I knew them both as education reformers and my board members as I began my career in education policy. I learned as much from what they said as from what they left unsaid. And I knew it was their and other board members’ curiosity and willingness to work with strange bedfellows to reach shared goals, that powered what many remember as the state’s golden age of reform. Those were efforts, and times, to be proud of.

I thought of the bishop, the Congressman and their political collaboration to improve education when I reviewed the results of the 2nd Edition of the Educational Opportunity in America Survey from 50CAN and Edge Research, where we asked over 23,000 American families a range of questions not just about their educational preferences, but about their experiences navigating our education system. In the era of increased partisanship and “enragement is engagement” algorithms, several of the results were fascinating not just for what they expose about family preferences, but for the complicated coalitions they reveal, which could be necessary to drive the next phase of education policy change.

In advocacy, lukewarm support for a policy doesn’t get you very far. The parents who show up are the ones who say they “strongly favor” — not just “favor” — an idea. Using that high bar, let’s look at what the survey reveals. There is strong support on the issue of whether or not states should provide free tutoring to students, with 54% of Republican parents (the lowest) strongly supporting the issue and 73% of parents identifying as members of the DSA/Green party (the highest) strongly supporting it, as well. 

Free summer camp, similarly, features strong support with 47% of Republicans, 50% of Libertarians and Independents, 63% of Democrats, and 78% of DSA/Green party respondents strongly favoring the idea. Open enrollment also enjoys fairly uniform support across the survey with between 44% of Independents and 53% of Libertarians strongly favoring letting students attend the public school of their choice. 

One might argue that tutoring, summer camp, and open enrollment are relatively anodyne and should enjoy an easy path to victory. Certainly their cross partisan endorsement creates a good base for policy change. But it’s worth noting that — in this age when no political party has close to majority support from parents — even for these popular issues to get a majority of parental support we need to reach across the aisle. 

According to Gallup, in their most just 27% of American adults consider themselves Democrats, and the same percentage consider themselves Republicans. So that 63% of Democrats who support free summer camp is only about 17% of all parents. Only by bringing in Republicans and Independents do you get back to a majority of all parents strongly in favor of the idea. 

For other issues, the logic of strange bedfellows is even stronger. When asked about the hot-button topic du jour of education savings accounts, the highest support was found among DSA/Green respondents, with 57% strongly favoring, with Libertarians and Independents bringing up the rear at 43% jointly. Charter schools, conversely, get their strongest support, at 44%, from Libertarians with all other groups between 34% ofIndependents and 38% of Republicans. Supporters of these issues can’t afford to turn anyone away. 

So what can be gleaned from this data that might help in pursuing future policy change?

First, strange bedfellows will be the norm as building a diverse constituency, when no single party can guarantee success, will require new alliances with different political alignments. Second, it will require focus and issue discipline that allows groups to support the same policy for completely different reasons. And lastly, it will necessitate a dealmaking pragmatism that allows for the packaging of issues in unexpected ways. If you care about the future of ESAs, for instance, you might want to pair it with free tutoring or free summer camp to build a broader base of support. Politics is, after all, about addition.

The good thing is that we have some striking examples of this pragmatic approach to politics in action. They include Louisiana with its Steve Carter Education Program — part of the state’s larger tutoring initiative passed alongside its GATOR ESA — Massachusetts for early literacy efforts and New Jersey with its state funded Tutoring Corps; these programs ensure more students who need tutoring receive it. Arizona used its COVID relief funds during a Republican administration to run its sweeping AZ on Track Summer camp program. And Arkansas, Idaho, Nevada, West Virginia, Oklahoma and Kansas under Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly have all recently enacted open enrollment laws. 

ESA-like policies, which by some reports half of the nation’s children are now eligible to participate in, have been the shark allowing other policies to come along for the ride like a remora. Utah and Arkansas, for instance, added significant funds to raise teacher salaries when passing their ESA laws; Arizona did so separately. Texas — because everything is larger there -– increased public school funding by $8.5 billion,$4 billion of which was for teacher salary increases, when it passed its $1 billion ESA last year. 

Arkansas also adopted the science of reading and eliminated its charter cap in the process. Indeed, there are many good examples already that show an education strategy that aligns interests of seemingly disparate groups and with popular or unexpected issues is an effective one. When it comes to the politics of education reform, more may indeed be more. 

