportionately immigrant women. Because of the constant neglect of child care as a value, we have them making poverty or near poverty wages themselves, which takes a huge toll and that has effects on the quality and the stability of the child care. It also affects those families of the providers themselves. 

How does American work culture work against community building and child care? Talk about general cultural shaming and the perception of “moral failing” for parents needing help in early childhood.

There’s a sense of rugged individualism.

I think what’s really interesting with child care, is here we’ve put it in this bucket of ‘It’s your job to figure it out, and if you don’t figure it out, there’s something wrong with you, and if you’re really terrible, if you messed up so badly, we might have a little bit of aid for you, but we’re going to be reluctant about it.’

Now, what I find fascinating about that argument is when those kids turn five what we do is meet them with constitutional rights for free education and care for at least seven hours a day, 180 days a year. It’s not, obviously enough, but there’s a very different way that we approach things like public education. We bucket child care as a private individual good. 

In your book, you also discuss how education is a more formal institution that’s harder to change because of bureaucracy, tradition and funding, but child care has more room for innovation. Why is that? What’s the big goal, and how can we get there?

Education in this country has been around for at this point 175 years and it has had a lot of time to grow. We all have a sense of what a school is and what it should be and what the structures are and there’s lots of veto points along the way if you try to change them.

A child care system is a much more open playing field in some ways. … Part of my argument uses a chance to say, ‘OK, based on what we’ve learned from things in the public school system, what do we need to do to build a child care system that’s going to work well for everyone, for all families and all kids and all educators?’

And one of the features … (that) is interesting in child care, particularly talking about early child care, but school age as well, is this idea of we need to be able to meet parents and families where they’re at, so that if a family wants to have a grandparent or stay at home parent, we should honor that… and support that in the same way that (if) they want to have a licensed child care center or a licensed family child care at your home… that supports going to look different. A pediatrician’s office and ER are both part of the health care system, but they’re not the same. 

Sometimes we draw a line around what is actually child care and what isn’t and actually we’re much worse off for it. That’s not what parents need.

That’s one place where we have an opportunity to think about a more inclusive and pluralistic system that, at the most fundamental level, we should guarantee families have access to the care and early learning experiences that they and their kids need to thrive. I think if we start there, it opens up a lot of doors and it cuts through a lot of the noise.

You discuss how one way we view children is through the lens of an “investable child,” or an investment that needs to perform rather than viewing a child as an individual. How would shifting our perspective on children change people’s view on child care? What would it involve? 

We’ve lost the child from child care in a lot of ways. It’s only and all about the parents and the parents attachment to the workforce – and this is on both sides of the political aisle. 

I do think there has to be some affirmative cases made that how a child experiences their childhood and what their day to day experiences are not only shapes their future selves, but there is actually something that is deeply important to the national soul in that as well. 

One of my fundamental problems with the economic case, while I think it is valid and it can be useful, is that it is morally impoverished. It has no particular claim on any values or deep human morality. I do think that that’s something that we can recenter if we talk about it like that. 

The fact that child care programs can come alongside parents and help them parent the way they want to parent and can help children to have joyful childhood – that is actually something that we should want. This will come, in some senses, from the top down. I do think the way that our leaders talk about child care is really important. 

One of the biggest underlying topics of your book and our conversation is also reframing child care from just an economic or social issue, but to one of the loss of the American Dream, which in recent decades has centered more on finances and material possessions than small freedoms. How can we make this shift and “lead with values first”? 

Gallup polled recently, in the past month or two, a bunch of Americans about what values… are the most important values to them. It was interesting that across all political parties, across all geographic regions of the country, across all income levels, one value dominated all the others, and it was family. It wasn’t freedom. It wasn’t like self determination with individuals, it was family. 

I think particularly in this era when there’s a lot of precariousness, a lot of uncertainty geopolitically and the environment, polarization, loneliness – all of these issues that we see around us – that people are really hungry for more. Something else can be seen in Gen Z and Gen Alpha as well, that there’s actually this pulling back, in some senses, from hyper materialism, and so the question is, what comes next? What fills that? And I think there’s an opportunity. 

Politicians need to…, realize that in a lot of ways, family and child care are a key part of where people want to go – they do really value that, not just about their bank account. And so to start talking about it, that’s really important. 

It’s a question too of the mechanisms of narrative change. There are a few levers to pull on for culture change and narrative change, and I think all of them will probably be pulled at once for a broader mind shift to this idea of what is the good life like? What are we even doing here?

The last chapter of the book is pretty philosophical for a reason. When we jump ahead, we are often just talking past each other, because we haven’t even grounded out what’s the goal? What is the ultimate goal with having an effective child care system? In my mind, it is not to maximize labor force participation. That might be a nice side benefit, but the more we say things like, ‘Child care is the workforce,’ or the more we talk about (it) only in terms of its effect on business productivity, the more we lose the American families… a lot of people are stumbling in the dark for meaning and for community and child care can be a really, really important part of that.

Normally, Virginia is the interesting off-year gubernatorial election, and New Jersey is pretty boring.

But not this year.

One reason is that Virginia has trended bluer across the last few presidential cycles, while New Jersey has gone in the other direction. Kamala Harris got a slightly higher share of the vote in the Old Dominion than in , which is a sign of a new era. Plus, Virginia Democrats have an uncontested primary, and the nomination is going to Abigail Spanberger, a sensible moderate Democrat who seems perfectly suited to winning the state. Virginia currently has a Republican governor, so the state’s soft Democrats don’t have to worry about any backlash. And not only is the president a Republican, he’s hammering the state with layoffs. Unless Spanberger screws up, she should win.

Virginia’s race is also not that interesting from a governance perspective. Even though Virginia is now pretty solidly blue, the Democratic Party has rarely held a trifecta, so the policy status quo is pretty clearly to the right of the electorate. Being a smart moderate Democrat in Virginia basically just means supporting the reasonable, politically viable progressive ideas and not the crazy ones, which requires good sense but not a ton of tough decision-making.

New Jersey is different.

The state is still solidly blue, and you’d expect the Democratic nominee to win, especially with Trump in office. But New Jersey Democrats face meaningful political headwinds, and if Kamala Harris were in office, they might be at real risk.

The question of what to do as governor of the state is also trickier. Phil Murphy is wrapping up his second term, and Democrats controlled the state legislature for both terms. A same-party successor always has a tougher job in a situation like this, because the low-hanging fruit of the Democratic agenda has already been picked. New Jersey has a minimum wage of $15.49, indexed to inflation. They have legal marijuana. They have a generous Medicaid program. New Jersey has the , according to the Tax Foundation’s rankings. It’s less obvious what the next Democratic governor is going to do here than in Virginia.

And the field is large, with six primary candidates running.

There are good choices in the mix. Mikie Sherrill is a smart, pragmatic member of Congress who’s and seems to be leading the pack. Steven Fulop, the mayor of Jersey City, is a YIMBY champion who has walked the walk in a major way. Josh Gottheimer, another House member, is not my personal flavor of moderate, but he’s got support from colleagues like Ritchie Torres, Tom Suozzi, and Jared Golden, who I respect a lot. I feel torn between Sherrill and Fulop, but honestly, it’s an embarrassment of riches to have a field where Gottheimer is my No. 3 choice.

Another of the candidates is Sean Spiller, president of the New Jersey Education Association — i.e. the state’s teachers union. The New York Times recently had a piece on how unusual this situation is, with and rendering the polite myth of non-coordination between campaigns and super PACs unusually untenable.

What the Times didn’t talk about, though, was the part that I find genuinely odd, which is that nobody in the crowded field is taking the opportunity to smartly differentiate themselves on education.

Democrats often seem reluctant to propose ideas that teachers unions don’t like, because they want their support (or at least non-hostility) in a primary. But I’m pretty sure the NJEA is going to back Spiller no matter what Sherrill or Gottheimer or Fulop say, so why not be bolder?

Democrats could use fresh thinking on education

As , one of the most underrated developments in recent political history is that Democrats have lost their traditionally large issue advantage on education.

I think it’s also worth noting that voters rate education as a pretty important issue — more important than the issues related to climate change, abortion and child care that have dominated the progressive agenda in recent years.

The other thing about education is that while of course Democrats can’t, and shouldn’t, give up on trying to come up with smart, politically appealing things to say about immigration and crime, those are longstanding areas of GOP issue advantage.

Fundamentally, voters want “tough” policies on these issues. , the number of people who said the criminal justice system is not tough enough outnumbered those who said it was too tough by a 2:1 ratio, and mass opinion was more right-wing than that in every year both before and after 2020. And Democrats are just not the party that’s seen as “tough.” 

Education, though, is a classic liberal issue, like health care. The hard part for Democrats should be persuading the public to care more about education than about immigration, not convincing them that Democrats can be trusted to handle education policy.

That loss of trust is multi-faceted, but I think it has to do not only with pandemic school closures per se, but with a larger vibe around school closures whereby Democrats started signaling that they don’t really think education is particularly important.

The prior cohort of Democrats wildly overpromised on education as a , which unfortunately led the party to completely . This was a mistake, because the evidence is overwhelming that .

Good schools don’t generate equal outcomes for everyone, because students differ in their innate abilities and their life circumstances. But good schools still generate better outcomes than we’d see without good schools. And while I believe in , we don’t face a sharp tradeoff at a systems level. During the era when education policy was overwhelmingly focused on low-end performance, students did better across the board. In the more recent era, low-end performance has declined precipitously and the performance of the top students is essentially flat.

Weaker students and students from poorer families are, in practice, the canaries in the coal mine, because they’re the ones who really depend on public policy rather than parental supplementation. But there’s clearly a problem here, and Democrats should re-engage, because I think there are some pretty obvious ways to make things better:

• Make sure advanced coursework is fair with , but don’t eliminate it in a misguided push for equality.
  
• : Raise entry-level pay, reduce regulatory barriers to entry, stop giving raises for low-value credentials, start giving raises to above-average teachers (and even bigger raises to above-average teachers who are willing to work in tough schools) and reduce job security for the weakest performers.
  
• Allow (indeed, encourage) the , while shutting down the least-effective ones.

More abstractly, though, I would love to see a return to the Obama-style message that education is important — certainly too important to trust to Republicans, who don’t care and just want to cut and privatize everything, but also too important to spend money on without asking about results.

A disappointing Garden State discourse

On education, the candidates I like in New Jersey are … fine.

Fulop, as a housing-forward candidate, is :

Despite being the most diverse state in the country, New Jersey has the dubious distinction of having some of the most segregated schools in the country. The next governor needs to address this issue head-on as a “fair & efficient education” includes diversity. In Year 1, Gov. Fulop will impanel an independent board of educators, activists and state leaders tasked with producing a comprehensive, statewide plan to address segregation, including economic and social factors.

I agree with him that this is important and that it’s a noteworthy aspect of the New Jersey status quo. But an expert panel is going to tell him what he already knows, namely that school segregation is largely downstream of housing market dynamics. And Fulop knows the score on housing. But if anything, I think this linkage just goes to show that YIMBYs need to think more about K-12 education. The vast majority of anti-YIMBY arguments are nonsense. But a clearly true fact is that if more people lived in your town, some of them would send kids to your town’s public schools.

If the school system does a good job, this is a pure logistics issue — more students requires more classrooms and more buildings. But a lot of suburban Americans are relying on socioeconomic segregation as their de facto education policy.

Democrats in particular often seem more comfortable zoning low-income families out of whole communities than they do guaranteeing that schools will have reasonable discipline policies, ability-appropriate math coursework and . New Jersey needs better housing policy, but to get there, state officials need to take these questions of functioning public services seriously.

:

Across New Jersey, students in every district continue to face post-pandemic struggles with mental health and learning loss. That’s why I fought to bring back federal funding to safely reopen schools and get kids back on track, including by introducing legislation to provide high-quality tutoring to students. As governor, we’ll expand on this progress by supporting effective programs — like high-impact tutoring — that address learning loss. We’ll address the mental health crisis by increasing the number of school counselors, psychologists and mental health services in our schools. And as a mom of four, I know that kids learn better when their stomachs are full. I will make school meals available at no cost for every student in New Jersey because we know good nutrition is essential to academic achievement.

If a candidate asked me for a bunch of K-12 education ideas that make sense on the merits but won’t provoke any clashes with unions or the progressive education establishment, this list is basically what I’d give them.

But thinking about it seriously, if we’re talking about learning loss (and we should be), shouldn’t we be talking about the old education reform standbys of standards and accountability? High-dosage tutoring is a good idea, but it’s weird to put all the responsibilities for improving outcomes on tutors rather than everything else that happens in school buildings. More mental health inputs sounds like a good idea, but are we going to measure the outputs? We know that across the board in education, more inputs usually help. But just adding inputs is no substitute for measuring outcomes.

The centerpiece of Gottheimer’s whole campaign is that he wants to cut taxes and largely pay for it with government efficiency undertakings. He can’t do that without taking on some entrenched interests, and K-12 education is obviously one of the biggest line items. “Cut wasteful school spending so you can cut taxes” is not my favorite brand of moderation (I would rather reinvest the money in making schools better), but it’s not an unreasonable idea. Again, though, Gottheimer doesn’t call out any specific education changes or cross any union red lines.

If not now, when?

The education reform spirit is not entirely dead within the Democratic Party.

Recently, Senators Cory Booker (whose star is back on the rise thanks to his talking filibuster), Brian Schatz (a leading contender to succeed Chuck Schumer) and Michael Bennet (who’s running for governor of Colorado) were the Democratic sponsors of a . Both and have made friendly visits to charter schools in the terrain they represent — they’re not wild ideologues on this issue or, as far as I can tell, any other. But the sense that it’s cool to occasionally be at odds with teachers unions has definitely vanished.

