Stripped of careful phrasing, the logic is familiar: Some students are deficient, fixing them is costly, and enrolling too many of them threatens institutions.Ěý

That is deficit thinking dressed in the language of stewardship. When an institution implies that certain students are the problem, it has already made a judgment about who belongs.

Consider what deficit framing erases. Imagine a first-generation student who graduates near the top of her class from an under-resourced high school in a rural district. She has taken every math course available to her through Algebra II, taught by a long-term substitute, from a textbook nearly a decade out of date. She arrives at a university, sits for a math placement exam, scores below the cutoff and is routed into non-credit remedial coursework that she may have to pay for out of pocket. It delays her progress and drains her financial aid. Within two years, she leaves without a degree.Ěý

The institution calls this an outcome. The data suggests it was a decision made the day she sat for that test. But context is key.

The label “underprepared,” when used to disqualify students rather than support them, turns a snapshot of current performance into a verdict about their potential. Researcher Gloria Ladson-Billings argued that we should stop focusing on the so-called “achievement gap” and instead examine the “” — a historical accumulation of disinvestment that shapes who gets access to strong instruction, advanced coursework, advising and college preparation.Ěý

The core issue is not what students lack. It is what institutions have failed to provide. 

The math placement problem is not neutral. Given what , a significant portion of remedial placements may have been unnecessary. A placement exam, however well constructed, measures what a student has had access to, not what they are capable of learning. When a single test score is the primary determinant of a student’s math pathway, universities routinely mistake opportunity gaps for ability gaps. 

The result is that capable students — disproportionately students of color, multilingual learners and students from low-income backgrounds — are funneled into remedial sequences that delay and derail degree completion, while the system presents that routing as objective.

Research from Policy Analysis for California Education has documented in high school math access: Despite strong evidence that taking advanced math courses in high school predicts postsecondary success, access to and achievement in those courses remain unequally distributed.Ěý

A student who completes Algebra II in an under-resourced high school and a student who completes the same course in a well-resourced district may arrive at the same institution with the same transcript notation and radically different preparation — not because of any difference in their capability, but because of differences in what their schools were able to offer. 

The evidence on alternatives is clear. The Community College Research Center found that incorporating high school transcript data into placement decisions could . Studies of corequisite remediation — where students enroll directly in gateway, credit-bearing courses while receiving concurrent academic support — show stronger outcomes than traditionalĚý prerequisite sequences.

ĚýFor example, Tennessee community colleges found that students in such courses were more likely to pass gateway math within one year. The conclusion is not complicated: Institutional design choices, not student deficits, determine who succeeds.

For more students to succeed, colleges should provide support alongside college-level instruction. The University System of Georgia replaced traditional, non-credit remedial math with a that places students directly into college-level courses while providing just-in-time support through labs, tutoring and aligned instruction. This approach has significantly improved outcomes, tripling completion rates in gatework coursework and boosting pass rates while offering more responsive, individualized help that keeps students on track, including in STEM pathways.Ěý

The students described as “profoundly underprepared” are not a liability. They are young people who have navigated inequitable systems — under-resourced schools, inadequate counseling, economic instability and placement exams that measure circumstance more than capability — to arrive at a gateway that institutions gatekeep. The question is not whether today’s incoming college students are capable. The question is whether colleges are willing to invest, build, and deliver the supports that remove the institutional barriers hindering their success.Ěý

Students do not fail the system. The system fails to build what they need to succeed. Restricting access is not stewardship. It is a choice and it is worth being honest about who bears the cost of the choice.

Unlike needs-based programs that are limited to households where students qualify for free or reduced-price school lunch, families with of the median for their area would be eligible to apply for a Federal Scholarship Tax Credit from a participating organization. An estimated could benefit.

This could be a game-changer for New Yorkers currently struggling to afford educational opportunities for their children. At the same time, the scholarships could also prove an incentive for even more public school students to exit already . 

Since they would be the ones most immediately affected by it, I asked the New York City families subscribed to my and social media how they felt about Hochul’s announcement.

To begin with, there was general confusion about how the program would operate.

One anonymous poster asked, “(Does) ‘donate money to an eligible scholarship-granting organization’ means you gift a school $1,700 per year and that gets deducted from your tuition? Otherwise, how does this increase choice for parents? Also, can I donate $1,700 to a tutoring company and get $1,700 worth of lessons?”

That is not how it would work. Donors could not directly benefit from their donations, and the reason supporters believe the program would increase school choice is that it would give parents who otherwise could not afford private schooling a break on tuition.

As the majority of NYC private schools charge upward of $60,000 a year, detractors scoffed that a measly $1,700 wouldn’t make a meaningful difference. But that’s assuming the scholarships given would be only $1,700 per family. If 40 benefactors donated $1,700 to a private school like Trinity, Horace Mann or Dalton, one child could receive a full scholarship, or two children could get half-off tuition.

In addition, NYC is home to dozens of parochial schools, which charge much less than the independent schools name-checked above. Some Catholic elementary schools cost $6,000 to $10,000 per student per year, as do some Jewish yeshivas and Muslim madrassas. An increase in donations from the Federal Scholarship Tax Credit might make it possible for many new students to attend at a discount.

This doesn’t sit well with NYC mom Rebecca Garte, who wrote that the program would be “publicly subsidizing private institutions.”

That’s true, but public money is already being used to subsidize city private educational organizations in a variety of ways across all grade levels. 

The only way then-Mayor Bill de Blasio could get his signature initiative, universal pre-K and, later, 3K, off the ground was to pay private schools, including religious ones, with public money. The majority of afterschool programming in public elementary and middle schools is who are paid by the city. And there are , which students can use for public and private colleges — again, including religious ones. 

Nevertheless, parents like Elizabeth Kelly don’t care about precedent. Her position is simple, “I am against the tax credit.  Let’s just make our public schools better.”

Yiatin Chu, parent of an NYC public school ninth grader, on the other hand, recognizes how the Federal Scholarship Tax Credit would help families like hers. She says, “I support the federal tax credit scholarship program because even middle-income families are eligible, a segment of public school families that don’t get much help. I like that the scholarship can be used for SHSAT (Specialized High School Admissions Test) and SAT preparation or extra tutoring on any subject that our children might need. If Gov. Hochul doesn’t renege on her support, I hope to use it for my child’s SAT prep.”

In the end, opinions in support ran 3 to 1 versus those against. Those who were for the program expressed sentiments similar to those of mom Desiree Milin, who said, “Since the NYC public school system is not equal for all children, I would have no problem helping parents pay into a private school education. We switched our child into Catholic school after he did not get any of his public middle school choices. A good education should be accessible to all children.”

As of now, have signaled that they plan to opt into the program. Only three of them are headed by Democratic governors: Colorado (Jared Polis), North Carolina (Josh Stein) and now, New York. With New York City being the largest school district in America, the results of the Federal Scholarship Tax Credit here could become a case study for all those still on the fence about bringing it to their respective areas, and answer questions— not to mention address misconceptions — that many still have about it.

She taught for more than 40 years in the South Ward of Newark, New Jersey, one of the lowest-income communities in the country. Her students regularly achieved high Advanced Placement scores and earned admission to some of the nation’s most selective colleges. 

But those outcomes don’t fully capture her impact. Marie built a classroom grounded in intellectual rigor, cultural relevance and deep human connection. It was a place where students felt seen, challenged and capable. It was also where I learned how to teach.

As a young inexperienced student teacher, I entered her classroom full of conviction for teaching as a political act, but little understanding about what it would take to create learning opportunities that mattered. I was trying to figure out how to connect with students whose lived experiences differed from my own, how to teach in ways that were both rigorous and relevant, and how to confront my own assumptions about race, curriculum and schooling. 

Marie didn’t hand me any simple answers. She coached me, pushed my thinking, challenged my decisions and stayed in the work with me long after my formal placement in her classroom ended. What began as a student-teaching experience became a decades-long professional partnership that shaped my career.

Today, as a teacher educator and policy advocate, I have come to understand something that should be obvious but is rarely treated as such: Mentor teachers like Marie are not just “helping out.” They are doing some of the most important work in our education system. And we are almost entirely failing to support them.

Across the country, mentor teachers are the backbone of how we prepare new educators. They model instruction, provide feedback, guide reflection and help novice teachers navigate the realities of the classroom. consistently shows that high-quality mentoring improves teacher effectiveness, job satisfaction and retention, especially in the first three years when teachers are most likely to leave the profession.

Yet mentoring is too often treated as an informal add-on rather than essential to recruiting and retaining new teachers. Mentors are frequently selected based on availability, not expertise. Many receive little to no training in how to coach adult learners. Compensation is inconsistent at best or nonexistent at worst. And the time required to mentor effectively, often hundreds of hours, is layered on top of already demanding teaching loads. The result is a system built on goodwill instead of deliberately designed to support and sustain educators in this role.

Millions of research dollars have been spent studying the teacher pipeline, how to recruit more candidates into the profession, and how to retain teachers serving in our highest needs urban and rural schools. But schools spend far less time and resources addressing what happens once student-teachers get there. And mentor teachers are the missing link.

If schools are serious about strengthening the educator workforce, they need to treat mentoring as what it is: a form of adult education that requires skill, preparation and sustained investment. The best classroom teachers are not automatically the best mentors. Coaching new teachers, many of whom are young adults or career changers. requires expertise in facilitation, feedback and developmental support.

So, what would it look like to take mentor teaching seriously?

At the local level, school districts must create the conditions for mentoring to succeed. That means providing reduced teaching loads or dedicated time for mentor teachers to observe, coach and confer with new educators. It means selecting mentors based on demonstrated instructional expertise and relational capacity, not just availability. And it means integrating mentoring into the culture of schools, rather than treating it as a compliance requirement tied to credentialing.

At the state level, policymakers should establish clear standards for mentor teacher preparation and provide dedicated funding for stipends and professional learning. States can also require data collection on mentor participation, teacher retention and outcomes, ensuring that investments are tied to measurable impact. Without statewide expectations and funding, access to high-quality mentoring will continue to depend on local resources, exacerbating inequities between districts.

At the federal level, lawmakers should expand investments in teacher residency programs and other clinically rich preparation models that prioritize sustained, high-quality mentorship. Federal funding streams, such as Title II, should be leveraged to support mentor teacher development as a core component of teacher preparation and retention strategies nationwide.

When I think about Marie Gironda, I don’t just think about the mentor who shaped me. I think about the thousands of students she taught and the many educators she mentored — people whose lives and careers were influenced by her commitment to their learning. I also think about how rare it is to find someone like her in many schools, not because educators lack dedication, but because the conditions that sustain this kind of work are increasingly difficult to maintain.

We cannot build a strong, stable teacher workforce on exceptional individuals alone. If we want more teachers to stay, more students to thrive and more communities to benefit from excellent schools, we must invest in the people who teach teachers. We must invest in mentor teachers.

The ruling did not find that oversight is no longer needed because the funding disparities have been resolved. Instead, it concluded that the courts cannot enforce the remedy, leaving implementation entirely to the political branches of government.

The is deeply disappointed by this decision.

Across the South, states are grappling with how to fulfill constitutional obligations to provide all children with a quality education, and who is responsible for enforcing those commitments. In , courts have acknowledged funding disparities while leaving remedies largely to the legislature. In and , ongoing debates over school funding formulas and resource allocation continue to raise concerns about whether students in low-wealth communities are receiving adequate resources. While each state’s legal framework differs, the underlying issue is consistent: whether constitutional promises of education will be meaningfully enforced or left to shifting political priorities.

In North Carolina, plaintiffs in the original successfully argued that the state was failing to meet its constitutional obligation to provide every child with access to a quality public education. The court has long recognized that not all students, particularly those from low-income communities and communities of color, have been afforded equal educational opportunity.

But now, it is abrogating its duty for ensuring that the law is enforced, shifting responsibility for addressing these inequities to the North Carolina General Assembly and state leadership.

This decision comes at a pivotal moment, not just for North Carolina, but for the country. The United States is at a critical inflection point in how schools prepare students for a rapidly evolving economy. New, of education are emerging. Technology, particularly , is reshaping how students learn and how systems in the workplaces they will eventually graduate to operate. At the same time, the demand for a highly skilled workforce continues to grow. Today’s students need to learn how to function in this new, technologically advanced world.

How are we as a society going to meet that growing demand for skilled workers? The federal government is forecasting in the technology workforce. If America’s education leaders, both in individual states and as a nation, commit to giving more students access to the best advancements in technology and preparing them to join that highly skilled workforce, American competitiveness globally will increase. This is an opportunity.

