The Oklahoma Supreme Court on June 25 delivered its eagerly anticipated decision on whether the state could authorize an explicitly religious charter school. The court said no, resolving for now the issue in Oklahoma. But its inscrutable reasoning on the First Amendment’s establishment and free exercise clauses indicate that the U.S. Supreme Court will have to take up the issue—in either this case or one that will inevitably arise in another state.

Following the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling in Carson v. Makin that excluding religious schools from Maine’s voucher program was unconstitutional, the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and Diocese of Tulsa applied to Oklahoma’s Charter School Board to establish St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School. The board approved in a decision backed by state Attorney General John O’Connor, who cited the Supreme Court’s reasoning in the trilogy of Makin, Espinoza v. Montana (2020), and Trinity Lutheran v. Comer (2017) to justify his support. Oklahoma’s charter school law allowed other private organizations to operate charter schools, so preventing religious ones from doing so would violate the free exercise clause’s requirement that religious entities not be excluded from an “otherwise generally available public benefit.”

After 2022, however, a new attorney general, Gentner Drummond, assumed office. He promptly rejected his predecessor’s opinion and asked the board to rescind its approval. When it did not, Drummond asked the state Supreme Court to intervene. He argued that, among a parade of horribles that would result from the charter board’s action, allowing a Catholic charter school would require Oklahoma to fund a Muslim school or even “the blasphemous tenets of the Church of Satan.” In Drummond v. Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board, a 6–2 majority of the court agreed.

Their reasoning had an inauspicious start. It held that the charter school violated Article II Section 5 of Oklahoma’s state constitution, which reads: “No public money or property shall ever be appropriated, applied, donated, or used, directly or indirectly, for the use, benefit, or support of any sect, church, denomination, or system of religion, or for the use, benefit, or support of any priest, preacher, minister, or other religious teacher or dignitary, or sectarian institution as such.” This is also known as the state’s Blaine Amendment. But the U.S. Supreme Court effectively ruled Blaine Amendments unconstitutional in Comer and Espinoza.

The court then pointed out that the state’s charter school law also requires that charter schools be nonsectarian. But no one disagreed with that. The issue was whether that requirement violates the U.S. Constitution. The court also held that the school would be a “state actor” and therefore subject to the same requirements as traditional public schools. Whether that matters though hinges on whether the First Amendment is implicated. It is on this topic that the opinion becomes difficult to reconcile with recent Supreme Court decisions.

On the establishment clause, the court cited the Supreme Court’s 1947 ruling in Everson v. Board of Education that the government cannot pass laws “which aid one religion, aid all religions, or prefer one religion over another.” This citation was peculiar since it is this “no aid” line of reasoning that led to the infamous “Lemon test” the Supreme Court killed and buried in Kennedy v. Bremerton (2022). The court held in that case that the establishment clause must instead “be interpreted by ‘reference to historical practices and understandings’.” This “history and tradition test” emphasizes how those closest to a clause’s enactment understood its meaning.

It is not at all clear from the famously strained opinion in Everson—the court cited Thomas Jefferson as an authority on the clause’s meaning when he had nothing to do with its writing or ratification—that the decision could fit with the history and tradition test. It is possible that it could, but the Oklahoma Supreme Court did not even reference the new test. Instead, it briefly mentioned Bremerton and then cited an earlier series of cases involving school prayer that could well end up being circumscribed. Even if the prayer cases end up not being curtailed, they raise completely different questions because charter schools are, by definition, schools of choice. No one would ever be compelled to participate in a charter school’s religious activities.

Even more puzzling was the court’s free exercise clause analysis. The majority argued that the Makin, Espinoza, and Comer trilogy did not apply because they involved private entities, and this case involved the “State’s creation and funding of a new religious institution.” Their reasoning, however, ignored the fact that most charter schools are operated by private corporations. That these corporations, and indeed any corporation, cannot exist without a state charter does not mean that they are state actors. Simply being authorized to operate by the state is not the same thing as being created by the state.

One could imagine, and certainly would have hoped for, a more clearly reasoned decision, but the Oklahoma court did not provide it. Even if no appeal is made in this case or if the Supreme Court declines to hear one, the thorny issues that the majority elided will come up again and need to be resolved.

In short, this decision represents at most the opening salvo on religious charter schools, not the final word.

Joshua Dunn is executive director of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville’s Institute of American Civics at the Baker School of Public Policy and Public Affairs.

Every December, in a practice that dates back decades, the chief justice of the United States releases a year-end report on the federal judiciary. Despite the New Year’s Eve timing of these reports, they typically elicit less celebration than somnolence. As one veteran journalist who covers the Supreme Court noted with considerable understatement, “The year-end report is usually devoid of anything controversial.”

In 2019, however, with the United States deep in the grip of political polarization, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. issued a year-end report that proved arresting. That unusual document explored the judiciary’s myriad connections to civic education. “By virtue of their judicial responsibilities, judges are necessarily engaged in civic education,” Roberts wrote. “When judges render their judgments through written opinions that explain their reasoning, they advance public understanding of the law.” The Supreme Court’s iconic decision invalidating school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education, Roberts noted, could be viewed through this prism. Chief Justice Earl Warren saw to it that the 1954 opinion would be concise enough—at just 13 pages—to be reprinted in newspapers around the nation. Brown, Roberts wrote, exemplifies “the power of a judicial decision as a teaching tool,” as it provided “every citizen [an opportunity to] understand the Court’s rationale.” Roberts delivered a sobering assessment of the nation’s disregard for democratic ideals and the attendant decline of civic education. “[W]e have come to take democracy for granted,” Roberts lamented, “and civic education has fallen by the wayside.”

Since Roberts issued this cri de coeur in 2019, concerns about democracy and civic education have only intensified. Most prominently, the atrocities committed at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, represented the starkest repudiation of democracy on American soil in decades. One scholar termed that day “a Sputnik moment for an ambitious revival of civics instruction.” As divisions over race, gender, and immigration have deepened, controversies involving civic education have become a salient, persistent topic of national controversy. Five years ago, the New York Times released its 1619 Project, which emphasized the nation’s deep connections to race-based chattel slavery and the ongoing legacy of that odious institution. In response, President Donald Trump formed the 1776 Commission with an eye toward attacking and displacing the 1619 Project’s slavery-based narrative.

These competing projects have been amply debated, and I have no interest in rehearsing those discussions here. I do, however, want to press two observations. First, the 1619 Project and the 1776 Report both portrayed themselves as tools of civic education. Each contemplated how schools could implement the animating ideas of the respective projects, and various educators across the nation have done just that. Second, the competing reports, which dispute the nation’s true origins, embody the profound polarization that afflicts American society. Our two dominant political tribes appear perilously close to singing in unison: “You say 1619. I say 1776. Let’s call the whole thing off.”

It sometimes seems that agreeing to disagree (often angrily) is the only thing that Blue America and Red America can settle on. Yet the nation would be well served by attempting to identify some common ground on the question of civic education. Rather than fighting exclusively about what should not be taught in the nation’s public schools, why not contemplate approaches to civic education that might garner widespread support?

Even in our intensely divided era, there is broad, bipartisan agreement that the current state of civic education is lacking. Not long ago, Senator Chris Coons, a Democrat from Delaware, and Senator John Cornyn, a Republican from Texas, co-sponsored a bill called the “Civics Secures Democracy Act.” That measure, if enacted, would appropriate roughly $6 billion over the course of six years to foster education in civics and history. Supreme Court justices from across the ideological spectrum have also joined forces on this cause. Justices Neil Gorsuch and Sonia Sotomayor, who often disagree in high-profile cases, have made joint appearances touting the need to deepen student comprehension of our basic civic structures. On such occasions, Gorsuch has asserted that the state of civic education poses a national security crisis and noted that political and cultural polarization forms an important part of the crisis: “How can the democracy function if we can’t talk to one another, and if we can’t disagree, kindly, with respect for one another’s differences and different points of view?” For her part, Sotomayor has also dedicated significant time to promoting iCivics, an organization founded and formerly chaired by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, which seeks to capitalize on youngsters’ fascination with video games to spark their interest in learning about government.

Concerns regarding civic education are well founded; the state of civic comprehension in the United States is—in a word—grim. National Assessment of Educational Progress civics exams conducted in 2022 revealed that less than 25 percent of American 8th graders demonstrated proficiency in the subject. Fewer than one-third of the students could identify why the Founders adopted the Declaration of Independence. The civic knowledge of adults is also lacking. In 2016, one survey determined that only about one in four Americans could name all three branches of government.

In this essay, I aim to amplify and expand on Chief Justice Roberts’s call to connect the judiciary to civic education. I seek to promote an approach that I label “student-centered civic education”—an approach that could find bipartisan support. This method places the historic struggles for students’ constitutional rights front and center in the curriculum. It foregrounds the major Supreme Court decisions that have shaped the everyday lives of students across the nation, but it also uses these decisions as a springboard for discussing the broader issues, arguments, and student activism that fueled those controversies. It is simultaneously retrospective and prospective—teaching students about the hard-fought constitutional struggles that young people waged yesteryear and encouraging them to evaluate critically the contours of their rights in the context of tomorrow’s civic society. A student-centered approach to civic education thus frames students as active participants in shaping our constitutional order and positions them to become engaged, stewards of our democracy.

Scintillating Questions

The student-centered approach examines the relationships between the people and their government in a way that is tangibly connected to the daily lives of adolescents. High school students tend to view abstract constitutional concepts—such as federalism or the separation of powers—as disconnected from the things that matter most to them. But highlighting constitutional conflicts involving students and the limitations that judicial opinions have placed on school authority hits home for young people. The nation’s 50 million public school students, like most people, will gravitate toward subject matter that immediately informs their own lives.

Cases involving the constitutional rights of students will captivate them as no other civic-education topic can. Should schools be able to force students who participate in extracurricular activities to provide urine samples for drug testing? Should school officials be able to punish students by striking them repeatedly with a two-foot-long wooden paddle? Should they be able to strip-search students in an effort to locate contraband ibuprofen tablets? Should schools be able to exclude unauthorized immigrants? Should schools be able to suspend a cheerleader from the junior-varsity squad for an entire year because she posted a vulgarity on social media—off-campus on a weekend afternoon—to vent her frustration about failing to make varsity? Should high school football coaches be allowed to kneel down in prayer at midfield following games, or do such rituals religiously coerce players? These are among the scintillating questions presented by actual Supreme Court opinions involving constitutional rights in schools. These questions, I submit, would engage even the most jaded of students.

The student-centered approach also drives home the point that young people have made invaluable contributions to our current constitutional order. Sometimes students perceive civic affairs as the exclusive domain of adults. But when students today read about teenagers John Tinker and Mary Beth Tinker wearing black armbands to school in the 1960s over the objections of school authorities in Des Moines, Iowa, they understand that constitutional rights do not materialize out of thin air. The Tinkers dared to protest the Vietnam War on school grounds, endured suspensions, and waged a four-year court battle to make students’ First Amendment rights a reality. Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District demonstrates that young people of prior generations have successfully stood up for constitutional rights and played a pivotal role in creating modern American society. And today’s students may realize that they, too, have an indispensable role to play in bequeathing a constitutional tradition to subsequent generations.

Student-centered civic education also helps young Americans gain deeper understanding and respect for constitutional values at a time when some of those values have come under assault. It is no secret, for example, that many young people today harbor grave skepticism about the First Amendment’s utility. Free expression, critics maintain, is used as either a shield to protect the powerful or a cudgel to bash the powerless. But if students learned early on how young people have harnessed the power of free speech in schools—including not just Tinker’s protection of antiwar speech but other judicial precedents such as one vindicating the ability of civil rights activists in Mississippi to promote racial equality—they would see how the First Amendment often protects minority opinion and protest.

The nation’s universities have in recent years witnessed numerous high-profile conflagrations where students have evinced precious little respect for free speech. Commentators have expressed alarm that our institutions of higher education—where intellectual exchange on contentious topics is supposed to be prized—appear to hold free speech in such low esteem. Too few of those commentators have noted, though, that college students may well disregard freedom of expression partly because they did not meaningfully encounter the concept in elementary or secondary school. Cultivating respect for free-speech values should not be delayed until college. That process needs to start long before then, something that a student-centered civic education would prioritize.

The topics presented in a student-centered civic-education curriculum lend themselves to active debate among students about their constitutional rights in school. After students learn the basics of, say, free speech in schools, teachers should offer novel factual scenarios in mock hearings designed to test the limits of permissible student speech, assigning half of the class to act as lawyers for the student and the other half to act as lawyers for the school board. These mock disputes would encourage students to disagree with each other’s constitutional views respectfully and thereby aid our ailing democratic experiment. If students do not begin learning how to disagree with their peers in the relatively safe school context, disagreements in non-school settings will increasingly escalate into the ad hominem attacks that have become a disconcerting staple of both our politics and our broader culture. Teachers could take this exercise a step further by assigning students to defend a legal position that runs counter to the students’ own viewpoints, requiring them to articulate the most compelling arguments on the other side and helping them to develop empathy for people who disagree with them.

Some of the most significant Supreme Court opinions assessing students’ constitutional rights have emphasized the role of public schools in developing citizens. Students could explore this theme in their coursework. In Brown, for instance, Warren declared that “education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments. . . . It is the very foundation of good citizenship.” In 1972, when assessing an objection to a compulsory education law, the court wrote that “education is necessary to prepare citizens to participate effectively and intelligently in our open political system if we are to preserve freedom and independence.” In 2021, Justice Stephen Breyer’s opinion for the court in Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L., a case involving off-campus student speech, noted that public schools themselves have an interest in protecting students’ free expression because doing so preserves our democratic order. “America’s public schools are the nurseries of democracy,” Breyer contended. “Our representative democracy only works if we protect the marketplace of ideas.”