With all of this offered, the question left for us may be: In this age of stark differences can we really focus on the areas of agreement with people we may otherwise oppose? I suspect Bishop Jackson and Congressman Zimmer asked themselves these same questions before stepping forward to lead their state’s ed reform coalition of the time. Those differences never stopped them. And they shouldn’t stop us either.

This would be a mistake.

Students and families cannot afford to wait. Scores on the 2025 National Assessment of Educational Progress, and, attendance and engagement are all at historic lows, confirming what educators and many families already knew: Student performance and well-being continue to decline. Those learning losses will continue to have profound impacts both on the students themselves and on the nation’s broader economic prosperity. Meanwhile, decades of top-down reform efforts have yielded disappointingly little improvement, despite massive investments and constant policy churn.

State policymakers have a better path forward, one that doesn’t depend on federal direction: creating the conditions for bottom-up innovation to emerge, spread and scale within their own education systems.

As the Hoover Institution’s has documented, the current education infrastructure actively prevents innovation from emerging, spreading and generating measurable improvements in learner outcomes. Years of investment in top-down innovation and reform have yielded many lessons but little actual progress.

A new white paper from the Hoover Institution reveals why this approach matters. “,” synthesizes decades of evidence on education innovation, as well as organizational, network and diffusion theory. By dividing the growth of innovation into three clear phases — start, spread, and sustain — the paper’s framework illustrates clear actions and decision points in which policymakers and education leaders can either help or hinder innovation.  

We know that the most scalable and sustainable improvements emerge from the needs and problems that practitioners define and from the solutions they help develop. Yet, as a finds, it remains “very rare for an innovation to get diffused within a school and it is much rarer that it gets diffused between schools.”

The framework identifies obstacles that prevent good ideas. At the earliest stages where bottom-up ideas might start, rigid bureaucracies foster risk-averse cultures among educators. Decades of emphasis on standardized test scores have conditioned teachers to avoid failure, making new initiatives seem high-risk, low-reward. Many principals preemptively block innovation due to perceived regulatory barriers even though research shows these barriers are often negotiable or misunderstood.

When innovations do emerge, they struggle to spread. Teachers attempting to implement new practices face unfamiliar partnerships with district administrators, intermediaries and policymakers; they receive little preparation or support for managing these relationships. Schools, already overwhelmed with mandates and regulations, lack the basic administrative infrastructure and tools to disseminate ideas effectively. 

Perhaps most critically, the education sector lacks a robust knowledge ecosystem to capture what works, determine when replication is more sensible than adaptation and analyze whether and how an innovation fits in different local contexts.

At the scale phase, accountability systems emphasizing narrow metrics actively discourage ambitious teaching. Policymakers tend to be “failure-avoidant, linear thinkers” while innovations need trial-and-error cycles. The bias toward quick wins denies innovations time to demonstrate impact.

The result? A system where constant informal change happens in classrooms daily, but meaningful and potentially impactful innovations rarely spread beyond individual teachers or schools, and students’ outcomes continue to stagnate or decline.

The good news is state legislatures don’t need permission from Washington to address these barriers. The framework identifies specific policy levers that state lawmakers control:

• Invest in knowledge ecosystems. Bottom-up innovations often fail to expand, not because they don’t work, but because there’s no infrastructure to capture what works, why it works and how to adapt it to new contexts. States should fund networks connecting innovative practitioners, support rapid-cycle evaluation and incentivize “fail-forward” learning. Most knowledge sharing networks are led by intermediaries, such as NASBE and KnowledgeWorks’s,�� , in Michigan and NHLI’s. One state example comes from Nevada, where the Department of Education and the Center for the Future of Learning jointly lead the to support pilots, create tools for community engagement, and develop case studies to inform practice.

• Genuinely engage educators in policymaking. Innovations spread when they align with teachers’ values and address immediate classroom needs. Yet teachers are routinely shut out of policy development. States should remove procedural barriers and invest in the time and capacity needed for front-line educators to shape policy, not token teacher advisory councils, but an authentic partnership. Examples such as Georgia’s brings 21 classroom teachers annually into direct engagement with state and federal policymakers; and North Carolina’s has graduated over 800 fellows who continue to influence education policy statewide. 