But if longstanding disparities in access to quality education are not addressed, then the benefits of these advancements will not be shared equally among students. Instead, they will widen existing gaps.

This is no time for any branch of government, particularly the judiciary, to step back from its responsibility. Instead, local, state and federal leaders must work in unison to address the educational needs of students — particularly the deficiencies that courts themselves have identified over decades.

: “The majority’s message to our children is clear: pull yourself up by your bootstraps, but there is nothing this court will do if the political branches never met their obligation to put boots on your feet in the first place.”

The question now is whether the state will act. Whether and how the North Carolina General Assembly and state leadership will fund solutions, and whether additional legal challenges will follow, remain open questions.

The Southern Education Foundation urges state leaders to take immediate action to meet the obligations set forth in the North Carolina Constitution and to ensure that every child has access to a quality education.

The court’s decision does not resolve the issues identified in Leandro; it changes who is responsible for addressing them. What happens next will depend on whether state leaders choose to fulfill the constitutional promise of education for all students.

Their bill, titled the , is being framed as a defense of public education. It is actually something else: a revealing glimpse into the mindset that is holding Democrats back.

A decade ago, Democrats were more willing to challenge the status quo. On education, they pushed for higher standards, greater accountability and new models like charter schools. They believed public education wasn’t just something to defend, but something to improve. They were willing to take on districts that weren’t delivering for students, even when it meant challenging teachers unions.

That spirit is hard to find today. 

The federal scholarship tax credit program, enacted last year, lets states direct federal dollars — potentially billions — to a wide range of student needs, including tutoring, afterschool programs, transportation and services for kids with disabilities. In states that opt in, families have the choice to use these scholarships to fill the gaps in their children’s education.Ěý

That is something denied to states that opt out. And yet, the majority of Democrats in the Senate are trying to repeal the program — not because those uses fall outside their priorities, but because the funding flows outside traditional public school systems. 

Even though the tax credit program would provide significant new resources to advance priorities Democrats themselves have championed, its support for private school scholarships crosses a line in the sand for them. To most families, turning down new funding for students doesn’t make sense. But for Democrats, it follows a clear chain of logic, one that prioritizes the preservation of existing school systems over students’ needs, defers to the interests of teachers unions and applies ideological purity tests that treat any nontraditional learning environment as a threat.Ěý

That way of thinking carries real consequences, especially at a moment when students need more support, not less.

The country is in the midst of a decade-long education depression, one marked by historic learning loss, widening achievement gaps and growing disengagement. Families see it, educators feel it and districts, facing acute financial strain, struggle to meet students’ needs.

For years, many on the left have that the United States always finds money for other priorities but refuses to invest meaningfully in education. President Donald Trump’s proposed record-breaking $1.5 trillion defense budget underscores the point. But for the first time in a long while, there is also, finally, new money for education. And Democrats want to turn these dollars away.Ěý

That choice is even harder to justify when you consider the broader fiscal reality. The federal government has run deficits for more than two decades; if lawmakers are going to keep borrowing against the future, the least they can do is invest in the generation who will inherit their debt.

Democrats’ reflexive opposition to the tax credit program reveals how much their policy imagination has narrowed, leaving them unable to see how it helps their constituents and advances their priorities. Some of their critiques are substantive: Questions about accountability, oversight and whether private school scholarships are subject to the same civil rights protections as traditional public schools deserve serious answers. But those are arguments for getting in the room and shaping the program, not walking away. Repealing the program would only ensure that the students who need those dollars most — low- and middle-income families, children with disabilities, communities of color — would end up with nothing. Democrats should be fighting to make this program work for those families, not fighting to take it off the table. 

Democrats long held a clear advantage over Republicans on education. That advantage has in recent years as voters have grown more skeptical that the party is delivering results. Trying to repeal the tax credit program will only make matters worse.

Polling across multiple states shows strong support for participation in the scholarship tax credit program, including among Democratic voters. In many cases, support approaches or exceeds , particularly among working-class families and families of color.

What some Democratic politicians see as an unacceptable departure from orthodoxy, many families see as a practical way to get their children the help they need. At some point, the gap between how policymakers view the issue and how families experience it demands a reckoning. Democrats should focus less on defending what exists and more on exploring what could be. 

When Colorado’s Jared Polis became the first Democratic governor to announce that his state would opt into the scholarship tax credit program, he framed it perfectly: “[I]t’s only our own creativity that can hold us back. Anything we can envision, this is a very powerful funding mechanism.” He called the decision a “no-brainer” and said he “would be crazy not to” participate.

That is the mindset Democrats need right now. Not a defensive posture, but an expansive one — grounded not in scarcity, but in abundance. 

An starts from the premise that the goal is an educated public, not the preservation of any particular school model or the adults employed within it. It recognizes that public funding can support a wide range of tools, strategies and approaches, so long as they serve students well. And it invites educators, families and policymakers to imagine different ways of organizing learning, rather than assuming the century-old model designed for an industrial economy is the only one capable of serving today’s students.

The tax credit program is not a cure-all, but it is a meaningful new investment. At a moment of real need, real disruption and real opportunity, Democrats should not be narrowing the conversation. They should be expanding it.

In the post-COVID era, tutoring has for mixed results following significant investments to address learning loss. This comes despite a that shows high-dosage tutoring yields, on average, a learning gain of one-third of a grade level per year, with the potential for a full extra year of learning over three years. 

So, what gives? 

Programs falter when implementation becomes an afterthought. Between 2022 and 2024, school systems invested billions of dollars in high-dosage tutoring to address COVID-era learning loss. But states and districts often lacked the data infrastructure to track participation and measure student learning impacts, and the federal framework in which they were operating asked for little accountability. This left many states floundering, rapidly trying to deliver services to students without adequate systems to track and manage their data.

Imagine being given eggs, flour and sugar and told to bake a cake, with no measurements and no recipe. Obviously, no matter how talented the baker, the results will be haphazard.

On the other hand, when educators and schools are given the proper tools to implement, measure and scale proven interventions, student learning improves. 

Christina’s experience as school superintendent in Washington, D.C. shows what can happen when clear recipes, accurate measurements and the right ingredients are built in from the start. From day one, every dollar invested in D.C.’s high-impact tutoring initiative was backed by a carefully designed research and evaluation framework — not just to measure academic progress, but to track attendance and social-emotional growth as well. By forging strong partnerships with top researchers and treating evidence as essential, not optional, the district was able to see and respond to real-time results. — administered periodically throughout the program — showed consistently positive, and in some cases improving, ratings of their relationships with tutors and sense of belonging at school.Ěý

Early findings showed that students who participated in tutoring not only , but also than peers who were not tutored — a breakthrough for children most at risk of chronic absenteeism. Focusing on the fundamentals of implementation and measurement paid huge dividends, allowing D.C. to truly understand the wide-ranging impacts of the tutoring program. It was a big bet on students, but one anchored in research and built on a foundation of ongoing data collection and continuous improvement. This wasn’t about chasing the latest trend; it was about weaving research and practice together so that every step could be measured, continuously improved and ultimately scaled to reach more students.

Programs that deliver real results do the disciplined, unglamorous work of implementation: scheduling tutoring during the school day rather than after hours; providing tutors with real training and support; tracking attendance and participation daily; and solving logistical problems as soon as they emerge. 

It’s also important to ensure investments in tutoring are linked to results through outcomes-based contracts with providers. To administer , the utilizes outcomes-based contracting so there is mutual accountability for student performance. Tutoring providers receive a base payment of 60% of the total contract amount to deliver the services. The remaining 40% is tied to outcomes of participating students. This encourages a quality-over-quantity approach, so tutors can focus on improving outcomes through meaningful sessions, rather than checking a box.

Effective high-impact tutoring isn’t about finding a silver bullet or chasing magical new programs. It’s about building reliable systems that work for students every day. Clear guidance, like the developed by our teams at Accelerate and the Strategic Data Project at Harvard University, help districts understand how to define and track who receives tutoring and how much of it is happening, and ultimately implement effective programs.  

Using toolkits like this one allows leaders to ensure that dollars are directed toward what works. It also gives leaders real-time, data-backed insights into what’s working and what isn’t, so they can invest money in solutions that work and redirect funds from strategies that aren’t connecting with students. As with any other smart investment, the benefits of steady, consistent improvement grow over time. 

To make sure solutions like high-dosage tutoring have real impact, education leaders need to commit to the hard, necessary work of asking basic questions about the student experience, implementing rigorous measurement tools and focusing relentlessly on student outcomes. Every day, students are asked to try their hardest and give us their best. All of us — educators, policymakers and researchers — have to hold ourselves to the same standard.

Supporters of the proposal argue that programs like MEGA reflect a broader recognition that states and local communities are often better positioned than Washington to understand the unique challenges facing their schools. Rather than maintaining fragmented federal programs with rigid compliance structures, decentralization efforts seek to give states more authority to innovate, coordinate resources and tailor solutions to regional realities.

The MEGA proposal therefore illustrates both the promise and the responsibility that accompany decentralization. Returning authority to states creates opportunities for more responsive and adaptive governance, but it also places responsibility squarely on state leaders to produce measurable results for children and families.

Decentralization alone does not guarantee success.

For decades, critics of centralized education policy argued that federal mandates often produced bloated compliance systems and procedural requirements disconnected from local realities. Washington became increasingly skilled at regulating inputs while struggling to improve long-term outcomes. 

Yet granting states more autonomy does not automatically produce effective governance.

A state can possess broad authority and still oversee failing schools, collapsing civic trust and stagnant upward mobility. Debates over parental rights, curriculum transparency, school choice and cultural accountability have become central to education politics in many states. Those issues matter. Parents should have meaningful authority over their children’s education, and communities deserve institutions that reflect local needs and values.

But education policy cannot become merely a politics of resistance. It must also become a politics of construction.

The real test of decentralization is whether states can build institutions that work.

Today, educational inequality remains profoundly geographic. In many parts of the country, a child’s ZIP code predicts educational achievement, workforce readiness, family stability and future earnings with alarming consistency. Some communities consistently produce mobility and strong civic outcomes. Others remain trapped in cycles of decline.

This is no longer simply a federal problem. It is increasingly a problem of state capacity.

Too many states spent decades demanding greater autonomy without building the institutional sophistication required to govern effectively once power returned to them. Many accountability systems still operate as relics of the old compliance era. They measure standardized-test averages and graduation statistics while failing to answer the question parents actually care about: Are children prepared to flourish as adults?

Any serious education agenda should focus less on bureaucratic processes and more on long-term human outcomes.

States should begin measuring mobility itself. That means tracking educational opportunity and life outcomes geographically—particularly at the ZIP-code level—and identifying which communities consistently produce upward mobility and which do not.

The purpose of these measures is not to create another compliance regime, but to identify which communities are successfully helping children transition into stable adulthood.

Such systems could include measures such as:

• Early literacy and numeracy rates 
• Chronic absenteeism 
• Access to tutoring, mentoring and after-school programsĚý
• Participation in career and technical education 
• Youth employment and apprenticeship participation 
• Postsecondary completion 
• Workforce participation 
• Family stability and parental involvement 

Examples of effective state-level reform already exist. Mississippi, once ranked near the bottom nationally in educational performance, has posted significant gains in early literacy after implementing statewide reading reforms, teacher training initiatives and evidence-based intervention strategies. Other states have increasingly aligned community colleges, workforce-development systems and career education with regional labor-market needs.Ěý

These efforts remain uneven, but they demonstrate that state-led governance can produce measurable improvement when institutions are coherent and focused on outcomes.

States should not fear this kind of measurement or experimentation. Properly designed, it strengthens decentralization rather than weakens it. A governor in Wisconsin may understand the needs of manufacturing communities better than federal officials in Washington. Rural Appalachia faces different challenges than suburban Texas. States can align workforce systems, transportation policy, public safety and education in ways national bureaucracies often cannot.

That flexibility is precisely why decentralization matters. But flexibility without accountability becomes little more than fragmentation.

Decentralization is a governing framework, not a substitute for governing.

The central questions are straightforward: Can states build integrated longitudinal data systems that actually track outcomes over time? Can they identify which neighborhoods consistently trap children in educational failure? Can they align K–12 education with workforce demand and civic formation? Can they distinguish between symbolic politics and measurable improvement? 

Those are the priorities that matter now.