The Supreme Court has also embraced a special responsibility for safeguarding constitutional rights in the school context, lest students draw baleful lessons about citizenship. Justice Robert Jackson powerfully expressed this point in 1943, when he led the court’s invalidation of a state measure that required students to salute the American flag in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette. “That [public schools] are educating the young for citizenship is reason for scrupulous protection of Constitutional freedoms of the individual,” Jackson wrote, “if we are not to strangle the free mind at its source and teach youth to discount important principles of our government as mere platitudes.”

In exploring the court’s conceptualization of public schools as institutions that form citizens, students should understand that justices hold divergent views on what citizenship entails, particularly for young people in school settings. Some justices have embraced a robust conception of citizenship for students, suggesting that schools ought to permit wide-ranging, spirited debates on contentious questions. Writing for the court in Tinker, Justice Abe Fortas espoused this robust notion of citizenship. “Any word spoken, in class, in the lunchroom, or on the campus, that deviates from the views of another person may start an argument or cause a disturbance,” Fortas stated. “But our Constitution says we must take this risk, and our history says that it is . . . this kind of openness . . . that is the basis of our national strength and of the independence and vigor of Americans who grow up and live in this relatively permissive, often disputatious, society.”

Other Supreme Court justices have offered a far thinner conception of citizenship for students. They hold that schools should not host freewheeling debates but should instead concentrate on imposing order and discipline on students. Call this competing notion “Report Card Citizenship,” with a nod toward the grade for behavior that some elementary schools once meted out. Justice Hugo Black, dissenting in Tinker, wrote that “school discipline . . . is an integral and important part of training our children to be good citizens—to be better citizens.”

The thin conception of citizenship has seen its stock fluctuate dramatically in Supreme Court opinions since Black’s dissent in Tinker. During the 1980s, the court at times seemed to endorse Report Card Citizenship. In assessing a school district’s ability to punish a high school student for a lewd speech at a school assembly, the court emphasized the school’s duty to “inculcate the habits and manners of civility” and to “teach by example the shared values of a civilized social order.” But the court’s most recent decision involving student speech rebuked Report Card Citizenship. Breyer’s opinion for the court in Mahanoy, like Fortas’s in Tinker, reasoned that schools cannot, without harming our democracy, act as roving censors who punish students for dissident speech. Pupils in student-centered civic-education courses should be encouraged to evaluate critically these competing conceptions of citizenship.

Additional Benefits

As teachers and students together learn about students’ constitutional rights, their awareness will likely help prevent schools from committing certain violations of those rights. A teacher who leads a classroom discussion on Barnette, for instance, will be unlikely to suspend students for refusing to salute the American flag. Such conflicts are distressingly common in American schools, even though Barnette repudiated mandatory flag salutes more than eight decades ago.

Teachers of a student-centered civic curriculum would, moreover, not only help to honor constitutional rights within their own classrooms, but they could also become invaluable resources for an entire school. It seems improbable that busy math and science teachers are going to educate themselves on the minutiae of the Supreme Court’s doctrine governing schools. Yet, when algebra and chemistry teachers confront scenarios touching upon students’ constitutional rights, civics instructors could provide guidance to their colleagues about constitutional protections. These same “in-house experts” could also serve as sounding boards for school administrators contemplating thorny constitutional questions, as it is often impractical to seek advice from school-board attorneys during a hectic school day. These informal consultations could well help increase respect for students’ constitutional rights within the school.

If schools commit fewer violations of students’ rights, they will also mitigate a significant source of political polarization. The nation’s public schools have become a battleground of the modern culture wars, and the media often highlight instances where school authorities have overstepped their constitutional authority. But media organizations have differing views on which violations to highlight, depending on whether these outlets lean left or right. The consumers of these varied, highly clickable reports are left to conclude that the nation’s public schools are systemically attacking their most cherished values, thereby intensifying the partisan divide.

Consider two recent high-profile constitutional controversies that arose when public schools erroneously abridged students’ First Amendment rights—the first involving speech associated with liberals and the second involving speech associated with conservatives. In 2021, two Black elementary school students in Ardmore, Oklahoma, wore T-shirts reading: “Black Lives Matter.” For this seemingly innocuous action, the students were ejected from their classrooms and forced to sit in an administrative office until the end of the day. One school official justified these disciplinary actions by stating that political statements would no longer be permitted at school. The district superintendent suggested that the policy pertained to statements from across the political spectrum: “I don’t want my kids wearing MAGA hats or Trump shirts to school either, because it just creates, in this emotionally charged environment, anxiety and issues that I don’t want our kids to deal with.” After this controversy appeared in the New York Times, the school district updated its policy to prohibit clothing “items [displaying] social or political content.”

The second controversy arose when a high school senior in Franklinton, Louisiana, had his school parking space painted with a portrait of Trump. School policy permitted seniors, for a modest fee, to decorate their spaces, and although the policy prohibited designs that included vulgar language or another student’s name, it did not forbid political statements. Nevertheless, school officials painted over the image, deeming it excessively political. A federal district court judge overrode the school’s decision, holding that it violated Tinker’s foundational protection for student speech. As one might predict, the case received no mention in the New York Times but was trumpeted by Fox News.

These dueling episodes and their attendant coverage—played to quite distinct, but nonetheless equally outraged audiences—further political polarization.

Going Further

Studying judicial opinions involving students’ constitutional rights would ideally lay the groundwork for exploring more-abstract concepts that undergird civic knowledge. For example, classroom discussion of Barnette’s prohibition on compulsory flag salutes in school sets up debate on the government’s ability to instill patriotism and to prohibit speech that is regarded as antipatriotic. Students could then consider state and federal legislative efforts to prohibit burning the American flag and the two Supreme Court decisions that invalidated such efforts. Teachers could use that discussion to illustrate concepts such as federalism, separation of powers, congressional authority, and executive authority. Similarly, a classroom discussion about Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier—which held that educators can typically regulate articles appearing in school newspapers without violating the First Amendment—invites a conversation about the media’s central role in maintaining democracy. In addition, analyzing San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez—which declined to invalidate dramatically unequal school-financing schemes—could spur reflection on how well a nation that extols equal opportunity for all lives up to that lofty ideal. Relatedly, Zelman v. Simmons-Harris—which upheld the constitutionality of governments offering students vouchers to attend private, religious schools—opens up a discussion about the Establishment Clause, economic theory, and the desirability of public-private partnerships.

A Presidential Commission?

How can proponents of robust civic education initiate the kind of widespread reform that I have sketched here? One vehicle of change could be a presidential commission on civic education. Many readers may counter that the road to inaction is paved with presidential commissions, and sometimes such criticisms are merited. Yet presidential commissions and their ilk can on occasion crystalize the public’s attention. For example, the renowned report A Nation at Risk served as a significant focal point for education reformers throughout much of the 1980s.

Numerous private, public, and philanthropic organizations have examined civic education over the years, but these pursuits too often happen in intellectual silos. While these efforts have value on their own, we need—especially today—to find a way to bring them together. A presidential commission examining civic education could provide an excellent occasion for such an assemblage, enabling communities to understand better which approaches work well and which do not. A commission that embraces student-centered civic education should include model lesson plans in an appendix to its report, distilling relevant Supreme Court opinions into portions that are easily digestible for students, offering hypothetical scenarios involving students that are designed to test the limits of those opinions, and providing concrete advice to teachers on how they might spur students to engage with those topics. The commission’s resource materials would ideally provide one-stop shopping for teachers focusing on civic education. Of course, the commission would in no sense aim to mandate that public schools adopt a particular approach. Instead, building on the abundant existing resources in this domain, the commission would devise a model that teachers and local school districts could adopt and adapt. The hope is that school districts and teachers from very different parts of the country would want to implement the framework because it would focus on the relevant topic of students’ constitutional rights and encourage students to actively and critically evaluate the content of those rights.

Forming a commission on civic education could be a sound political idea for a second term of President Joe Biden. In one of his first official moves in January 2021, Biden swiftly rescinded the 1776 Commission Report. The historian Michael Kazin then argued in the New York Times: “Now that the 1776 Commission is deprived of federal authority, its influence will wane more quickly than that of the president who established it.” But just as Trump continues to cast a long shadow over American politics and culture, the 1776 Commission’s Report has not vanished, as its content can easily be accessed via the Internet. Closing our eyes will not, moreover, magically make it disappear. Instead, Biden should assemble a civically minded group from a range of ideological perspectives to offer an affirmative vision of civic education—one that highlights the struggle for students’ constitutional rights. If the president seeks to dislodge the 1776 Report from our intellectual landscape, he must offer his own conception of civic education, and he should frame it, as Gorsuch did, as promoting a vital national security interest.

Prominent Republicans have not shied away from discussing civic education. In May 2020, Steve Bannon, former adviser to President Trump, offered a remarkable statement about future political struggles: “The path to save the nation is very simple—it’s going to go through the school boards.” In the aftermath of the 2020 election, it seems that some right-wing Republicans have embraced what might be termed the “Bannon Playbook” by focusing on education issues. Perhaps the foremost tactic in this political strategy has sought to transform and distort Critical Race Theory into an intellectual bogeyman. Leading figures in the Democratic Party have too often remained silent on these high-profile cultural questions. But it is incumbent upon Democrats, I believe, to provide their own notions of civic education. As the old adage runs, “If you don’t define yourself, someone else will do it for you.”

President Biden has emphasized his desire to locate common ground with Republicans when possible—without sacrificing his core principles. Focusing on students’ constitutional rights as articulated by the Supreme Court—a struggle that dates back to the first half of the 20th century—would enable Biden’s commission to minimize some of the polarizing disputes that have proved insoluble during recent debates. Many Americans understand the profound need to address missing, limited, or ineffective civic education as a way of bolstering our nation’s foundational commitments. In 2018, for instance, one national survey found that the most popular approach to fortifying American democracy was a policy aimed at “ensur[ing] that schools make civic education a bigger part of the curriculum.” To underscore that the commission is truly dedicated to locating commonality on civic education for Americans of different political stripes, Biden should make sure to tap high-profile people associated with the Republican Party to serve. Indeed, he could even consider selecting Chief Justice Roberts to chair, or co-chair, the civic-education commission. If the chief justice should decline, Biden could nonetheless identify Roberts’s year-end report from 2019 as an important inspiration for the group and even title the commission after a passage that Roberts wrote. Near the very end of his report, Roberts stated: “Civic education, like all education, is a continuing enterprise and conversation.” Biden’s Presidential Commission on the Civic Enterprise has a nice ring to it, suggesting that civic education is a collaborative, difficult undertaking that demands considerable effort.

The ideas that I have outlined here are sure to generate disagreement. Some readers may contend that “students’ constitutional rights” is a contradiction in terms. Justice Clarence Thomas has espoused precisely that view regarding student speech, and teachers adopting the student-centered model of civic education should have their own students confront it. Other readers may maintain that the president ought not tread on ground that rightly belongs to states and localities. Still others may find that student-centered civic education places too much attention on judges, courts, and rights at the expense of other material. For my own part, I welcome such disagreements—and many others besides—because their existence would indicate that civic education is being actively debated in venues where such debates remain all too rare.

Firsthand Experience

My interest in promoting the student-centered model of civic education is not purely theoretical; it is informed by my own experience. On graduating from college in 1997, long before I dreamed of becoming a law professor, I enrolled in a one-year teacher-certification program at Duke University. As part of that program, I had the privilege of teaching a civic-education class to 9th graders at a public school in Durham, North Carolina. I recall witnessing the students—some of whom had displayed minimal interest in analyzing the differences among the three branches of government—come alive when we turned our attention to Tinker. I believe that the students engaged with Tinker deeply because they viewed themselves—at long last—as having some skin in the game. They felt they had genuine expertise about the regulation of students in schools.

Some two decades later, after I joined the faculty at Yale Law School in 2019, I became the faculty adviser for a long-standing program that places law-school students in New Haven’s public schools to teach a student-centered civic-education course. In a small but meaningful way, this program helps bridge the wide chasm that all too often separates elite, cloistered Yale from gritty, under-resourced New Haven. The redoubtable, committed Yale Law students who participate in the program do virtually all of the work, including preparing their students for a citywide oral-argument competition that occurs on Yale’s campus.

I find that visiting those classrooms and seeing student-centered civic education in action is always an inspiring experience. During my first year at Yale, I remember driving early one morning across town to a New Haven public school—one with a virtually all Black and Latino student population, a majority of whom are eligible for free lunch. After passing through the school’s metal detectors, I found my way to the correct classroom, where I witnessed students diligently preparing for their upcoming oral arguments. The students sounded very much like young lawyers, using shorthand for case names to claim that the Supreme Court’s precedents either required (or foreclosed) finding that a hypothetical principal violated a hypothetical student’s First Amendment rights. These students plainly viewed themselves as the subjects of law, not the objects of law, and felt legally and civically empowered. As the students began filing out after class, I overheard one young Black woman say quietly to a classmate, “I want to be a judge when I grow up.” It is my fervent hope that expanding the student-centered model in our schools will inspire more young people around the country to embrace such civically minded ambitions.

Justin Driver is the Robert R. Slaughter Professor of Law at Yale Law School and the author of The Schoolhouse Gate. This essay is drawn from an article that will appear in a NOMOS volume titled Civic Education in Polarized Times, to be published by New York University Press.

This article appeared in the Summer 2024 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Driver, J. (2024). Building Better Citizens Begins in the Classroom: For civics to matter again, students must actively engage with their own constitutional rights. Education Next, 24(3), 22-31.

May 17 marks the 70th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark school desegregation decision in Brown v. Board of Education. There is ample reason to celebrate Brown: not only did it mark the beginning of the end of the racial caste system in the South, but also it reinvigorated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Its implications reach far beyond race and education, as important as those matters remain.