• Support flexible implementation. Innovations that require strict fidelity struggle to spread; those that offer clear principles with room for local adaptation thrive. State policy should embrace “tight-but-loose” frameworks that maintain core commitments while allowing schools to adapt. Part of this flexibility entails states offering stronger scaffolds for novice teachers while giving more seasoned practitioners greater latitude to exercise professional judgment. Since 2016, has taken this approach for supporting personalized, competency-based change.

• Provide adequate, sustained resources. Unlike businesses, which can attract investment capital, educators must develop their own infrastructure before scaling. Federal funding historically has been scarce and short-term as in the case of the grants. School-level innovators often come to rely  on local or regional education foundations to provide seed funding for new models. In 2015, for example, the Nellie Mae Education Foundation to support innovation efforts across five New England school districts. For over a decade, North Carolina has offered smaller innovation grants as part of its ongoing and New York State offers that develop, implement, and share innovative programs. Generous and sustained support can rarely be counted on, but states can fill this gap by ensuring innovations have the financial runway needed to develop tools, train educators and demonstrate impact over time.

Do we want to spend another session waiting for Washington to solve problems it hasn’t solved in decades? Or are we ready to build infrastructure that enables teachers and school leaders — the people closest to students — to innovate, learn and improve?

The evidence is clear. Bottom-up innovation, when properly supported, can transform education. States have the authority and the tools to create supportive conditions. What they need now is political will. 

Our students can’t wait for federal certainty. State policymakers should give them something better: a system designed to foster, capture and spread the innovations that will actually improve their learning. The framework exists. The session is starting. It’s time for states to lead.

As for its other mission — to work with state legislators to fix the problem — founder Rebecca Sibilia now admits that EdBuild did this “very, very poorly.” In 2020, after just five years, the group closed up shop. 

Sibilia, who previously worked on school finance with Washington, D.C., schools and for the education reform group StudentsFirst, remembers that at the time she and others at the organization decided that while they’d done much to raise consciousness about the problem, they lacked the tools to move the issue forward.

As it turns out, the move coincided with the COVID pandemic, which threw school budgets into chaos nationwide. If anything, the need for clear, actionable information on funding now is greater than ever. “One of the biggest things that has come from the COVID era is that we have realized how much the data sucks,” she said.

Policymakers “have been making guesses in the dark about how to fund our schools.”

So four years later, Sibilia is debuting a new venture, EdFund, which goes live today. She spoke this week with ����Ӱ��’s Greg Toppo about the need for better funding research and dissemination — and a new model for collaborating not just with legislators and policymakers, but for underwriting researchers, journalists and others to help make sense of the data. Sibilia plans to issue EdFund’s first request for proposals shortly.

She expects to eventually have “many more proposals than what we have money to fund.” At the moment, the new organization has three main funders — the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation and the Peter and Carmen Lucia Buck Foundation — providing about $1.5 million annually. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

����Ӱ��: Thinking about EdBuild, you focused so much on unequal funding. I wonder: What’s the evolution? What’s next?

Rebecca Sibilia: EdBuild was really constituted with two missions: The first was to raise national awareness around the problem, which we did pretty well. And the second was to work with legislatures to actually fix it, which we did very, very poorly. And so at the end of the five years, we were like, “I’m not sure there’s much else to tell. We’ve raised the collective consciousness on what the problem is with school funding in terms of local funds. But we certainly aren’t structured, we certainly don’t have the tools to move this forward. And so, we need to shut down.” That was why we shut down.  

Four years later, what’s your focus? 

We need much more policy-relevant research because for 60 years, we’ve been arguing about whether or not money matters, and it is the dumbest debate of all dumb questions that exist in the world. Because at the end of the day, states exist in a limited-resource environment. What we don’t need is an answer to an ethereal question about endless resources and what they’ll do for student achievement. What we need are answers to practical questions, like “Where should I put a marginal dollar when I have it?” Or, “What are the right tax policies that states should be setting around local dollars in order to create more equitable, but also adequately funded systems?”

This complete disconnect between research and policy has led us to a place where policymakers have been making guesses in the dark about how to fund our schools, and I frankly believe that’s one of the reasons why very few legislators actually understand their funding formula. There’s very little science behind it because we just haven’t provided that.