Americans increasingly distrust centralized institutions, but distrust alone does not build flourishing communities. Strong families, strong schools and strong civic institutions require operational excellence, not merely political rhetoric.

The country stands at another inflection point in education governance. The argument for returning greater authority to states has gained substantial momentum. The next challenge is proving that states can use that authority wisely.

Decentralization was never meant to be an escape from responsibility. Properly understood, it is a demand for greater responsibility — closer to the people, more responsive to local conditions and ultimately more accountable for results.

If states cannot deliver upward mobility, civic stability and educational competence, then the case for decentralization weakens. But if they can, this may yet become one of the great renewal stories of American public life.

The fourth time a child told me something similar, I knew we had a problem. A few minutes later, a little girl tugged on my shirt to tell me she didn’t need to learn either. She knew how from watching TV.

As a 16-year-old water safety advocate and teen ambassador for the National Drowning Prevention Alliance, I visit preschools and elementary schools around New York City — reading stories about water safety, teaching the rules, then purposely reciting them wrong so the kids can giggle at my mistakes and correct me. To the outside, it may look like storytime. To me, it is a lesson that could save a life.

Our nation has not come close to solving the childhood drowning epidemic. Each year, drown in America. Drowning is the for children ages 1 to 4. For children ages 5 to 14, it is the second leading cause of accidental death.

There’s a reason we keep failing. We have focused almost entirely on swim lessons because the data is too good to ignore: Formal instruction reduces drowning risk by a . But swim lessons only work if children actually get them. Millions of children don’t. 

Lessons require money, transportation, pool access and a caregiver who can take them. Even when programs are free, families still must find them, navigate registration forms and overcome language barriers. As a result, many children, especially in low-income, minority neighborhoods, fall through the cracks and receive no water safety education at all.Ěý

African-American children ages 5 to 19 drown in swimming pools at than white children, and have few or no swimming skills.

That’s where teachers come in.

Teachers don’t need a pool. They don’t need a budget or a liability waiver. And they have the one thing no existing swim policy can guarantee: a captive audience of kids, already in the room.

It’s most urgent for the youngest children. To 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds, water is fascinating and naturally attracts them. It can also kill them, yet many don’t understand those dangers. It’s a concept adults tend to gloss over because to us, those dangers seem obvious.

A teacher can tell a preschooler never to go near water without a grown-up. A teacher can tell a kindergartner that water is dangerous even in — bathtubs, buckets, anything more than an inch. A teacher can teach small children that if they fall in, they should try to flip onto their back and float. Even knowing this could save a life.

Some educators worry that talking about water with young children will frighten them. I heard that line repeatedly when preschools rejected my request to visit the classroom. But consider this: We teach fire safety to preschoolers without frightening them. We teach them to get low and crawl. We teach street safety. We instruct them to look both ways before crossing the street. We even conduct lockdown drills with them. Water safety is no different. And when I speak to little children, I never use the word drowning. The kids still leave knowing exactly what to do.

The beauty of water safety education is that it can grow with the child. What starts as rules for little children turns into more sophisticated explanations for older children who can understand the science and consequences of water.

In elementary school, a teacher can explain that drowning doesn’t look like it does in the movies. There’s no splashing or screaming. It’s mostly silent. And if a friend is in trouble, you shouldn’t jump in after them. In water safety circles, it’s called the rule — throw something that floats, but never jump in yourself. A third or fourth grader can also understand that you never jump or dive into water without knowing how deep it is.

When children reach middle school, the lessons fit naturally into science class. A teacher can explain what a rip current is, how to identify one and what to do if you’re caught in one. They can also explain how suction works and why a broken pool drain generates enough force to hold a swimmer underwater.

In high school, water safety belongs in health class. We teach sex education. Why is water safety never mentioned? A teacher can explain why alcohol and open water are a deadly combination, how hydraulics in rivers and waterfalls can trap even the strongest swimmers, and why jumping on a dare may be the last decision they ever make.

None of this requires water. It requires a teacher. And the curriculum already exists for free from the and the .

Only one state has figured this out. In 2018, a 1-year-old boy named slipped away at a neighbor’s party and drowned in their pool. His parents turned their grief , signed in 2022, requiring water safety education in every Louisiana public school, kindergarten through 12th grade. In the three years since it passed, has followed. And now, the federal government has stepped back, too. In August 2025, the Trump administration the CDC’s drowning prevention program.

What’s clear is that classroom education can never replace swim lessons. There is no substitute for instruction in the water. But the classroom can serve as an insurance policy for the millions of children who will never get swim lessons.

Teachers don’t need to wait for a law. They can start tomorrow. If I can teach this during my lunch hour, just imagine what a real teacher could do.

By the end of 2027, New York state is planning to completely phase out Regents exams and, instead, implement a new framework. This approach emphasizes not only content knowledge, but the development of skills such as critical thinking, creativity, communication and the ability to navigate an increasingly complex world.Ěý

The shift away from Regents exams and toward a more holistic framework like one that Portrait of a Graduate represents presents a genuine opportunity. Not just to change how students are assessed, but to rethink what New York’s public education system prioritizes — real-world skills and holistic development over test scores.

For decades, education policy focused heavily on measurement. From No Child Left Behind to the Every Student Succeeds Act, the dominant theory of education reform has been to define measurable standards, test consistently and hold schools accountable for results. The intention was serious: raise achievement and close persistent gaps. But after nearly 25 years, outcomes remain uneven. In many places, proficiency has barely moved, even as educators and parents confront rising levels of student anxiety, disengagement and mental health challenges.

Now, as the state moves away from the Regents and begins building toward the Portrait of a Graduate, the question is no longer only what is measured, but whether educators can build a curriculum that actually helps students develop the skills the framework demands.

These are not developed in typical classroom settings alone. They are built through experience: sustained practice, collaboration, feedback and the opportunity to perform and communicate in real time. Some of the most powerful environments available for developing these capacities already exist, though they are too often pushed to the margins of the school day.

They exist in music and the arts.

In a music classroom, students learn to listen deeply, adjust in real time and collaborate toward a shared goal. They develop discipline through practice and resilience through repetition, and they learn to manage pressure while communicating something meaningful in front of others. These are not simply artistic experiences; they are cognitive and human ones.

Music doesn’t just engage the brain, it changes it. In just a few years, children who study music show in the regions responsible for processing complexity and in the pathways that connect the entire brain. This is not enrichment, this is development. And the evidence goes further: Research has consistently shown that structured music training strengthens — the very capacities that support the skills included in the Portrait of a Graduate framework.Ěý

But beyond the research, children’s experiences are just as compelling. Students who have music classes daily develop not only skill, but , focus and a sense of agency. They begin to see themselves differently — not just as learners, but as contributors and creators.

For more than a century, the Regents exams signaled what New York’s education system valued. Now, the Portrait of a Graduate is redefining what student success looks like, shifting the focus toward the capacities young people need to thrive in the world beyond school. It’s up to educators to build a curriculum that genuinely develops them.

The Portrait of a Graduate asks schools to develop students who can think critically, communicate clearly, collaborate under pressure and navigate ambiguity with confidence. Music education has been doing exactly that in classrooms across the state for generations. The research confirms it. The students who have lived it demonstrate it.

As New York moves away from the Regents exams and redefines what it means to graduate, music education may be the most important curriculum for achieving the student success New York state is after.

In the past year, major contracts for the federally funded Comprehensive Centers and Regional Educational Laboratories have been canceled, then reinstated. Calling the structure of Comprehensive Centers “duplicative” and “confusing,” the U.S. Department of Education solicited public comment on a redesign. The 2027 budget proposal released by the White House in April zeros out both Comprehensive Centers and RELs entirely.ĚýĚý

Watching this unfold with concern are state education agencies—the primary recipients of this expertise on how to comply with federal laws and improve education outcomes. We recently interviewed state agency leaders in 14 states to hear about their experience with federal technical assistance: What works? What doesn’t? What can they not afford to lose? Our sample is not nationally representative, and the Department of Education is conducting its own broader need-sensing. But offers a ground-level view that can help inform the choices ahead. 

Leaders most often named three functions of federal technical assistance as valuable and not easily replaced.  

The first: providing specialized expertise to help implement the most effective instructional practices. Smaller agencies, in particular, lack staff experts on topics such as evidence-based literacy instruction or supporting students with dyslexia. They also lack the resources to evaluate whether changes in practice are occurring in schools. “I can count on one hand the number of PhDs we have, and I think it’s two,” one leader told us. “We just don’t have the capacity to dig into the issues that we know we want to.” 

The second was cross-state networking. Technical assistance providers often broker connections between individuals in similar roles across state lines, connections that leaders would not have made on their own. This creates opportunities to learn from one another and exchange promising practices. “It is completely a siloed job out here in our region,” one said, “and having access to [other] people who are doing the work is the biggest benefit.”  

The third was providing authoritative guidance on compliance with federal law that is specific to states’ own systems, staff and rules. This function matters especially in the context of efforts to give more autonomy to states. If states are going to take on greater responsibility for how federal education funds are spent, they will need timely, expert help navigating complex requirements in federal laws — which remain in place even as other aspects of education policy are largely “returned to the states.” 

Given the restructuring and budget proposals, there is real uncertainty about what technical assistance will look like when the dust settles. Leaders we spoke with provided caveats about some of the ideas that have been floated and suggested improvements they would like to see. 

Some expressed frustration with bureaucratic delays in Education Department processes — particularly around selecting providers and initiating new projects. Yet they were still skeptical about the idea of giving each state funds to contract for its own technical assistance. “If I’ve got a million bucks, and I want to build this thing, requests for information go out today, it’s likely the first opportunity that that work begins is probably at least a year out,” one leader said. “This is state procurement; that’s the rule, not the exception.”  

State leaders also worried that direct contracting would fragment the national expertise and cross-state coordination a federal system provides. They preferred centralized systems more responsive to states’ priorities over a mandate to “do it yourself.” 

The ongoing push to hand education functions to other agencies, some leaders cautioned, would result in more complexity, not less. “Instead of having five contacts at ED, we’re going to have two contacts at the Department of Labor… [another at] Health and Human Services… [another at] Commerce,” one said. “I don’t actually think it’s going to create more efficiencies.” 

Other state agency leaders wanted the federal government to lead more boldly on evidence-based practices. The Department of Education, one told us, “has never really put their stake in the ground on what is good instruction, what is good assessment, what are good materials.”  

In all, the state leaders we interviewed would welcome reforms that cut red tape and give them more voice in shaping the support they receive. At the same time, they wanted to retain an infrastructure that can deliver specialized research support, cross-state leadership, and state-specific compliance guidance.  

As the decision point nears, their experience offers a roadmap for getting the details right — one grounded in the daily realities of running a state education system.

That line may sound like a crude throwback to James Carville’s famous Clinton-era mantra, but it captures a meaningful dilemma inside the Democratic Party’s current approach to education.

Since the party’s defeat in 2024, several Democrats have urged a return to the Obama-era emphasis on accountability for student outcomes, arguing that Democrats have ceded the education issue to Republicans and, in the process, squandered a longstanding advantage.

“In education, you need … accountability,” former Obama Education Secretary Arne Duncan argued recently. “[Our side isn’t offering that]. We’re adrift, it’s killing us politically, and it’s killing our kids.”

Meanwhile, former Providence, Rhode Island, mayor Jorge Elorza and Democratic education activist Ben Austin say that their party has become too deferential to teachers unions. Democrats must “adopt an abundance mindset” and stop allowing organized interests to dictate the party’s agenda, so that “when families and special interests want different things… there should be no doubt about whose side Democrats are on.” Elorza and Duncan blue-state governors to participate in the new federal school choice tax credit in President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill.

Finally, in the Wall Street Journal last fall, former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel chided his union critics while touting the academic gains made on his watch. “The teachers union brass disagreed with my approach in Chicago,” Emanuel wrote. “That’s fine — the results speak for themselves.”

The fundamental challenge for these Democrats, however, is that the electorate they hope to persuade has changed. Put simply, today’s Democratic voters are much closer to the very interest groups these reformers hope to confront.

Combining and survey data stretching back to the 1990s, I find that Democratic voters have become wildly more supportive of teachers unions over the past decade. Relying on three decades’ worth of near-identical survey about teachers unions, I plotted net favorability toward these unions by party and year, calculated as the share of survey respondents expressing positive views toward unions minus the share expressing negative views.

Several patterns stand out.

