This piece originally appeared in Washington Monthly.
Amid Donald Trump’s campaign to dismantle the Department of Education, a recent report from one of its most respected agencies, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, revealed that more than a third of the nation’s students struggle to read after being in school for eight years.
The finding was the latest sign of crisis in the nation’s elementary and secondary schools. There are many others. While high school grade point averages and graduation rates are climbing, the testing company ACT reports that only one in five high school graduates is prepared to pass introductory college courses—the lowest level in over a decade. Student absenteeism has skyrocketed; a quarter of California’s ninth graders were absent an average of 40 school days in 2023-24. A majority of those who do show up say they aren’t being challenged, according to a 2024 Gallup/Walton Family Foundation poll.
But Republicans and Democrats have largely abandoned the hard work of improving the performance of the nation’s 100,000 charter and traditional public schools that educate 90 percent of America’s students.
Beyond attacking the Education Department (and, in the process, sending a message that the nation devalues education) and opposing diversity, equity, and inclusion in schools and colleges, Republicans have prioritized giving families taxpayers’ money to abandon public education. In the past four years, more than a dozen red states have passed laws allowing any student—regardless of need—to use public funding to subsidize their private, religious, or, in some cases, homeschool education. A lot of the money has gone to affluent families with kids already in private schools. Last year, these “universal” choice programs cost taxpayers $4 billion. The irony is that if the president wanted to help the less-well-educated, working-class voters who helped return him to office, he would also pursue public school reform since public schools are the only educational option in large swaths of Trump country. But that’s not the president’s plan. Expect the administration to back bills circulating in Congress to fund up to $10 billion in federal private school “scholarships” for families with incomes as high as $450,000.
Democrats, meanwhile, have been largely silent on student achievement. Heavily influenced by the nation’s teacher unions, they rail against the “privatization” of education but back few steps to strengthen public schooling. Often, they reject the academic rigor that parents tell pollsters they want. In taking up the mantle of social justice, for example, many progressives have gone beyond reasonable demands that the breadth of the nation’s peoples and experiences be reflected in school curricula and that teachers be trained to avoid implicit biases, to arguing standards themselves are racist. In November, teacher unions spent $10 million on a successful ballot campaign to end statewide graduation exams, a cornerstone of Massachusetts’ education improvements over two decades. The president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association claimed that the tests mostly measured the impact of structural racism on students.
Perversely, the flight from rigor has done the most damage to students that social justice advocates rightly want to help. The recent National Assessment report revealed that the achievement gap between the nation’s highest- and lowest-performing students has grown steadily for over a decade. Vanderbilt University researchers have found that high-achieving students from the wealthiest 20 percent of U.S. families are six times more likely to study advanced coursework than equally high-performing students from the poorest 20 percent. The education policy community has called for schools to return students to pre-pandemic achievement levels. But the challenge facing public education today is much greater than that.
The days of sweeping national public school reform agendas from Washington, like the long-running campaign for standards, testing, and accountability under the administrations of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, are over. But there are proven state- and local-level reforms that would strengthen the academic foundations of the nation’s schools and potentially allow them to enjoy significant bipartisan support—even in today’s hyper-polarized environment. Together, they would give many more students a shot at achieving their potential in the classroom and beyond. Here are six:
Turn the teaching profession into a rational labor market. Not surprisingly, teachers are the most significant in-school factors to students’ success. Yet public schools have traditionally pegged teachers’ pay to their college credits and years in the classroom rather than the demand for their skills and the quality of their work. As a result, thousands of schools lack qualified teachers in math, the sciences, and other key academic subjects because they can make more money in different fields. The pandemic pointed the way out of the problem when desperate school districts started paying bonuses and higher salaries to recruit and retain teachers in shortage fields—often with the approval of local teacher unions.