So who is your audience?

We’re trying to bridge the gap between research and policy. So we see our stakeholders as three groups, with two very different workstreams: the research community, advocates and journalists. I would love to be able to say that policymakers are the endgame on this, but really, advocates and journalists are the ones who are going to be able to interpret this work, and get the overall thrust of what is new and what it means for kids, into the hands of policymakers. I should also mention that we’re a 501(c)3 [nonprofit].

When you talked to ����Ӱ�� in 2020, you said the next step wouldn’t be through a 501(c)3. It sounds like you’ve changed your mind.

I have not. I’m just not the one to do it. There is an organization that you may have heard of that recently started up with some seed money from the Gates Foundation called . They are at the Southern Education Foundation and they’re shaping up a litigation strategy for school district borders and school funding and integration. So they’re kind of pulling on both of those strings. I’ve given up on legislators actually making a fundamental change to the system. I really think that that’s going to happen through the courts. But in the meantime, the research has to inform what we’ve got in place right now, because that endgame in the courts is in 10, 15, 20 years.

Your “exit interview” with us happened right as COVID hit. And I wondered: What have the past four years done to this issue?

One of the biggest things that has come from the COVID era is that we have realized how much the data sucks. School finance data sucks. It sucks, it sucks. And it’s one of the biggest restrictions to good research in this field, and certainly timely research that could inform better decisions. We had a focus group of about 40 or so graduate and Phd students, and we asked them if they were studying school finance. They said, “No.” We asked them, “Which of these 10 factors would make you more likely to study school finance?” And 80% of them said, “Better data.” 

The second thing is that we’re understanding a lot more that school districts tend to invest in the things that do matter for raising student achievement, and that’s human capital. Whether it’s teachers, tutors, guidance counselors, etc. It’s human capital. This question of whether putting an additional dollar into a school district will raise student achievement —what Kirabo Jackson will tell you is, “Yes, just the dollar will.” What EricHanushek will tell you is, “Well, it depends on how it’s spent.” And the answer that we’ve learned through ESSER funds is that it tends to be spent on the people in the school, which means that everyone’s right. So those are kind of the two things that have come out of COVID.

Let’s go back to the first issue: How can you make the data suck less? Is this what your RFP is about?

Yes, in part. Let me go through the four C’s of who we are: We’re going to curate a policy-relevant research agenda. So instead of letting funders determine what they’re going to fund and making researchers chase that money, we’re instead going to go to policymakers and say, “What are the questions you’re going to have to grapple with in the next five years,” and then fund research to answer those questions. We’re going to curate a policy-relevant research agenda. That was the first thing we did. That’s why we’ve been quiet for the past six months.

The second thing we’re going to do is commission research against that policy agenda. That’s the RFP that we’re releasing this year. We hope to double the size of the investment next year and so on. And what you’ll see in the RFP is that we say: In some cases, we are flying so blind as it relates to school funding, that just putting together a data set will move the entire research field forward. So if students want to do this, if journalists want to do this, if policy organizations want to do this, in some cases collecting better data is just part of the solution. 

O.K. 

And then the third thing that we’re hoping to do is communicate the research that does exist and will come out of these RFPs in a way that it’s friendly for policy audiences — journalists and advocates primarily. We’re going to do so by white-labeling stuff. What we’re going to try to do is put together interactives and graphics and briefings and that sort of stuff, but it’ll all be available to advocates through an [an embeddable element on a website], and they can just stick it straight on their website. Or we’ll have podcasts that someone can send to a policymaker to listen to. We’re really trying for this to become an opportunity for advocates to learn what the research says, and a way for advocates to actually incorporate that into their everyday work so that everything is just more grounded in research. 

Then the fourth is connect. I got a call just the other day: There is a state that we happen to have been linked to in the past that happens to be moving school funding reform this year. And they were like, “We need somebody who can come down and talk about this one element of our funding formula.” So we sent one of our board members down, because he is an economist and has studied the issue. He can talk about that and educate policymakers on what his research says. We’re hoping to do more of that — just make those direct connections.