First, Republican attitudes toward teachers unions have remained remarkably stable over time. Republicans were net negative toward unions in the mid-1990s, remained net negative throughout the Obama years, and are similarly negative today. The story here is not one of Republicans suddenly turning against teachers unions.

Second, Democratic support for teachers unions rose steadily during the first Trump administration before accelerating sharply after the pandemic. Democratic favorability climbed steadily during Trump’s first term, rising from roughly +15 in 2015 to nearly +40 by 2020. After the pandemic, however, Democratic support for teachers unions exploded upward again, peaking above +60 by 2023. 

Third, Democratic voters were once far more ambivalent about teachers unions than today’s politics might suggest. During the Obama years, their net favorability hovered in the low teens — almost identical to where Democratic opinion stood in 1996, even as GOP presidential candidate Bob Dole made the unions a of his campaign attacks. In other words, the Obama-era was not a historical anomaly but followed a period when many Democratic voters still held mixed views about teachers unions.

Taken together, these political trends create several major obstacles for Democrats hoping to the Obama-era reform agenda.

First, many Democratic voters now appear to view teachers unions not simply as education interest groups or mere political allies, but as progressive bulwarks against Donald Trump and the Republican Party.

Over the past decade, some teachers unions have expanded their political agenda well beyond traditional workplace concerns like compensation or class size. From immigration enforcement and racial justice campaigns to anti-Trump mobilization and “common-good bargaining,” they have increasingly positioned themselves as key actors within the party’s progressive coalition. And this approach has been popular with Democratic voters.

It is also quite visible in one of the nation’s largest teacher-union affiliates, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU). I recently more than 350 CTU social-media posts published this year on X. Roughly one in five focused on Donald Trump or immigration enforcement. Not a single post addressed improving student academic achievement.

Second, the Democrats most actively engaged in education politics are also the Democrats most supportive of teachers unions. Four of the 18 surveys that I analyzed asked respondents if they voted in their most recent school board election, allowing me to examine how Democratic voters who participate in these low-turnout elections feel about teachers unions. Among Democrats who report voting in school board elections, favorable views of teachers unions rose from roughly two-in-five voters in 2009 to more than three-in-five in 2018 and approximately four-in-five by 2023–24. 

Finally, the political alignment between Democratic voters and teachers unions appears strongest in the nation’s deepest-blue locales, precisely the places where Democratic education policy is most likely to be shaped. For example, last month a new found that 83% of California Democrats approve of teachers unions (a 70% net favorable rating). A recent exception came in Virginia, a more moderate state where Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanberger vetoed a collective bargaining bill favored by the teachers union.

Veteran education advisor Andy Rotherham recently that school reform has historically succeeded only when it wasn’t coded purely in red-versus-blue. Education politics, he argues, traditionally resembled “consumer versus producer” politics more than conventional ideological conflict: parents and students on one side, school systems and unions on the other. 

Rotherham is surely right that education politics have become increasingly . Yet the data suggest the shift has been far more asymmetric than a simple story of partisan sorting would predict. Republican attitudes toward teachers unions changed relatively little over time. The major shift occurred among Democrats, whose support for unions surged during the Trump years and accelerated further after the pandemic. 

In other words, teachers unions did not merely become caught in partisan crossfire. They became more deeply integrated into the institutional identity of the Democratic Party itself.

That dynamic also extends far beyond education. Writers such as , , and legal scholar have each argued that Democrats increasingly struggle to reconcile an “abundance” politics focused on building and institutional effectiveness with a coalition deeply intertwined with organized producer interests, particularly in the public sector. 

Education may be one of the clearest examples of that broader tension. Reform-minded Democrats that the party should care less about the governance model of a school and more about whether students are actually learning. But that shift is politically difficult when the most powerful education interest group inside the Democratic coalition enjoys record levels of support among Democratic voters.

During the Obama years, Democrats could plausibly balance support for organized labor with a reform agenda centered on accountability and school performance. Today, that balancing act looks far more difficult. Teachers unions are no longer merely one stakeholder among many inside the Democratic coalition. For many Democrats, they have become symbolic defenders of the broader progressive project itself.

The University of California at San Diego recently shook both higher education and K-12 when it a startling reality: Many incoming freshmen could not perform basic middle school math. 

The university was commendably specific about the causes: the COVID-19 pandemic and its educational disruptions, elimination of standardized testing, grade inflation and expanded admissions from under-resourced high schools. Together, these forces produced a class increasingly unprepared for quantitative rigor.

But here’s the paradox: These students looked highly successful on paper. Ninety-four percent had taken advanced math courses like calculus or statistics. They averaged a 3.7 grade-point average. One in four had a 4.0. 

So where did America’s K-12 school systems go wrong?

There isn’t a simple answer. But I would suggest a fundamental, largely unacknowledged problem driving these outcomes:

America’s schools are terrible at catching kids up.

A 2023 of nearly 3 million students across seven states found that those who started out behind academically rarely caught up. Students in the 25th percentile in third grade tended to remain in the bottom third through eighth grade and into high school. Low-income students, and Black and Hispanic kids,  barely moved at all. When the national ed nonprofit TNTP 28,000 schools nationwide, only 5% helped the average student catch up to grade level.

Kids who are behind stay behind. Kids who are far behind stay far behind. Call it the Catch-up Crisis.  

Why are schools so bad at catching kids up?

Because teachers are being asked to do the impossible.

In a classroom of 25 to 30 students, teachers must determine who is on grade level, who is behind (and why), how to modify instruction for each struggling child and how to extend learning for advanced students — all while delivering grade-level content.

Diagnostic exams, designed to give educators information on how students are progressing, are infrequent and often test different subject matter than what is used in the classroom. Intervention programs designed to catch kids up are purchased but poorly implemented. Students needing intensive help are sometimes segregated into programs with low expectations and weak outcomes.

In short, teachers rarely have the effective tools they need.

And in the absence of solutions, another practice creeps in: grade inflation (as evidenced by the incoming class at UC San Diego).

It’s hard to tell parents their child is behind. It’s harder still when the school cannot explain how it will help them catch up. So .

But when teachers have a roadmap for acceleration, honesty becomes possible. Poor grades become temporary markers on a path to growth, not permanent labels to be hidden.

There is reason for hope. TNTP’s study 1,400 schools where students consistently learned more than a year’s worth of material annually, enabling those who started behind to reach grade level. 

In other words, the Catch-up Crisis is reversible. But first. we need a bold, shared goal: that students who fall behind grade level will catch up to — or exceed — grade-level standards within two school years, and without fail by high school graduation.

Call it “On Track in 2.”

Governors and state education commissioners should adopt this goal publicly and report each year on how many students are behind, how many are catching up and how many are on track to do so.

Of course, setting the goal is easier than achieving it.  Doing that will mean tackling three big gaps for teachers: limited real-time insight into student learning, little evidence-based guidance on how to address specific learning gaps and minimal job-embedded coaching.

Before artificial intelligence, solving these at scale was nearly impossible. Students generate enormous amounts of work daily — assignments, quizzes, writing, projects. No human can analyze all of it for 25 students every day. But AI can surface patterns quickly and provide teachers with usable, digestible insights.

More profoundly, AI can help generate evidence-informed strategies for specific challenges.

Imagine a fifth grader who is struggling with fractions. His teacher knows he earned a C- on the last test but doesn’t know why or what to do to help. AI can analyze the student’s work in real time and discovers he tends to invert numerators and denominators; it draws on data from thousands of similar children to see what worked best to help those with the same misconceptions and recommends content for a 15-minute tutoring block for the teacher to review and revise.  

Of course, the teacher should always make the final call. But now she has a playbook to use as a starting point.

The same applies to feedback for teachers. High-quality coaching is rare because it is time-intensive and expensive, and the quality can vary without intensive oversight and training of coaches by the district. AI-supported , used responsibly, could provide timely, standards-aligned feedback on recorded lessons, supplementing human coaching rather than replacing it.

This is not science fiction. In the Bronx, Superintendents Cristine Vaughan and Harry Sherman have launched pilots designed to catch kids up in math using AI. They are partnering with organizations such as , and that provide smart and safe AI tools for teachers that assess students in real time,Ěý identify what’s holding them back and recommend instruction that helps them get over the hump where they’re struggling. The pilots also include high-quality professional coaching for the teaching staff. Schools using these types of programs are seeing and increased student engagement.

These efforts are not yet the answer. And no technology should enter classrooms without strict vetting to ensure data privacy and security and to avoid adding to the problem with excessive screen time for students.  But they show the potential of smart and safe technology to give teachers new tools to catch kids up.

The evidence that the Catch-up Crisis is solvable is all around. It’s up to the adults who make and implement education policy to remove the barriers that are preventing America’s students from excelling.

Correction: The essay mischaracterized how many incoming freshmen at UC San Diego could not do middle school math. The correct number is 12.5%. Also, the name of one of the Bronx superintendents was misspelled. It’s Cristine Vaughan.

A of four urban districts confirms these research-based early literacy pedagogies are indeed widely implemented in these school systems. Educators are doing many things right: They are consistently delivering explicit phonics instruction that includes a clear purpose using high-quality foundational skills curricula.Ěý

Across the four districts, between 88% and 94% of over 200 surveyed teachers reported using their foundational skills curriculum daily or almost daily. Classroom observations of 112 foundational skills lessons confirmed that instruction was focused, aligned, and explicit—hallmarks of effective early literacy teaching.

But something critical was often absent from those same lessons: the opportunity to

connect sounds and words to meaning. In a previous report, we explored how meaning is often missing in the tasks that upper elementary students are assigned — for instance, finding literal and nonliteral language in a reading passage but not what the author was trying to convey. In our latest publication, we look specifically at the foundational reading skills taught in the earlier grades.

Moreover, we found that many students meet literacy benchmarks for foundational skills on early literacy screening assessments. But by third grade — when they are expected to make meaning from more complex texts on state literacy assessments — far fewer demonstrate proficiency. 

In other words, early success with word reading does not always translate into later success with comprehension. 

This mirrors national trends: relying on early literacy assessments indicates that 56% of K–2 students nationally are “on track” for learning to read, but only 31% of fourth graders performed at or above the proficient level on the 2024 NAEP reading assessment, a test that requires students to comprehend with greater depth.

What we found in our research, which included hours of classroom observation, was that only about one in five lessons gave students the chance to apply their phonics knowledge beyond single words to connected text: sentences, passages or stories that build reading fluency. And in more than half of lessons, teachers addressed word meaning just once or not at all.

In other words, students are learning how to blend sounds together to read words but not consistently how to make sense of them. We’ve made real progress on decoding, but the connections between decoding and meaning are often missing.

That stems, in part, from how early literacy instruction is structured and supported. Decoding and language comprehension are often taught in distinct lessons with different curricula, and teachers receive separate professional learning for each.

While this structure can support focused instruction, it can also give the false impression that meaning making does not belong in phonics lessons. At the same time, K–2 literacy data systems — including screeners and progress monitoring — tend to emphasize phonemic awareness and phonics, reinforcing the idea that those are the outcomes that matter.

The findings from this study point to an area for growth in foundational skills instruction that may help: bridging processes. These processes are the mechanisms that connect word recognition and language comprehension and should be incorporated into word recognition or phonics instruction, supporting students to build more meaning as they learn to decode. Two key bridging processes are vocabulary knowledge, which is understanding the meanings of words, and reading fluency or the ability to read connected text accurately and smoothly.

Without these bridging processes, decoding single words can be devoid of meaning.

Students may be able to sound out words yet still struggle to understand what they read. Importantly, bridging processes must be built into phonics instruction early on, and students should work on them throughout their early years of schooling, not just after they have successfully learned to decode words.

The encouraging news is that incorporating bridging processes does not require an overhaul of instruction or instructional systems. In many cases, bridging processes can be embedded into existing lessons in small but powerful ways.

Consider a phonics lesson on the two common sounds for double o, as in mood and look. A teacher might briefly define a target word — such as, “a brook is a small stream” — and show a picture of a brook before students practice reading it. Then she might instruct students to turn to a partner and share a sentence with the word brook.

This can take less than a minute but can anchor decoding in meaning, which is important for all students, especially for emergent multilingual students to expand their vocabulary as they are learning English. 

Similarly, building fluency doesn’t require a pivot away from explicit phonics instruction.

It requires ensuring that students regularly read sentences, passages and texts that incorporate the phonics patterns they are learning.Ěý

For example, after decoding a list of words like book, cook, hood, soon, tool, and boot, students might read a simple sentence like, “We went to fish in the brook,” applying their phonics knowledge to connected text. Then they might read a short story about animals at a brook with several other double o words.