In the 2016 primary, Hillary Clinton broke with Barack Obama on education reform to , and Sanders lacked the creativity or ideological flexibility to make lemonade and present himself as more moderate than Clinton on this. In the 2020 primary cycle, , and he never really ran on it. Joe Biden seems to have sincerely disagreed with Obama about this and did not stand up for the Obama-Biden administration’s legacy on education. I thought Julian Castro, who was in the Obama cabinet, might pick up the baton, .

I was disappointed by the trajectory of education policy in both of those cycles, but I did understand what everyone was thinking.

The New Jersey gubernatorial primary, by contrast, seems like a situation where there is an objective incentive for someone to take some positions fearlessly, without regard for union politics.

For starters, it’s a six-candidate field. The , followed by Fulop at 14%, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka at 12%t, Gottheimer at 11%, Spiller at 9% and former state senate leader Steve Sweeney at 8%. In a field that big, almost anything you can do to stand out from the pack can be helpful. You also don’t need to take positions that a majority of Democratic Party primary voters agree with. Of course, taking positions the general electorate finds toxic would be a bad idea, but that’s not what we’re talking about here.

And, again, to end where I began, the head of the teachers union is literally a candidate in the race. If the union is already committed to beating you, why not try to reap the upside by showing some refreshing boldness and independence of thought?

I think it was a mistake of Sanders not to seize this opportunity in 2016, but I get that he is literally Bernie Sanders, not someone who is inclined to take a heterodox position on a union issue, even if the relevant union is trying to beat him. But Fulop and Gottheimer and Sherrill are not Bernie Sanders — this seems more like passivity than ideological rigidity.

People forget that until recently, we had a lot of education reform Democrats, and it’s not as if they got knocked off in droves in primaries. The Obama legacy was abandoned at the presidential level for quirky, contingent reasons, and abandoning it hasn’t worked out well for the party. This weird Spiller ego trip is both a reminder that unions sometimes make bad calls due to weird leadership priorities and also an opportunity to assert a . You can respect public school teachers and labor unions and also understand that the job of the union is to advocate for the interests of the service providers, while the job of an elected official is to advocate for the partially overlapping interests of the people who use the services. In fact, I feel like the New Jersey field includes multiple candidates who almost certainly get this. So why not say it?

Student achievement started falling about a decade ago, slowly at first, and then all at once. Then COVID led to dramatic drops in enrollment and attendance and a decline in trust in public schools. This year, with the expiration of federal relief funds, schools will have a lot less money to spend on staff or new programs.

With all this in mind, with education floundering and in need of direction, I sketched out a list of 12 guiding principles. Some may seem like obvious truisms, but they haven’t always been reflected in policy or classroom practices in recent years. Others may be more controversial and fly in the face of prevailing trends. But America is overdue for a big national reckoning about the current and future state of its public schools, so here’s my attempt to start that conversation: 

1. Education is good, but knowledge is better. More schooling leads to more learning, and people who know more stuff tend to lead more successful, productive lives. That’s good for individuals and good for society. But time in school is merely an input measure, and the outcome — achievement — is what will ultimately matter in a child’s life. That lesson can be multiplied over the broader society. As economist Rick Hanushek to me back in 2015, “In the long run, the economic well-being of countries depends upon the quality of their workers.”

2. Teachers are incredibly important. Educators are still in-school factor for student learning, and the best teachers also improve students’ . As a policy matter, schools should hold teachers to high standards and pay them like professionals.

3. Incentives matter. Students and educators are rational actors and will respond to incentives. When states and school districts — especially those in areas — retreat from school and student , that will have consequences in the form of reduced academic effort and lower achievement. Teachers as a group are well-intentioned and mission-oriented, but they naturally to toward with less challenging students. Deliberate policy nudges in the form of for working in schools and can help reverse these normal human tendencies.

4. Testing and high expectations are good. They give people targets to shoot for, hold them accountable for results and provide a tool for diagnosing what needs to improve.

5. Parents deserve honest, timely information about their child’s performance. The nonprofit group Learning Heroes has found that believe their child is on grade level, while the reality is about half that. This has fed into an urgency gap, where educators warn the public that kids are behind even as they struggle to enroll students in tutoring or summer school or convince students to take those programs seriously.

States have been mostly indifferent to this disconnect. They take months to process and distribute the results of their annual spring tests. Those exams are meant to present parents with the objective reality of their child’s performance, but that check on the system can’t happen given the current delays. In response, Ohio now requires school districts to with parents no later than June 30 of each year, and Virginia will soon give parents their child’s results after the testing window closes. More states should follow Ohio and Virginia’s lead.

6. All children should get a fair opportunity to be educated to the best of their ability. A noble pursuit for “equity” has sometimes meant that schools hold higher-achieving students back. That’s a mistake, and schools would be better off with a clear focus on developing all kids’ talent. , in which students qualify for accelerated courses based on their demonstrated performance, is one simple policy that’s starting to spread across the country. Similarly, more places could adopt individual learning plans, as Mississippi did in reading, or what some states do for gifted students.

7. Public education can take many forms. The current system of delivering public K-12 education through residential school districts is a weird artifact of history. It’s not how pre-K or higher ed work, it leads to economic segregation and it distorts the housing market. Plus, as Johns Hopkins researcher Ashley Rogers-Berner has pointed out, it makes the U.S. an outlier internationally.

8. Choice is good, but it doesn’t guarantee better results. Within education, choice makes people happier with their schools and helps students (and teachers) find the right fit. , , voluntary desegregation programs and can all boost outcomes for kids. There should be fewer and more options.

Still, choice is no guarantee of quality, and a well-functioning market requires oversight. As economist and others have noted, the logic of the free market doesn’t apply neatly in the K-12 context, given the lack of information parents have about their choices and the limited options they may have available depending on where they live. In other words, policymakers can’t just assume parents voting with their feet will automatically lead to systemwide improvements. 

9. Beginners need to be explicitly taught to master the basics. In basically every human endeavor, beginners need to follow carefully sequenced steps to learn the fundamentals and make progress. For example, kids won’t learn to read well unless they can decode letters into words. That requires teachers to patiently break down the 44 distinct phonemes used in the English language, and that can feel boring or unimportant to adults who don’t remember how they learned to read. Too many education fads suffer from this “” and assume that kids will just figure things out on their own. 

10. Knowledge is specific to particular domains. We all want kids to be creative, and to be able to read with comprehension. But these are not . Instead, they are tied up with what someone already knows and can do. For example, the most creative people in any field are those who have mastered the basics and can apply those in new ways. Similarly, people’s ability to read and understand something new depends on what they already know. People don’t knowledge they don’t continue to refresh, and there is very little across skills and subjects. Learning chess won’t make you smarter, and most adults have forgotten much of what they learned in school. As such, schools should seek to help students develop deep knowledge in specific content areas, rather than taking a skills-based approach.

11. Practice is good. Educators sometimes speak derogatorily about “rote” memorization or “drill and kill.” No one talks like that in sports or the arts, even though, in those fields, it’s obvious that leads to improvement. Within education, kids need to master their times tables before they can handle more advanced math, and they need to spend plenty of time immersed in books to build up their vocabulary and reading stamina. It doesn’t all need to happen during the school day, but kids need lots of time to practice academic skills.

12. Individual policies matter, but they are not a guaranteed recipe. Researchers have documented a number of variables associated with improvements in student outcomes. For example, it’s true that generally helps schools produce better results and that smaller classes are easier to work with than bigger ones. But sometimes, advocates take these lessons too far. They assume there are no trade-offs to these policies or lose sight of the ultimate goal of education. For example, states like California and Florida spent billions of dollars reducing class sizes , perhaps in part because it led to a decline in . Maine about twice as much per pupil as Mississippi does, yet students in Mississippi outperform those in Maine, once you factor in demographics.

Education is complicated, and policymakers need to focus on the end goal — or they can get lost chasing the wrong things. By remembering the principles I’ve outlined here, they have a better chance of getting American education back on track and helping all students reach their full potential.

For several weeks in February 2011, she was one of tens of thousands of demonstrators who packed the Wisconsin state capitol to protest against legislation that aimed to shut down collective bargaining for public employees. One night, caught amid a swell of activists belting the civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome,” she suddenly noticed that she was standing a few feet from Jesse Jackson, who had traveled to Madison to spur resistance to the Republican-led bill.

To Bazan, a social studies teacher in the nearby town of Deerfield, it seemed that she was living through one of the historic scenes she often described to her high school students. Though the GOP had won in the previous fall’s elections, capturing both chambers of the state legislature and electing the ambitious conservative Scott Walker as governor, the fight wasn’t over. Marching in solidarity with progressive heavyweights like Jackson, and with the eyes of the labor movement on Wisconsin, she and her colleagues could still prevail in the struggle to keep their hard-won rights. 

“You could see the Democratic legislators waving to us from the windows of their offices,” she recalled. “We really believed that we weren’t alone anymore, that these people were in it with us, and that it might force the legislature to back down.”

But Walker and his allies didn’t fold. 

Instead, after another month of political theatrics, they enacted , better known to history as Act 10. Its passage was a staggering setback for labor, stripping public-sector unions— with notable exceptions, such as police officers and firefighters — of virtually all bargaining powers. 

Before the crowds dispersed, the bill had already started to reshape the K–12 landscape in Wisconsin, both by shoring up district finances and straitjacketing unions’ political sway. While Walker ultimately lost the governorship in 2018, his signature accomplishment stands as a model for conservative governance in a purple state.

After a major judicial ruling last year, however, it is unclear whether Act 10 will stand at all for much longer. In December, a state circuit judge the law’s constraints on collective bargaining, declaring the exemptions for first responders a violation of Wisconsin’s equal protection doctrine. Even with pending an eventual appeal to the state Supreme Court, some political observers are weighing the potential of a massive shift in state policy.

Fourteen years under the Act 10 regime have cast ripples across much of Wisconsin. Overall teacher compensation has fallen substantially, to cash-strapped districts. Academic research has found that the weakening of workplace rights freed up school systems to change the way they structure pay, rewarding the best instructors while simultaneously lifting student achievement higher.

But as top performers found new opportunities, new divisions opened up among districts and even genders, with male employees often receiving higher salaries than their female coworkers. Solidarity continued to dissolve as formerly mighty unions lost members and prestige. And a lingering hurt still hangs over many Wisconsin teachers, who feel that the Republican triumph was built on their misery. 

Disheartened by what she described as an increasingly hardline stance from her school board, Bazan soon moved to another district. “They have a union on paper, but it has no power,” she said.

The restoration of their power would be a cause for immense celebration, even as most experts agree that some of the changes to education spending and teacher influence likely cannot be altered. Alan Borsuk, a senior fellow in public policy at Marquette University Law School, said that while teachers had largely “learned to live with” the changes to their bottom line, the blow to their esteem remained.

“In some ways, the biggest impact of Act 10 was what it did, intangibly, to the teaching field,” he said. “So much hostility to teachers came out during that time, and the damage to teacher morale continues to this day. It just hasn’t been a cheerful profession for a lot of people.”

***

The shock delivered to teachers resulted primarily from a rollback of union strength that could only be called historic. As the first state to allow public employees to organize, bargain, and strike, a revolution in workers’ rights a half-century before Act 10; in its wake, that mass movement suffered its worst defeat in a half-century.

After the expiration of the collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) that were in effect when the law was signed, unions were forbidden to negotiate over fringe benefits or working conditions. Though they retained the right to negotiate salaries, they could not secure raises that outpaced inflation in a given year. Further, teachers would be required to make to their own pensions and benefits, overturning generous perks that had been won at the bargaining table years earlier. Finally, organizing itself was made harder by for unions to hold recertification votes each year to remain active. 

Kim Kohlhaas was then in her 15th year as an elementary educator in Superior,, a lakefront city near the border with Minnesota. She described the time she spent there before the adoption of Act 10 as a “dream job,” but the impact of the change made itself felt within months.

“Our contract was 28 pages long,” said Kohlhaas, who now serves as the head of the American Federation of Teachers’ Wisconsin affiliate. “It became one page, and that was just recognizing that we existed.”

No longer obliged to deal with unions like the AFT over regular salary increases, school districts were responding to their newfound freedom exactly as Walker had intended. Some kept their existing salary schedules more or less intact, with merit pay schemes that who attained additional professional credentials or earned high grades in the state’s teacher rating metric. 

The effects, detailed in a series of studies conducted by Yale economist Barbara Biasi, have largely been promising. 

In , Biasi compared Wisconsin districts that moved toward a flexible pay model with those that continued setting compensation on the basis of seniority, as had largely been the practice before Act 10. Collecting both statewide salary records and data on teacher value added (a measure of effectiveness that reflects students’ improvement in standardized test scores), she found that highly successful teachers in “seniority-pay” districts tended to find new positions in communities offering some form of merit pay, meaningfully increasing both average teacher quality and student scores in those places. 

According to Biasi’s estimates, the value-added of those job-movers was 60% higher than their counterparts who chose to leave their districts after the adoption of flexible pay structures. In addition, some proportion of relatively lower-performing teachers simply stopped teaching in public schools, whether to leave the profession entirely or to work in private institutions.

In circulated this spring, Biasi extended her findings up to 2016, five years after Republicans pushed the reform through. In the years prior to 2011, she found, seniority was practically the only factor determining teacher pay: A professional over 57 years old earned, on average, 88% more than one who was 24 years old. But after the pre-Act 10 contracts expired, those career veterans earned slightly less than they previously had, only making 73% more than their most junior colleagues.

As the gap between older and younger educators flattened, student achievement — especially for children from low-income families — saw a significant bump throughout the state, with standardized test scores climbing higher statewide each additional year after Act 10 was passed. 