I was struck by something you said a couple years ago. You singled out California, New York and New Jersey, arguably three of the most progressive states in the country, that have “the most shameful set of borders around schools.” And it really made me think that if they can’t budge on this issue, what hope do you have for anybody solving it?

The states where all of the school finance reform mojo is happening are in the South! Tennessee their funding formula and went to a very progressive funding system. The Mississippi House , a very progressive funding system. The two co-chairs in Alabama have been talking about it — I wouldn’t be surprised to see them move in the next year or two.

It’s the southern states that are recognizing that the way they’re funding schools through these resource formulas just isn’t aligned with the science. This is one area where we actually can do some bootleg research and it can inform stuff. We used to say all the time at EdBuild that we need to move to a student-based funding formula for two reasons: One, different students have different needs. Two, when you think about how things work in the state capitol, you want advocates to be able to advocate for kids rather than themselves. And so in a resource-based formula, the people who are advocating in the capitol are the nurses association, the teachers association, the superintendents association, the principals. And the people in a weighted-student-formula environment who are lobbying in the capitol are special ed parents and English-language-learner communities and that sort of stuff. That’s really where you start to tilt the system in favor of kids instead of in favor of resources. 

It doesn’t sound like you’re abandoning the border fight. Taking a new approach maybe?

I’ve given up on borders changing through the legislature. The power dynamic just works against school districts that serve predominantly students of color.

I live in Maryland and we have county schools, which is not to say that they’re equal, but I live in a county that’s pretty diverse. I’d imagine somebody like you would say that’s a step in the right direction. Tell me where a place like Maryland sits in this discussion.

New Jersey has just over a million students, and they have over 600 school districts. Maryland has 850,000 kids, and they’ve got 24. That’s where Maryland fits in the conversation. So here’s the deal: What Maryland can do is they can take these enormous inequities in local funds and pool them because they’re sharing them across a much larger geography. The state has to do less to equalize because it’s equalizing at the local level first.

In New Jersey, the state has an enormous burden to equalize because they have to fix things for the 550 school districts that aren’t the bastions of wealth in the state. We can either move to systems that look like Maryland — and I believe that has to happen through the courts — or, short of that, we can change funding formulas to make much more sense as it relates to the way that we’re funding schools. And that’s what we can do through legislatures, policymakers, researchers all talking.

O.K. This is becoming clear to me now.

You can headline it as, “Rebecca Sibilia has given up hope.” [Laughs.]

I’m going to assume that you’re going to be done in five years, because that’s the way you do everything. What would you consider success in 2029? 

You know , right? He’s my ex-husband. And we’re still very good friends. We got engaged trying to change Tennessee’s funding formula 10 years ago. And we got it done last year. We started in 2016 to try to change Mississippi’s funding formula. And this year the House passed something. It takes a decade from the point that you start to educate the legislature and advocates and journalists about how their formula works and what research says for that to translate into policy. I believe that an organization can exist for five years and have a 15-year impact. We are seeing that bear out from the EdBuild time. 

One of the reasons we have these four distinct workstreams is because I think that several can be absorbed in different places. So maybe EdFund continues to run just as a funders’ collaborative. It just takes in money from foundations and puts it out for research, but the people who are curating the research agenda are the National Conference of State Legislatures. And the people who are communicating are at a specialized shop in the Urban Institute. And we’ve already created the bridges. Everyone’s talking and singing “Kumbaya,” so we don’t need to do the connecting anymore.

When you think about the construct of what EdFund could be, it could continue to exist past me. I could peace out and EdFund could continue to exist as it is, or we can start thinking about whether or not it makes more sense for these activities, once they have worked well together for a few years, to be absorbed in different places. Frankly, many other organizations out there in the education space could also afford to think about their work in the same respect.

I couldn’t let you go without asking you about this tweet from you at South by Southwest. Somebody took a picture of you talking to the Education Writers Association and you tweeted, “A bunch of journalists just created a better school funding formula than any current state model. How about them apples? Want more equitable funding? Elect your local reporter.” Thank you, by the way. We won’t take credit for that, but I wonder: Conceptually, is it a simple thing that we are just mucking up, or is it truly a complicated matter? 