Our study found that such opportunities to build fluency were surprisingly rare and did not meaningfully increase from kindergarten through second grade. 

This is a missed opportunity. 

Stories and passages that use targeted phonics skills are often provided in early literacy curricula but are sometimes skipped due to pacing or a lack of understanding their importance. 

Fluency develops through practice with connected text; without it, students struggle to transition from decoding single words to understanding longer texts.

Bridging processes are critical for students to connect word recognition and language comprehension. Adequately addressing them requires more than individual teacher effort. District leaders must clearly assert that these processes are fundamental to foundational skills instruction and reflect this priority in curricula, professional learning and classroom observation tools.

District and school leaders should expand the data they use to capture a broader view of reading development, aligning tools with bridging processes and incorporating information beyond word recognition.

School leaders and instructional coaches should provide professional learning opportunities around bridging processes, leveraging existing structures like professional learning communities to teach educators how to embed vocabulary and fluency practice into phonics lessons without sacrificing instructional focus. 

This can be done through watching exemplar videos, conducting peer observations, lesson rehearsal and engaging in coaching conversations.

The promise of early literacy reform has always been that strong foundations would lead to strong readers. But developing students’ decoding skills alone is not enough.

If we continue to teach decoding and language comprehension as separate endeavors, the result will be the same: early gains that fade when students are asked to read and comprehend longer texts. But if we build the bridges through vocabulary knowledge, reading fluency practice and intentional meaning making in phonics instruction, we can change that trajectory.

SRI Education and ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ both receive financial support from the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies.

Using a protocol I developed called “,” students mapped what gets in the way of learning. Nearly 100 participants generated more than 250 responses, which they posted, grouped and debated in real time. Students facilitated the process themselves and surfaced patterns with a clarity many adult teams struggle to reach. 

One theme rose quickly: “Nothing changes.”

Students weren’t talking about curriculum or rigor. They were describing what happens after they speak up. “We report things and nothing changes,” one student explained. Another added, “The biggest issue isn’t just bullying, it’s when adults don’t respond.” Across the workshop, roughly half of student responses pointed to the same issue: not whether students have a voice, but whether that voice leads to visible action. That’s the difference.

Across the country, policymakers are doubling down on civics, adding coursework, expanding standards and promoting credentials meant to signal engagement, including efforts like the Seal of Civic Engagement in Connecticut. These efforts are politically appealing, but they risk solving the wrong problem.

They rest on a flawed premise: that civic disengagement can be fixed through coursework and recognition alone. In reality, they may reinforce the very dynamic students describe, where participation is encouraged in theory but rarely shapes outcomes in practice.

This pattern is not unique. National surveys, including those from , show that many students feel their input is collected but rarely acted upon. The issue is not whether students are asked for their voice, but whether that voice meaningfully shapes outcomes.

When students spend years in systems where their input rarely influences decisions, they internalize a quiet but powerful lesson about how institutions work. Participation becomes symbolic, authority feels fixed and influence seems out of reach. Over time, students don’t just disengage. They adjust their expectations of how institutions operate.

The students in that Connecticut workshop were not disengaged. They were observant. In that room, they didn’t just identify problems; they modeled the kind of participation schools say they want to teach. Repeated experience taught them that speaking up does not necessarily lead to change.

We are asking students to believe in democracy while placing them in systems that rarely practice it. Civic engagement is not just about understanding democratic systems. It is about believing that participation matters and seeing evidence that it does.

A school can require civics coursework and still operate in ways that undermine it. It can teach the structure of government while modeling a system where decisions are largely made without meaningful student input. That contradiction is embedded in daily experience.

In too many schools, disengagement isn’t an accident. It is a predictable outcome of how systems are designed. Schools are one of the first public institutions young people encounter, and what they learn there about voice and power does not stay there. If we are serious about strengthening civic engagement, we have to look beyond what we teach and examine how schools function. 

This is, at its core, a design problem.

Students are more likely to engage when they feel known and respected. But belonging alone is not enough; a student can feel supported and still feel powerless.

The same conditions that build belonging, voice, participation and the ability to influence outcomes are also the conditions that foster long-term civic engagement. When those elements are absent, engagement fades over time.

What Needs to Change

This is not a call for another initiative layered onto an already crowded system. It is a call to rethink how schools operate on a daily basis. At a minimum, schools should establish structures where students regularly present proposals to school leadership and where responses are publicly tracked so students can see what changes and why. 

Schools should also make feedback loops visible, create consistent opportunities for dialogue and disagreement, and provide authentic audiences beyond the classroom where student ideas carry weight.

In the Connecticut workshop, the most striking moment was not the list of problems. It was what happened when students were given real responsibility to surface, organize and present their ideas. They did so thoughtfully and collaboratively, demonstrating the very civic skills schools aim to teach. The capacity is already there. The question is whether schools are designed to use it.

We tell students their voice matters, yet we place them in systems where it rarely influences outcomes. Students notice, and over time, they internalize that gap, not because they are apathetic, but because their experience has taught them what to expect.

If we continue to treat civic learning as a content issue, we will keep missing the point.

America does not have a civics crisis because students are disengaged. It has a civics crisis because too many schools are not designed to give students meaningful opportunities to participate. Until that changes, no amount of additional coursework will be enough, because students are already learning how our systems work — not from what we teach, but from how our schools actually operate.

That era produced real gains, particularly in its early years. But over the past decade-plus, national academic progress has slowed, a trend that began before the pandemic and worsened afterward. 

The show that reading and math achievement remains below pre-pandemic levels nationally. Researchers and educators point to several overlapping challenges: rising student mental health needs, chronic absenteeism, widening opportunity gaps and the growing demands placed on schools both inside and outside the classroom.

To meet this moment, another incremental adjustment to the old reform playbook will not be enough. A new education revolution is needed, one that prepares students for a world shaped by artificial intelligence and puts their voices at the center.

AI offers the possibility of something truly transformative for students and educators, but only if it is approached differently than past waves of education technology.

Properly used, AI can help students research complex topics, test ideas and accelerate learning in ways that were previously impossible. It gives young people greater independence to create, question and problem-solve.

For teachers, AI can reduce routine administrative work and create more time for engaging, rigorous and deeply human learning experiences. Most importantly, it makes individualized learning more achievable at scale, particularly for students living in poverty, English learners and children with disabilities.

But education has been here before.

Schools once believed that putting a laptop in every student’s hands would transform learning. Devices alone, however, did not change instruction or improve outcomes.

The difference now is not access. It is adaptability. AI has the potential to reshape how individual students learn, but realizing that potential will require far more than adopting new software.

In the United States, education is deeply local. That creates room for innovation, but it also creates fragmentation. As schools begin adopting AI, districts across the country are developing different approaches, frameworks and expectations, often with little coordination or shared direction.

At a moment when the country should respond as it did to Sputnik — with a national call to action — there is a risk of disjointed efforts while other countries move forward with greater urgency and coherence.

AI will not replace human relationships or judgment, but it will reshape many aspects of work and learning. What is increasingly clear is that people who understand how to use this technology effectively will have a significant advantage over those who do not. 

That makes AI literacy essential. If every child deserves a fair shot at the American dream, then every student in every community must have the opportunity to develop these skills.

So where should that work begin?

Right now, many of the frameworks guiding AI in education are being written by adults: policymakers, technologists, researchers and commentators. Many are thoughtful. But most are still missing something critical:

The voices of students.

Today’s young people are digital natives in a world designed by digital immigrants, already navigating these tools with greater fluency than the adults around them.

Students will inherit the consequences of the decisions being made now. Shouldn’t they have a say in how AI shapes their education and future?

This summer, AASA, The School Superintendents Association, and Day of AI, a nonprofit initiative born out of MIT, are launching a that will bring together 50 school leaders representing every state to explore the future of AI in education.

Superintendents will participate in learning experiences on emerging AI innovations, breakthroughs,and the implications for schools alongside MIT experts, including , director of MIT RAISE and one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in AI.

But the school leaders will not come alone. Each will bring two students from their state.

Those students will participate in a parallel convening at the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate, where they will serve as “student senators” and work with Kennedy Institute staff to draft a National AI Policy for the responsible, productive and ethical use of artificial intelligence in public schools.

The student-developed policy will be shared with AASA’s nationwide network of more than 10,000 district leaders, giving students an opportunity to influence real-world conversations, decisions and guidelines on how AI is used in classrooms across the country.

Thirty years ago, education reform gained momentum when leaders across political and ideological lines rallied around the belief that schools could better prepare students for the future.

Today, education faces another inflection point.

If students are expected to live and work in an AI-driven future, they should help shape how that future is designed.

The next revolution in education should not be led by policymakers and pundits, but by students themselves.

The George M. Pullman Educational Foundation was founded to address this challenge. Since 1950, it has provided students in the Chicago metropolitan area with four-year scholarships that can be used in any major at any accredited college. That flexibility matters. It allows recipients to transfer schools, change course or adjust plans as circumstances evolve, without risking a loss of funding.

Equally important is the support that comes with that money. Pullman staff members and a network of foundation alumni regularly check in on students to help them navigate academic and personal challenges. Mental health resources are available as well — a feature that was added to the scholarship program in 2025, as student feedback and made clear that stress is one of the top reasons, along with financial pressures, that undergraduates struggle to finish college.

Over the past five years, 84% of the foundation’s scholarship recipients have earned a college degree in four years, , and 95% finished within six years. Almost 60% were first-generation college students, 100% were Pell Grant-eligible and 70% graduated debt-free. These outcomes are not the product of extraordinary students alone. They reflect four assumptions about what they need to succeed.

1. Funding must be predictable. One-time scholarships can help with access, but they do little to ensure completion. Students need to know from the outset that support will last.

2. Flexibility matters. Restricting aid to a specific school, major or path may simplify administration, but it limits students’ ability to respond to real-world challenges. Academic journeys are rarely linear.

3. Support services should be treated as essential, not as optional enhancements. Advising, mentorship and mental health resources are not add-ons. They are central to whether students persist and graduate.

4. Access to information must improve. Many students still learn about scholarships and financial aid through informal networks — guidance counselors, community organizations or word of mouth. Increasing awareness and establishing more official sources of information is as important as expanding funding.

This scholarship model stands in stark contrast to a system in which students must piece together funding from federal loans, state grants, aid from colleges and private scholarships. And after all that work, many still come up short, leaving families to bridge the gap. For students with fewer resources, that gap often determines whether earning a degree is even an option.

The inequities are well-documented. A recent found that 56% of students from the highest-income families receive college grants exceeding their calculated need, compared with just 0.2% of those from the lowest-income families. This helps explain the growing gap between cost and perceived value, as nearly 40% of those planning to attend college never enroll, with first-generation and low-income students having the highest opt-out rates.

In addition, research shows that advising, can significantly increase completion rates, in some cases by as much as 55% to 60% for at-risk students. Yet these services are often treated as add-ons that are nice to have. Nearly expect cuts to student support budgets in the coming years, even as needs grow.

The consequences of the current scholarship system are stark. Fewer than complete a four-year degree within four years, and outcomes are worse for . Many who start college never graduate. Others struggle to finish, accumulating additional costs and uncertainty the longer it takes.

Yet the need for increasing numbers of promising college graduates remains strong. The pipeline of college-educated workers will face by 2032. At the same time, are being forced to delay enrollment, opt for community college or forsake earning a four-year degree altogether. 

None of the benefits embedded in the Pullman scholarship are out of reach for funders, universities and policymakers. They already have the tools to implement them. What is required is a shift in perspective — from viewing scholarships as transactions to treating them as long-term investments in student success.

Failing to support talented students with needs through graduation denies those without a bachelor’s degree an earnings bump of roughly over those with only a high school diploma. It also poses a risk to the nation’s economy, because while the workforce is evolving and the demand for diverse college-educated talent continues to grow, the pipeline of college-educated workers is expected to face by 2032. The challenge is aligning the system with the realities students face today.

A reset is possible. By aligning funding with flexibility, pairing financial support with consistent guidance and recognizing that completion — not just access — is the true measure of success, higher education administrators and funders can build a system that delivers on its promise. 

It was also the kind of video that makes many teachers think, “That’s amazing — and there is absolutely no way I can do that.”