Biasi observed that no district has switched to a fully pay-for-performance system, in part because superintendents and principals do not typically have access to value-added statistics themselves. Instead, they were taking advantage of the autonomy around pay to favor employees whom they saw as working harder and more capably to boost learning. 

“They’re just using this flexibility to retain teachers that they consider to be better, or at a higher risk of departing for a nearby district, or who are in positions that are particularly difficult to staff,” she said.

***

Academic improvements like those revealed in Biasi’s research would be welcome anywhere. But even among its Republican supporters, Act 10 was not principally sold as a policy to improve schools.

Instead, it was seen as a way of heading off fiscal calamity. Like many states during the Great Recession, Wisconsin faced a large revenue shortfall in early 2011. When he took office, Walker vowed to close the structural deficit, that local governments “don’t have anything to offer.” Either Act 10 would be approved by lawmakers, or thousands of state employees had to be laid off. 

Nearly a decade and a half later, the budgetary picture is much brighter, with the state . After a dip during the financial crisis, Wisconsin has finished in the black every year since, with its total debt recently falling to its lowest level since the Clinton presidency.

In particular, conservatives tout an employee pension fund that was fortified over the long term by the contribution requirements included in Act 10. According to from the nonprofit Equable Institute, the funding ratio for Wisconsin’s retirement programs exceeds 100%, ranking the sixth-best of any system in the country. The Pew Charitable Trusts has that the state effectively balances while also insulating retirees from inflation. 

Borsuk, a frequent critic of state Republicans who is married to a retired teacher, said the financial case for the law was “clear and compelling,” especially when contrasted with of neighboring Illinois, where state employee pension funds are ranked among the most over-extended in the nation. 

“It saves school districts a huge amount of money, and some of them were facing fairly dire circumstances in 2009 and 2010,” he argued. “Teachers had to pay more to support their benefits, but to be honest, they got used to that, and life went on.”

Yet many schools and districts aren’t as sanguine. Wisconsin’s annual spending per K–12 student, which was 11% higher than the national average when Act 10 was being debated, just a decade later. Between 2002 and 2020, the state’s K–12 spending grew at the third-slowest rate anywhere in the country. After adjusting for inflation, the median teacher’s take-home pay fell from $68,949 in 2011 to $59,250 in 2023, according to .

That trend resulted partially from an exodus of older teachers in the first few years after the law went into effect — that the exit rate rose from 5% to 9% in its immediate aftermath — and their replacement with lower-paid novices. Headcounts , but Kohlhaas described a period of heightened churn that saw schools’ relationships with families frayed as familiar and well-liked staffers left for other districts.

“The first couple of years after Act 10, the retirement parties were not celebrations,” she said. “The teachers, the secretaries, the nurses, the bus drivers, the paraprofessionals — usually the first faces that students see in the morning — were changing every year, or sometimes mid-year.”

***

In a job market that was quickly becoming much more fluid, union membership also began to lose its appeal. School staff were increasingly on the move between districts, and the benefits of belonging to an organization with a severely narrowed scope of action were not always clear.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the proportion of union members in Wisconsin’s workforce , from 14.2% to 7.4%, between 2010 and 2023 (since that figure includes workers from all sectors, the drop for government employees is likely much steeper). A from the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, a right-leaning think tank, showed that the total number of unions holding annual recertification votes across the state declined from 540 in 2014 to 369 in 2018. 

The largest teachers’ union in the state, the Wisconsin Education Association Council, experienced of manpower and organizing heft. A conducted by a pair of researchers at the University of Wisconsin found that WEAC was forced to restructure and cut its staffing by about two-thirds. The retrenchment was made necessary by a freefall in the collection of dues, the payment of which was made voluntary by Act 10.

The loss of paid organizers could be offset, in part, by the efforts of teacher volunteers. But the union had no ready replacement for the millions of dollars in government relations funds that had suddenly evaporated; WEAC went from being one of the biggest lobbying forces in Madison to a second-tier player virtually overnight. 

Spillovers into elections were inevitable. In , Yale’s Biasi studied the effect of Act 10 on political donations during gubernatorial races in 2012 and 2014. Across all Wisconsin school districts, she calculated that the reform depressed contributions to the Democratic Party by 33.1 per 1,000 people, and by over 50 per 1,000 teachers. Scott Walker’s vote share increased by about 2 percentage points as a result. 

Unions “essentially stopped donating money to Democratic political campaigns after the reform because there was a huge drop in revenues coming in.” Biasi said. “Membership went down, and so they just became increasingly less influential actors post-Act 10.”

Gender politics were inflamed as well. Once collective bargaining was invalidated, individual teachers were left to negotiate their salaries by themselves — typically at the start of their work in a new school. But while these interactions occurred at the individual level, a significant pattern made itself felt over the course of several years: Male teachers were making more than female colleagues of similar age, effectiveness, and experience.

that, two years after the expiration of CBAs that had been in effect when Act 10 was signed, salaries for male staff were .4% higher than those for comparable female staff, a gap that grew to 1% after another three years. That estimate would be the equivalent of $540 per year, mostly attributable to women being over pay . While hardly lavish, the disparity could be seen as adding insult to the injury already sustained by .

***

Whether those wounds will be mended anytime soon is difficult to say. 

After the ruling issued in December, the fate of Act 10 will not be decided until an appeal is heard by the state Supreme Court. In all likelihood, much of 2025 will pass before a final ruling is delivered — most likely not until in April. The court’s liberal faction holds a 4-3 majority after Democrats to flip a Republican-held seat in 2023. This spring’s contest is also drawing national attention, with White House advisor Elon Musk contributing $1 million to support the Republican candidate.

Foes of the law were hopeful even before conservative Justice Brian Hagedorn announced in January that from hearing the case (Hagedorn had previously defended Act 10 in his capacity as Gov. Walker’s counsel). But some believe that even the wholesale rejection of the law wouldn’t restore to labor the primacy it formerly enjoyed.

Borsuk remarked that, with the expiration of federal pandemic aid last fall, local districts would be hard-pressed to grant generous new contracts to reinvigorated unions. Cities and towns have already had to dig deep to finance increases in school spending, of property tax hikes last fall to keep up with expenses. 

“School districts in Wisconsin are under an enormous amount of financial pressure in every part of the state,” he said. “There’ll be some change, but it’s not like the golden era can return; there isn’t much gold.”

But to Bazan, the prospect of an overturned Act 10 is too promising to dismiss. More than simple financial rewards, she said, she looked forward to regaining “a voice outside the classroom.” 

“A world without Act 10 is one where teachers get back the respect that we lost 14 years ago,” she said. “When we lost that seat at the table, we lost a lot of that respect as well.”

In a signed letter attached to today’s “Ours to Solve, Once — and For All” report, the six-member council (Jean-Claude Brizard, Mitch Daniels, Chris Howard, Andrew Luck, Frances Messano and Condoleezza Rice) writes that it identified “fundamental barriers” to student equity and success within the current school system. “Despite our national commitment to the issue, steep increases in funding, and decades of reform efforts, our current system has been unable to offset poor student outcomes – particularly for minority and low-income students,” the introduction to the report says. “This failure goes against who we profess to be as a nation.”

Hoover Institution Director and Council Co-Chair Condoleezza Rice went a step further in a Tuesday statement, framing the issue through the lens of national stability: “Education excellence is critical to the societal contract supporting our democracy and is inextricably tied to the success — or failure — of our nation.”

Today’s report is unique in its focus on broader, system-level reforms. The council criticizes the existing structure of the nation’s education landscape, noting that the local school boards and state and federal agencies that run today’s schools “are not the product of coherent and thoughtful design. Rather, they evolved over decades to a point where they hinder more than help the cause of improved outcomes for all students.”

The group also highlights the “perplexing contradiction” of today’s public schools, where the current system boasts strong community support, superior research and dedicated teachers and staff, but students’ academic outcomes vary widely — and many of these results are underwhelming. 

“According to virtually every available metric, the overall quality of American schools has either declined or remained stagnant since the 1970s,” the council writes.

On a per-student basis, the U.S. spends 40% more than the average spent by member countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the council notes. At the same time, the U.S ranks 34th in math globally on the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) evaluations.

“Changing the way these institutions are organized and function ― what we call the ‘operating system’ of public education ― will raise trust, respect, agency, and empowerment for teachers and principals and will provide essential support from other education leaders,” the group says in the report.

The council recommends four core commitments that they believe will help improve the educational “operating system”: Re-organizing the current system toward a new “true north”  that focuses on student outcomes; minimizing regulations and mandates in favor of embracing incentives; cultivating and rewarding professional mastery in the education workforce; and flipping the system “from top-down to bottom-up.”  

“In the flipped system hierarchy, schools are the apex organization,” writes the council. “They need sufficient discretion to make decisions in situ to manage their own operations and to adapt their efforts to address the needs of their students.”

A Hoover Institution spokesperson said that a dedicated website will accompany the report. Set to launch next month, the hub will offer readers and policymakers additional resources and details. 

A summit is also being scheduled for January at Stanford University, which will aim to bring experts together from across the country to discuss  and debate the findings of the report. 

“We hope this report builds motivation and commitment for change,” the council members write in their introduction. “Together, we can launch a new approach to address the current state of public education in America, and provide every child the foundational opportunities they deserve.” 

Disclosure: The Hoover Institution provides financial support to ����Ӱ��.

School was becoming the place he poured all his energy into, on the heels of his father’s incarceration and uncle’s murder. But simultaneously, from as young as four years old, disgusted looks from educators taught him schools were a place where he would be treated differently because he was Black. Being your authentic self, raw emotions and all, seemed to only be okay for white children.

He watched Eric, a Black classmate frequently isolated and paddled for disruptions or difficulty focusing, be expelled in first grade after bringing a water gun to school. From an early age, aunts and uncles imparting wisdom shared their experiences, told that they “would be lucky if they graduated.” 

Marrying autobiography with research and analysis of education reform movements, Fuller recounts his educational life in devastating detail in Being Black in America’s Schools, “an American story that I honestly believe is begging to be told.” 

From managing suicidal thoughts at eight to becoming desensitized to students’ humanity in pursuit of higher test scores working for a network charter, perpetuating the educational violence he thought he never would, Fuller verbalizes how policies landed in the mind of a Black child and educator. 

Amid debates of how and where Black history will be taught and a youth mental health crisis that is disproportionately felt by Black children, Fuller’s work has been described as a “beacon” that showcases “what keeps us captive while giving keen insights on what can free us,” by Abdul Tubman, activist and descendant of Harriet Tubman. 

Revealing the humans behind data and educational movements, Fuller shows the dehumanization happening in ways big and small in classrooms across the country. Tracked into advanced work in high school, for instance, he remembered how it felt to be isolated from his Black peers, then to see counselors write them, and their futures, off before they’d even graduated.  

“In the same way that the inherent racism in our criminal justice system is killing Black and brown people all the time, the inherent racism in our education system is killing the dreams of Black and brown children in the classroom,” Fuller, now an associate provost at The New School in New York City, told ����Ӱ��. 

Released in late July by Dafina, an imprint of Kensington Publishing, Fuller’s story exposes hundreds of anecdotes and presents models for transformative change in the education system. Uplifting models that champion children’s emotional wellbeing and cultures, like community schools and the freedom schools of the 1960s, he imagines a future where all children grow up learning Black history, critical thinking, and financial and emotional literacy in order to lead and “dream their way out of a dreamless land.”  

Drawing from time as an educator and administrator in and around Philadelphia, Boston and New York City’s schools, Fuller has also released a workbook companion for educators about how to concretely apply these concepts to the classroom at grade level. 

“I would have loved for them to tell me that I was worthy, to see me as their child, their nephew, a younger version of who they were, to see me the way I witnessed teachers often see my white classmates. To see me as ‘just a good kid.’ … To attempt to understand me rather than punish me. I would have loved for them to ask me about my hopes and dreams and then cultivate them in me. I would have loved for them to have fun with me and show me the joy they felt from being around me,” he writes. 

In conversation with ����Ӱ��, Fuller reflects on the importance of transforming schools to teach Black children to love themselves and what’s at stake when kids aren’t taught how to interrogate the world around them.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

Jelani Cobb, writer and dean of Columbia’s journalism school, calls this “a book we needed yesterday.” Why write this now? What does it mean at this moment? 

Being Black in American Schools really came from a deep commitment of mine to marginalized children, all children, but specifically Black and brown children. And to liberatory education and powerful storytelling. I think this book is so important now in our current climate, given the attack on education that’s happening. The rhetoric in the conversation is pretty horrible.

It’s so important for us to have stories like this one to cut through a lot of the noise of the pundits, the politics because under all of that are the lived experiences of our students in our classrooms.

This book has been a four year journey really for me. In 2020 I was working for the New York City Department of Education. That was a summer where we had the killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor all over our television screens. What pundits now call the racial reckoning was happening. 

For me as an educator, I was looking at the world and our society and seeing that we were calling to the carpet our criminal justice system in a way that I felt was very valid – starting to interrogate its inherent racism and its inherent flaws. 

I wanted us to have that same conversation about another major American institution, which is our educational system. In the same way that the inherent racism in our criminal justice system is killing Black and brown people all the time, the inherent racism in our education system is killing the dreams of Black and brown children in the classroom. 

I imagine that coming to that realization also shaped the storytelling form you chose for this, weaving in and out of your own personal narrative, research, and historical moments in education reform. How did you decide to do that, and why are those lived experiences so necessary for people to hear and hold? 

It was really important for me to craft the book in the way that I did and I actually fought really hard for it. [Powerful storytelling] is what’s needed to really inspire action and change. Storytelling is what connects us, it’s the human aspect. 