At the same time, it is remarkable how many of the legal and policy questions raised by Brown remain unresolved. Consider some of the issues many school systems now confront:

• To what extent can school districts take students’ race into account in order to produce diverse schools and classrooms? In recent years the Supreme Court has limited the use of race-based assignments but has also allowed ample wiggle room.
• To what extent can school districts change the admissions requirements of exam schools to increase the number of Black and Hispanic students if the readily predictable result (and perhaps a secondary purpose) is to reduce the number of Asian American students?
• A number of public schools offer voluntary “affinity” groups or courses limited to Black students and led by Black teachers. Does this practice violate federal law?

These questions remain the subject of intense debate and litigation seven decades after Brown because the Supreme Court has never spelled out exactly why segregation violates the U.S. Constitution, what “desegregation” means, and what schools must do to comply with Brown’s mandate. Chief Justice Earl Warren’s constitutional argument in Brown was perfunctory, resting more on flawed social science evidence than on a convincing interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment. Neither in his 1954 opinion nor in his brief follow-up opinion in Brown II the next year did Warren specify what schools had to do to comply. One tragic consequence of this silence was that virtually no desegregation occurred in the South for a decade and a half. Just as important, when the Supreme Court did start to issue rulings on desegregation in the late 1960s, its opinions were ambiguous, contradictory, and meandering. For decades, the high court left lower federal courts and school officials without clear guidance on how to proceed.

As I explain in my 2023 book, The Crucible of Desegregation, the justices have oscillated between two interpretations that I label the “colorblind/limited intervention” approach and the “racial isolation/equal opportunity” approach. The first establishes a relatively clear legal rule: in all but the most extraordinary circumstances, government cannot use race to classify or categorize its citizens. The central goal is to take a particularly pernicious weapon out of the hands of government officials. Prohibiting the use of racial classifications struck at the heart of the racial caste system in the South without requiring courts to get deeply involved in education questions—thus the “limited intervention” half of the label.

According to the alternative interpretation, Brown held out the broader promise of equal educational opportunity. Providing equal opportunity to minority students requires not just ending legal segregation but also eliminating “racial isolation,” whatever its cause. Indeed, federal judges bear responsibility for examining all features of public education to ensure schools provide adequate instruction and fair treatment to minority students.

Supporters of both interpretations can find language in Brown to support their claims. Each approach has an Achilles’ heel: the former is too easy to evade; the latter too difficult to put into effect. Not until 2007, in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, did the high court spell out these competing positions, and even then, neither received support from a majority of the justices.

What Brown Didn’t Say

Writing for the Supreme Court in 1954, Warren was chiefly concerned with maintaining the court’s tenuous unanimity (which was seriously in doubt in the months leading up to the desegregation decisions), writing an opinion simple enough to appeal to the average citizen, and striking a tone that might ease the South into compliance. Although the court would soon strike down every form of state-sponsored segregation, Warren was understandably reluctant to announce such a controversial break with precedent in 1954. Therefore, he did not invoke the famous words of Justice John Marshall Harlan’s dissenting opinion in Plessy v. Ferguson: “Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.” But in Bolling v. Sharpe, the companion case to Brown that struck down school segregation in the District of Columbia, Warren seemed to endorse this understanding: “Classifications based solely upon race must be scrutinized with particular care, since they are contrary to our traditions, and hence constitutionally suspect.” And Brown II required school districts “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis” (emphasis added here and below).

In Brown I, though, Warren hedged, writing, “In the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place.” He looked “instead to the effect of segregation itself on public education.” Segregation retards “the educational and mental development of negro children” and “deprive[s] them of some of the benefits they would receive in a racial[ly] integrated school system.” When a state undertakes to provide public education, it becomes “a right which must be made available to all on equal terms.” Thus, on top of Brown’s apparent ban on racial classifications was layered a vague commitment to “equal opportunity,” to be judged in part by the effect of education practices on minority children.

In 1954–55, the court gave no indication of just what school districts had to do to comply with the ruling. Warren’s even shorter opinion in Brown II merely told school officials to desegregate “with all deliberate speed.” The standard established by the court for evaluating schools’ desegregation efforts was as vague as the schedule for achieving it was amorphous.

Colorblindness, Then and Now

In the 1950s, state-mandated separation of the races was viewed by almost all advocates of desegregation as the central problem, and prohibition of racial classifications as the obvious solution. This was definitely true of Thurgood Marshall and the other NAACP leaders who had long dedicated themselves to the cause. Their initial brief insisted that “The Fourteenth Amendment precludes a state from imposing distinctions or classifications based upon race or color alone.” In oral argument, the NAACP’s Robert Carter explained that the “one fundamental contention which we will seek to develop” is that “no State has any authority under the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to use race as a factor in affording educational opportunity among its citizens.”

Members of the court and the NAACP litigation team recognized they would face intense opposition in the South, but they assumed the desegregation process itself would be relatively straightforward. Heading up the team, Thurgood Marshall assured the court that “the only thing that we are asking for is that the state-imposed racial segregation be taken off,” leaving local officials “to work out their solutions of the problem to assign children on any reasonable basis they want to assign them on.” That, he suggested, could be achieved in the summer. Almost everyone envisioned a return to neighborhood schools in the South—after decades of busing students past the nearest school to attend a segregated one. In the border states, de jure segregation did quickly disappear.

But in the Deep South the court’s decision was greeted with the “massive resistance” U.S. Senator Harry Flood Byrd of Virginia called for in 1954. Within two years, Byrd had amassed a coalition of nearly 100 southern politicians committed to blocking Brown’s implementation. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, southern school districts were using “freedom of choice” plans to avoid anything more than token desegregation. Almost all federal judges conceded that these plans were constitutional as long as the choices students and their parents made were in fact free, and not tainted by the presumption that students would attend their previously segregated schools. But in most cases, “freedom of choice” was little more than a transparent fraud, corrupted both by administrative manipulation and by informal intimidation. This created a major practical challenge to those who supported a colorblind interpretation of Brown.

By the second half of the 1960s, the Civil Rights Act was the law of the land, yet virtually no Black students were going to school with white students in the Deep South. Federal judges on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals decided that time for stalling had finally run out. Working with the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW), they demanded data to prove that formerly segregated districts had taken “affirmative action” to achieve “the conversion of a de jure segregated dual system into a unitary, nonracial (nondiscriminatory) system—lock, stock, and barrel: students, faculty, staff, facilities, programs, and activities.” Initially, the demands of the Fifth Circuit and HEW were relatively mild: nearly two decades after Brown, they required only 10 to 20 percent of Black children be enrolled in formerly all-white schools. Without such a numerical standard, it is doubtful any significant change in school enrollments would ever have been achieved. But a Rubicon had been crossed. Now racial classifications were being used to promote desegregation, not enforce segregation.

Was the use of racial assignments a temporary measure designed to wring stigmatizing racial identification out of school districts guilty of unconstitutional segregation, or was it an appropriate—even constitutionally mandated—measure for achieving racial balance in perpetuity in the North and West as well as the South? If the Supreme Court seemed to suggest the latter in the 1970s, by the 1990s it had begun to suggest the former.

Several of the justices appointed by Presidents Reagan and Bush reintroduced the colorblind interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment that the NAACP had previously favored but long since abandoned. In 1995 Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that the “simple, yet fundamental, truth” announced in Brown is “the principle that the government must treat citizens as individuals, and not as members of racial, ethnic, or religious groups.” According to Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, “Reduction of an individual to an assigned racial identity for differential treatment is among the most pernicious actions our government can undertake.” Justice Sandra Day O’Connor argued that the use of so-called “benign racial classifications” implies “confidence in [courts’] ability to distinguish good from harmful governmental uses of racial criteria. History should teach greater humility.” According to Chief Justice John G. Roberts, “It is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race.”

In the 2007 Seattle case, the high court sharply limited school districts’ ability to use race-based student assignments to achieve what by then was widely known as “diversity” rather than “racial balance.” Four members of the court adopted a colorblind interpretation of the 14th Amendment, but the pivotal fifth vote was cast by Kennedy, who, in his concurring opinion, offered schools significantly more flexibility in using race-based assignment. The court’s 2023 decision in the Harvard affirmative action case suggests that it is inclined to further restrict school districts’ authority. But given how long the court has gone without issuing desegregation opinions, we should not expect a definitive decision soon.

From Racial Segregation to Racial Isolation

Soon after the Fifth Circuit and HEW used numerical targets to jumpstart what UCLA professor Gary Orfield has aptly described as the “reconstruction of southern education,” the Supreme Court finally broke its silence and handed down the first of a flurry of desegregation decisions. In 1968, a unanimous court announced that each school board in formerly segregated districts must “come forward with a plan that promises realistically to work, and promises realistically to work now” (emphasis in original). The demand for immediate action was certainly in order. But what does it mean “to work”? School districts, Justice William J. Brennan explained, have an “affirmative duty” to “convert to a unitary school system in which racial discrimination will be eliminated root and branch.” What, then, is a “unitary school system”? Apparently, one that entirely eliminates the “racial identification” of previously segregated schools. In Brennan’s felicitous phrase, school boards must “fashion steps which promise realistically to convert to a system without ‘white’ schools and ‘Negro’ schools, but just schools.”

Trying to guess what the justices meant, the lower courts held that for a formerly “dual” school system to eliminate “racially identifiable” schools, the racial composition of the student body in each school in the district must approximate that of the district’s overall student population. In other words, white and Black students must be distributed proportionally among all the district’s schools.

Was this a judicial remedy designed to undo the effects of decades of segregation and noncompliance? Or was it a constitutional requirement for all schools, whether or not they had engaged in intentional racial discrimination? On this crucial matter the Supreme Court remained noncommittal. But lower courts repeatedly asserted that racial imbalance by itself reduces the educational opportunities of minority students and is therefore unconstitutional.

This understanding was first enunciated in a 1967 report of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights entitled Racial Isolation in the Public Schools. Its conclusion summarized what soon became the conventional wisdom. The “central truth” announced in the report was that:

Negro children suffer serious harm when their education takes place in public schools which are racially segregated, whatever the source of such segregation may be. Negro children who attend predominantly Negro schools do not achieve as well as other children, Negro and white. Their aspirations are more restricted than those of other children and they do not have as much confidence that they can influence their own futures. When they become adults, they are less likely to participate in the mainstream of American society, and more likely to fear, dislike, and avoid white Americans.

The commission recommended that Congress enact legislation specifying that in no public school should minority enrollment exceed 50 percent.

This “central truth” was conveyed to federal judges by a cadre of expert witnesses who testified in the trial phase of desegregation cases. For example, during the first round of litigation in Keyes v. School District No. 1, Denver, Judge William Doyle stated, “We cannot ignore the overwhelming evidence to the effect that isolation or segregation per se is a substantial factor in producing unequal educational outcomes.” Consequently, “we must conclude that segregation, regardless of its cause, is a major factor in producing inferior schools and unequal educational opportunity.” Reflecting on the testimony he had heard about the harm done by racial isolation, the trial judge in the Detroit case found it “unfortunate that we cannot deal with public school segregation on a no-fault basis, for if racial segregation in our public schools is an evil, then it should make no difference whether we classify it as de jure or de facto.” The court’s goal was simply “to remedy a condition which we believe needs correction.”

Behind this “racial isolation” argument lay two assumptions: that Brown promised not just the elimination of racial discrimination, but a broader “equal educational opportunity,” and that changing the racial composition of schools would substantially improve educational opportunities for minority students. For example, the district court judge who ordered the desegregation of San Francisco’s schools in 1970 cited the Coleman Report and the Civil Rights Commission’s study to conclude that “Black students in identifiably black schools do not perform as well as they would perform in an integrated school. . . . While integration of schools would improve the academic performance of black children, it would have little or no adverse effect on the academic performance of white children.” Similarly, the judge in the Charlotte, North Carolina case confidently asserted that “the experts all agree” not only that “a racial mix in which black students heavily predominate tends to retard the progress of the whole group” but also that “if students are mingled with a clear white majority such as a 70/30 ratio . . . the better students can hold their pace, with substantial improvement for the poorer students.” Over three decades later, Justice Stephen G. Breyer claimed that social science research indicates “that black children from segregated educational environments significantly increase their achievement levels once they are placed in a more integrated setting.”

Especially in the North, where school districts are much smaller than in the South, coming close to a 70/30 ratio proved nearly impossible. The long-term trend of suburbanization coupled with the white flight that often accompanied desegregation orders meant that ending “racial isolation” would require massive inter-district busing. This proved extraordinarily unpopular. Endorsing such measures would have required the Supreme Court both to explicitly acknowledge the “racial isolation” rationale and to endure a major political backlash—including a possible constitutional amendment prohibiting busing to achieve racial balance. In 1974 it temporarily backed away from the “racial isolation” argument, insisting that judges could impose cross-district busing only if there was evidence that the state government or the affected suburbs had engaged in discriminatory behavior.

Over the past half century, demographic change has made eliminating “racial isolation” even harder. Today, fewer than half of all public school students are non-Hispanic white. Over the next decade, the proportion of Anglos in public schools is expected to decline to 45 percent, while the share of Hispanics grows to 29 percent. In the West, Hispanics already outnumber Anglos 42 percent to 38 percent. During the first decade of the 21st century, the student bodies of the 20 largest school systems in the country were, on average, 20 percent Anglo, 38 percent Hispanic, 32 percent African American, and 9 percent Asian. In 2017 the percentage of white students was 7 percent in Los Angeles and Miami-Dade County; 5 percent in Dallas; 8 percent in Houston; 2 percent in Detroit; 12 percent in Chicago; 14 percent in San Francisco and Philadelphia; 15 percent in Boston; and 16 percent in New York City. Further complicating these calculations is the fact that a growing share of students—today about 6 percent—label themselves “interracial.” In the 1960s and 1970s, the implicit goal of desegregation plans was to make virtually all schools majority white. But today that is out of the question in many parts of the country.