Most educators are not looking for one more performance to add to their day. They are already managing lesson plans, behavior, parent communication, paperwork, staff meetings, substitute shortages and the emotional weight of trying to meet every student’s needs. So when “greet students at the door” gets presented as another big, elaborate thing, it can feel unrealistic.

But the real power of a doorway greeting is not in the choreography.

It is in the connection.

I have seen this moment matter from preschool classrooms to high school hallways. After years of working with students and schools as a social worker, district administrator and consultant, I’ve learned that the ages and settings may change, but the need is remarkably consistent: Students want to know that someone is glad they are there.

Research suggests that this small routine can make a measurable difference. classrooms where teachers greeted students at the door saw a 20 percentage point increase in academic engagement and a 9 percentage point decrease in disruptive behavior. The researchers estimated that this kind of increase in engagement could add roughly an extra hour of engagement across a five-hour instructional day.

That is a significant return on a very small investment.

The beginning of class is one of the most important transitions of the school day. Students are moving from the hallway, cafeteria, playground or another classroom into a learning environment. They may be carrying noise, conflict, anxiety, excitement, frustration or unfinished conversations with them. The first few minutes of class can quickly become a scramble: students talking over each other, wandering, negotiating, arguing, sharpening pencils, asking what they missed or waiting to see how much the teacher will tolerate before stepping in.

A doorway greeting sets the tone before students cross the threshold.

The good news is that the most effective greetings in the research were not complicated and did not require special dance moves. The essentials are: Teachers used the student’s name. They made eye contact. They offered a brief nonverbal greeting — a handshake, fist bump, high five, nod or wave. Then they added a short positive or “pre-corrective” statement, which is simply a friendly reminder of what to do next.

That might sound like:

“Good morning, Jayden. I’m glad you’re here. Take a look at the warm-up on the board.”

“Hi, Maria. Good to see you. Grab your notebook and start with question one.”

“Welcome back, Marcus. Today is a fresh start. I’m glad you’re here because we’re going to learn about those volcanoes you were asking about.”

There is nothing flashy about it. But it is powerful because it combines connection and structure.

That combination matters.

Too often, schools treat relationships and expectations as if they are competing priorities. Some educators worry that a focus on relationships means being permissive. Others worry that a focus on expectations means being rigid or punitive. But students need both. They need to know that adults care about them, and they need to know what is expected.

A doorway greeting brings those two needs together in a practical way.

From a behavioral perspective, it is a predictable routine that explicitly teaches and reinforces expected behavior. Students know how to enter, where to look, what to start and how the class begins. That predictability lowers stress for students and teachers.

From a restorative practices perspective, it is a relationship-building habit. It communicates belonging. It gives teachers a daily opportunity to notice students before there is a problem. It allows a teacher to quietly repair after a difficult day, offer encouragement to a student who struggled yesterday or simply communicate, “You matter here. I see you and I’m glad you’re here.”

And from a classroom management perspective, it is prevention.

Teachers know that once a class begins in chaos, it can take a long time to recover. A calm, consistent start protects instructional time. It also reduces the need for repeated corrections once students are inside the room.

This practice becomes even more powerful when it is adopted schoolwide. I have seen schools make a community agreement for everyone to stand at their doors during passing periods or arrival time. The effect was immediate. Hallways felt calmer. Students were more connected to adults. Minor misbehavior decreased because adults were present, visible and welcoming. The whole building felt different. 

And something unexpected happened, too: Teachers began connecting with one another. They smiled and waved across the hall, offered words of encouragement, shared a quick joke and reminded one another, in small but meaningful ways, that they were in this together.

Of course, implementation matters. Doorway greetings should be simple, sustainable and adaptable. Teachers can choose a greeting style that fits their personality and their students. Some may use a fist bump. Some may use a warm verbal greeting. Some may offer students a choice: wave, elbow bump, peace sign or no-contact greeting. The point is not the gesture itself. The point is consistent positive contact paired with a clear start-of-class direction.

School leaders also have a role to play. If they want teachers greeting students at the door, they can model it themselves. They can be present, visible and engaged with students and staff during passing periods. That kind of modeling communicates that connection is not one more classroom management trick. It is part of the culture.

The best strategies in schools are often not the most complicated ones. They are the ones that are easy to repeat, grounded in research and aligned with what students and teachers actually need.

Greeting students at the door will not solve every behavior challenge. It will not replace strong instruction, meaningful relationships, clear routines or effective support systems. But it is one small practice that brings all of those ideas together. And when a routine becomes a habit, it becomes easier to sustain.

Two minutes at the door can say: You are welcome here. We are ready to learn. I see you. Let’s begin again.

For many students, that may be exactly the connection moment they need.

A new report on whole-book reading in secondary English classrooms arrives at a useful moment. The debate over whether students in school has become increasingly , and at times nearly . A growing chorus insists that American schools have abandoned literature and are trapped in a joyless regime of excerpt-driven “skills instruction” imposed by standards-aligned curriculum and testing. Rand brings something refreshing to the conversation: evidence. And, as it tends to do, the evidence complicates nearly everyone’s preferred narrative.

The report’s headline finding is less alarming than much of the recent rhetoric would suggest: Nearly 90% of secondary English Language Arts teachers report assigning at least one full fiction or nonfiction book during the school year. About two-thirds assign between one and four books annually, while roughly one-quarter assign five or more. Clearly, that’s not a picture of novels disappearing entirely from classrooms. But neither is it particularly reassuring. For one thing, the report doesn’t tell if the average number of books assigned has declined, or which books students are reading: graphic novels or classic literature? The authors also acknowledged, “We do not know the form their assignment took; teachers could have used the book for whole-class instruction or as a choice for independent reading.”

The researchers’ most troubling finding is that teachers serving disadvantaged students consistently assign fewer books. Students in high-poverty schools or majority nonwhite schools, multilingual learners and students with disabilities all appear less likely to experience sustained encounters with complete works of literature. 

That matters, because reading a book is not just an extended version of reading a passage. It requires different cognitive habits: sustained attention, memory, fluency and the ability to remain immersed in language and ideas over long stretches of time. As Doug Lemov noted in a I hosted recently, teaching whole books effectively means cultivating “cognitive persistence” in ways that are becoming increasingly rare in our fragmented digital culture. 

So, if there is a singularly troubling implication in the Rand report, it is not that books have vanished. It’s that the students most in need of the benefits that whole books provide appear least likely to receive them.

The report also contains a finding that will delight critics of standards-aligned curriculum: Teachers using publisher-developed instructional materials assigned fewer books on average than educators using self- or district-created materials. Rand cautiously suggests that excerpt-heavy curriculum design may partly explain the trend. That said, I suspect the authors of the report may be assigning too much causal weight to curriculum publishers and not enough to the accountability systems that have shaped their products. For at least a quarter-century, high-stakes reading tests have functionally imposed a theory of literacy upon American educators that views reading comprehension primarily a suite of transferable skills that can be amply demonstrated on short, decontextualized passages: finding the main idea, making inferences, citing evidence, identifying author’s purpose and so on.

If that is what policymakers demand and tests reward, curriculum publishers would be irrational not to align their products to it. Said differently, the tests drive practice. Curricula are adapted to the tests. This is one reason I have that reading exams damage literacy instruction: they subtly teach educators to think about reading in ways that are at odds with cognitive science, leading schools to de-emphasize the importance of background knowledge, vocabulary and fluency in favor of a skills-and-strategies approach that assumes reading comprehension can be taught, practiced and mastered via repeated practice on brief passages. This approach largely conflicts with the science of reading that policymakers, literacy advocates and curriculum reformers are to persuade states, districts and schools to embrace.

To be sure, testing mandates in grades 3 to 8 cannot fully explain the decline of whole-book instruction in high school. But accountability systems helped shape the field’s broader conception of reading itself — not merely elementary and middle school test prep. High school assessments like the SAT largely reinforce these signals, emphasizing analytical skills applied to . The point is not that standardized tests directly cause teachers to assign fewer novels in high school. It’s that the accountability era has normalized a fragmented theory of reading across the entire K-12 system. 

It would be a mistake to respond to the Rand report with a simplistic demand to raise the novel count. Assigning lots of books is not automatically good instruction. A poorly taught novel can easily become an exercise in disengagement or superficial discussion. What matters is whether schools and teachers understand why whole books matter in the first place and can confidently guide their students through literary analysis and conversation.

The AEI webinar I hosted last month touched on both of these crucial topics. During the event, Lemov argued that whole books are cognitively powerful precisely because they demand sustained thought. They immerse students in language rich enough to shape how they themselves think and speak. Reading a book requires students to hold ideas in memory over time, revise their understanding as characters evolve and tolerate ambiguity long enough for meaning to emerge.

Mike Austin of Great Hearts Academies made a related and more humanistic point: Books welcome students into an ongoing cultural and moral conversation larger than themselves. Whole books matter not merely because they are long, but because they allow students to inhabit another consciousness deeply enough to encounter enduring questions about human life and moral values. 

On the question of how to teach books effectively, Kyair Butts, a Baltimore middle school teacher, emphasized the importance of building classrooms where students feel safe taking academic risks, reading aloud, building fluency and participating in shared intellectual work.  Lemov reinforced this point by sharing a video of eighth graders reading To Kill a Mockingbird together in class. Their teacher walked around the room, paper book in hand, as she modeled expressive reading, cold-called on students to read and encouraged self-correction. All these practices help students develop their reading fluency, a key aspect of upper-grade literacy.

In sum, good ELA instruction doesn’t happen simply because a publisher inserts a novel into a curriculum map. Nor will schools fully recover sustained literary reading until or unless policymakers and administrators create structures that signal its value and reward it. For years, schools received the opposite signal. 

The question now is whether schools are prepared to reclaim a richer understanding of reading itself — not as a toolbox of comprehension “skills” or test prep, but as immersion in language, knowledge, memory, narrative and thought.

Annika Hernandez, a research associate in education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and a former middle and high school English teacher, contributed to this essay.

That’s now my school’s everyday reality. It took work, training and trust, but today each administrator serves in key instructional roles in the school.

To make the shift, we looked at achievement data and analyzed where it was lagging, by grade and across groups of students. Then we considered whether pairing a member of the administrative team with teachers in those grades and with those students could fuel growth. 

Looking at achievement data, we saw that our special education students across grades 3 to 8 needed help to make more growth in reading. In fact, the school was under a state watch for failing to hit benchmarks related to literacy gains among students with disabilities.

To address the problem, my administrative team and I — former teachers ourselves — first received training on the school’s and. Next, we created a plan to give special education students an extra 30 minutes of English instruction three times a week during their advisory period. We spent that time on reading strategies, including introducing vocabulary that would come up in their English classes and building their background knowledge to support reading comprehension. The effort worked; students with disabilities subsequently made more growth in reading than in previous years.

This year, we zeroed in on third grade, because those students weren’t hitting desired benchmarks. This was also a strategic choice because Arizona has a that requires students to demonstrate that they can read before being promoted to fourth grade.

From October through February, I co-taught third-grade English Language Arts, while my school’s instructional coach has been helping struggling students with basic reading skills alongside another third-grade teacher. We also tutor third graders once a week after school on fluency and comprehension. In addition, the dean of students, who oversees school safety and discipline, is co-teaching a fifth grade science class. 

One of the hardest things to navigate is how to go from being a co-teaching colleague on a given day to an administrator who has to observe and evaluate my co-teacher the next day. The co-teacher and I discuss beforehand when I’ll be putting on my evaluator hat, so she’s not surprised. When we debrief after a formal observation, I try to limit the conversation to the lesson I observed that day. This way, in other moments, she can share her thoughts and concerns openly, without wondering how I’ll interpret her remarks or whether they’ll show up in an evaluation. And this is not a one-way street. I routinely ask her for feedback on my lessons. 

Among the most thrilling parts of this experience has been participating in professional development with teachers, joining their weekly planning meetings and studying instructional materials on my own so I can maximize their potential in the classroom.

Too often, administrators don’t participate in professional learning alongside teachers. When they try to, they are frequently pulled away for other duties. My team and I do everything in our power to avoid that.

Sometimes our learning curve is steep. The dean of students was previously a music teacher, and in addition to learning the science curriculum, he’s helping me lead afterschool tutoring in reading for third graders. He was a little nervous at first, but after doing some professional development, studying on his own and being unafraid to ask questions, he’s doing great and the students are benefiting.