Over the years, through false narratives, through so many things, things get so politicized and so up in the air. There’s not enough of hearing the stories and the real lived experiences of people underneath all of the theories, underneath all of the data. It was really powerful to use my own story – one that is uniquely mine but is not unique, right? 

I talk about being a child of an incarcerated parent growing up. There are millions of children right now who are living that experience. I talk about being one of a few or sometimes the only a Black child or student of color in my classroom as I was being tracked in school [into advanced coursework]. There are hundreds of thousands of children that are experiencing that right now. 

My own story was authentic to me, I knew I could tell it well and analyze it now from my lens as an educator, but also, I felt like it was one that so many people could connect to. I weave in the research and the history and keep it greater than the story because I think it helps people connect to the point that I’m trying to get across … This is what happened, and this is what this means, and this is how it looks.

That comes across in moments like when you describe working in youth development in Philadelphia, seeing the distrust in the community, both for strangers coming to their door and for education after . You feel it, the lived impact of those moments. 

And at so many points, you describe having to advocate for yourself, against the bias of white educators who assumed you cheated or wanted to discipline you or your friends more harshly than your white peers. You show why believing a phrase you repeated often, “I deserve to be here,” was necessary. How do you instill or encourage that in youth who are systemically underserved, and how might we get to a point where youth don’t have to be such fierce advocates? 

I am a strong believer in advocating for yourself, especially as a marginalized person in this world and in our society. In schools, I think how you encourage it is through developing their critical consciousness, developing their own empowering concept of self. 

We come from a legacy of being marginalized, being pushed to the side and being told that we are less-than in society. Because of that, we’re not necessarily the first to advocate for ourselves, especially where we feel discredited or feel like we are seen as second-class citizens. 

I always encourage students that I work with and parents that they deserve to have quality education, they deserve to have a quality experience, and their voice deserves to be heard. 

That advocacy is so important and as you see in the book, my advocacy saved me in many ways. That was something that was really important in my household; my mom taught me to be an advocate for myself because she was an advocate for me. I had that, but not every student is gonna have that because parents come with their lived experiences as well.

To your other question, how do we get to a point where we don’t need to … I think at some level, we will always have to advocate for more for ourselves. That’s not trying to be bleak, but I just think that’s reality. How we get to a point where there’s not much as much advocacy needed is really, the point in the book: to first acknowledge that our educational system was, in its current designs and its original intention, not designed to properly educate Black and brown people well. And then start to interrogate the designs – how we restructure an education system so that it serves all students. 

You also explore why early childhood education is particularly important for forming a sense of self. Reports keep coming out revealing how many millions of young children – for some states like New Mexico, one in two – are experiencing parental incarceration, abuse, death or other ACEs [adverse childhood experiences]. How can educators better support the earliest learners with these lived traumas?

And also RST or racial stress trauma, which is still severely underreported. I believe that every child born outside of the nucleus of what American society is, whiteness, experiences some racial stress trauma. 

We know that from the age 0 to 5, so much of your child’s development takes place. Their mental development, their identity of self. When that is compounded with trauma, we have to address that – in our early childhood centers, our Head Start centers, and as soon as they’re entering into school. 

I normally break it down – at the earliest stages, our children have to love who they are. So what does that mean? However they identify needs to be honored, uplifted and they need to be seen, empowered and know that they have a place in our society. They’re not second class in society, they’re not “other” in society. They are front and center and important in society. You do that through building authentic relationships, and in curriculum. Liberatory curriculum is age appropriate, but also brings in the identities of those youngest learners in ways that are normalized, uplifting to their identities. 

The reality we need to face in America is what you just mentioned, most of our students are coming into the classroom with some form of trauma. We are creating an education system that is just ignoring it. Early childhood is also extremely underfunded. We need more mental health counselors and specialists in our early childhood centers … to think about the designs of your classrooms, schools and how you are addressing the needs of your students.

People will probably read this and be like, well, we don’t even have them in our middle or high schools. But that just tells you how much mental health children’s mental health is put on the back burner. We see it in the numbers. . We have to start putting our resources behind these things. 

That’s a part of liberatory education too, providing them with the tools and trained individuals to help them cope with the traumas that are the reality of living in America. 

You go through some models that try to do this very thing and put a huge emphasis on building up Black children – like community schools, the , and in . That emphasis on love, grace and empathy, it’s not something that’s necessarily taught to teachers in preparation programs. How do you remind educators or leaders who are currently in positions of power of that, to champion kids’ humanity? 

It is not taught in our teacher professional development programs as much as it needs to be. There are programs out there – I mention one, Glenn Singleton’s Courageous Conversations work which does great educator professional development around race – but there’s not a lot.

I’m not saying that children shouldn’t learn in your classrooms, but they won’t be able to learn if they’re in your classroom where they don’t feel safe or loved or like they are seen. 

I always say what moves people is storytelling. But also there’s and data out there that actually shows the more a child feels included in the curriculum, the more the child feels safe, or the better relationship the child has with their teacher, the better they’re going to do academically. There’s so much talk on disparities and how do we close the gaps … [We need more] access to that data showing that we need to have an emphasis on identity development and affirming curriculum. We need to have an emphasis on building authentic relationships. We need to have an emphasis on deconstructing bias in your practice. 

When I finished this book, we weren’t in the present day, of course. Now I’m thinking about the potential of what could happen with current policies, like book banning and the banning of diversity and inclusion, and what could come with Project 2025. I think where we need to focus is really on the grassroots. 

At the end of the day, regardless of what’s happening from a legislative standpoint, we still have millions of kids in the classroom that we are responsible for and can’t let fall through the cracks. If they ban diversity, equity and inclusion, so you can’t say those words, then don’t say those words, but still affirm your students in the classroom. Still honor their identity in the classroom. Those are the conversations that we need to be having with our teachers. 

We get caught up on, this is banned now so we can’t do this, or now we can’t teach AP African American studies. No, you can still honor your students and, and you don’t have to call it that, but you can still do it in the classroom on the ground. Our kids are suffering and we can’t continue to allow them to suffer at the hands of a small minority of people.

Particularly as you’re mentioning the hyper emphasis, especially after the pandemic, on learning losses and academic performance. I keep hearing from educators that we cannot lose the person in all of that, because it’s going to make it that much harder to do anything else. 

I hear sometimes this distinction that, oh, well, if we honor our student’s identity or if we really have a focus on what people like to call “soft skills,” they’ll lose the focus on the academic outcomes. Those two things are not separate, they go hand in hand. Children do better when their lived experiences are brought into the classroom, when you tie in real world current events and their lived experience, when you’re able to connect that to what you’re trying to teach them. They feel they feel more connected to what they’re trying to learn and therefore have better outcomes. 

Speaking of censorship and fear culture, in your writing, you express exactly why learning Black history, accurate history, is important for all children at every stage of education. Referencing the first ethnic studies course you took as a college student at Emory, you said it enabled you to “finally put theory and evidence behind many of mine and my family’s experiences. It was as if up until this point, I had been in a battle without armor.” 

Can you speak more on this, which alludes to a James Baldwin quote, about what you found in that course that you wished you had gotten earlier or that you think youth need exposure to today?

My dad was a part of the mass incarceration of nonviolent criminals who faced very long sentencing for drug related charges. I had experienced that act of violence by my society. Then growing up in South Carolina and experiencing on the ground discriminatory comments … I experienced all of that, that legacy of slavery, of racism that was passed down from generation to generation in our American society. 

When I got to Emory, I learned about redlining. I learned about mass incarceration. I learned about Jim Crow laws, I learned about all of these things and it was like, wow, no, I get it now. This isn’t just something that is happening. This is very intentional and it’s by design. It almost was an empowering thing because, as much as I had my family trying to let me know the great contributions of Black people in our society, your lived experiences are telling you a lot of different things counter to that. 

Without having the knowledge of, oh wow, our American society was designed to have these outcomes for this group of people, Black people. It’s not that we’re not as smart, or we’re just not as successful or we’re just not as capable. 

Now I understand the corrupt designs behind that lived experience, why my family and those around me have that experience. Now I understand it and I can go forward and combat it. I think that’s so important for our students to experience. 

The Baldwin quote came from a where he also said, children see everything, they are like a sponge. They’re observing everything but they can’t articulate necessarily what it is that they’re observing. But they know that something is off. They know that there’s some “terrible weight” on their parent’s shoulders that menaces them. That terrible weight is racism, is white supremacy. 

We’re experiencing that every day. Our children are experiencing it every day and they can’t necessarily articulate it. But if they’re not being taught the true history, they’re not being taught how to interrogate society, be civically engaged, and understand those individuals that were critical thinkers of our society – individuals like Baldwin, Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King. If they’re not taught the designs of our American society, then that is still a very disempowering curriculum that perpetuates racial propaganda and a social caste system in America. 

It’s so important at the earliest stage I got a little bit of it at home. My first [classroom] experience of it was when I got to college, but children need to be experiencing that at the earliest ages of early stages of their educational experience that is developmentally appropriate. 

I just want to emphasize that perspective and name that it runs counter to the narrative that I often hear used to minimize the importance of teaching Black history or systemic racism: this is going to teach kids to hate America, that they will feel depression, not pride. 

I hear those same things that you’re talking about, we don’t want to feel bad, or sometimes, we don’t want kids to feel guilty for things that they had nothing to do with. But to teach truth and to learn truth is empowering for everybody. It puts everyone on the same playing field. 

It’s so empowering for a Black child to know, hey, it’s not just because of who I am innately. It’s because of the legacies of how this country was designed and policies and practices that took place that impacted my ancestors and now have impacted me. Then, what can I do now to change those things so that my legacy can be different? Or my children, grandchildren, whoever’s can be different? That’s empowering for a white child too, like, oh, this is, this is where we messed up in the past. Now what can I do to make sure that we don’t repeat that in the future? 

This book is also referred to as a call to action. To whom and for what are you calling out for? 

There are three things I hope people get from this book. One is first just the knowledge and the acknowledgment that our educational system and in its original intention and current designs was to perpetuate a racial and social hierarchy within our American society. 

Then, let’s look at the designs of our educational system and figure out, in what ways is this design perpetuating that hierarchy so we can start to redesign, reimagine, make necessary change. So that those in power who are able to make the change from a legislative perspective, do that. Those in power who are able to make the change from a school design perspective, do that. Those in power who are able to make the change from interactions with students in the classroom, do that. And then those who maybe are not a parent or educator per se but are interested in the ways that we educate children in this country, they can then start to advocate for those for changes within their local communities and school systems. 

My hope is that this book really inspires us all to action. All of us play a part in that. You don’t have to be senator or work for the federal Department of Education. I hope that this book really makes everyone feel like they all have a part in it and they all can be actors agents of change. 

What has been the result?

The Hoover Institution’s A Nation at Risk +40 project brought together a dozen scholars in an attempt to better assess the real-life impact of these efforts. Each author dug deep into a key education reform initiative — standards-based accountability, new governance models, changes in teacher training and development, technology implementation and countless others — with the goal of cataloging what was tried and what happened as a result.

While each paper in the series speaks to a specific chapter of America’s school reform story, a critical added analysis was provided by the Hoover Institution’s Margaret “Macke” Raymond, who took on the task of looking across this series of reports to better understand what, if anything, they collectively tell us about school reform more broadly.

Her conclusions? 

While “40 years of scattershot reforms, have on the whole, failed to improve student learning,” she writes, there are indeed some high-level takeaways that “hold the potential for illuminating future directions” in school reform.

Specifically, Raymond’s findings suggest that policymakers can improve their odds of substantive and lasting policy impact by tackling six challenges related to planning, engagement, consensus building and implementation.

Overcoming Impulsiveness: Policymakers are under pressure to act and can be quick to embrace a reform strategy that has found success elsewhere. It worked there, the thinking goes, so it should work here. The research suggests, however, that local policymakers do not always take the time to determine whether their chosen approach is a good fit. Were the factors that led to that success in place in the new locale? If not, then what? Policymakers need to resist the urge to move quickly, and instead devote the time and resources necessary to understand how reform success can be accomplished for the specific populations they serve.

Moving Beyond the Margins: Policymakers who understand the challenges that come with large-scale reform sometimes focus on more marginal quick-win strategies, hoping these will prove easier to execute. Efforts of this kind can have impact and are typically cheaper and easier to launch. But policymakers can overlook that in their sheer “death by a thousand cuts” volume, marginal efforts can also produce reform fatigue and resistance. Worse still, the bandwidth they consume is then unavailable for broader, more systemic change. Small-scale approaches have their place — especially when structured as pilots from which lessons can be learned — but four decades of marginal reforms haven’t moved the needle. Approach them with caution.

Creating Coherence: Policymakers seldom take the time to understand how a proposed reform will interact with or impact efforts that are already on the books. As Raymond notes, reforms tend to be “ ‘bolted on’ one after another, without regard for how they fit together.” Each one, then, has the effect of “diluting the impact of the others.” Before enacting something new, policymakers would do well to engage stakeholders in more fully understanding the potential impact of launching yet another reform approach. Better yet, they should undertake a detailed inventory of existing efforts, study their results both in the near term and over time, and aggressively phase out initiatives that no longer meet their objectives.

Addressing Impatience: The steady drumbeat of electoral cycles creates pressure to demonstrate quick results. Policymakers seldom appreciate, though, that in some instances — the adoption of new curricular materials, for example, or the creation of new teacher preparation programs — measurable impact can take years to materialize. Impatience for results can undermine an initiative’s long-term success and sends a message to the forces of the status quo that if they just hold out long enough, “this too, shall pass.” Policymakers need to maintain reform momentum over the long term, which typically requires sustained (and often bipartisan) coalition building and deep levels of ongoing engagement.