From Racial Balance to Education Quality

Recognizing the futility of trying to end “racial isolation,” many judges refocused on other techniques for improving educational opportunity. For example, Judge Arthur Garrity concluded that Boston’s entire public school system was inadequate. He rejected the NAACP’s proposed plan because it failed to address the system’s many flaws. The special master he appointed to formulate a remedial plan asked, “What the hell is the point in desegregation if there are no good schools?” During the remedial phase of litigation in Reed vs. Rhodes, the Cleveland case, Judge Frank Battisti became alarmed at the “inferior education being meted out to those who were the victims of discrimination.” He devised remedies to address “educational testing, reading programs, counseling, extracurricular activities, and relations with universities, businesses and cultural institutions.” In 1977 the Supreme Court upheld an order requiring Detroit to establish new magnet and vocational schools as well as “in-service training for teachers and administrators, guidance and counseling programs, and revised testing procedures.” Such reforms, the court claimed, would “restore the victims of discriminatory conduct to the position they would have enjoyed” had public officials not acted unconstitutionally.

The most extensive effort to improve the quality of education in schools deemed “dual” by federal judges came in Kansas City, Missouri. Judge Russell Clark explained that the “long term goal of this court’s remedial order is to make available to all [Kansas City] students educational opportunity equal to or greater than those available” to the average student in suburban schools. To accomplish this, Clark overhauled the entire school system, turning each city high school into a magnet school with a special theme, ranging from science and math to classic Greek and agribusiness. By 1995 Kansas City was spending more than any comparable school system in the country. The cost of these court-ordered reforms was about $2 billion, most of which came from the state of Missouri and the rest from tax increases mandated by the court. Unfortunately, as Joshua Dunn shows in Complex Justice: The Case of Missouri v. Jenkins, the court’s plan never came close to working. Both the number of white students in city schools and the test scores of Kansas City students continued to decline. Eventually, Black parents revolted against the court’s plan, reinstituting more traditional neighborhood schools.

By the late 1970s, preliminary evidence from school districts undergoing desegregation had begun to trickle in. Reviews of these studies, including a major assessment conducted by the National Institute of Education (NIE), found small improvements in reading by Black students in districts undergoing desegregation, but no change in mathematics. The director of the NIE project found “the variability in effect sizes more striking and less well understood than any measure of central tendencies”—not surprising, given the wide variety of desegregation plans. Thirty years later Stanford professor Sean Reardon and his co-authors wrote, “It remains unclear if, and to what extent, school racial segregation affects student achievement.”

What Works?

Over 50 years ago the Supreme Court demanded that school districts that had engaged in unconstitutional discrimination “come forward with a plan that promises realistically to work.” But it never explained what it means for a plan “to work.” In 2006, 553 social scientists signed an amicus brief in support of Seattle’s effort to use racial assignments to promote diversity in its schools. “Racially desegregated schools,” they warned, “are not an educational or social panacea and the extent of benefits will depend on how desegregation is structured and implemented.” As readers of Education Next realize, in school reform, the devil is always in the details.

In his 2019 book Children of the Dream: Why School Integration Works, economist Rucker C. Johnson analyzed longitudinal studies extending back to the 1960s and found a strong, positive long-term relationship between the number of years Black students spend in a desegregated school and their total years of educational attainment, adult wages, and health status. Similarly, he found an inverse relationship between number of years spent in a desegregated school and future incarceration and poverty rates. He attributes these beneficial outcomes to two shifts accompanying desegregation: “sharp increases in per-pupil spending” and “significant reductions in the average class sizes experienced by black children.” These changes were particularly important in the South, where for years Black schools were notoriously underfunded. Johnson found that money mattered much more than Black-white student exposure. That is, where resources increased significantly but exposure did not, students did well. Conversely, “in court-ordered desegregation districts in which school spending for black children did not appreciably change, however, although the children experienced greater classroom exposure to their white peers, they did not make a comparable improvement in their educational and socioeconomic trajectories.”

In 2022 Garrett Anstreicher, Jason Fletcher, and Owen Thompson used a similar analytic technique to analyze a larger sample of students experiencing desegregation. They found “qualitatively quite large” positive effects in the South but “no substantive effects outside of the South.” They suggested that the “impactful legacy” of desegregation efforts “lies in their systematic dismantling of the overtly segregated educational systems that prevailed in the Jim Crow South.” The “distinct paucity of effects outside the South,” in contrast, indicates “the limitations to the efficacy of legally imposed integration initiatives in certain settings.” These findings are not surprising, but they highlight the hazards of equating the legal segregation of the Jim Crow South with the “racial isolation” one finds in virtually every big city today.

In the 1960s and 1970s, judges and educational “experts” could be forgiven for believing that adjusting the racial balance of schools by itself would produce substantial education benefits. Almost no one believes that today. Over the past half century, we have substantially reduced fiscal inequities between rich and poor school districts; we have improved the quality of education provided to English learners and students with disabilities; we have created programs to improve nutrition and health care for students from poor families; we have taken a variety of steps to identify and improve substandard schools. Yet “equal educational opportunity” continues to elude us. And Covid shutdowns seem to have wiped out several decades of progress.

As school officials continue to wrestle with these difficult issues, the Supreme Court is likely to further limit the explicit use of race in assigning students to schools and to classrooms. On the one hand, it is hard to see how race-based “affinity” classes can long survive judicial scrutiny. On the other hand, the ease with which southern school officials delayed desegregation in the 1950s and 1960s indicates how difficult it will be for Asian American parents and students to invoke the colorblind argument to challenge changes in exam-school criteria. Manipulating admissions and assignment rules to get the right racial result is usually easy; proving invidious intent is usually hard. Moreover, the court’s colorblind interpretation of the Equal Protection Clause and the Civil Rights Act does not place any restrictions on the use of socioeconomic criteria to promote diversity in schools at any level.

The history of Brown shows that, under the right circumstances, court-based reform can bring about substantial change in education, both directly through court orders and indirectly by spurring other government institutions into action. But the federal judiciary’s inability to specify what “desegregation” means, why we want it, and what school districts must do to achieve it led us down many dead ends. The best way to honor Brown is to forsake heated, ideological arguments about what the decision “really means” and to focus instead on the concrete steps that evidence has shown to improve the quality of education we provide to minority students.

R. Shep Melnick is Thomas P. O’Neill Jr. Professor of American Politics at Boston College and author of The Crucible of Desegregation: The Uncertain Search for Educational Equality (University of Chicago Press, 2023).

There may be no more familiar question in education than, “Why can’t we put politics aside and do what’s best for kids?” The answer, which is obvious to anyone who’s ever sat through a school board meeting, is because we don’t agree on “what’s best for kids.” It’s not even clear what it would mean to “put politics aside,” given that politics is how we resolve public disagreements—and that public education entails the use of public funds to hire public employees to educate the public’s kids.

Today, politics have taken on new urgency for education leaders navigating polarized debates about CRT, SEL, DEI, gender identity, and more. Especially in red and purple communities, a lot of frustrated conservative parents are squaring off against equally frustrated educators. We suspect that’s the reason, since the publication of our recent book Getting Education Right, why we’ve heard from so many school and system leaders asking some version of, “Any advice on how I can better get through to those conservatives?”

Unfortunately, few school and system leaders get much preparation or support when it comes to building trust on the right. Education leaders are immersed in a world of conferences, associations, degree programs, and trainings with a pronounced leftward tilt on hot-button issues such as race, gender, and parenthood. Indeed, they can grow so used to certain assumptions and phrases that it’s easy for them to get blindsided by conservative pushback. This is bad for schools and students alike.

Education leaders can fall into a reflexive disdain for conservative perspectives, even those that are otherwise innocuous and broadly popular. For instance, a wealth of evidence points to the obvious benefits of following the “success sequence”—finish high school, get a job, and get married before having kids. Seventy-seven percent of Americans, whether they’ve practiced it or not, say schools should teach it to kids. Yet, in education circles, those who promote the success sequence have become accustomed to being attacked as racists. Heck, we’ve repeatedly watched an accomplished Black educator get derided as a bigot for insisting his school teach his mostly Black students about the success sequence, as we note in the book.

In talking to leaders (whatever their own views) who are seeking to engage better with right-leaning parents, teachers, politicians, and community members, we’ve found ourselves repeatedly hitting on a few themes that seem to be helpful and thought it worth sharing those here. We aren’t communication pros or politicos, so this isn’t about PR or pandering. Rather, it’s about engaging with parents and other stakeholders in principled, productive ways.

Respect the whole community. Including those on the right.

Sitting through a professional development session as a conservative teacher or a community workshop as a conservative parent often means feeling like an interloper. Trainings and workshops routinely feature speakers who go on at great length about the virtues of DEI, restorative justice, and other “equitable” initiatives while casually deriding “right-wing book banners.”

Leaders can become inured to all this. At the institutions that prepare them for their roles, at district-sponsored events, and at the professional conferences they attend, such rhetoric is commonplace. As a result, they can make the mistake of assuming that everyone regards it as forward-thinking, even inclusive. Well, for those on the right, such talking points feel less like accepted truth than disingenuous barbs. They see divisive practices that have nothing to do with diversity or inclusion, “restorative” practices that fuel chaotic classrooms, and “equity” wielded to eliminate advanced math (as in California) or basic graduation requirements (as in Oregon). Conservatives find those denunciations of “book banning” to be politicized misrepresentations of attempts to remove genuinely pornographic texts from the shelves of middle-school libraries.

Heck, at the National Book Awards, beloved children’s entertainer LeVar Burton threatened to “throw hands” if there were any members of Moms for Liberty in the crowd. The room’s response? Laughter. So, in this bastion of progressive inclusiveness, it’s apparently cool to winkingly joke about violence against women . . . as long as they’re right-wing. If you’re seen as tolerating or accepting that kind of double standard, understand that conservatives will inevitably regard you with distrust, no matter how unfair you may think they’re being.

Here’s a simple standard for school and district leaders: presume that all of your parents deserve respect, no matter their politics. Do your homework on the speakers you hire to address students, teachers, and families. Are they going to engage constructively or peddle ideological agendas that denounce whole swaths of your community as rubes and racists? Are they going to allow for respectful discussion and disagreement or spew lazy stereotypes? When it’s a question of race, ethnicity, or immigration status, today’s school leaders intuitively accept that schools can’t appear to dismiss whole swaths of their community. That same moral compass ought to apply here. The ranks of teacher trainers and DEI consultants include too many incompetents and ideologues. Don’t invite those outrage artists into your school or system.

Engage with parents, even when you disagree with them

Conservatives tend to agree with Russell Kirk that, “The family always has been the source and center of community.” This primacy can seem discomfiting to some educators, counselors, and administrators (especially the ones with the “I’m your mom now” posters in their classrooms). After all, if an educator contends that first graders should learn about gender identity or middle schoolers about their “white privilege,” they think they’re just doing what’s right and that parental objections must be evidence of troubling personal agendas. We get it. Leaders who choose to hide a child’s in-school gender identity from parents are convinced they have the child’s best interests at heart.

But parents, in good faith and without any agenda other than their child’s well-being, may see things very differently. There already exist protocols for when teachers suspect that parents or guardians are abusing their charges. If such concerns exist, teachers should act on them. Where they don’t, schools should not be in the business of keeping things from parents. Given that parents rightly expect to be notified when the school gives their child an aspirin, it’s ludicrous to imagine that schools would hide the fact that their child is adopting an entirely new identity at school. You personally disagree? Okay. But understand that the thousands of schools that have adopted a policy of hiding a student’s in-school gender from their parents have taken an aggressive, ideological stance—and that it will be interpreted as such.

School leaders do well to appreciate that conservatives tend to think they’ve very temporarily entrusted their children to the care of their schools and have learned to be skeptical about what that entails. There are, of course, practical limits on how much influence parents should have on discipline or curriculum. And we’re all acquainted with problem parents who may be inclined to create conflict just because it’s in their nature, or because they can’t conceive that their child would ever misbehave. But a commitment to communication and transparency strikes us as a nonnegotiable baseline. A leader who can’t (or won’t) agree to that is unlikely to win the trust of conservative parents.

Take “true history” seriously

Yuval Levin, editor of National Affairs, has observed, “Conservatives tend to begin from gratitude for what is good and what works in our society and then strive to build on it, while liberals tend to begin from outrage at what is bad and broken and seek to uproot it.” These competing dispositions emerge when it comes to teaching American history. In their most extreme iterations, such perspectives can, on the one hand, lead to teachers turning a blind eye to the mistakes and shortcomings of our nation—or, on the other hand, becoming entirely consumed by them.

Conveniently, the vast majority of Americans occupy a reasonable position on the teaching of American history. In fact, 90 percent of Americans agree with some version of the statement, “Schools should teach American history, warts and all.” Contra the social-media rhetoric, conservatives know that America has a checkered history and agree that students need to learn about the Three-fifths Compromise, Jim Crow, Korematsu, and the Trail of Tears.

We fear, though, that far too many classrooms tilt toward vilifying America rather than teach a balanced and accurate history. The enthusiasm for the New York Times’s factually-challenged 1619 Project-based curriculum, the architect of which describes America as a “slavocracy,” is illustrative. There’s little pedagogical or public purpose in approaching history as a series of overwrought, oft-dubious tales of American villainy.  Educators need to tune out the noise from the extremes—both from the parents offended by books depicting Ruby Bridge’s harassers as white (they were!) and from the activists seemingly intent on convincing children that America is irredeemably evil. There was a time when schools leaned too far to the right on all this. Today, many lean too far to the left—and educators shouldn’t be surprised by the backlash that can result.

There are, however, sensible remedies. The teacher unions and ed school activists urge schools to teach “true history.” We think that’s a terrific idea. Teach about America’s shortcomings but also its successes at expanding the franchise, incorporating wave after wave of immigration, fending off genocidal fascists during World War II and murderous totalitarians during the half-century-long Cold War, creating shared prosperity, cleaning up the environment, combating the scourge of ethnic and racial hatred, erecting stable governing institutions, and pioneering deep and enduring protections for civil liberties. Teach it all, the good and the bad. If your educators haven’t been exposed to the good in their teacher training or fear being labeled naïve for discussing it . . . well, that’s when an unabashed commitment to “true history” will be especially useful.