The question I most frequently get is how I find time to do all this. One thing I’ve done is look for ways to work more efficiently. For example, we’ve streamlined how we track student progress data, putting it in a shareable online folder instead of having it live in multiple places, such as individual teachers’ files, which required us to spend too much time looking for it when we needed it. Today, more members of our team, including the school psychologist and instructional coaches, can easily look at and use this vital information..

When the children are in school, from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m., my administrative team makes a concerted effort to be with them. That means, to the fullest extent possible, I don’t take office meetings between those hours or work on budgeting, scheduling or other administrative tasks. I try to get those things done after the kids have left for the day.  

Over time, I’ve also grown better at delegating and trusting the strengths of my team instead of trying to do everything myself. For example, we’ve trained some of our educators to lead professional learning meetings, which are focused on looking at data and strategizing ways to meet teaching and learning goals. Previously, these were headed by an administrator. Putting teachers in charge has boosted instructional leadership among the staff, which helps me and ensures the team feels valued, capable and invested in the school’s success.

At the end of the day, I didn’t become a principal to shuffle paperwork. I pursued this opportunity so I could help students excel and live promise-filled lives. Rethinking my role and that of other administrators in my building is doing so much to help the school achieve that goal.Ěý

There are several answers to that question. I think one at the top of the list is figuring out how to use the tools that chartering developed, like performance contracting, authorizing, school-level autonomy, mission-driven governance and better measures of student success, to modernize all of U.S. public education for a changing economy and society.

No doubt, some of this has already occurred, as the charter idea has increasingly shaped mainstream expectations about how public schools should operate. — for example, and management. The challenge now is to ensure that chartering becomes a quality-and-opportunity strategy for all of K-12 public education.

The original charter idea was straightforward: a new type of public school that has the operational independence to design and run its own education program in exchange for being accountable for improved student results. Do this by allowing an organization called a to approve and oversee the schools. Over time, that approach expanded into a broader argument about flexibility, innovation, parent choice and pluralism in public education.

The growth of this new sector of public schools is substantial. , more than 3.7 million students attend 8,150 charter schools staffed by more than 251,000 teachers in states across the country, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and Guam.

Research from Stanford University’s found that charter students gain the equivalent of 16 additional days of learning in reading and six additional days in math compared with peers in traditional public schools. The researchers also documented substantial variation in school quality.

That variation is one reason the next phase of implementing the charter idea should focus less on sector growth alone and more on building stronger K-12 public education systems with many different types of independent public schools of choice that are accountable for results.

Here are five priorities that policymakers, community leaders and K-12 stakeholders can use to guide that effort.

First, use the charter authorizing process to learn how to renew faltering district schools. Good charter authorizers close persistently weak schools, replicate strong schools and maintain public trust. Expand this approach to all public schools, including strengthening current authorizing standards, improving transparency and making it easier for effective public charter and district schools to grow, while closing persistently ineffective schools.

Second, expand how school success is measured. Effective charters have proven that they can improve test scores. Many also have shown that this isn’t enough. Schools should also be judged by whether students succeed after graduation according to different measures, including employment, earnings, college persistence, military service, apprenticeship completion and civic participation. The next generation of K-12 accountability systems should focus more directly on using multiple measures to track student success in pursuing long-term opportunity.

Third, create more career-connected schools. Charters have shown how operational autonomy can make it easier for educators to design schools around real-world learning. For example, in the Los Angeles area project-based learning, college partnerships, industry alliances, work-based learning and career-connected education, making these opportunities central to students’ experience. Other charter models — including schools with early-college, apprenticeship and schools workforce-partnerships programs — show how high schools can better connect learning to work, further education and civic life. The educators and community partners who build these models can help the broader K-12 system understand what it takes to redesign schedules, create employer and college partnerships, and respond quickly to changing workforce and community needs. 

Fourth, learn from charters how to think differently about building and using school facilities. Many charter schools lack equitable access to buildings and capital financing, diverting classroom dollars to rent and construction costs. This shortcoming has unleashed innovative models like the , , and . Lessons learned from this process should spur districts to think differently about their approach to school construction and use.

Fifth, focus on a “more good public schools” strategy. Bridge the divide between charters and district schools by that replicates effective charter models within districts, which creates more good public schools. This can be done in many ways, including , charter-district , by charters, district schools, and community organizations, and .

All these efforts reflect a broader idea, which I call . A healthy and effective K-12 public education system should offer multiple high-quality pathways for young people with different goals, interests and talents. Charter schools are not the only way to create those pathways. But they remain one of the most flexible tools available for helping states and communities rethink how public education connects to opportunity.

The next phase of the charter school idea should not be about relitigating old ideological battles over public school choice. It should be about building a more flexible, accountable and opportunity-rich K-12 public education system inspired by the charter idea.

Unfortunately, too many are not able to participate. Not because they don’t care but because the system is complicated, confusing, and nobody explained it — or why it’s important. 

Every year, 4 million Americans turn 18, and most of them aren’t registered to vote. Here’s the thing: When 18-year-olds are registered in big elections, they turn out nearly as much as adults. The problem isn’t apathy — it’s access. In midterms, of this age group is typically registered, and even in presidential years, it’s fewer than half, versus three-quarters of older voters. 

Regardless of the issues that motivate young people — whether it’s housing affordability, education or immigration — our collective responsibility is to ensure young Americans are informed and able to express their opinions at the ballot box.

I founded The Civics Center in 2018 because I believe we can and should make voter registration a regular part of high school life. Not simply to register more voters but to instill an understanding of  and appreciation for democratic norms and values. With local partners in 38 states, we have supported close to 1,000 nonpartisan, student-led, peer-to-peer voter registration drives in U.S. high schools, because they’re the one place you can reach virtually every young American. 

We provide so that students can lead voter registration drives in school, supported by trusted adults, year after year. It’s like the school newspaper: Once you set up the infrastructure and name faculty advisors, the students do the work, and teachers support. As organizers graduate, younger students take over.

Many people are shocked to learn that the majority of U.S. teens can pre-register to vote as soon as they turn either 15, 16 or 17,. This means that not only is pretty much every senior old enough to register before graduation — so are many juniors and even sophomores. 

Another little-known fact: 26 states have requiring high schools to help students register to vote; sadly, few states implement those laws effectively. The 1993 “Motor Voter Law” highlights the ability of states to designate high schools as voter registration agencies, yet few have taken steps to do so. Absent official action, it’s in the hands of students, teachers, parents and others in the community. 

That might seem like adding yet another responsibility to overburdened and underpaid teachers, so we’re lightening the load with state-specific online aimed at increasing youth participation. That includes information for every state and the District of Columbia: age to register or preregister; upcoming elections and registration deadlines; ID requirements; the number of 18-year-olds in each state; instructions for registering online and by mail; laws requiring high schools to help; and calls to action such as register to vote, join a free training or run a drive. 

Toolkits help teachers who want to support their students’ work, a hands-on learning opportunity that encourages conversations about representative government and democratic power. These equip school communities with reliable information and action items to build a durable on-ramp to democracy and a path to lifelong civic engagement.

When we ask students to guess how their community is doing in registering young voters, they are shocked to hear the reality: Under 25% of 18-year-olds are registered in Ohio and Pennsylvania, 42% in New York,49% in New Jersey, 76% in Michigan. In those states, the same statistic for the people over 45 registered to vote is close to 90%. Many students are galvanized to take action to help their communities do better. 

Some of the discrepancies across states and counties can be explained by drivers’ licenses and the over-reliance on state DMVs to serve as voter registration agencies. Few teens drive in New York City, where under 35% of 18-year-olds are registered to vote and under 10% of 16- and 17-year-olds are preregistered. In California, poor DMV system design results in 45% of eligible 16- and 17-year-olds opting out of preregistering to vote.

The situation would have been worse if Congress had passed the SAVE Act requiring a narrow range of citizenship documents to register to vote; many high schoolers don’t have easy access to a passport or birth certificate, which cost money to order and time to ship. Even as the federal version has stalled in the Senate, some states have similar laws enacted or in the works that could survive legal challenges.

No one will be surprised to hear that the hurdles around voter registration disproportionately affect students from low-income or urban communities. That fuels a cycle of neglect and despair: When people aren’t registered to vote, they don’t provoke interest from candidates or campaigns; they are less likely to be asked for their input and in turn, are less likely to believe they have power or influence. On the other hand, voting while young typically fosters lifelong democratic engagement.

Because state laws and practices vary widely, we partner with other nonpartisan organizations, including the League of Women Voters, to support high school voter registration. The results can be extraordinary, with hundreds registered in a single, well-organized effort, and students gaining leadership skills and commitment to democracy. 

Imagine the impact: Adding just 100 new registrations per high school, repeated across the 27,000 U.S. high schools, we would see more than 2 million new voters every year.

All of which means that the next two months, leading to graduation season, offer the best chance we know to help the Class of 2026 turn into the voters of 2026 and every election to come.

Decades of presidential administrations have stood behind policies that kept immigration enforcement out of schools, except in extreme and unusual circumstances. The rules were designed so immigration officers could do their jobs without putting students and teachers at risk. This was even the . That is no longer true as Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers haunt schoolyards and school bus stops.

As education advocates on the ground in two cities where ICE’s chilling effect on school attendance has been the most intense, we urge Congress to use ongoing negotiations over the Department of Homeland Security budget to help keep students in our classrooms.  

Congress has the authority and responsibility to ensure schools are designated as sensitive locations, free of immigration enforcement, and able to serve as safe and welcoming places of learning for all.

The clear across every dimension on why children should be in school every day: better life outcomes, overall societal economic value, reduced crime, better health and more. This is so obvious that in 1982, during the Reagan administration, the that all students enjoy a Constitutional right to attend America’s public schools, for free, regardless of immigration status.

Aggressive immigration actions have driven record lows in student attendance — the number one prerequisite for a student’s ability to learn. In Minneapolis, at some schools during Operation MetroSurge. In Chicago, as many as 3,000 additional students who would have been in attendance are missing school every week as a result of immigration actions. stayed home on September 29, 2025, alone due to ICE actions. 

Whole classrooms go empty and thousands of educational hours are lost as terrified children, many of them U.S. citizens, remain absent following heavy immigration activity near schools.

We recognize the value of immigration enforcement when it is focused on those who pose a safety risk to our communities, but schools should not be the place where this enforcement occurs. Armed immigration officers patrolling school bus stops and outside school buildings are causing significant instability and impacting learning. During Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis, schools quickly restructured bus routes because it was no longer safe for students to wait at bus stops, and staff and parents drove neighborhood children to school. 

In both Chicago and Minneapolis, parents formed human shields around schools to allow students to safely enter and exit the building. Teachers switched from hanging student work on the wall to to block out the windows of first-floor classrooms. 

But the impact of recent immigration enforcement tactics goes beyond forcing communities to devise strategies to get kids safely to their schoolrooms. 

As required by law, school administrators are implementing lockdowns similar to those used in mass shooter situations when armed agents are near schools. Students stop coming to school after seeing their teachers, classmates and other parents detained at drop-off or pick-up. As a result, schools scramble to provide virtual learning options for kids who often lack reliable internet access or sufficient devices.

Children, including citizens in or near schools where indiscriminate immigration actions have bled into their safe spaces, have racked up learning loss similar to what was experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic. ICE enforcement near schools is effectively manufacturing the same devastating effects on children as the pandemic.

For thousands of families and children in Minnesota, Chicago, and across the U.S., faith in our education system is in peril. Back in 1982, the Supreme Court acknowledged how sacred it was to protect schools and children’s learning. Congress must harken back to those sentiments and ensure children today are equally protected.

There are different views on the issues that Democrats and Republicans are currently debating that are for the Department of Homeland Security. However, one of those demands should be easy to agree upon: protecting sensitive areas, especially schools, school bus stops and other places where children congregate.

We are asking our better angels to intervene and ensure that the final DHS funding agreement includes clear, enforceable protections for sensitive locations that keep immigration enforcement away from schools so that every child can attend school safely and regularly.

Yet just freely letting students use AI to generate ideas, explain difficult concepts and produce/revise writing ” upon which learning depends and . 

So I have been attempting the “third option” recommended by both the and the : teaching AI literacy.

This year my 10^th and 11^th grade English students used AI itself as a text to advance their critical thinking skills. We still read novels and short stories, still engaged in discussions and wrote essays, but AI was now a regular part of our work together.

As we read, we examined how large language models’ recycled novel “analyses” mis-read and oversimplified complex literature, producing distillations that often lacked nuance compared with the creative, discursive yet defensible readings that the students themselves generated. They learned to discern actual analysis from simplistic summaries, and to suspect the allure of AI’s instant “correct answers.”