There’s a part of every school funding formula called an . If you boil it all down, the state decides how much every school district needs to operate. They subtract out how much they think each community should raise, and then they give the rest. That’s what happens in every state. On the allocation side, people tend to understand how their state allocates: There’s a base amount and then there’s a weight for different kids, etc. That’s a policy that’s kind of easy to understand.

Ohio’s expected local contribution, I’m not kidding, goes for four pages, 12-point font, just in the mathematical equation alone. So if you’re a legislator and you’re looking at your state code and it’s 16 pages worth of, “Divide by, add two, regress four,” you’re just going to be like, “I give up.” But if you boil it down to, “Ohio uses a matrix that starts with the property wealth of every school district and gives a deduction for districts that have lower median household incomes,” I get that. What’s happened in school funding is that we’ve gotten so scared of the way it’s written because the code looks so scary.

It is scary, but we haven’t conveyed the concepts. Why haven’t we conveyed the concepts? Because research is what conveys concepts. And we haven’t had research to do it.

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provide financial support to EdBuild and ����Ӱ��.

Surrounded by “school choice” advocates in the Statehouse, Sen. Lori Den Hartog, R-Meridian, and Rep. Wendy Horman, R-Idaho Falls, announced the $50 million “parental choice tax credit” program. 

It’s the latest Idaho proposal that seeks to open up public funds for private education. Den Hartog and Horman, who have been leading proponents of the “school choice” movement in Idaho, plan to introduce the bill during the , which starts Monday. 

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“In a time of high inflation and economic uncertainty, the increased concern over the alignment of family values and education, this proposal is designed to support Idaho parents as they make decisions about their child’s education,” Den Hartog said.

The proposal has two parts. First, private school families of any income could claim $5,000 tax credits for expenses “related to the nonpublic academic instruction,” Den Hartog said. That includes tuition, fees, transportation, tutoring, test-taking and exam preparation, among other things.

Qualifying students would be school-aged and enrolled in a non-public school, which could include religious schools and home schools. The tax credits would be first come, first served with a $40 million cap. 

A second bucket of state funds — $10 million — would be set aside for a “kickstart” program benefitting low-income students. Rather than claiming private school expenses on their taxes, families who qualify for the federal earned income tax credit could collect up to $5,000 in grants for one year. After a year, those families would be rolled into the tax credit program. 

In recent years, similar legislation has failed in the face of widespread anxiety about expending public funds on private schools. Opponents of similar mechanisms — often called “vouchers” — worry about a lack of accountability for private school expenses and fear that limited public school funds would be siphoned. 

Public school leaders have bitterly fought proposals to fund private education at the state level. Quinn Perry, policy and government affairs director for the Idaho School Boards Association, told Idaho Education News this week that private school voucher programs in other states have been “budget busters.”

Arizona’s expanding school voucher program is expected to $900 million this school year. Initial estimates in the Grand Canyon State pegged the cost at $65 million.

The Arizona Mirror last week that the state faces a $400 million deficit, because of the rising cost of private school vouchers and decreasing state revenue due to a new flat income tax — which Idaho also enacted, in 2022.

Den Hartog and Horman brushed aside those concerns Friday. They touted the proposed spending caps and the fact that the State Tax Commission would oversee the tax credits and grants, creating an “accountability measure” backed by the threat of perjury for lying on one’s taxes. 

Horman, a former public school board trustee who co-chairs the Legislature’s powerful budget committee, said the program would be “complementary” to Idaho’s public school system. She said she wouldn’t support a policy that harms public education. 

“I am not a fan of budget-busting bills,” Horman said. 

Den Hartog and Horman also acknowledged that those caps could increase in future years, if demand calls for it. 

House Assistant Minority Leader Lauren Necochea slammed the proposal in a conversation with reporters Friday. The Boise Democrat said funneling the money through the Tax Commission is likely a strategy to sidestep the House Education Committee, which blocked similar legislation last year. 

“Whether it’s the state Tax Commission cutting the check or another agency, the result is the same: dollars are being siphoned out of the fund that we use for public schools and will go towards private, religious and, potentially, for-profit institutions with zero accountability,” Necochea said.

National groups that advocate for “school choice” in recent years have spent heavily lobbying Idaho lawmakers to pass a private school voucher policy. But Friday’s news conference demonstrated homegrown support, as well. Dozens of children and parents held signs reading “support the parental choice tax credit program.”