Effective public stewards forge relationships with their whole community. There have been laudable efforts to make sure that educators reach out across racial, ethnic, linguistic, and sexual identity differences. Making every child and every family feel welcome and respected is important. Given intense polarization and roiling tensions between conservatives and their schools, leaders who haven’t gotten much useful counsel when it comes to engaging the right will find it an especially propitious time to apply this advice to a relationship that’s on the ropes.

Frederick M. Hess is an executive editor of Education Next. Michael Q. McShane is director of research for EdChoice. They are the authors of Getting Education Right: A Conservative Vision for Improving Early Childhood, K–12, and College (Teachers College Press).

Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, who died last week at age 82, was, for much of the 1990s, one of the most articulate and persistent legislative advocates for school choice.

Lieberman’s death prompted admiring statements from political figures across the spectrum who noted his contributions across a wide range of issues, from civil rights to the environment to national security. It also offers an opportunity to reflect on and celebrate his school-choice-related achievements, some of which are still benefiting millions of American families. Lieberman’s experience as Al Gore’s running mate in 2000, and his subsequent late-career path as a “No Labels” advocate and political independent, also point to the constraints that school choice advocates face within the Democratic Party, where teachers unions have formidable clout.

After initially winning election to the Senate in 1988, Lieberman backed a series of efforts to expand school choice to include private schools. Typically they were means-tested or experimental programs, rather than sweeping universal ones.

For example, in March 1995, Lieberman joined Senator Dan Coats, an Indiana Republican, to introduce the “Low-Income School Choice Demonstration Act of 1995,” which would have appropriated $30 million for between ten and 20 “demonstration projects” to “determine the effects on parents and schools of providing financial assistance to low-income parents to enable such parents to select the public or private schools their children will attend.”

The bill didn’t pass, but Lieberman’s remarks on the Senate floor on introducing the legislation encapsulated the way he saw and communicated about the issue—linked to religious faith, and as a way of helping poor children. “It is clear that the public schools are not working for all students, particularly in our poorest communities. We have a responsibility to seek more effective ways to address the needs of these children,” the senator said.

He went on: “Private school choice opens doors for children in our poorest neighborhoods, where religious schools—particularly Catholic schools—often have had better results than public schools. I have long believed what some research has shown—that the success of parochial schools is in part due to their students’ and teachers’ shared beliefs and strong moral values.”

 

D.C. Scholarships

In 1997, again working with Coats, Lieberman introduced the District of Columbia Student Opportunity Scholarship Act of 1997. Congress approved it, but President Clinton vetoed it. Eventually, in 2003, the vouchers became law.

There have been ongoing battles over renewing the funding for it, but the program remains in existence today, offering individual scholarship awards of up to $16,070 for high school and up to $10,713  for elementary and middle school. In the 2022–23 school year, 1,707 students used the scholarships. Of those students, 79.8 percent had an “African-American/Black” racial background, and their average family income was $20,572, according to a “fact sheet” available at the program website.

About 12,000 students have been awarded the scholarships over two decades, and survey data show high-school graduation rates, college acceptance rates, and parental satisfaction rates above 90 percent. The Washington Post editorial board has embraced the program as “worthy” and describes the federal funding for it as “well-spent.”

Arguably, the small voucher program has had a positive effect even on the many more students in the traditional DC public schools and charter schools, which, spurred by the threat of the private school scholarship program, upped their game in ways that translated into gains on standardized tests of reading and math. The DC school improvement story has a lot of protagonists—Mayor Adrian Fenty, Chancellors Michelle Rhee and Kaya Henderson—but in a way it’s also a little-noticed legacy of Lieberman.

 

Federal Education Savings Accounts

In April 1998, Lieberman took to the Senate floor again, this time to speak in favor of a federal education savings account that would have let parents earning less than $160,000 save $2,000 a year in after-tax money tax-free for K–12 expenses, including private school tuition. “At a time when many parents are seeking more choices for their kids, especially for the students who are trapped in failing and unresponsive local schools, this bill would help make private or parochial school a more affordable option for those families who decide that is the best choice for their child, or in some cases, the only chance to get a decent education,” Lieberman said.

Explaining the fierce opposition to the plan, he said, “I fear that our critics are so committed to the noble mission of public education that they have shut their eyes to the egregious failures in some of our public schools and insisted on defending the indefensible. And they are so conditioned to believing that any departure from the one-size-fits-all approach is the beginning of the end for public schools that they refuse to even concede the possibility that offering children a choice could give them a chance at a better life while we are working to repair and reform all of our public schools.”

“Parents increasingly are demanding more choices for their children—be it in the form of public school choice, charter schools, or scholarships for low-income kids to attend a quality private or parochial school. And they are seeking more of a focus on results rather than a defense of the system and all who function in it,” Lieberman said then. “Hopefully we can begin to change the dynamic of what for too long has been a disappointingly dogmatic and unproductive debate on education policy in this country and lay the groundwork for a new bipartisan commitment to putting children first.”

That particular upward adjustment to the contribution limits for Coverdell accounts, named after Senator Paul Coverdell, Republican of Georgia, eventually was enacted in 2001 and took effect in 2002. And the overall concept of tax-advantaged savings for private school expenses was expanded further by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, which allowed Section 529 college savings accounts to be used for K–12 education expenses.

 

The Vice Presidential Nominee

The paradox of Lieberman’s political career is that his biggest win—the Gore-Lieberman ticket won the popular vote in the 2000 presidential election—was also his biggest loss, as a litigated recount in Florida that went to the Supreme Court concluded in the loss of the state for Gore and Lieberman, and the presidency of George W. Bush. Lieberman’s stint as vice presidential nominee can also be seen as something of a simultaneous high and low for his school choice advocacy.

The policy position was a sign of the independence, bipartisanship, integrity, and swing-voter appeal that helped Lieberman get chosen by Gore to begin with. Lieberman attracted a lot of attention for being a Democratic vice presidential nominee who was a longtime, enthusiastic school choice advocate.

In August 2000, when Gore announced Lieberman as his running mate, there was a burst of attention around the question of whether the ticket would back private school choice. “School voucher foes find Lieberman a vexing choice,” was a Los Angeles Times headline. A spokesman tied the senator’s support for vouchers to Connecticut Catholic schools, not the senator’s own observant Jewish faith. A New York Times opinion piece by Nina Rees, then at the conservative Heritage Foundation, reported Lieberman “has supported at least seven bills to promote school choice since 1992.”

The apparent conflict was resolved, more or less, by Lieberman saying that he’d provide discreet counsel to Gore, but that President Gore would call the shots. That’s typical for a vice presidential nominee, so it’s hard to fault Lieberman too much. Yet in the presidential campaign, the Democrats let Republicans take the advantage on the issue. Private school choice wasn’t among the Democratic policy proposals on education in the 2000 campaign. As the GOP candidate, George W. Bush did propose vouchers as an accountability mechanism for failing public schools. As president, however, Bush abandoned it eventually in negotiations with congressional Democrats over what became the No Child Left Behind Act.

 

Democrats and Independents

That becoming the Democratic Party’s vice presidential nominee involved Lieberman’s downplaying one of his key domestic policy positions was an indicator of a broader tension between the politician and the party that also involved other issues, such as national security policy. In 2006, when Senator Lieberman faced a primary challenge from Ned Lamont, an antiwar heir to a J.P. Morgan fortune, the state AFL-CIO backed Lieberman, but the teachers unions backed Lamont. Lieberman lost the Democratic primary but won reelection to the Senate as an “independent Democrat.” He kept sponsoring school choice bills but without a lot of Democratic company. For example, on March 16, 2010, a Lieberman amendment to reauthorize the DC opportunity scholarship program failed, 42 to 55. The only Democrats who voted for it were Senators Dianne Feinstein of California, Bill Nelson of Florida, and Mark Warner of Virginia. Of those, only Warner remains in the Senate.

At the time of his death, Lieberman was co-chairing a “No Labels” effort to find a presidential ticket to run against Biden and Trump. Biden, like Lieberman, backed some private school choice legislation as a senator but has shelved it as president. Trump has expressed support for it but didn’t get it done in term one.

Yet perhaps the story of school choice and the Democrats won’t have ended entirely with the passing of Joe Lieberman.

Lieberman had told interviewers repeatedly that he was attracted to politics initially by the promise of John F. Kennedy’s presidency. He wrote his Yale senior thesis about a Connecticut political boss, John Bailey, who helped to deliver the Nutmeg State to Kennedy, and he also worked, early in his career, for Abe Ribicoff, another Connecticut Democrat who served as JFK’s secretary of Health, Education and Welfare.

Some Kennedy family members ardently disavow Robert Kennedy Jr.’s 2024 presidential campaign, but it’s worth noting that RFK Jr. told Bari Weiss last year, “I had a choice of where I was going to send my kids to school, just because I have resources and it, and, you know, all Americans should have that choice.” Kennedy hasn’t made choice a signature issue, but there’s still plenty of time before Election Day.

In its equal-opportunity, unifying way, Kennedy’s comment was an echo of Lieberman’s vision that, as he once said in the Senate, “Lower-income parents who want their kids to learn in a religious environment should have that chance, just as wealthier parents do.” Lieberman did not live to see that vision fully realized, but he helped to bring it closer to reality.

Ira Stoll, a former managing editor of Education Next, writes regularly at The Editors.

Since the release of A Nation at Risk in 1983, the school reform movement has generated significant insights and promising practices for improving schools for children in poverty and students of color. The work of trying to radically improve student outcomes also produced glaring missteps and tough lessons. Few efforts demonstrate the complexity of attempting to provide a bold citywide plan to ensure educational excellence for all children better than the experiences in Newark, New Jersey. Much has been written about the political drama during my tenure as superintendent from 2011 to 2014. However, very little has been written about the actual playbook, results, and implications for educational policymakers and leaders.

I was appointed superintendent of Newark Public Schools (NPS) in 2011 by then governor Chris Christie and the state’s education commissioner at the time, Chris Cerf. While most school districts have a local board charged with hiring a superintendent, NPS had lost that authority back in 1995, when the state took control of the district.

As I arrived in Newark, 39 percent of students who entered the system failed to graduate, and only 40 percent of third-graders could read and write at grade level. Enrollment was plummeting. The district’s nearly forty thousand students and one hundred schools still made it the largest in the state, with the majority of students living below the poverty level.

Local politicians and families had grown impatient. For the five years prior to my arrival as superintendent, many elected leaders had become early adopters of a growing national charter school movement that aimed to free schools from government red tape and allow them autonomy to innovate. These supporters included Cory Booker (then a young councilman), school board member Shavar Jeffries (who now heads the charter school behemoth KIPP Foundation), and state senator Teresa Ruiz, among other notable local leaders. Charters weren’t the only new option—other school models, such as magnet high schools (often with entrance requirements) and partner-run small high schools, had gained momentum too.

Some of these schools had notable evidence of improving achievement for Newark students, and it was understandable that they were gaining strong support from local leaders, influential funders, and certainly the families of the nearly 5,500 students who attended them.

But it was clear that the most impactful efforts at improving schools in Newark were working around the very system they were trying to improve. And in New Jersey, these new schools were funded on a per-pupil basis; in other words, the money followed the child out of the traditional system and into the public charter system. Logically, this made sense. But in practice, this proliferation of competitors to district-run schools was creating unintended consequences that few wanted to discuss.

Building a “System of Great Schools”

Given the perilous state of the city’s schools, the unrealistic expectations around quick achievement gains, and the pressure from ideologues on all sides, many speculated that the superintendent role wasn’t doable. But I was inspired by the scale of the challenge and the ferocious commitment of many leaders in the community.

We started with the theory that the unit of change was the school itself and embraced the idea that what we were building was what my former boss, then New York City Schools chancellor Joel Klein, called “a system of great schools,” not a “great school system.” This was a subtle but profound distinction, because it meant we were seeking to ensure that there were one hundred excellent schools serving every child in every neighborhood—regardless of governance structure.

First, we needed to set a unifying goal for the district: every child would be college ready. That’s right, college, not just career—because we believed that choice of higher education should be up to the student, not simply determined by the inadequacy of their preparation, and because Newark families were demanding this.

In poll after poll, focus group after focus group, they told us very clearly: they wanted their children to graduate college ready. Moreover, they believed that “career ready” was a euphemism for low expectations. Families felt that academic excellence was a passport out of poverty.

Most parents were with us from day one. The challenge was the well-meaning funders and other influencers who wanted to muddy the waters and talk about everything except whether students could read, write, and do math at grade level.

When we started sharing actual data about proficiency rates and the number of young people earning diplomas indicative of their mastery of hard content, we started to encounter real pushback, both within and outside the school system. This was a theme I became increasingly familiar with: often what families say they want can be quite different from what those who speak for them are willing to stand for.

Ensuring “Four-Ingredient” Schools

With our North Star established, we rolled up our sleeves to improve the district, school by school. There was a large and growing body of research and evidence about high-performing schools in high-poverty neighborhoods. Combined with our team’s years of on-the-ground school transformation experience, we zeroed in on four basic ingredients that every high-quality school possessed: people, content, culture, and conditions.

Our aim: ensure that every NPS school was a four-ingredient school so that we could make steady progress toward college readiness for all. Our philosophy: focus on what works regardless of ideology, which often led to “third-way” solutions—combining the best of seemingly disparate views or forging a new path to transcend old, binary thinking. Our mantra: implementation matters.

People. It’s critical to have the right people in the right seats, from the leadership team to the teachers to mental health professionals to custodial staff.

We know intuitively the power that a great teacher has, and a growing body of research reinforced this belief, showing us that teachers are the most significant in-school factor determining a child’s level of achievement. Further, the most significant factor in getting great teachers in every classroom is the quality of the principal.