As we engaged in literary discussions, we sometimes invited chatbots into the conversation; many students described these interactions as “bizarre” and “disjointed,” adequate for reviewing plot but too circular or directionless for genuinely provocative dialogue. ChatGPT’s sycophancy in particular tended to kill the necessary tension for true debate. One student “started purposely saying dumb things just to see how GPT would still find a way to say `great idea.’ It just felt so fake.”

As we wrote, we compared LLM-generated essays with human-generated ones, teasing out how AI’s “sophisticated-sounding” yet “generic” prose differed from the “messier” but ultimately, in the students’ judgment, more engaging language they themselves created. In a world where everyone has access to LLMs, these students were discovering the value of developing genuine voice. I hope at least some emerged thinking ChatGPT was best reserved for inter-office memos and letters to one’s utility company.

As we researched, we studied how AI search summaries — which users are now — don’t actually represent internet searches, but instead reflect word proximity within a static corpus of text, a corpus lacking access to paywalled scholarly research and therefore drawing disproportionately on unregulated chat forums. 

Students examined whether LLMs accurately reported their sources and to what extent AI drew from ideologically extreme sites. They saw how wording a query — e.g., “is abortion safe” vs. “is abortion murder” — could lead to politically-slanted results based on what the AI thought they wanted to see, and how sources often said something very different than AI summaries claimed they did. 

As we took and organized notes, students compared their manual note-taking process to the output of AI note-taking tools, learning how what we choose to include or exclude in summarizing notes, how we use emphasis and phrasing — did Africa under colonialism “fuel worldwide industrial production” or were African resources and peoples “exploited for the benefit of Western industrial profit” — create and propagate different narratives.

These narratives do not ; “what is ranked at the top” of AI searches “is ultimately influenced by the priorities of LLMs’ shareholders,” so we studied studying the politics of AI magnates like Sam Altman and Peter Thiel, learning how Gemini’s responses to political questions, and studying algorithmic bias (e.g., image generation requests for “doctor” returning mainly white males), all helped my students re-think their understanding that AI tools were neutral and simply utilitarian.

When we studied AI, we simultaneously studied neurological research about how humans, unlike LLMs, don’t just rely on pattern recognition, but also make intuitive leaps, and used Edward De Bono’s activities as practice. Students did something else that AI couldn’t: related classroom content to personal experiences. 

One multilingual student recalled attending a business meeting with her father where he faltered, because he “[knew] that someone who has the ability to speak English better [me] sat right next to him… ‘It makes me want to depend on you’ he told me, ‘when I’m totally capable of doing so by myself.’ He did much better after I left.” The student then made the leap to consider how, even if AI help is readily available, perhaps we gain something by refusing to rely on it.

When I abandoned AI bans, I instituted AI audits. Students had to demonstrate their thoughtful, detailed evaluation of each AI tool they used, including knowledge of how it operated, what they felt they gained and lost by using it, how they verified accuracy of information, and how they had not relinquished their own thinking. The students didn’t necessarily conclude “AI is always bad,” but they did see that using it always requires vigilance. Best of all, they didn’t have to take my moralizing word for any of this; they discovered it for themselves. 

Yes, I had to teach fewer novels in order to make room for AI literacy, but ultimately my job is not to teach novels; it’s to teach students. Their insights — how Grammarly’s “correcting” language altered integral parts of people’s unique voices, how personal evolution often comes from struggle and discomfort, how our desire for ease can hold us back from achieving our potential, how dangerous it is to invest authority in words just because they emerge from a machine — were equally valuable as any takeaway they gleaned from novels. And this time I knew those takeaways were theirs, not ChatGPT’s.

I teach an affluent population, but are with more economically and linguistically diverse learners. To be sure, my experience was often fraught. Some of my less-confident students never stopped considering LLMs’ “clear” and “well organized” writing superior to their own, and still hesitated to trust their own readings of literature over “the answers” ChatGPT offered. 

I struggle with asking students to critically evaluate AI while their own linguistic and analytic skills are still developing, but I also know I cannot create the conditions that allow teenagers to become master writers and thinkers before they are exposed to AI; they will soon arrive at my classroom having been using it since childhood. 

Post-pandemic suggests that, when teaching anything, we cannot wait for students operating well-below grade level to “catch up” before introducing higher order thinking skills; we have to figure out how to teach both simultaneously.   

That requires creativity, and creativity is what makes humans superior to AI, which can only regurgitate already-created ideas. Teachers excel at creativity; every day we come up with new ways to meet the ever-changing needs of our students, and right now AI literacy is one of those needs. 

that this training is crucial for keeping AI users — a population swiftly becoming synonymous with “humans beings” — from engaging in “cognitive surrender, marked by passive trust and uncritical evaluation of external information,” as opposed to “cognitive offloading, which involves strategic delegation of cognition during deliberation” when using AI.

about AI rendering English classes obsolete forget that the humanities are about studying what is human about us — including both our criticality and our adaptability.

Note: This is an abridged, non-scholarly version of a peer-reviewed article slated for publication in Issue 115.6 of NCTE’s .

Silly me.

As part of our at the Hoover Institution, we held nine conversations with 82 parents and community members across the country. We intentionally focused on communities with public schools that persistently performed at the bottom of their state’s distribution, choosing a wide set of different locations.  

Local nonprofit agencies partnered with us to identify people with tangible stakes in how well their schools performed but who routinely do not have a seat at the table: Local employers, nonprofit service providers, local elected officials and parents agreed to participate. We got a small clue of what we would find during the set-up period when, in several places, local agencies declined to partner with us for fear of reprisals.

We found that while districts often express support for community involvement, their actions say something different. Members of every community reported ostracism and persistent refusal of school leaders to engage with local stakeholders. In seven of the nine conversations, we learned the patterns were decades old. 

We heard of teachers disrespecting students because of their parents’ school experiences years earlier. Many we spoke with recognize the importance of strong education but noted that others in their communities have lost confidence in the promise of education, mainly because it hasn’t materialized for themselves or their children.  

Further, the growing complexity of schooling — budgets, assessments and accountability (or the lack thereof) — has left parents without the knowledge they need for full engagement.  This was mentioned as an excuse used by school leaders to dismiss overtures from the community.  

Despite the history, 90% of the community members we interviewed were interested in actively participating in building stronger outcomes for the students in their schools. They were motivated to be schooled in the business of schooling to become better partners in discussions and decisions. 

This was not passive interest: To help improve local schools, over half of participants were willing to make a commitment of 20 hours over a six-month period. Critically, participants felt daunted by solo campaigns, but held stock in the power of collective involvement.

One might question the power of nine communities to carry the story for the nation, especially since we are not able to describe the motivations of school personnel that underlie the behavior community members described. These limitations aside, the consistent picture of long-term discounting community input and disengagement aligns with other and anecdotes.

These findings should prompt a strong reaction from authorities at all levels of education governance. We are losing connection between a fundamental institution of our democracy and the public it is designed to serve. Regardless of their reasons, when public servants — superintendents, teachers and board members — insulate themselves from potential challenges, they drive the that the deck is stacked against the common citizen.

One easy remedy would be to teach community members more about the education system to enable informed participation. That could happen with online tutorials of how schools operate and are governed.  Tapping AI capabilities to produce these tutorials could be a valued school project for interested students, perhaps in conjunction with civics courses.  

Harder solutions would provide more durable improvement: Lean in to partnering with disconnected stakeholders. Local and state leaders are overlooking a golden opportunity to build better schools and communities in tandem.  Greater affinity to a community’s school strengthens community connections for adults and students, improves life satisfaction and prompts better student results.  

Perhaps the greatest lost opportunity is for state education agencies to partner directly with communities that have underperforming schools to apply top-down/bottom-up accountability for student results. The opportunity exists to equip community stakeholders with evidence of successful schools and districts like their own. New policies could prompt local school officials, community members and state representatives to undertake formal review and selection from a list of proven alternatives as part of a contract-based improvement plan. Ongoing monitoring could be shared between the state and local stakeholders.

Combining the leverage of state statute with the zeal of local interests could tap the best of both forms of power. A motivated community is a terrible thing to waste.  

Disclosure: The Hoover Institution provides financial support toĚýĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ.

But the most important question wasn’t how we got there, it was why it hadn’t happened sooner.

Like many districts, we weren’t lacking a curriculum, effort or committed teachers. What we were missing was something far less visible and far more important.

We had reached a point where math performance wasn’t where we wanted it to be. Teachers were frustrated, and our instinct was to look outward for a solution. We began searching for a new math program — something that would finally move the needle.

We approached the process thoughtfully. A committee was formed, programs were reviewed, and alignment to standards was carefully analyzed. On paper, many options looked promising. But the more we evaluated, the more uncomfortable the truth became: The issue wasn’t the program.

Across our elementary schools in Pennsylvania’s Abington Heights School District, we were hearing the same concerns. Students were progressing without a solid grasp of foundational concepts. Skills that had supposedly been mastered weren’t transferring. Teachers were reteaching content, often with the same results. It forced us to confront a difficult question: If the curriculum is aligned and the content is there, why isn’t the learning sticking?

That question led us to take a closer look at our own practices. Like many elementary schools, we had invested heavily in literacy, and our teachers felt confident in reading instruction. Math, however, was a different story.

Many teachers did not feel that same level of confidence in mathematics. That lack of confidence shaped instruction in ways we hadn’t fully recognized. Lessons often leaned toward procedures or steps to follow rather than deep conceptual understanding.

Students could sometimes arrive at the correct answer, but they struggled to explain why. And when students cannot explain their thinking, the learning rarely lasts.

We also realized we weren’t fully leveraging the data available to us. While we had assessments and performance metrics, we were not consistently analyzing student work to understand how students were thinking. Without that insight, instruction remained generalized rather than responsive to individual needs.

What changed was not just the amount of data we had, but how we used it and how we used it together. Through our professional learning program, our teams developed a shared approach to analyzing student work, identifying patterns in thinking and using that insight to guide instruction.

In practice, this meant teachers coming together with student work by sorting responses, discussing strategies and identifying where understanding broke down. These conversations made student thinking visible in a way we hadn’t experienced before.

Data conversations became a regular part of our collaboration, not an isolated event tied to testing windows. Teachers met to examine student strategies, anticipate misconceptions and align next instructional moves. 

Instead of continuing the search for a new program, we made a different decision — one that required more commitment but ultimately led to more meaningful change. We chose to invest in our teachers.

We implemented across our elementary schools, focusing on building teachers’ conceptual understanding of mathematics and how that understanding develops over time. From the outset, this was not a passive experience. Teachers were actively engaged in solving problems, analyzing strategies and grappling with concepts themselves.

That experience was, at times, uncomfortable and that was precisely why it worked. Teachers began to experience math as a process of reasoning and sense-making rather than simply applying procedures. That shift deepened their understanding and created a new level of empathy for student learning.

As teacher understanding grew, instruction began to evolve. Educators became more intentional about the questions they asked and more attentive to student thinking. They created space for multiple approaches and encouraged students to explain their reasoning. Over time, that shift led to something just as important as instructional change: increased teacher confidence.

That created a shift in student mindset. Math is no longer viewed as a set of rules to follow, but as something to explore. We now have students who ask for more math time — something that would have been difficult to imagine just a few years ago.

This transformation has also reshaped how our teachers work together. Teachers regularly examine student work, identify patterns in thinking and determine next instructional steps. Conversations are grounded in evidence and a shared understanding of how students learn mathematics.

We have moved away from asking, “Where are we in the program?” and toward asking, “Where are our students in their understanding?”

The results followed and they were significant. Within a few years, math proficiency rose from roughly 70% to over 85% across key grade levels, alongside strong gains in student growth. Just as important as the numbers is what we now see in classrooms every day: instruction focused on understanding and students actively engaged in meaningful mathematical thinking.

This experience has reinforced a belief that feels more important than ever: programs do not change outcomes, people do. When we invest in teacher knowledge and give educators the tools and confidence to truly understand their content, everything else begins to align.

Of course, this kind of change requires ongoing commitment. We continue to train new teachers and prioritize collaboration to sustain the work.

If there is one lesson we would share with other district leaders, it is this: Before searching for a better program, take a closer look at how your system supports teaching and learning. You may find, as we did, that the most powerful solution isn’t something new; it’s a deeper investment in how teachers understand and teach mathematics.