Prioritizing Implementation: Raymond’s findings suggest that countless education reform initiatives have been put to sea with great fanfare, only to be dashed to pieces on the rocks of implementation. The journey of a reform idea from the capitol steps to the classroom door is far longer and more hazardous than most policymakers realize. As a result, they hardly ever craft detailed implementation roadmaps identifying who is responsible for which mission-critical actions at various levels. They seldom build feedback loops to track implementation progress and rarely utilize small-scale pilots to identify potential roadblocks in advance. Absent unrelenting attention to the day-to-day work of implementation, policymakers should have little hope for sustained and meaningful change.

Ensuring effectiveness. “Apart from formal pilots,” Raymond reports, “most reforms launch without considering how to learn from them.” New initiatives are rarely accompanied by a plan for research and analysis, and policymakers seldom conduct in-depth program evaluation. As a critical first step, policymakers need to determine the key metrics they intend to track as indicators of success. If they are making progress, how will they know? From there, procedures need to be put in place for regular reviews of the relevant data, including feedback from stakeholders. The critical question for policymakers: If their reform is clearly not on track to success, what do they do then?

In the conclusion to her study, Raymond notes that the Hoover Institution’s analysis of four decades of school reform has produced “an impressive record of what not to do.” To help policymakers put these lessons to good use, Hoover has crafted an education policy that is organized around the six key challenges described above and asks policymakers a series of questions to help them test their thinking. The education reform movement has seen some successes over the past 40 years, but policymakers also have plenty to learn from failures. The Hoover Institution’s new toolkit will help them do just that.

While public education is the cornerstone of democracy, the technical causes that make school elections unrepresentative are many. Off-year elections lead to low voter turnout for choosing the nation’s approximately . Students — those most affected by what happens in the classroom — are excluded from casting ballots. The unchecked influence of dark money remains prevalent. Extremists inject national culture-war issues into local races to spur battles that distract education leaders from their core mission. And few states or communities mandate any kind of legal right to a quality public education.

This status quo results in unrepresentative decision-making, which threatens American public education and democracy as a whole.

According to a recent poll, believe democracy is under threat. But in places where democratic innovations are implemented, voter participation increases, dark money decreases and governance becomes more representative of the communities it serves.This is an emerging opportunity that education advocates must seize. 

Across the country, promising signs of progress are emerging. In Portland, Maine, the school board now uses . In California, districts are moving en masse to , which dramatically increase voter turnout and produce representatives better aligned to their constituents. Cities in Maryland have , and many states are considering a new legal right to a quality education.

These nonpartisan, pro-democracy reforms are creating more inclusive, representative and responsive educational governance systems that reflect the diverse voices of their communities. Yet, this progress is uneven. In states like Texas and Florida, the opposite trend is evident: increasing centralization, a shift toward partisan elections and erosion of community control.

In response, was founded by Education Civil Rights Now, The Open System Institute and Seek Common Ground to advance these trends and support this emerging movement in education to build a stronger democracy. But early on, it became clear that most education leaders were not aware of this critical landscape. For six months, a team researched and now has produced — a unique nationwide analysis that highlights promising policies and challenges (like ranked-choice voting bans) and zeroes in on communities and states with the potential to unrig the system. The research seeks to be the starting point for leaders in education and democracy to work together in a shared pursuit that could accelerate the power of both movements. 

How does this get started? First, communities and states can use the map to assess the current status of their edudemocracy. Second, leaders must identify starting points at which governance and electoral design could be changed. Building coalitions to reimagine and create these new systems ensures the result isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach, but rather a strategic push for innovations that meet local needs. Lastly, education and democracy leaders should form learning communities to support one another and commit to the long, hard work of generating even more innovative ideas over time, increasing participation and decreasing polarization.

Achieving these goals will not be possible unless leaders from across the political, practitioner and philanthropic spheres unite in common purpose. This fall and beyond, Cornerstone intends to do its part by raising funds to empower organizations on the ground in states and communities. They will commit to building coalitions — working with state legislatures and local school boards, among others — to pass policies and practices that will open up education democracy. Hopefully, more will join them to learn from the first group and chart their own path to implement high-impact reforms. 

Our goal is that by the 2030s, the nation should have a transformed educational election landscape,where innovations like expanding voting rights to 16-year-olds in school board elections, attaining school board turnouts as high as those for presidential elections and enshrining high-quality public education as a civil right are the norm, not the exception.

The decisions made today will shape the future of the education system and democracy for generations to come. The new National EduDemocracy Landscape Map offers a roadmap for navigating this opportunity and rebuilding trust in institutions, reinvigorating public participation, decreasing polarization and ensuring that all children receive the education they need to secure the future they deserve.

Famous in the institutional lore of New York City public schools, the rubber room was actually a number of spaces, called Temporary Reassignment Centers, where hundreds of teachers awaited arbitration related to official claims of incompetence, insubordination or abuse. They’d been removed from classrooms and spent years going through the process, all the while receiving full compensation. 

When veteran journalist Steven Brill introduced the term into the wider American lexicon with published in the New Yorker, it instantly became a byword for the ailments that many believed were ruining American schools: Too-powerful unions protected unfit workers from being fired, while feckless administrators filed paperwork and awaited hearings that might never come. All the while, kids paid the price.

His investigation, later expanded into a book-length treatment, wasn’t greeted with universal praise. Critics accused him of attempting to “” teachers while subjecting deep-pocketed charter school supporters to . In the New York Review of Books, education historian and reform foe Brill’s book was actually “about politics and power, about how a small group of extremely wealthy men have captured national education policy.”

Still, the story became a central text during the reform movement’s golden age, with newly elected President Barack Obama pushing states to tighten academic standards and link decisions on teacher hiring and compensation to standardized test results. Local education leaders — none more prominent than those Brill profiled, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his chancellor of public schools, Joel Klein — attempted to oblige, often coming into fierce conflict with teachers’ unions through their support of charter schools.

As the most determined reformers discovered, nothing gold can stay. The decade-long push for testing and accountability generated an even stronger response from educators, parents and policymakers, whether the being implemented were worth the incremental gains in student test scores. By the middle of the 2010s, Washington had , and most districts began to reconsider their own posture toward school improvement.

The latest example: In New York, lawmakers of measures that had allowed districts to expedite the termination process for tenured teachers, effectively allowing each school system to establish its own teacher evaluation process. In July, Gov. Kathy Hochul signed the repeal, which counteracted legislation that had been enacted by her predecessor, the reform-minded Gov. Andrew Cuomo, less than a decade earlier.

Brill professes ambivalence about the change. The rubber room may have been an intolerable feature of schools in his hometown of New York, but he believes the steps taken to eliminate it were largely “cosmetic” to begin with. A student of complex and hard-to-change systems — after writing a book-length treatment of dysfunctional schools, , he moved on to a volume on — he strikes a cynical tone on the near-term possibilities for improvement.

In a discussion with ����Ӱ��’s Kevin Mahnken, Brill spoke about the political shortcomings of reformers like Klein and Michelle Rhee, the organizational exhaustion facing charter schools, and what he describes as teachers’ unions legitimate arguments against education savings accounts.

“If you shift the political power and market power to people getting vouchers, you lose the constituency that funds and manages and holds accountable public schools,” he said.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

����Ӱ��: What’s your response to New York reversing course on these policies? And what do you think was the legacy of your reporting on the “rubber room”?

Steven Brill: I have questions of my own about how much policy has actually changed since my story came out. 

To the extent that Race to the Top had any effect, it’s long in the past. To win that competition, New York State enacted certain changes in process that were cosmetic and useless. From what I know of the rubber room, was that they stopped having teachers appear in one place, where some pesky reporter could go and find them. They still didn’t have to do any work, they just didn’t have to gather in one place.

To come to your larger question, I’m not sure how much of a difference this repeal makes. I’d want to know if there was some district, somewhere, that actually showed some real teeth in their accountability requirement and now have to abandon that.

If there was an exodus of low-performing teachers from New York classrooms over the last two decades, we never heard about it.

No. And if your only recourse is to fire teachers — as opposed to holding back salary increases from some that need improvement, or giving good ones bonuses — it’s not likely to work anyway. 

As far as I could tell, the principal problem of public education had to do with having some quality control, accountability, and incentives. All of which the private sector has in most workplaces, especially workplaces that actually matter, but which there’s a total lack of in public education in New York and a lot of other cities. 

The irony is that I went from writing about public education’s failings to writing about healthcare, where I found the problems to be exactly the opposite. In public education, I think it’s generally true that the people actually doing the educating were under-compensated and not given any kind of performance accountability. Whereas in healthcare, the people actually doing the healthcare are also under-compensated, but the ones really ruining the system are everyone except the doctors and nurses and orderlies; it’s the insurance companies, the hospital administrators, the drug companies, the equipment makers. 

In other words, in medicine, the people who aren’t abusing the system are the doctors. But in public education, I think there’s a pretty good argument that the people abusing and undermining the system are actually the teachers.

What’s the lesson you draw from that comparison? Are these just the vices of the public sector versus those of the private sector?

What I’m really driving at is that the structure around American healthcare is what undermines it, creating profit incentives for everybody except doctors and nurses acting in good faith. In public education, there are no incentives, and the reason there’s no change is that the workers basically get to help elect their bosses.

I don’t think it’s a matter of doctors being more accountable in the private sector. If you compare public sector doctors with private sector problems, you notice the same problem, which is not the doctors themselves but rather everything around the system.

A moment ago, you mentioned that teacher accountability needs to involve both carrots and sticks. And it’s true that the hard-charging reformers, like New York City’s Joel Klein or Washington, D.C.’s Michelle Rhee, created political problems for themselves by being perceived as hard on teachers. Do you think they should bear most of the responsibility over the intense conflicts that arose over education reform in major school districts?

Maybe people like Joel Klein were just too instinctively combative toward the union, but I would put the onus on the other side. The worst thing you could say to [American Federation of Teachers President] Randi Weingarten, other than that a teacher should be fired, is that a teacher should get a bonus.

I really like Randi, but to her, that idea was extremely divisive. I remember having conversations with her, and she’d say, “Who is a principal to judge what makes an effective teacher?” And I wondered, “If you don’t want to use test scores, what else is there?” In every other workplace, a supervisor is responsible for judging the comparative effectiveness of his workforce in one way or another. 

So it goes in both ways. Some of it may have been unduly confrontational from the management side, but it was certainly unduly combative on the workers’ side as well. My view is that we should start by having teachers be much better compensated, and beyond that, we should be able to have positive accountability: If someone’s a really good teacher, they should be able to be promoted rapidly and compensated fairly. That doesn’t happen. It’s not an environment where that can happen.

In charter schools, which have their own set of sustainability problems that I’ve written about, it does happen — maybe to excess, but it happens. If your focus is purely on the kids, it’s easier to just ask the question, “Which teacher is doing the most for kids?” rather than “Which teacher has been breathing for the last 20 years?”

You were writing about these issues at the zenith of the education reform movement, right in the early Obama years. What would you pinpoint as the beginning of the end of that period of possibility?

When did [New York City Mayor Bill] de Blasio get elected? Whenever that was, I’d put it there.

The first time I ever met de Blasio, I was in a public meeting where politicians were arguing over the location of some charter schools. This was in a big auditorium in Lower Manhattan. And this big, tall guy stands up, introduces himself as a city councilman, and says that charters are just a right-wing plot by hedge funders to get rid of public education. It was a big speech.

At the end, when I found him and asked which charters he had in mind, he said he was talking about Success Academy. I asked, “But if they’re so terrible, why would all these parents line up to try to get into the lottery?” He said he didn’t have time to talk, but he gave me his card. 

His election as mayor of education reform. Then Rahm Emanuel’s mayoral tenure ended in Chicago, and his successors didn’t feel the same about education reform. So you’d place the implosion somewhere in there. I don’t think there’s any big district run by reformers anymore.

It’s instructive just to look at who’s in charge. Michelle Rhee and Joel Klein haven’t run districts since I was in college. Randi Weingarten is still here, and as close to the pinnacle of the Democratic Party as she’s ever been.

I think the unions basically waited everybody out. Randi helped negotiate with [then-Deputy New York Education Commissioner] John King to get the final Race to the Top application in, and after it went through, and called Joel Klein. We just laughed about it because it was such bullshit. You knew it was never going to mean anything.

The only upshot was that they decided, “Why do we have these rubber rooms that a reporter can find? Why don’t we just use the principal’s office in a school or something?” And I think that’s basically what’s happened.

Have your views on charter schools changed? I remember that your observation from this period was essentially that they have some promise for the children enrolled in them, but they can’t possibly be scaled sufficiently to make a meaningful impact on American school quality.

What I always felt about charter schools was that, first, they shouldn’t be thought of as a cure-all because there were always going to be scams and bad schools. And those should be held every bit as accountable, or more so, than a traditional public school. 

But there was a second thing that I was always sensitive to as someone who has run companies. And that is, at a certain point after the first or second year, the adrenaline wears off for a young teacher working 10–12 hours a day and meeting with parents and kids on weekends or times of crisis. That experience just has to be made more normal for teachers. One of the young charter teachers that I tracked in my book just experienced a life change when she had kids and couldn’t keep going. You can’t expect people not to burn out and turn over as time goes on. 

When I was first looking at them, the energy around the Success Academy schools was equivalent to that of a political campaign. I mean, people were working all-out, 24/7, and . [Success Academy founder] Eva Moskowitz has done a very good job of normalizing that. I remember, towards the end of when I was writing my book, the founders of another charter network instituted a rule stating that some proportion of their faculty couldn’t be on email over the weekends. It was the beginning of realizing that the jig was up in terms of everybody running at a full sprint all the time. If you think about a big organization sustaining its energy and its quality, you really have to start doing that.