We focused on leadership from day one in Newark. I’ve never been to a great school with a mediocre principal, and I have never been to a failing school with a terrific principal (except perhaps at the very beginning of a turnaround). Within two years, we had replaced nearly one-quarter of our principals through aggressive recruiting and selection, giving preference to Newarkers and leaders who not only knew instruction but thought of themselves as community organizers and change agents.

Many states at this time were starting to use quantitative test score data in teacher evaluations, and New Jersey was eager to follow suit. However, my team and I felt that the science for such “value-added” approaches didn’t hold up when it came to determining the effectiveness of individual teachers. Not only did we feel that using the value-added approach in teacher evaluations would be unfair to teachers, we also knew that including such a poison pill in our new evaluation plan would create a backlash that could sabotage the entire effort. We took a lot of flak from hardline education reformers, who had become fixated on using test scores as a shortcut to accountability and who worried that our questioning the use of test scores in teacher evaluations would water down reform.

To help non-charter schools accelerate the “people” ingredient, we negotiated what was widely considered an ambitious contract with Newark teachers. Despite agreeing to key labor reforms after more than two hundred hours at the bargaining table, some in the Newark Teachers Union and their national affiliate, the American Federation of Teachers, vociferously advocated against them within weeks of the contract being ratified by an overwhelming majority of teachers. Both groups had a long track record of preserving some of the sacred cows of teacher labor negotiations: seniority-based placement, infallibility of teachers with tenure (regardless of what they do), and resistance to any form of accountability—no matter how nuanced. Meanwhile, we found many of our own ideas to be popular among everyday teachers, who told us the quality of the teacher in the classroom next door is a factor in whether or not they want to stay at a school. I was pushing largely because I believed then—and still believe now—that teachers unions need to evolve to become part of the solution or they will become obsolete.

We also had to completely restructure and reimagine the central office to be in service to schools and families. This required breaking senior leaders into new teams and inviting them to clearly articulate how they would enable the four school-level ingredients. It also meant crafting clear plans with goals aligned with good management and coaching—not simply doing what had always been done.

Content. A high-quality school needs high-quality and culturally competent curricula. It also needs frameworks, protocols, and data that drive great instruction and continuous improvement.

I started in Newark about a year after the Common Core State Standards had become a force nationally and the same month that New Jersey adopted a version of them. Common Core gave us an unambiguous and evidence-based target. It also served as a catalyst to scrutinize our curricula with a more rigorous lens.

The research here is undeniable; high-quality, culturally competent instructional materials are critical to ensuring that students are truly internalizing difficult content. Historically, though, we had all underinvested in this area in the early reforms after A Nation at Risk.

High-quality instructional materials are an ingredient that is hard to get right when you are working only at the school or small-network level. Scale is your friend. These decisions are better made at a system level, where content experts can dedicate the necessary time to addressing academic needs and cultural contexts, as well as coherence and alignment between the plethora of different curricula and assessments. It is also the area that, at the time in Newark, brought the most consensus. We did “teach-ins” for administrators, educators, influencers, and families who all really seemed to get and support the mandate for good, rigorous content that was consistent across the city.

Culture. Schools with intentionally curated environments characterized by high standards alongside high support produce better student outcomes.

From day one in Newark, we focused on the seminal research work and promising practices that had emerged, connecting how kids feel, how adults feel, and student outcomes. Years after comparing student achievement results to staff, student, and family survey responses, researchers Tony Bryk and Barbara Schneider found that the schools with high levels of trust were far more likely to get beat-the-odds results than their counterparts. Economists like Ron Ferguson and social policy experts like Christopher Jencks found a direct correlation between adult expectations, student surveys, and student outcomes.

Relatedly, an area where I have seen some of the greatest challenges for adults in establishing and preserving culture is in response to conflict and disruptive incidents. How we handle student discipline, struggle, and conflict is where adult biases show up the most. This is a problem not only from an equity and justice lens but also from a student achievement standpoint. Often students who need the most support and time on task are being excluded the most. Students can’t learn when they feel shame and helplessness. So it is no surprise to me that data shows that the relationship between the discipline gap and achievement is more than correlative—it is also causal.

For these reasons, we hired administrators who showed skill in building culture and partnering with families. We created an entire central-office team focused on student well-being and discipline.

We made progress, but admittedly, the playbook on culture is harder to run for many reasons. Too often, discussions about what student culture should feel like are preachy, ideological, or theoretical—devoid of practical, research-based, promising practices. Building culture is far from a paint-by-numbers task. Effective cultures don’t feel the same in every school, but they do share key components. This is nuanced and hard to teach to administrators. The culture work requires us to surface and address adult biases about what kids can accomplish and what is considered “dangerous” behavior, and this can cause real discomfort and resistance.

Conditions. This ingredient is all about strong operations and infrastructure.

It is important to address the physical environment and the day-to-day operations. None of the other ingredients of a strong school or system can succeed if we don’t address the conditions in which our children learn and our teachers teach. In Newark, we had a lot of work to do on this ingredient.

When I started, Malcolm X Shabazz High School had a river running through its fourth floor on rainy days. Many schools didn’t have air conditioning, in a city where average temperatures reach above a humid ninety degrees for months. Some schools weren’t even wired for internet access, and only a few had laptops to check out to students for the day.

Local leaders openly talked about a “rolling start” at the beginning of the school year, which referred to the fact that it took weeks to sort out the basics: enrollment, special education schedules and services, buses, and even books. Honestly, I had never heard of a system where instruction didn’t start on day one.

Some of these intolerable conditions were due to bad public policy and some were because of poor management. My team and I would say we could tell if a school was getting results by how visitors were greeted at the door (if at all) and how quickly families could get the answer to whatever they were asking. We created school operations managers to attend to the operational needs of the school. At the time, this got me in trouble with the administrators’ union (because I was seen as encroaching on district administrator roles and jobs). Even today our approach to operations is considered innovative, which just shows how little we prioritize the conditions in our schools.

The One Newark Plan

While establishing a focus on college readiness and building four-ingredient schools was our primary focus right out of the gate, we knew we had to make progress on a citywide plan that addressed the schools beyond our purview. Looking at the full picture in Newark, you saw that everyone was doing their own thing, and the unintended consequences of this lack of coordination were becoming more evident and unsustainable every day.

From our earliest school visits, we could see that the poorest neighborhood schools were emptying out and becoming concentrated with the highest-need students and the lowest-quality staff. The diversity and variety of school models wasn’t materializing; with all the new schools, we weren’t actually providing a lot of choice, just more flavors of “no excuses” ice cream at the elementary level and a bunch of run-of-the-mill high schools.

Meanwhile, every year, including my first, our district had to cut about $50 million. While there was certainly a lot of bloated bureaucracy to streamline, more than 80 percent of that money was wrapped up in people. Newark Public Schools employs many Newarkers in a city with double the national poverty rate.

As a city, we had to ask ourselves: “Is it even possible for every child in Newark to have access to a school that meets their needs? Even those children facing the longest odds?”

Our team had no choice but to stare down these questions, which led us to some unconventional and controversial answers. The first thing we had to do: try to rise above political arguments rooted in ideology and self-interest about what type of school models should exist. There were about a hundred schools in Newark. We knew we would get to excellence more quickly if we had a variety of governance structures: traditional, charter, magnet, partner run, and hybrid. But we also knew we couldn’t simply let a thousand flowers bloom and allow others to die, especially when those vulnerable schools were serving our students with the highest need. We also knew that the community deserved excellence citywide.

We pored over our own data: student enrollment trends across governance models, overall city population trends, facilities assessments, and (of course) student outcomes. We fanned out and hosted more than a hundred community-based meetings with faith-based leaders, nonprofit executives, families in struggling schools, families in high-performing schools, charter advocates, charter operators, private schools, local funders, elected officials, union leaders, and early childhood providers. We began to socialize the idea that we needed one citywide plan across governance structures, as well as the harsh reality that the district’s footprint had to shrink. We wanted to find a way to preserve the best of the new-schools movement while also addressing some of the unacceptable consequences of its uncoordinated growth.

This process—over the course of about a year—led to a comprehensive plan we called One Newark. The plan opened with three core values to drive our collective decision-making: equity, excellence, and efficiency:

• Excellence: We must ensure that every child in every neighborhood has access to a “four-ingredient” school as quickly as possible and that no kid is in a failing school.
• Equity: We must ensure that all students—including those who are facing the longest odds—are on the pathway to college and a twenty-first-century career.
• Efficiency: We must ensure that every possible dollar is invested in staff and priorities that make a positive difference for all students.

We launched headlong into implementation in the winter of 2013–14.

We started publishing “family-friendly” snapshots—across both district and charter schools— so that community members could see how their schools were doing in comparison to schools with similar populations. We looked at overall proficiency but also at growth, critical in a city like Newark with low proficiency rates across the board. We also compared schools with similar student populations to one another.

We created a simple red, yellow, and green system so that the community could see the landscape clearly. “Red schools” were low-proficiency, low-growth schools. Green were high proficiency and high growth. Yellow schools were “on the move” (low proficiency, high growth) or “to watch” (high proficiency, low growth). The color-coding was clear and intuitive, and many in the community started talking about “no red schools.”

We placed an emphasis on transparent data about how schools were doing with students in poverty, students with disabilities, and English learners. We created standard measures—across district and charter schools—to report on student retention. People from all sides fought us on this level of transparency—the unions, some charter schools (which weren’t obligated to share their data with us), and some funders who worried we were reducing children to numbers. But many families and policymakers embraced the information. There’s no perfect system, but there was no way to make a citywide plan without a decent measure of school quality.

We performed detailed enrollment analysis and defined the need for a common definition of a “minimum viable school.” From a funding standpoint, schools with fewer than 500 students are hard to sustain with a staffing model that ensures things like appropriate class size, electives, teacher preparation times, and staff to attend to running operations. Newark had a lot of “red” schools that were also not financially viable, and many of them were in the poorest neighborhoods.

We also looked at demand data—who was applying to charters and from what neighborhoods, who was seeking new small high schools and from what neighborhoods, and which neighborhoods were growing and which were shrinking.

The picture was becoming increasingly clear: the need for a course correction was long overdue. We had traditional schools where 80 percent of families were on charter school waiting lists, but the district’s resistance to collaboration and the charters’ insistence on growing only one grade level each year meant large-scale closures and consolidations were inevitable.

The district had too many elementary schools overall, due to a population decrease, neighborhood shifts, and charter growth. We didn’t have enough early learning centers to meet the increased demand. We had too many selective high schools. Most of the new small high schools being incubated downtown were serving families from other wards, while iconic and historic high schools were emptying out. The picture was bleak. We had to make some hard decisions.

We decided to be radically transparent about our findings and the implications in a proposed ward-by-ward plan. Some charters should take over existing schools with high demand, keep families who opted in, and keep the buildings and the school name, instead of simply continuing to build new schools one grade at a time. Some elementary schools needed to convert to early learning centers. Some small high schools that were performing well needed to move into our comprehensive high schools, and some underperforming partner-run high schools needed to close. Magnets had to change their enrollment process. And some buildings had to be shut—some condemned, some repurposed, and some sold, potentially to charters.

Another anchor of the One Newark plan was ensuring that every family had equal access to choice. Both psychologically and practically, it didn’t make sense for one-third of families to get what they wanted and the rest to get what was left over. For starters, this dynamic was creating an almost civil war–like atmosphere, with charter and non-charter families pitted against each other and magnet and nonmagnet families screaming at each other in meetings. Also, one goal of establishing high-performing schools in high-poverty neighborhoods is to feed the groundswell of belief that kids can achieve. Newark’s choice system was helping create a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure in the non-charter schools.

This is where universal enrollment came into play. All families could access the system and apply to all schools. An algorithm gave preference to kids in the neighborhood, followed by kids in poverty, then kids with disabilities, and then everyone else at random.

It was a game changer. Now all schools were required to think about how to market themselves and own their quality, or lack thereof. By year two, more than three-quarters of the families of kindergartners and ninth-graders were using the system. At one point, we opened a family support center to help families exercise choice. We had planned for a soft launch, but word got out and more than a thousand families showed up on the first day, and the situation almost devolved into chaos. While our critics crowed about our operational failure—and it was indeed a failure—it also showed how much family demand there was for choice and quality. This is one of the hundreds of examples I’ve had throughout my career that defies the ridiculous stereotype that poor families don’t care about education.

The universal enrollment system may have been hardest on some members of Newark’s political elite who were used to the benefits afforded to them in an unfair, transactional system. I recall one meeting in which a prominent official—previously a supporter of mine—yelled, “You made a liar out of me! I told my cousin I could get her kid into this school!”

Our team knew that the tenets of the plan were bold, unconventional, and controversial and that the politics were going to be tough to navigate. Choice, charters, labor reforms, and teacher excellence polled well. Laying off Newarkers and teachers and “closing” traditional schools or turning them over to highly successful charters were wildly unpopular. But to have the plan succeed citywide, you couldn’t have one without the other.

To add a deeper degree of difficulty, while the plan was emerging and leading up to the official launch, we suffered a series of seismic political blows. In September 2013, the Bridgegate scandal broke and increasingly sidelined Governor Christie. Shortly thereafter, then senator Frank Lautenberg tragically passed away. Mayor Booker, who had also been an active and strong supporter of the plan and was working hard to build momentum around it, announced he was running for that U.S. Senate seat. His announcement also spurred the need for an earlier-than-expected mayoral election where the leading candidates spent considerable time spewing hatred about charters and about me personally (although backstage and publicly, they had previously supported both). Shortly thereafter, Commissioner Cerf resigned. To use a sports analogy: the entire offensive line left the field.