Robbe Hart, a single father from Emmett, said he commutes more than 60 miles, round-trip, for his sons to attend Greenleaf Friends Academy. The travel is “extremely expensive,” Hart said, but his sons have “thrived” at the Christian school.

“If this bill passed, it would help thousands of other people that are going through the same thing that I go through,” he said.

In a recently published article, political scientist Alex Garlick found that sudden increases in legislation at the state level are associated with more bills introduced in Congress on the same topic in the following legislative session. The correlation, which is particularly strong among Republican office holders and those within the same state delegation, suggests a consistent pathway of political messaging between state capitals and Washington, D.C.

Garlick, an assistant professor at the College of New Jersey, argued that anti-CRT proposals have already proven beneficial for some conservative lawmakers by driving press coverage and excitement among the GOP faithful. If Republicans win control over one or both houses of Congress in the midterm elections, as prognosticators expect, they will likely pass a similar piece of legislation — even though it would have “no chance” of being signed by President Biden, he added.

“By introducing these laws at the state level, Republicans are finding positive engagement with the media, their base, and donors,” Garlick said. “That indicates to me that we’re likely to see more of this at the congressional level.”

The study relies on an intensive examination of bills introduced in all 50 states and Congress between 1991 and 2016. Using a comprehensive index maintained by the data company LexisNexis, Garlick exported approximately one million citations of state and federal legislation, then grouped them into 22 separate policy areas. For each policy area, he tracked the timing of when bills were filed, irrespective of whether they were passed — first in statehouses, then in the next two-year session of Congress.

In 12 policy areas, including education, Garlick found that a marked increase in legislative attention at the state level tends to precede a similar increase at the national level. Specifically, an increase of less than two bills per state in any policy area would yield about five new bills in the next Congress. 

Some evidence emerged suggesting a partisan dimension to the phenomenon, which Garlick calls “bottom-up diffusion.” By accessing information from civic data initiative Open States, which records the partisan affiliation of members introducing bills, Garlick found that between 2009 and 2016, Washington Republicans proposed more laws related to a given policy area after an increase in such bills proposed by state-level Republicans the previous session. Additionally, congressmen are more likely to take up the proposals of state representatives and senators within their own states.

For Garlick, political diffusion is a reflection of how state political organizations relate to their federal equivalents. In an era when most experts agree that the political and media environment is “nationalizing,” — with national debates around issues like racism and public health predominating over local concerns — bottom-up diffusion shows how lower-level actors can drive the conversation. Garlick likened the interaction to the way in which local fast food franchises implement menu or branding changes, but still mostly replicate the offerings of their parent company.

“You can see some experimentation at your local McDonald’s, but generally they’re serving the same thing,” he said. “For the Republican Party, what they’re serving is usually small government, tax cuts, etc. What’s been interesting in the past two years is how much education has moved into that basket of goods.”

According to Education Week’s , lawmakers in over 40 states have introduced CRT-related bills just since last January. But they have been passed in just 14 of those states, while they have stalled, been vetoed, or remain under consideration in the rest. The relatively low rate of adoption, at least thus far, indicates that the attempts may be best understood as “messaging” legislation, aimed at appealing to interest groups and deliberately highlighting issues that are uncomfortable for the majority party. 

National polling has split on the question of whether schools should be more tightly regulated in their efforts to teach students about controversies relating to gender, sex, and race. In the meantime, and measures have already found among Republicans in Washington, suggesting that the national GOP will be prepared to take the baton — and, contingent upon majorities elected this fall, take votes — on K-12 legislation next year. 

Garlick said that the explosion of new K-12 items on state agendas are indicative of two interlocking trends: both the “renewed interest in using education policy to reach ideological goals,” and the often stymied progress of new legislation in Washington. The rapid progression of school-related issues being addressed by legislatures, from COVID remediation to trans athletes to CRT, offer a guide to where politicians’ attention is turning.

“In this gridlocked, polarized reality of the last 20 years, Congress has really taken itself out of the game on a lot of major issues, so we need to look at other forces that are actually driving the political process. That’s why messaging legislation does matter, and why more attention needs to be paid to the states. Because that’s where politics is changing in a rapid way.”