On the positive side, charters provided competition in the best sense of the word. When I found out that Success Academies co-located in the same building as New York City public schools, I immediately saw that as a perfect story. It was like a science experiment in that there was literally a line going through the building, and the results on either side were so different. What explained it? The money was the same, so it had to be something else. 

To me, that is the surviving benefit of charter schools, along with all the value that kids got out of them.

Their value was as a proof point of what could be accomplished?

It should really be an embarrassment. But that’s where politics comes in. People like Randi were willing to sustain the embarrassment for a while and wait it out.

What do you make of the spread of universal education savings account programs? Do you think they could help bring about improvements to public schools, or are you worried about a potential lack of accountability in that sector?

Here’s the theory: If you give me, as a parent, $10,000 dollars a year to get an education for my 10-year-old, and I can spend it on whatever educational costs I choose, then the marketplace will work. I’ll spend my $10,000 in the place where I’ll get the most value, which would typically be defined as the best education in math, reading, civics, athletic opportunities, and everything else a school is supposed to do. It wouldn’t be defined as the best Orthodox Jewish education or indoctrination into a certain political standpoint, but it would be education.

The problem is, how do you try to hold accountable everyone who gets those $10,000 checks? You end up with the same kind of system as public education. Maybe you send your kid to a school down the block with nine other kids, and the total cost of that to the public is $100,000 for 10 students. Someone — and you would think it would be Republicans leading this charge — would want to make sure taxpayers are getting the most for their $100,000.

So how do you do that? I’m asking because I actually don’t know. What does, say, Florida do to make sure kids in a private choice school are reading at the level you want them to? In charters, kids take tests, and the schools’ scores are public. I’m not convinced that a public elementary school should have a monopoly on those kids either; they should have to earn it. But a lot depends on whether we’re holding accountable the schools receiving those $10,000 checks. 

A lot of ESA proponents would make the argument that by voting with their feet and withdrawing their kids if results aren’t good.

Well, take New York. My kids, because their parents have money, all went to private schools in Manhattan. You’d better believe those private schools were accountable for the ridiculous fees they were getting to educate our kids. If they suddenly weren’t getting into college or learning how to read, those schools wouldn’t exist because the marketplace would do its work, and they’d close. 

That’s hardly a solution to the shortage of educational opportunity. You can’t say, “Let’s just keep those alternatives for wealthy people and nobody else.” I understand the inclination to not have that be the only alternative to public schools. But you do have to set up some kind of accountability and regulation. In the case of the elite schools on the East Side of Manhattan, the accountability is that parents, by and large, are really sophisticated and tough. Sometimes they’re too tough and too demanding. But it works.

The political war around this issue seems so contentious that you wonder if any kind of compromise exists to introduce a level of accountability besides parental choice.

The other issue the unions raise — and they’re probably right in this case — is that if you shift the political power and market power to people getting vouchers, you lose the constituency that funds and manages and holds accountable public schools. 

If I were Randi Weingarten, the example I would use is that of jury duty. This is going to sound way off-topic, but it’s not. Some years ago, a new chief judge was appointed to run the court system in New York, and the first thing she did was for jury duty. In the past, if you were a good citizen and reported for jury duty, they’d send you to this dingy place where there weren’t enough chairs to sit down and clerks treated you terribly. It was just a miserable experience.

Judge Judith Kaye started hearing complaints from neighbors and lawyer friends and people at her country club, basically saying, “My God, have you seen what it’s like to go to jury duty? It’s disgusting, you can’t use your laptop, the people are so rude!” And jury duty in New York is now a much better environment and much more democratized. 

My point is that if there were a constitutional amendment saying that all K–12 schools in the United States needed to be fully public, those schools would get a lot better. Trust me, the kinds of people who ended up in the rubber room would be hounded out. But it’s perfectly tolerable if some kid in Harlem is subject to those teachers while my kid is off at a private school.

As you mention, a situation like that would be politically unworkable. I wonder if we’re heading toward the inverse scenario, in which everyone is given choice.

Another analogue, which is a sign of the times, is to imagine how nice commercial air travel would be if you banned private jets. We should think of the voucher movement in those terms. People are saying, “I’m a captive of these crappy public schools — why are you allowing it? Is it because the teachers elect you?”

Another big change in the education world over the last decade or so has been the dramatic shift in focus toward matters of equity, which has recently proven controversial in some of its manifestations. I’m thinking of San Francisco trying to stop teaching Algebra in eighth-grade, or KIPP from “Work hard. Be nice.” What’s your view on these developments?

I think it’s just awful. The idea that working hard was something negative — what does it even mean?

I wrote a book about the problems of the intensely merit-based society that we’ve become. But it was really meant to be a critique of how we decide merit. The idea that everybody should have the same outcome, rather than the same opportunity, is just ridiculous. Politically it’s a total loser because obviously most people think they’re the exception in some way.

Another area where we’re seeing the debate over merit play out is in college admissions, where high-prestige institutions are now like the SAT to determine their applicants’ ability. For a few years there, it looked like we might be .

The first long magazine article I ever wrote was about what a scam the Educational Testing Service and the College Board were. But that had to do with the merits of the test, not the idea of testing for merit. If you’re left with nothing but your high school grades to get into college, and the Ivy League just accepts the top 2 percent of every school, that doesn’t work. That’s saying to parents, “Whatever you do, don’t send your kids to Stuyvesant or Brooklyn Tech because the odds of finishing in the top 2 percent are tiny.”

What I try to set aside is the question of whether the merit-based tests reflect true merit. Life is always unfair in different ways. I always wanted to be a pitcher for the Yankees, but if the tryouts involve how fast you can throw a baseball, it’s not going to work out. That’s just how life is.

When I spoke with Bill Gates last year, he compared school improvement efforts very unfavorably with his foundation’s successful work to lower malaria deaths. Specifically, he called American K–12 schools a “challenged space.” Would you agree with that assessment? If so, why?

That’s a very interesting observation. I think it’s because nobody’s against cutting malaria. 

The malaria lobby isn’t that strong. But you run into a whole set of challenges when you do all the things Gates tried with schools. And some of his investments were entirely logical! 

He was willing to invest money in having teachers be able to be observed by their supervisors. Who could be against that? It turns out, a lot of unions were.

So again, who is against holding teachers accountable, both in a positive and a negative way? Who’s against changing the type of textbooks that get used? The people who sell the current textbooks. Who’s against having schools structured in a new way? The people whose jobs depend upon the current structure.

I have a house in a village in Westchester called Katonah. Katonah is part of Bedford, but each place has a separate school district, and each district has a superintendent who supervises the same number of students as a large middle school in the Bronx. And the last time I looked, each of those people had a salary nearly equivalent to Joel Klein’s when he was the chancellor of New York City schools. 

But if you try to merge 6–10 school districts in Westchester and form a school system about half the size of the Bronx, you’ll get resistance from whoever is the superintendent, the deputy superintendent, the general counsel, the purchase manager, and anyone else who has good jobs in those districts. That’s different from finding a cure for malaria.

“I felt there had to be something different,” said the school’s founder, Candice Hilton, who quit her job as a public school teacher last December after seven years in the system. Her daughter had just started kindergarten that fall and it provided a new lens through which Hilton could view today’s schooling. “Her teacher was amazing,” said Hilton, “but she told me how bored she was doing worksheets.” 

At the same time, Hilton was reflecting on all of the required standardized testing in today’s schools and the pressures it was creating for students and teachers alike. “We tested the kids so many days straight. It was just a sad space to be in for our education system,” recalled Hilton.

After leaving the public school system, Hilton began researching what it would take to homeschool her daughter. It was through that research that she decided to become a microschool founder. She opened Hilton Horizons Academy in a cheerful rented space inside a culinary school with a dozen K-8 students. A hybrid microschool, Hilton’s students attend the mixed-age program two or three days a week for individualized academics and enrichment. Tuition for the three-day program is $4,900 a year. All of Hilton’s students are legally homeschooled, with the vast majority of them new to homeschooling this academic year. “Most of my students are coming from public school. Most of them are first-time homeschoolers,” said Hilton, adding that only two of her current students were previously homeschooled.

At , which opened in Goodyear, Arizona one week after Hilton Horizons Academy, founder Elisa Hernandez’s 14 microschool students are a mix of homeschoolers and those coming from traditional public or private schools. A high school English teacher who taught in the public school system for 10 years, Hernandez quit for reasons similar to Hilton. Post-Covid, she noticed that schools became even more focused on standardized testing, perhaps as a result of more attention being paid to alleged learning loss during pandemic school closures. “There was a shift where we were told to teach to that standardized test. Your worth as a teacher was now tied to that score, or your students’ scores. That was a big shift for me,” recalled Hernandez. 

Last year, she began a small tutoring business on the side while still teaching full-time in the public schools. She enjoyed it so much that she decided to turn the tutoring business into a dedicated microschool, leaving her teaching job at the end of the school year in May. Hernandez wanted to create the type of school in which she knew children would thrive. “I think that learning should be fun and learning should be personalized. If those two things are happening, that can be groundbreaking and world-changing,” she said.

Students attend Hernandez’s home-based program for sixth to twelfth graders up to four days a week at an annual cost of $5,600. She intentionally set her tuition below the approximately $7,000 that all Arizona K-12 students are now eligible to receive under the state’s universal education savings account (ESA) program. “I wanted to make sure that they had enough money left over to do sports, clubs, whatever it is that they want to do,” said Hernandez.

Microschools and similarly creative schooling options gained increased popularity in the wake of the pandemic, and they continue to gain momentum. Not only are new schools and spaces opening across the U.S. but existing ones are expanding. 

New from VELA, a philanthropic nonprofit organization and entrepreneur community, reveals that over 90 percent of the unconventional learning environments it surveyed had more learners last fall than they did at their launch date, and the median compound rate of growth for these programs was 25 percent a year. 

As parent demand for more individualized, innovative education options grows, more everyday entrepreneurs are stepping up to meet that demand, while finding greater personal and professional satisfaction as school founders. Many of them are former public school teachers like Hilton and Hernandez who grew tired of one-size-fits-all standardized schooling and wanted to create an alternative. According to its 2024 sector , the National Microschooling Centers estimates that over 70 percent of today’s microschool founders are current or former licensed educators.

“I’m not a business person. I’m an English teacher,” Hernandez says, acknowledging that she initially felt intimidated by the idea of starting a school. She, like Hilton, decided to join the program earlier this year to gain support and mentorship before, during, and after launch. Started by Amar Kumar, founder of the national microschool network, KaiPod Learning, the Catalyst program provides business startup support and ongoing operational assistance to school founders. The cohort-style program is free to participants, with a small revenue-sharing agreement if they decide to launch a school following the program.

“We started KaiPod Catalyst because we saw tens of thousands of educators looking for alternative career paths in many of the same communities where families were looking for alternative education options,” Kumar told me, adding that applications for the fall cohort are now open.

The new school founders I spoke with say the support from KaiPod Catalyst has been invaluable as they move from their role as teachers to teacher-entrepreneurs. “I think that something that stopped me from starting a microschool earlier was the lack of mentorship,” said Amanda Lucas, who taught in private and charter schools throughout New York City for about a decade. She also participated in a KaiPod Catalyst cohort earlier this year. “I didn’t have any mentors, and I didn’t have anyone to go to and to help me get through the tough times and answer questions,” added Lucas. 

Her microschool, , launches on September 4th in a leased, home-like space in Old Bridge, New Jersey. She currently has 10 enrolled students, ages 6 to 13, with two additional teachers. Her full-time program costs $15,000 a year, with various part-time enrollment options. 

Lucas expects to expand in the coming months given the increased number of inquiries she has been receiving from interested families, but she plans to remain a microschool for homeschoolers, rather than become a recognized private school. “Private schools, like charter schools, don’t give you all of the freedom that a microschool does,” said Lucas. “I want full autonomy, and I want absolute freedom in education. I also really believe in homeschooling and if we have too many students, I won’t be able to tailor the education the way that I want to,” she said.

As the new school year begins, new schools are sprouting across the country, offering the personalization, freedom, and flexibility that enable both students and teachers to flourish.

Disclosure: Stand Together Trust provides financial support to Vela Education Fund and ����Ӱ��.

Addressing thousands of her party’s most loyal supporters just days after being endorsed by President Joe Biden, to defend labor rights and beat back Republican plans to dissolve the U.S. Department of Education. Above all, she heaped praise on members of the nation’s eighth-largest union, which she said was engaged in “the most noble work: teaching other people’s children.”

“And God knows,” she quickly added, “we don’t pay you enough.”

Harris made no firm commitments in her 20 minutes of remarks, only her second major speech . Yet that near-digression unmistakably echoed the signature idea of her 2020 presidential campaign — and quite possibly provided a preview of what she intends to accomplish in the White House.

More than five years ago, when then-Sen. Harris was considered one of the betting favorites to win the Democratic nomination and contest Donald Trump’s reelection, she pitched her first major policy offering directly to teachers. While her fellow progressives broadcast their ambitions to enact and , she unveiled to raise teacher salaries with state and federal funds, potentially closing the earnings gap between educators and other comparably educated professionals. 

The proposal reflected the upheaval of the #RedforEd movement, which had launched a wave of teacher strikes the previous year, remembered Sarah Shapiro, a former staffer at the liberal Center for American Progress (CAP) who volunteered for Harris’s failed 2020 bid. But it also demonstrated Harris’s abiding focus on schools and their employees, she said.

“It showed how ambitious she is in advocating for public schools and supporting that workforce, which has continued to struggle since the pandemic,” said Shapiro, now a Democratic staffer in the U.S. Senate.

Whether the vice president dusts off her promise to boost teacher pay is one of several questions that could define the K–12 agenda going forward if she prevails over Trump in November. With the Democratic National Convention just weeks away, she and her advisers will soon decide if voters want sweeping changes to federal education policy — in effect, a progressive version of the Heritage Foundation’s controversial Project 2025 — or a more measured continuation of the program that Biden and Harris have pursued the last four years.