The overall approach was comprehensive, and it had to be to ensure that none of our kids were trapped in failing schools, the district didn’t go bankrupt, communities weren’t living with vacant buildings, and the city was on a path to success. I described the plan to author Dale Russakoff as “three-dimensional chess” in an effort to convey why all the pieces had to happen at one time and couldn’t be phased. There were too many interdependent parts to a very complex system, and the stakes couldn’t be higher. Unfortunately, in her 2015 book about Newark, The Prize, which went on to become a bestseller, this quote fed an inaccurate portrayal of me as a top-down, cold technocrat—a narrative that was taking shape across much of the media coverage about our work in Newark. It couldn’t have been further from the truth—the emotional pieces of what needed to happen were not lost on me or the team. I lived with my husband and baby son in Newark and had conversations with neighbors in grocery stores and local watering holes on a daily basis. It all felt so heavy, but also necessary.

Results and Lessons

During my tenure and the subsequent years under Cerf, our district teams improved outcomes for students in every neighborhood and every age group—from early childhood to high school.

In early childhood, we secured a $7 million Head Start grant (becoming only the second district in the country to do so) to add more than one thousand early childhood seats. We brought early childhood standards to life and sounded the alarm to focus on the importance of high-quality early learning. Newark went from having fewer than half of our residents eligible for free early childhood programs (which was most families) in those programs to enrolling nearly 90 percent.

In 2015, the Center on Reinventing Public Education named Newark as the top district in the country based on its share of high-poverty, high-performance elementary schools. By 2019, more than one-third of Black students attended schools that exceeded the state average, compared with 10 percent in 2011. The number of good schools and schools “on the move” grew every year due to our district-run turnaround approach, charter conversion schools, and some outright closures and consolidations. Newark was among the top four cities in the country for student outcomes of Black students living in poverty.

The citywide graduation rate rose 14 points, closing the gap with the state average by 7 percentage points—with almost double the percentage of students graduating having passed the state exit exam. About 87 percent of Newark graduates who enrolled in college returned for a second term, far exceeding national averages despite high poverty rates.

And we saw signs that the overall community—despite the political rancor we encountered— was starting to believe in the “system of great schools.” For the first time in decades, student enrollment was increasing overall in Newark, as was the population of the city.

Because we felt responsible for every child in Newark, we engaged all families, charter and district, with equal vigor. This was a good and mission-aligned approach, but it was almost impossible to execute, given the tensions (both perceived and very real) inherent in growing the charter footprint. The conundrum is perfectly exemplified by the mother who called in to ask me a question on-air during a local NPR show. She had just dropped off her kids at North Star Academy Charter School, she said, because she needed them to have access to excellence. At the same time, she was on her way to my office to picket against me on behalf of her nephew, who had lost his job as a school aide due to the smaller footprint of the district.

Our strategy all along was to be up front about failure and embrace accountability. Again, while our radical transparency seemed like a good idea on its face, it turned out that a lot of people don’t want to hear their school is failing—no matter how carefully crafted the message. We prioritized students who were at the back of the line. Our universal enrollment system gave preference to students from the poorest neighborhoods and those with disabilities. We revamped the magnet school admissions process to look at multiple factors for student admissions at the central office. These were good decisions for children, families, and equity, but it also put us in the crosshairs of power brokers who were used to getting what they wanted and considered coveted seats theirs to give out. They also had access to the biggest microphones and would use them to mobilize the community against our efforts.

Some charter school operators and their supporters mobilized their constituents in opposition to these citywide efforts as well. They wanted to grow where they wanted to grow, not necessarily in alignment with supply-and-demand patterns or the overall plan.

Charters weren’t the only group stuck in their own goals and plans—and at least most of their concerns were in service of building quality schools. School-based partners and vendors, local nonprofits, funders, and other leaders all had their individual projects, schools, and pet issues. The incentives to keep doing one’s own thing were profound. I was stuck in a daily loop of explicit and often threatening demands to support individual agendas—many of them having nothing to do with what was best for individual neighborhoods and schools, let alone the collective.

We had to find a way for the idea of choice to lift all boats, but it wasn’t happening—and it can’t happen without good public policy and collective action. I’ve had many school choice advocates dispute this. Some will have you believe that the mere presence of competition somehow magically raises everyone’s game. It certainly didn’t happen that way in Newark, nor in the dozens of systems I have worked in since. The One Newark plan should have been envisioned before the unintended consequences were at our doorstep. Maybe that would have given us more time.

I also made mistakes. My messages were not straightforward and sticky enough. This work, as you can see, is complex and multifaceted, and I could have paid more attention to how to ensure good, proactive, community-friendly communication.

More critically, I needed to develop a more sophisticated understanding of how to see the community in relation to the system of schools. In Figure 1, the center is the school, and the next level out is the families and students. The next ring is influencers—folks connected to the school who have direct influence on that specific school. The next ring is community-wide partners—community-based agencies and other city agencies like police and child welfare. And the outermost ring is elected officials and power brokers—for instance, pastors of large congregations, thought leaders, and community-based organizations serving the city.

Figure 1: The community in relation to the system of schools

We knew it was critical to focus on our families and students, and we knew it was a tremendous amount of our work to build collective action focused on them. I give us high marks for our dogged and strategic work on the red ring. But in retrospect, we spent far too much time with folks in the outermost ring—the political and power class—and not enough with those in the orange. It wasn’t until nearer the end of my tenure that we started to create a database for each individual school’s orange ring. I came to realize a hard lesson—that while the politicians and power brokers confidently spoke for the community, they were often after a political win: a contract, a coveted spot in a school, a policy, or a job for a family member or friend. I wish I could take precious minutes I spent with those in the green ring and reinvest them in the orange ring.

The painful but informative experiences I had in Newark, along with a long career since then of working with systems leaders across the country, have convinced me that collective action is the missing link for change at the systems and community levels. Too often, we interchange concepts of true grassroots organizing and community engagement and sidestep the obvious truth that power brokers and special interest groups have an organized, well-resourced, and often outsized influence on speaking for the community.

Conclusion

The insights I’ve shared above are not based on any specific ideology. They were developed out of necessity and refined through years of application and practice across a wide variety of settings—from New York to California and many places in between, in both districts and charter networks, in small school communities, and in the largest cities and states.

It may seem like a lot to tackle, and indeed it is. But if we are to truly transform our systems at scale, we can’t simply cling to one specific ingredient or hew to a single governance ideology. The surest way to avoid bias and ensure a holistic strategy is to zoom out to the community-level goal. Make the community—not just one school, network, neighborhood, or district—the unit of change.

The story of Newark should push all of us to define the role of the “system” and why it is so critical and yet so difficult to fulfill that mandate for an entire community. In short: the system should manage the incentives, policies, guardrails, and resources to ensure that every child has access to a high-quality school by doing four things.

Enable “Four-Ingredient schools. As discussed above, we the value of a game-changing principal in every school and an excellent educator in every classroom; the impact of high-quality instructional materials that are culturally competent; the research on school culture and handling discipline; and what conditions have to be in place to enable achievement. Systems leaders should set direction and advocate; procure best-in-class materials; set policy to incentivize districts, schools, and charter management organizations to implement what we know works; and sanction practices antithetical to student progress.

Ensure quality and equity. The paradigm of districts versus charters sadly guarantees that many kids—particularly those with the most challenges—are left behind. Policymakers and community leaders should be held accountable when they allow kids and families to fall through the cracks. Leaders need to be accountable for ensuring all kids access high-quality schools. Our new accountability systems should correct for mistakes we made before, from focusing only on proficiency and meaningless graduation rates to treating growth, college-readiness, and retention as critical outcome measures.

Break bureaucracy. A fundamental way to clear a runway for accelerated school improvement is to actively tear down past practices and federal, state, and local policies that block individual schools from innovating. We need more of a “whiteboard” approach than one that tweaks decades of dysfunction. Policymakers and community leaders need to wake up every day wondering what they can do to ensure that people running schools have the time to do the right thing as opposed to managing byzantine policies and procedures from competing departments.

Create cross-system and community-based solutions. The students who face the most challenges have generally been failed by multiple systems. Statistically, they are likely to be students of color. Too often they are labeled “special populations” and further marginalized out of classrooms and into separate and unequal programs. To truly reverse patterns for students that systems have failed the most, we need cross-agency and community-based solutions with school success at the core: more out-of-the-box ideas to aggregate services and help students who are the most vulnerable succeed.

I share these ideas and epiphanies humbly and with tremendous gratitude to the countless friends, colleagues, and mentors in this sector who helped shape my beliefs about this work. It’s been more than a decade since I arrived in Newark and forty years since A Nation at Risk. My hope is that we’ve all gained a bit of useful perspective and are ready to roll up our sleeves and put the lessons we’ve learned into action.

Cami Anderson was superintendent of Newark Public schools from 2011 to 2014. She is the Founder and CEO of ThirdWay Solutions.

Excerpted from a chapter of A Nation At Risk +40: A Review of Progress in US Public Education, a collection of essays published by the Hoover Institution that reflects on education reform in the four decades since the landmark 1983 report.

In 1988, Xerox CEO David Kearns co-authored a book titled Winning the Brain Race: A Bold Plan to Make Our Schools Competitive. Three years later, Kearns became deputy secretary of education under President George H. W. Bush. Three years after that, IBM CEO Lou Gerstner co-authored Reinventing Education: Entrepreneurship in America’s Public Schools, a book summarizing and synthesizing promising programs and practices developed by schools that had received innovation grants from RJR Nabisco. In 1996, Gerstner hosted the National Governor’s Association (NGA) at IBM’s headquarters in New York for an education summit where 43 governors, each accompanied by a CEO from their home states, discussed K–12 education standards. A direct outgrowth of that gathering was the creation of Achieve, a joint education reform project of the NGA and corporate executives, which Gerstner co-chaired until 2002. In 2003, Gerstner established and chaired the Teaching Commission, composed of education and business leaders, which published the report Teaching at Risk: A Call to Action.

Viewed through the prism of 2024, this brief retrospective on the engagement of two prominent CEOs in national K–12 education improvement and reform feels like a dim memory from a distant past. This is not to say there aren’t CEOs today who care deeply about education quality and equity, especially when it comes to career readiness. As just one example, Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, has been a committed advocate and supporter of career pathways and work-based learning through the company’s New Skills for Youth initiative. But there are few if any voices from the C-suite who have committed their own time and their company’s brand and resources to the broad-based challenges that continue to confront our public school system.

The K–12 education challenges we face today and their implications for the long-term health of the economy are just as important as they were 40 years ago, maybe even more so. Yet corporate leaders are largely missing in action, and the silence is deafening.

To be sure, wealthy entrepreneurs and investors played an outsized role in the education reform movement of the 1990s and early 2000s, but mostly through their personal philanthropy and the resources of their family foundations, not their corporations. People such as Bill Gates, Mike Bloomberg, Eli Broad, Michael Dell, John Walton, Mark Zuckerberg, John Doerr, and Julian Robertson mobilized billions of dollars to support national and local initiatives such as small high schools, charter schools, academic standards, digital learning, alternative pathways to teaching, and performance-based compensation.

Many of these investments have had a meaningful and lasting positive impact, but others were false starts or dead ends, and some drew significant blowback from teachers unions and civil rights activists. Although these funders remain engaged in improving public education, they have generally lowered their profiles, re-evaluated their strategies, and narrowed their focus.

Era of Engagement

In the aftermath of the 1983 report A Nation at Risk, business leadership was not just a hallmark of the national education-policy landscape; it was also a crucial driver of state and local school reforms. In my home state of Massachusetts, Jack Rennie, CEO of Pacer Systems, formed the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education. At first, MBAE set out to highlight the low levels of achievement and improvement in the commonwealth’s public schools, especially in low-income urban neighborhoods, and to develop a set of policy recommendations based on effective practices from across the country and around the world, culminating in a 1991 report titled Every Child a Winner.

But Rennie didn’t just write a report. He organized his peers from around the state, in collaboration with other CEO-led organizations, such as the Massachusetts Business Roundtable and Associated Industries of Massachusetts, along with major employers such as State Street Bank and Raytheon, to launch a relentless campaign to pass what became the Education Reform Act of 1993. Equally important, Rennie kept the organization alive after the law’s passage to ensure the legislature and administration followed through on their commitments to develop state standards, student assessments, and school accountability systems, and to increase overall state funding, especially to the commonwealth’s highest-need communities.

Preceding MBAE, but with a more local focus, was the Boston Private Industry Council. Originally established to implement federal job-training programs, the Council soon became a forum for broader business engagement with the Boston Public Schools, ultimately leading to the signing of the Boston Compact in 1982, through the leadership of State Street chairman Bill Edgerly. The Compact, which committed local businesses to hiring more of Boston’s public school students and graduates in exchange for improvements in education quality, gave the city’s business leaders a seat at the table in setting and implementing district priorities. Ten years later, Edgerly walked the halls of the Massachusetts State House to ensure that a charter school provision was included in the landmark Education Reform Act.

Similar stories of active and effective engagement by key business leaders in public education were not uncommon in the not-too-distant past. A 1998 study from the National Education Goals Panel, a presidential advisory body, highlighted the impact of the business community on the strong learning gains in Texas and North Carolina, which posted the nation’s biggest increases in NAEP scores between 1990 and 1997. The study found that rising academic achievement in both states was tied to their systems of standards-based accountability, combined with a relaxation of many state mandates and the transfer of more decisionmaking to the school level. Crucial to the adoption and implementation of these reforms was support from business leaders.

“In both states the business community played a critical role in developing the strategic plan for reform, forging compromises whenever possible with the education interests, and passing the necessary legislation,” wrote authors David Grissmer and Ann Flanagan in the panel’s report. The sector’s influence stemmed from the efforts of “a handful of businessmen in each state who devoted considerable time and energy to learning the education issues, forming relationships with key stakeholders and remain[ing] involved over long time periods.”

The active involvement of business in education policymaking during the 1980s and ’90s was a revival from an earlier age. The mid- to late-1960s and the 1970s saw a precipitous withdrawal, but before then, business leaders were seen as key stakeholders in the public education system at all levels, working to increase overall education attainment and develop vocational programs as well as serving on and often leading local school boards. Business engagement intensified during the Cold War, as post-Sputnik America placed new urgency on strengthening the overall quality of public schools, and especially science education.