Teach reading the right way. Nothing matters more to parents of young children than ensuring their kids can read. And reading is foundational to everything else in education. But U.S. schools have long used a second-rate method of teaching reading called “balanced literacy,” which has students memorize words or guess them based on context clues. States as different as Mississippi and Minnesota have introduced a proven model that combines the systematic teaching of sounds and letters with reading materials based on history, science, and other academic subjects. This strategy, based on the science of reading, pays dividends for students and is a winner with parents in both blue states and red.
Rethink “gifted” education. The concentration of white and Asian students in advanced programs in U.S. public education has spawned a movement to dismantle gifted-and-talented programs, exam schools, and other advanced programs because they promote racial and economic segregation in public education. But a handful of states and school districts have pioneered a third way, a strategy that embraces both excellence and equity. They have preserved advanced programs but expanded the range of students who participate by creating more pathways into the programs and abandoning the scarcity mentality in advanced education that forces too many talented students to compete for too few seats. North Carolina law, for example, now requires that all high-scoring third graders receive advanced math coursework in fourth grade. Many reformers, including a former president of the National Association for Gifted Children, have abandoned the term “gifted,” signaling as it does that innate ability rather than hard work is the key ingredient of academic success—a notion that Asian nations with many high-achieving students roundly reject—while perpetuating long-debunked stereotypes that differences in educational performance are rooted in race, gender, and class.
Expand tutoring in public education. Tutoring has long been a successful teaching strategy—think Socrates—and one that has mostly helped students from families with the resources to pay for it. The number of private tutoring centers, out of the financial reach of many families, more than tripled between 1997 and 2016, from roughly 3,000 to nearly 10,000. Then came Covid and the disruptions of school closures, hybrid instruction, and quarantines. Suddenly, tutoring programs were appearing in public schools nationwide, encouraged by new research showing substantial learning gains from high-quality tutoring and the billions of dollars in federal pandemic response funding pouring into state and local education agencies. The result was a significant increase in schools’ instructional horsepower. The challenge is sustaining the tutoring movement after federal COVID-19 aid. Why not make tutoring a part of teacher training? The feds could help pay the way for more college students and young adults to tutor through the AmeriCorps and work-study programs. This is another winning issue in both red and blue states. [See “Tutorize, Don’t Privatize, Public Schools” by Paul Glastris, Washington Monthly, January 5, 2025.]
Bring communities into schools. The pandemic hammered home the reality that many students have mental and physical health needs and other challenges in their lives that undermine learning. Asthma has long been the single largest contributor to chronic student absenteeism rates that have skyrocketed in the wake of the Covid crisis. Linking schools more closely with local children’s hospitals, housing agencies, mental health clinics, food banks, and other community agencies would create a more coherent support ecosystem for students and build a stronger foundation for student achievement. Currently, many schools don’t even have full-time nurses. Teacher unions and their allies support the community school concept. Others contend that schools should stay in their lane and not concern themselves with the non-academic side of student success. It’s a nonsensical debate. Yes, schools should provide a rigorous education, and addressing students’ very real needs would help them do that.
Expand school choice in public education. Republican proponents of giving families public money for private schooling have tapped into a vast reservoir of parental demand for more educational “freedom.” But expanding public school choice would generate far more choice and improvement-inducing competition than is possible by giving families public money to attend private schools. The best way to do that is to encourage the creation of more schooling options in both traditional school districts and the public charter sector and opening them up to parents by replacing traditional public school attendance zones with “common enrollment systems” that allow families to select charter and school district programs through a single application process. Public school enrollment has risen steadily in the District of Columbia since the city introduced the concept a decade ago.
The troubling national decline in academic achievement has been accompanied by claims that schools have mistakenly prepared students for college at the expense of vocational education. More to the point is that millions of students lack the academic foundation needed to earn their way to living wages, regardless of the work they do. That’s the argument that policymakers should champion. We can’t have a strong workforce, social mobility, national cohesion, or even a functioning democracy without a populace that is far better educated than ours is today.