Those efforts have included massive expenditures in pandemic relief aid and student loan forgiveness, but little drive to comprehensively lift academic achievement or transform how education is delivered. Nearly a decade after the eclipse of the No Child Left Behind Act, some longtime observers believe the Democrats’ always-fickle dance with school reform and choice has faltered completely. 

Michael Petrilli, president of the reform-friendly Thomas B. Fordham Institute and an alumnus of the Education Department from the early days of NCLB, said Harris had a unique opportunity to realize her own vision for schools. Unburdened by primary challengers who might have obliged her to define her goals earlier, he argued, she could spend the remainder of the campaign filling a blank canvas.

“She hasn’t had to make any specific promises, and she hasn’t put any policy positions out there that are her own,” Petrilli said. “So she’s got a free hand.”

Red for Ed’s legacy

Harris was presented with a somewhat similar freedom in 2020, albeit in drastically different circumstances. 

That primary campaign featured an astonishing 29 major candidates, including brand names like Bernie Sanders and would-be giant killers like Pete Buttiegieg. From the outset, the freshman senator was considered , drawing huge crowds to her speeches and enjoying enviable polling numbers.

In the middle of that honeymoon phase, Harris opted to wade head-on into the K–12 debate. Her teacher pay reform would have given the average American teacher a $13,500 raise, with Washington picking up 10 percent of the tab. Thereafter, the campaign said, the federal government would pay $3 for every dollar contributed by states to close their compensation gap between teachers and other professionals with similar credentials and experience.

It made for an unusual centerpiece to her campaign rollout. At a time when her opponents were brainstorming billion-dollar initiatives seemingly every week — from Andrew Yang’s push for a to Cory Booker’s enthusiasm for — comparatively few addressed education. Surveyed about their positions on the issue, forgiving student debt, making community college free, and whether they’d sent their own children to public schools. When Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s famously detail-oriented campaign released its principal contribution on children and families, it childcare subsidies rather than schools as such.

Jorge Elorza, a rising star in the Democratic Party then serving in his second term as mayor of Providence, Rhode Island, said he appreciated Harris’s willingness to throw down the gauntlet to her primary opponents.

“It was during a campaign where many of the other candidates didn’t propose much around K–12,” said Elorza, who now leads the advocacy group . “I give her credit for thinking big and coming out with a significant proposal on education.”

Democrats had spent much of the prior four years trying to forge a new path on education and shed some of the dissension that had wracked their coalition throughout much of the reform era. Hillary Clinton’s showed a willingness to move away from standardized testing and toward a closer embrace of teachers’ unions, whose leaders were some of Clinton’s closest allies. 

The Trump administration only accelerated that process, with Democrats finding it “hard to be associated with anything” the president or Education Secretary Betsy DeVos supported, Elorza recalled. When thousands of teachers, dissatisfied with paychecks that had never recovered from cuts enacted during the Great Recession, marched on state capitols in the #RedforEd summer of 2018, Harris for the cause.

When she announced her presidential candidacy a few months later, she also benefited from the help of some of the progressive movement’s most influential thinkers on education. Catherine Brown, then the vice president of education policy at CAP, assisted the campaign as a volunteer by helping draft its K–12 plans. 

Alongside the sizable commitment to increased teacher pay, Harris’s agenda included a slew of ideas to bolster the attractiveness of teaching, including more resources for professional development, career ladders and mentorship programs, and a large fund dedicated to training teachers at minority-serving colleges and universities. Many of the same recommendations appeared to be inspired by CAP’s , launched in the late Obama era in the hopes of modernizing the profession.

Brown said Harris’s team went through a “really strong policymaking process” to develop its education platform, including multiple iterations, cost modeling, and thorough consultations with K–12 experts. Even five years later, bits and pieces of its workforce proposals are mirrored in to deal with increased teacher turnover following the pandemic. Though her primary campaign ultimately fell short of the finish line, running out of money by the end of 2019, its legacy was unique, she continued. 

“I don’t remember a lot of other elected officials coming to us and saying, ‘How do we make these ideas real?’ So that was exciting.”

Open playing field for choice

The question now is how much Harris will seek to build on her previous bid and its various policy items. 

The Biden presidency offers scant clues about what direction its desired successor might take. While it mobilized unprecedented federal funding to cope with the post-COVID crisis in student learning, those resources were, by design, awarded without substantial obligations for states to reform longstanding practices or demonstrate much evidence of achievement growth. In comparison with the Obama administration’s highly prescriptive Race to the Top initiative — or even Biden’s own maneuvers to wipe out billions in student loan payments — its goals have, at times, .

The lack of clarity is notable at a moment when, according to recent testing data, eighth-graders still lag far behind their pre-COVID learning trajectories. A long-awaited revision of Title IX regulations will be held up in court indefinitely following challenges from Republican officials, while the Department of Education’s , called “Raise the Bar,” has yet to break through to public attention. Meanwhile, last week’s public embrace of unionized teachers could trouble the waters with parents them for putting the brakes on attempts to lift pandemic restrictions on in-person learning.

Carmel Martin, a veteran Democratic staffer who served as Harris’s domestic policy advisor through 2023, wrote in an email that her former boss saw teachers as “the most important assets that our education system has” and would likely continue to press for better pay on their behalf.  

“The vice president was acutely aware of the toll in terms of academic progress, but also the mental and emotional health of our children,” wrote Martin, now a special secretary to Maryland Gov. Wes Moore. “As president, I am sure she will continue to prioritize investment in our students, teachers and schools.”  

Brown said the party has long since accepted the breakup of the reform consensus, but hasn’t yet produced a roadmap for the next Democratic White House. 

“I don’t think K–12 was unimportant to [the Biden administration], but we’ve sort of gotten past NCLB, and there’s a moment now to ask, ‘What’s the priority now?’” she said. “I’m sure a lot of people are working on that, but that question has not been answered yet.”

Petrill believes the issue of education could be the ideal avenue for Harris to outflank Trump by . In addition to whatever new spending commitments she may prefer, the vice president could take advantage of her background in law enforcement to strike a more assertive tone on school discipline.

Such a tack might lead to the development of a federal response to eye-watering rates of chronic absenteeism, which could easily derail any possibility of a meaningful learning recovery. In a move that later proved controversial, Harris used her powers as both San Francisco’s district attorney and California’s attorney general . Given that absenteeism in their federal school accountability frameworks, a President Harris could have scope for public intervention. 

Better still, Petrilli added, Harris could once again embrace charter schools, which previously had the support of Presidents Clinton and Obama but fell out of favor under Trump. With the GOP now increasingly focused on facilitating the rapid spread of education savings accounts, which channel public funding to families to spend on educational costs like private school tuition, he said it is possible to re-engage the millions of parents who rely on public school choice. 

“You’ve got Republicans, who have moved away from public education reform into just talking about private school choice, and the Democrats are mostly just talking about more money,” Petrilli said. “That does leave a lot of the playing field open.”

At the same time, the likely nominee must tread carefully around the issue of public support for private schools. Already, an alliance of education advocacy groups has publicly asked her not to tap Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro as her running mate; Shapiro has in his home state to support a form of school vouchers in exchange for increasing funding for public education.

Elorza praised the K–12 record of the Biden-Harris administration, which he credited with providing desperately needed funds to keep schools’ doors open and payrolls solvent. But now that the emergency is over, he said, there should follow a “moment of realignment” that scales up promising new innovations in education, from personalized learning to high-dosage tutoring.

“I remember being mayor at the time of the pandemic, and what we needed was resources to make sure we could keep the lights on,” said Elorza. “Now there’s an opportunity to craft a new agenda.”

“By every metric,” she said — skipping past the word “nearly” in — “Massachusetts has the best schools in the country.” 

If the lawmakers and civil servants packing the State House didn’t burst into applause, it was partly because they were hearing old news. For years, Healey and her predecessors have touted the excellence of the Massachusetts school system before local and national audiences, citing math and English scores since the early 1990s. By the late Obama era, its path of ascent was held up as a template for . 

The audience also understood, however, that Healey wasn’t calling for a victory lap. Rather, she warned of a serious threat: thousands of children deficient in literacy skills thanks to schools using what she called “disproven, out-of-date” methods. While disadvantaged students face the greatest risk of falling behind, revealed last year that questionable curricula are in use in some of the wealthiest and best-regarded school districts in Massachusetts.

The governor quickly moved into a pitch for her , which will offer resources and incentives to local educators to revamp their early literacy programs in accordance with scientific evidence. But the proposal, and the academic drift underlying it, reveal worries about where Massachusetts finds itself after three decades of energetic policymaking and school improvement.

As even the state’s biggest boosters concede, however, those reforms stopped yielding the same results in the years leading up to the pandemic. Since COVID, already-significant achievement gaps between rich and poor students have , with test scores levels seen in 2019. Ed Lambert, a former state representative who now leads the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education, said that local leaders had been too slow in recent years to embrace the kind of experimentation that fueled the state’s remarkable rise.

 “Often, holding that mantle of ‘first in the nation’ has led to a level of complacency that isn’t serving us well,” Lambert said.

Even more alarming, in the eyes of education officials, is the possible reversal of some of the hallmarks of Massachusetts’s brand of K–12 reform. Activists have begun a spirited push to eliminate the use of the MCAS, the state’s standardized test, as a high school graduation assessment; in late May, leaders of the effort announced that twice the number of signatures necessary to place their initiative on the November ballot. The campaign is being led by New England’s largest union, the Massachusetts Teachers Association, which has transformed itself over the last 10 years into a progressive heavyweight.

Harvard professor Paul Reville, who previously served as a top policy advisor to former Gov. Deval Patrick, observed that Massachusetts was caught between its celebrated past and a murky future. If the state is to remain a national exemplar, he said, it will have to change the way it pursues change. 

“Massachusetts reflects a national uncertainty about where we go next, post-reform and post-COVID,” Reville said. “It’s an era of chronic absenteeism and declining confidence in public education generally, and Massachusetts demonstrates the symptoms of that as vividly as any other state.”

MCAS viewed as ‘roadblock’

No single development will influence the path ahead more than the clash over MCAS.

The Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System was developed as the result of the landmark Education Reform Act of 1993, considered the Big Bang of recent K–12 history in the state. The legislation , but its central achievement was to vastly increase the role of the state government in overseeing schools.  

Nearly a decade before Congress took up the No Child Left Behind Act, that meant students in elementary, middle, and high school would sit for the MCAS each year; that their performance would be monitored and reported to families; and that schools would be held accountable for the results. In addition, tenth graders would need to pass the test in order to graduate high school. 

Federal law caught up with Massachusetts with the passage of NCLB. But according to , it remains one of only nine states to administer a graduation exam, down from a high of 27 in the 1990s. Education authorities in New York recently recommended going forward, while legislators in Florida considered abandoning the existing requirement that students pass tests in Algebra I and tenth-grade English before graduating. 

The same process may well play out in Massachusetts. Defenders of the exam insist that discarding it will allow the state’s 316 school districts to adopt a patchwork of separate, weaker standards — concerns that were loudly amplified by members that reviewed the ballot question this spring. 

In one of the panel’s meetings, Reville and Lambert both testified in favor of retaining the tenth-grade MCAS requirement. Among those speaking in opposition was Kirsten Frazier, a high school teacher who works with English learners in the central Massachusetts city of Worcester. 

In an interview with ����Ӱ��, Frazier said that her students — many of them recent arrivals to the United States — often fail the MCAS on their first attempt. Though they are given several opportunities to retake it, each comes at the cost of desperately needed instructional time, she added.

“This test, especially when you have the pressure of not graduating if you don’t pass, creates a massive roadblock,” Frazier said. 

Members of the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education have responded that each year fail to graduate due solely to their test scores. Ninety-five percent of upperclassmen pass by their second try, state data show.

What’s more, an analysis by Brown University economist John Papay is correlated with real-world outcomes like college enrollment and career earnings. Paul Toner, a former president of the MTA who now serves on the city council of Cambridge, Massachusetts, argued both that the MCAS should be more regularly updated and that it stood head and shoulders above other state tests.

“If you talk to anyone in the assessment game around the country, they will tell you that MCAS is the best of the state assessment systems,” Toner said. “Is it perfect? No. But it’s the best.”

Yet the exam’s longtime detractors believe that high schoolers should be assessed through other means. Glenn Koocher, head of the , said that while passing MCAS was ultimately “not that hard,” its use as a graduation requirement made it more of a cudgel than a meaningful standard of achievement.

“Very few kids ultimately don’t graduate,” Koocher said. “But the MCAS is just there as a symbol of, ‘Here’s what happens if you don’t do what we tell you.’ And I find little value in it.” 

A ‘more progressive’ union

Much of the Massachusetts political establishment has already come forward in opposition to the November ballot initiative, including . On the other side stands the 117,000 members of the MTA. 

The union — known under Toner’s leadership for being willing to cooperate with reform-friendly policies around teacher evaluation and charter school expansion — swerved toward with the election of new leadership in 2014. 

the most notable advances of the education reform era, MTA organizers earned national attention in 2016 by helping defeat a ballot measure that would have lifted the state’s cap on charter schools. In a campaign , the organization proved it could summon enormous resources and substantially swing public opinion to its cause. 

That reputation has been solidified with more policy victories in the years since, including a push for a . Along with its parent union, the National Education Association, to a campaign that raised taxes locally on incomes over $1 million, a change that is projected to raise billions in future state revenues.

But the organization’s growing profile has been accompanied by political missteps. Current MTA President Max Page, who was elected in 2022 to “raise more hell to win greater justice,” was soon derided after opining before the state board of education was “tied to the capitalist class and its need for profit.” 

A spokesman for the Massachusetts Teachers Association declined to provide a comment for this story.

Frazier, a member of her local MTA affiliate, said she appreciated the statewide union becoming “more progressive” over the last decade.

“We basically ended up with activist leadership,” said Frazier. “Those of us who have always wanted to be activists now actually feel like we can be.”

Committed education reformers are less enthused. James Peyser, who served as secretary of education under former Republican Gov. Charlie Baker, said that if the MTA succeeds in jettisoning the MCAS, it could be the first step in an “unwinding” of accountability and school improvement.

“If you have no real assessment system to determine how students are doing, and you have no accountability for meeting standards, and you have no authority for the state to take action when schools aren’t adequately serving their students, then the Education Reform Act is a dead letter,” he said.

Promising strides on literacy

As much as the battles over reform implicate the recent past, many believe Gov. Healey’s overhaul of literacy instruction could deliver a promising way forward.

The proposal was triggered in part by the revelation last fall that use curricular materials that have fallen out of favor with reading experts for . Some still rely, or have only recently transitioned away from, the Units of Study curriculum, which was in an expert report four years ago. 

Statewide achievement in early literacy also points to major shortcomings since the pandemic. from the 2022 MCAS, less than half of all third graders scored proficient in reading, including just 26 percent of students from low-income families, 15 percent of students with disabilities and 11 percent of English learners.

Literacy Launch, Healey’s , would include $30 million over the next five years to help districts transition to curricula more aligned with the science of reading, along with providing technical assistance from the state’s education department and tightening certification rules to require that teacher training programs provide more instruction about how children learn to read.

The program, included in the governor’s 2025 budget proposal, is virtually assured of passage. But a parallel effort in the legislature, that schools use only reading curricula that have been approved by state authorities, has been met with stout opposition from district leaders and teachers’ unions alike. 

have passed such laws over the last decade, some explicitly prohibiting the use of low-quality instructional materials, but Massachusetts lawmakers have thus far demurred. A February letter signed by almost 50 local superintendents protested that the bill under consideration would abrogate local control over schools.

Lambert, of the Business Alliance, said he found the legislature’s failure to act “just confounding,” particularly in light of public support for such a measure. A found that over 80 percent of parents believed that schools should “probably” or “definitely” be required to use evidence-based teaching materials. 

“A lot of the same people who will tell you that society needs to believe in science don’t necessarily believe that when it comes to literacy and choosing a curriculum that works,” Lambert said.

The absence of a strong literacy law pointed to a more general failure to keep up with policy developments that have been road-tested in other places, he argued. While states like Tennessee have invested heavily in programs to target struggling students with tutoring, Massachusetts — the home of the Match Charter Public High School, and spawned imitators around the country — hasn’t launched a similar effort. that local resources devoted to gifted and talented education, including a statewide office that was shuttered in the early 1990s, also lag those elsewhere.

While arguing that state authorities should, as a rule, avoid meddling in local decisions about curriculum, Peyser said the importance of early reading made it an exception.

“The reality is that we’re 30 years into education reform, and at the third- or fourth-grade level, the reading proficiency levels are not a whole lot better than they used to be,” Peyser said. “It’s such a foundational skill that, unless you solve that problem, it’s an uphill struggle to do anything you want to do.”

“I thought I would be out of my element,” Moore told me when I met him earlier this month at the school, where he has worked since last fall. “I quickly became a convert. This fits what kids need. Parents are making this choice to meet the needs of their kids because public schools can’t do it anymore. I’m absolutely sold on what happens here,” he added.

What happens is deep, joyful learning tied to student interests that blends academic and social-emotional skills in a relaxed, nature-based setting. 

Founded in 1970 by a group of parents looking for a more holistic educational approach for their children, School Around Us operated as a state-recognized K-8 private school until 2020 when the school leaders decided to shift away from a traditional schooling model to a learning community serving homeschoolers. 

It’s part of a growing trend, both in Maine and nationally, of new schools and spaces offering smaller, more individualized, more flexible learning options that parents and teachers desire. Many of these programs, including School Around Us, are part of the that supports alternative education environments across the U.S. with grants and entrepreneurial resources.

Converting to a homeschooling community has enabled School Around Us to serve the rapidly growing population of homeschoolers in their area. According to the new Johns Hopkins University , homeschooling numbers now hover around six percent of the total K-12 school-age population, a dramatic increase from pre-pandemic estimates. Maine has seen its homeschooling numbers high since 2020. 

“We have doubled in size since before the pandemic and our numbers keep climbing,” said Amy Wentworth, a Maine certified teacher who attended School Around Us as a child and has taught there for over 20 years. School Around Us now serves 43 students with both full-time and part-time enrollment options. Wentworth says that since 2020, parents are looking to be more involved with their children’s education and appreciate more personalized learning options — especially immersive ones like School Around Us that embrace Maine’s natural beauty and abundant community resources. 

“It’s reinvigorated me in my teaching,” said Wentworth about her program’s shift from operating as a private school to a homeschooling co-learning community. “I feel rejuvenated with excitement and huge possibilities for the future.”

Ning Sawangjaeng feels similarly rejuvenated. A longtime teacher at an established Montessori school in Maine, Sawangjaeng was eager for a new opportunity. She joined the in Camden as its founding Lead Guide when the program launched in September 2023. “The core of Giving Tree is that kids can be happy and be themselves,” Sawangjaeng told me during my visit, adding that the hours the children spend each day outside and in the forest trails surrounding the center are crucial to their overall learning and growth.

Jessica Mazur, along with Isabella Wincklhofer, cofounded Giving Tree to meet the needs of their children and others in their community. 

A former operations leader at Apple who now runs her own small consulting business, Mazur explained how the pandemic shifted her views on education. Her oldest child had attended local public schools, but during school closures and the ongoing education disruption of 2020 and beyond, Mazur began to consider alternatives to conventional schooling. As schooling returned to normal, she and several other parents in her community were already hooked on a different vision for education. “Once we saw what education could be, we couldn’t unsee it,” said Mazur.

Like so many entrepreneurial parents, Mazur decided to build what she couldn’t find: a personalized, Montessori-inspired, nature-based learning space for a mixed-age group of homeschoolers ages five and up. Giving Tree now serves 20 learners ages five to 12 with most choosing to attend the center four days a week. Part-time enrollment options are also available, and interest in the program continues to spread through parent word of mouth.

That’s also how in Cape Elizabeth has grown from six kids in the fall of 2020 to 36 K-5 students for the upcoming school year. 

Like Mazur, Roots’s founder, Jaclyn Gallo, realized during the pandemic that she needed to take charge of her children’s education. She opened her state-recognized private school in a yoga studio during its first year, but demand kept growing for her personalized, place-based educational mode where all children are taught by certified teachers. Last fall, Gallo expanded to a new, large building with abundant outdoor space and wooded trails to accommodate continued growth. 

For all 12 of next year’s kindergarteners, Roots will be their first schooling experience. Unlike many of the students in the older grades — including Gallo’s daughter — who left a traditional public school for Roots, the parents of her kindergarteners knew early on that they wanted an alternative to conventional schooling for their children.

“There is a growing awareness by parents that, especially in the early grades, what is being asked of children is not developmentally appropriate,” said Gallo, explaining that the rigidity and standardization of traditional schooling prevents a more individualized, play-filled, organic approach to learning and child development. “It’s the system not the kids,” said Gallo, adding that many parents — including her and her husband — moved to this town specifically for the 

public schools. “Many of us want to believe in the public schools ideologically, but it’s just not working for some kids.” Still, Gallo is committed to forging relationships with the local public elementary school and finding ways to collaborate.

Gallo expects to grow her school to a maximum of about 60 or 70 kids over the coming years, retaining the microschool model that she thinks is so crucial to learning. She hopes to help other entrepreneurial parents and teachers open microschools similar to Roots in their own neighborhoods. “Being super big defeats the purpose of what we’re doing. I like knowing each kid and their families. The family relationships are so important,” she said.

About 100 miles north, in rural Appleton, Adrienne Hofmann is also focused on creating an intentionally small, relationship-based, outdoor-focused learning community. 

A former public school teacher in Texas who is also a certified teacher in the state of Maine, Hofmann became more familiar with homeschooling and alternative education during the pandemic. She began formulating her vision for , a newly-licensed, forest-filled early childhood program. “Before this venture, nearly every program I worked for didn’t feel quite right, leaving me yearning for something more fulfilling,” Hofmann told me when I visited her program’s lovely yurt site. “This journey inspired me to create a supportive and nurturing environment initially designed for homeschooling families and now geared toward those seeking a nature and play-based experience, reminiscent of our own childhoods.” 

Located on an off-the-grid, 18-acre parcel, Nature Play All Day will open this fall, enabling children from ages two to six to spend all day outside, playing freely, with no top-down impositions on their learning. Access is crucial for Hofmann, and Maine’s child care subsidies will enable more families to choose her program.

Like all of the founders and educators I met during my Maine visit, Hofmann believes that we are only at the beginning of a growing movement toward smaller, simpler, more holistic educational models. Prompted by the pandemic, more parents and teachers are now seeking and building homespun alternatives to conventional schooling. 

“I like to think that one of the best things to come out of COVID is just how simple things can be,” said Hofmann. 

Increasing numbers of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) are acting as incubators for innovation in the teaching profession, and helping to grow the nation’s Black teacher pipeline.

����Ӱ�� recently partnered with the Progressive Policy Institute for an online panel examining how HBCUs are key contributors to bolstering Black educators.

In the replay below, you’ll hear from experts Katherine Norris of Howard University’s College of Education, Dr. Artesius Miller of Morehouse College and Utopian Academy for the Arts Charter School, Sharif El-Mekki from the Center for Black Teacher Development and ����Ӱ��’s Marianna McMurdock. Watch the full conversation:

Go Deeper: Explore our recent coverage of the teacher workforce below.

• How Black Educators in America’s Fastest-Shrinking City Are Reimagining Teacher Pipelines

• Teacher Prep Programs See ‘Encouraging’ Growth, New Federal Data Reveal

• Breaking Down the Walls to Teaching: Alternative Pipelines Boom

• Preserving Black History Starts with Ensuring There Are Black Teachers

Similarly, educators share a deep concern for the well-being of their students, families and communities. However, they lack the life-saving constraints and coherent, systemwide guidance SOLAS gives sea captains.

In 2023, a team of education leaders and researchers launched the (EAC) to address harms caused by the absence of SOLAS-like guidance. We saw too many education initiatives that were initially successful fail to endure because of a lack of consistent licensure, accreditation, continuing education or accountability grounded in evidence.

To fill this void, our are creating guidance for decisionmakers in the form of . These are being vetted, curated and organized based on scientific research and on data from high-performing schools, districts and states that consistently produce strong results, especially for marginalized populations. These resources, focused on academic achievement and social-emotional well-being, could become the basis for specific education policies, programs, and practices. They will be accessible on our website, distributed through collaborating partner organizations and promulgated through convenings with education agencies.

Just as the maritime safety standards improved safety and saved lives, the EAC is committed to constraining the use of non-evidence-based programs that cause waste and even harm. For example, , an  intervention targeted to lowest-achieving first graders, has been used with at an per child, which has resulted in total expenditures of $2.5 billion. But, as noted in the , “Reading Recovery students subsequently fell behind and by than similar students who hadn’t had the tutoring, according to a [December 2022] . The tutoring seemed to harm them.”

 Even the much-touted reading initiative that moved Mississippi from the lowest-performing state on fourth-grade NAEP reading scores to 21st in the nation, may have serious flaws. EAC co-founder Kelly Butler, CEO of Mississippi’s , worries that not all components of the state’s education system are being held to the same level of accountability, which can undermine sustainability.

To fulfill its mission, EAC’s first goal is to make evidence the basis for licensure, educator preparation programs, and continuing education. Toward this end, we are collaborating with national organizations including , at the Hunt Institute, , , and the to identify evidence-based resources for licensure, educator preparation and continuing education. We plan to present the results of these collaborations to an audience of higher education professors through the Alabama Department of Education, through the University of North Dakota at a conference for K-12 educators from across the state and through the New Hampshire Department of Education’s conference for teachers and administrators. We are also identifying selection criteria for model policies as a first step in recruiting and convening a coalition of states that will audit the degree to which their licensure, educator preparation programs, accountability and continuing education policies align with the evidence-based resources identified by the EAC and other trustworthy organizations.

To ensure that successful reform efforts will be sustainable, our second goal requires focusing on what is necessary to make evidence central to decisionmaking in nine major components of the U.S. education system: educator preparation, state policy, district and school leadership, assessment, parent and family advocacy, professional learning, linguistic diversity, special education and instructional materials. These components are represented by nine EAC teams that are identifying and organizing evidence-based resources for use by education decisionmakers. Already, Stephanie Stollar, co-lead of the EAC’s educator preparation team, is advising the leaders of 12 educator preparation programs on the use of evidence-based resources and practices to ensure new teachers are equipped with the knowledge and skills they need to improve student achievement.

Because education is a complex, multifaceted system, decisionmakers need to adopt a systems perspective, recognizing that failure of one component can impact the effectiveness of the entire ecosystem. Once the full set of constraints and guidance is in place, accountability will be possible and will contribute to educational equity by significantly and permanently improving the achievement and social-emotional and behavioral well-being of all students — with special attention to those with learning differences and other marginalized groups.

In the for the transformation of the profession into an evidence-based system, educators will relinquish certain freedoms — notably the leeway to employ ineffective practices — but will gain guidance that empowers them to fulfill their original purpose by profoundly impacting the future of students, families and communities. The alternative is to continue rearranging the deck chairs under the guise of education reform.