With the onset of school desegregation and other broad cultural shifts, however, business leaders began to revisit their cost-benefit calculations and concluded that the risk of political controversy outweighed the potential for positive effect. According to a 1991 study from the Committee for Economic Development, “over a period of only a few years business’s influence was eclipsed, and its representatives were less and less prominent in the deliberations about local educational policy and rarely involved in the development of important new state and federal educational roles.”

The retreat from education didn’t last, however, as rapid technological change and growing global competition, especially from Japan, put the shortcomings of public schools back onto the front pages of the business magazines. Concerns about competitiveness re-engaged business leaders, which in turn got the attention of politicians. When the idea for creating a blue-ribbon commission on education was first surfaced within the Reagan administration in 1981, the White House reportedly wanted no part of it. But by the time A Nation at Risk was issued two years later, with its dire warning that “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people,” the president was fully on board.

“Knowledge, learning, information, and skilled intelligence are the new raw materials of international commerce,” the report asserted. “If only to keep and improve on the slim competitive edge we still retain in world markets, we must dedicate ourselves to the reform of our educational system.”

Retreat from Public Involvement

Forty years later, the nature and extent of global competition has only increased, now with China (a geopolitical adversary) rather than Japan (an ally) as the leading challenger to American dominance. Similarly, the pace of technological change and diffusion has only accelerated, and the centrality of knowledge-based workers to the innovation that drives economic growth and wealth creation is beyond dispute. Equally important, the ongoing Baby Boomer retirement wave and growing diversity of the American workforce has sharpened the business case for closing persistent achievement and attainment gaps.

At the same time, in the wake of Covid-19 the country is facing an unprecedented education crisis that has produced the most precipitous decline in academic achievement we’ve ever seen, which is likely to reverberate throughout the economy for years to come.

And yet, with all of these factors threatening the long-term health of the American economy, today’s business leaders tend to shy away from public involvement in the core challenges of K–12 education. The causes of this disengagement vary from company to company and place to place, but some patterns have emerged.

One factor is simply generational change in corner offices. The cohort of senior executives who were involved in the early days of the current education-reform movement retired years ago, and the memory of pre-reform conditions is gone with them. As a result, today’s business leaders have little understanding of what K–12 education would look like if the basic architecture of standards-based reform were to fade away.

Compounding the problem is the consolidation and globalization of many industries that previously had a stronger local presence and a concomitant dependence on a local workforce. Companies whose histories and identities had once been deeply rooted in a state or region now have headquarters in other parts of the country or in different countries altogether. The banking industry, which has traditionally played a leading role in business-government relations at a state and local level, has been especially affected by this trend, resulting in a 70 percent reduction in the number of independent banks since 1990.

CEOs who had once been pillars of communities where they had grown up and raised their families have been replaced by senior vice presidents and general managers who are recent arrivals, without the relationships or long-term commitments that motivate and enable effective public engagement. Equally important, as managers of subsidiaries or divisions, the current generation of local business leaders may simply lack the authority to act on their own.

This consolidation has not produced a new generation of respected national business leaders who have credibility with the American public, the way earlier CEOs like Kearns and Gerstner did. Americans have always had a love-hate relationship with corporate executives, but as the “commanding heights” of industry have shifted from hardware and manufacturing to software and social media, the average citizen has taken an increasingly jaundiced view of their good intentions. According to a recent Gallup poll gauging Americans’ confidence in institutions, only 14 percent of the public has “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in big business, down about half since the beginning of this century and lower than all other institutions except the U.S. Congress.

Another reason that K–12 education has drifted down the list of priorities for business leaders is that there is no compelling and actionable policy agenda around which they can coalesce and mobilize. This is in part a result of past success. The foundations of education reform that the business community embraced in the 1980s and ’90s are largely still in place, even though they may be under threat or fraying around the edges. Advocating for programs or practices that have the potential to improve student outcomes is a less comfortable role for business leaders to play, since they typically believe the details of teaching and learning should be left to the experts and educators.

The other side of the coin is the frustration that many executives feel at the slow pace of change and improvement. Some of the major recommendations from A Nation at Risk and subsequently from the business community—such as longer school days and school years, merit-based pay for teachers, and certifications in high-demand STEM fields—have not been implemented at any meaningful scale. The reforms that have been adopted, such as common academic standards, statewide student assessments, and school accountability systems, are widely perceived to have not moved the needle, even though a closer look at the data suggests they have had a significant positive effect.

According to Tom Kane, professor of education and economics at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and director of the Center for Education Policy Research, standards-based education reform has produced achievement and equity gains that may amount to “the most important social policy success of the last half century.” Still, the results have not met the unrealistic expectations of many reform advocates, funders, and policymakers.

The perception of underwhelming progress has led some wealthy business leaders to shift their personal attention more toward expanding parental choice, through mechanisms such as charter schools and vouchers, rather than investing more time and resources with school districts, often out of a growing skepticism that significant systemic change is even possible. These outside-the-system strategies are seen as having a more immediate and sustainable impact on student outcomes, especially in low-income urban communities, with the potential to generate productive competitive pressure over time on neighboring school districts.

Perhaps the most important factor driving the retreat of the business community has been the end of the spirit of bipartisanship that was the hallmark of education policy for almost 30 years, which had created a safe space for business leaders to stand. If George W. Bush and Ted Kennedy can join hands to pass the No Child Left Behind Act, then surely there’s little risk to a business in joining the team. Unfortunately, the era of good feelings didn’t last, with the last straw for many being the controversy surrounding Race to the Top and Common Core.

Things have since gone from bad to worse, with education not only dividing politicians along party lines but dividing friends and neighbors over issues such as remote learning, Covid vaccines, mask mandates, and culture wars related to race and gender identity. In some instances, these flashpoints have even created internal management challenges for corporate executives or generated protests and boycotts from otherwise loyal customers.

The bottom line is that most business leaders and business associations no longer believe the rewards of getting involved in K–12 education policy are worth the risk.

This does not mean that employers have walked away from education entirely. Instead, they have tended to focus on less-controversial aspects that have a greater direct impact on business or that speak to specific areas of expertise. For example, businesses have actively supported development of tech-enabled innovations in digital learning and have promoted expansion and improvement of project-based, hands-on STEM programs, including computer science, at all grade levels. They have also championed investments in vocational-technical high schools and the development of career pathways with work-based learning experiences and industry-recognized certifications. Most of these initiatives place a priority on so-called “durable skills,” an updated version of “21st century skills,” which concern nonacademic domains such as communication, problem solving, and teamwork.

Businesses have also shifted their attention to both ends of the K–12 spectrum by supporting increased funding for childcare and the strengthening of post-secondary or so-called “last mile” skill-based credential programs. The former addresses the growing needs of the post-Covid hybrid workforce, with many working parents in need of affordable day care. The latter aims to create a talent pipeline for specific high-demand occupations—neither of which has much impact on public schools.

These issues are worthy of attention from the business sector, and many of them align closely with the interests of individual businesses and the economy as a whole. Nevertheless, there is a risk that by avoiding direct engagement with the core of K–12 education, business leaders will just be doing damage control rather than supporting and sustaining the broad-based change and improvement that’s needed.

Even more problematic is the possibility that while employers are trying to work around the system’s weaknesses, the increasingly shaky support for standards-based reform that has held over the past several decades will crumble under fire from opponents.

Exhibit A is a pending union-led ballot initiative in Massachusetts that would eliminate the 10th-grade standardized exam from the state’s graduation requirements. Although the ballot question would not repeal all state testing requirements, it would be the first step in rolling back the standards-based accountability system that was enshrined in the 1993 Education Reform Act. If this proposal succeeds at the ballot box or in the legislature, the Massachusetts Teachers Association predicts “the 30-year experiment with test, punish and privatize will end.”

A similar movement is afoot in Oregon, where the state board of education has extended through 2029 its Covid-era suspension of statewide assessments as part of the high school graduation requirements. The legislature has further mandated that all families be informed of their right to withdraw their children from state testing, resulting in one-third of Oregon’s juniors opting out.

An Urgent Need

Notwithstanding these unsettling trends, the basic components of education reform remain popular with the general public. For example, over 70 percent of Americans still favor annual testing in reading and math, according to the 2022 Education Next opinion survey. But that support is becoming more uneven and more divided along partisan lines—which is to say, the pragmatic center is holding, but it’s tenuous.

At the same time, legislators and other policymakers who were “present at the creation” are now long gone, as is the institutional memory of what life was like pre-reform. Many newer public officials have heard little but the steady drumbeat of opposition, mainly from teachers unions and superintendents but also from critics on the right who were activated by the curriculum controversies during the Obama administration and who continue to be skeptical of government mandates.

Even many of the education and advocacy organizations that were established in the wake of the reform movement have faded into the background of public discourse, partly in response to the changing priorities of their philanthropic funders but also out of deference to those who have caricatured education reform as either another brick in the wall of structural racism or an obstacle to parents’ rights.

In other words, there is a mismatch between broad public opinion and the mobilized constituencies. Since it’s the advocates who walk the halls of power, show up at hearings, and hold signs on street corners, many elected officials hesitate to expend political capital defending a system they did not create.

Recently, reform-minded organizations have tried to revive the bipartisan consensus that characterized education policymaking until the last decade. The most notable example is the Building Bridges Initiative, which in 2023 produced an updated call to action titled A Generation at Risk. In addition, policy and advocacy organizations such as 50CAN, Education Reform Now, the PIE Network, the Fordham Institute, ExcelinEd, The Education Trust, and the National Parents Union are continuing to fight the good fight. Nevertheless, there is a large hole in the ecosystem that only the business community can fill.

More specifically, there is an urgent need for business leaders, CEOs in particular, to re-engage at the national and local level and reprioritize K–12 education, especially with regard to state policy. The first order of business will be to affirm the basic architecture of academic standards, statewide student assessments, and performance-based accountability, in order to prevent backsliding and a return to the pre-reform conditions described in A Nation at Risk. Essential to this defense is countering the popular narrative that standards-based reform has been a failure by pointing to the strong evidence of its efficacy and positive impact.

Equally important is expanding the business community’s programmatic focus beyond STEM and career-oriented education to include a broader set of scalable initiatives across the K–12 spectrum, including both district and charter schools, such as:

Addressing the post-Covid student absenteeism crisis through enforcement of attendance policies, effective communications with parents and the general public, and proactive strategies for re-engaging students.

Improving early literacy through the science of reading, including systematic phonics and vocabulary instruction, along with exposure to a broad base of content knowledge.

Accelerating learning gains and closing achievement gaps through high-dosage reading and math tutoring embedded in the school day.

Increasing post-secondary access and success through early college cohort pathways (more than just individual dual enrollment), focused on first-generation students.

Expanding and improving out-of-school time learning through academic “acceleration” programs during school vacations and intentional summer experiences that combine learning with fun, enrichment, and work.

Deepening and diversifying the pipeline of well-prepared teachers and school leaders.

Investing in innovation and research to drive evidence-based continuous improvement in our schools.

One of the lessons of the past several decades is that policy solutions by themselves are not enough to fuel continuous improvement and reduce disparities in achievement; changes in practice are also required, and business needs to have a seat at the table as one of the public education system’s key stakeholders and customers—not just as a cheerleader, but as a full partner.

I don’t mean to suggest that these are the simple answers to a complex problem or that these initiatives are easy to implement with fidelity and high-quality at large scale. But they are a place to start, with a strong body of evidence supporting their efficacy and growing interest and support on the part of educators, students, and families.

As an added benefit, by advocating for doing more of what’s working, business leaders may be able to revive a sense of optimism about what public schools can do—and give policymakers and parents something to talk about other than the cultural battles that have roiled legislatures and school boards across the country.

Re-engagement must include working collaboratively with local public schools and districts to add value in the classroom or the back office, not only to make a positive and practical contribution, but also to affirm good faith, because unfortunately, many educators view businesses with suspicion and assume some hidden agenda.

It also means getting involved in policymaking at the local level, through active engagement with municipal or county officials and school boards, to make sure they know that school quality matters to local businesses and that employers are prepared to publicly support education leaders or, if necessary, call them out.

But local efforts are not enough, because state governments control much of education policy and many resources. Critical to an effective state-level re-engagement is strengthening and expanding the network of state-based, business-led education coalitions, such as the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education, Colorado Succeeds, and Tennessee SCORE, which not only cut across industry sectors but also work in close partnership with community-based organizations and parent groups.

Of course, collaboration is never easy, even among businesses in the same industry, let alone across a diverse regional economy. Throw in the added complexity of working with grassroots advocates and nonprofit organizations, and you can see why many corporate executives would prefer to focus on meeting next quarter’s earnings forecast. At the same time, collective action can provide safety in numbers to mitigate some of the risks while greatly improving the chances for success.

Although most of the action in education occurs in the states, there is a critical role for business leadership at the national level: to create a broader public agenda and narrative, mobilize resources, and help support and coordinate local initiatives. A new generation of leadership is needed to galvanize and guide executives around the country in making K–12 education a top priority in their own communities, just as David Kearns and Lou Gerstner did in the 1980s and ’90s.

Public education is not a business. It’s an inherently political institution whose educators and leaders have to play by a set of rules they don’t control and answer to multiple stakeholders, including elected officials, who often have sharply conflicting ideas and interests. Public education is not susceptible to quick changes in strategy or structure, let alone quick fixes. And it’s not for people who have thin skin or are looking for the thanks of a grateful nation.

All in all, the value proposition may not sound too good to business leaders. But at the end of the day, there may be no more important long-term contribution these men and women can make to their communities and the economy than to get involved, get organized, and get back into the K–12 arena.

James A. Peyser served as secretary of education for Massachusetts from 2015–2022 and as chairman of the state board of education from 1999–2006. He is currently a senior adviser with Bellwether and America Achieves.

This article appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Peyser, J.A. (2024). Bringing Business Leaders Back to School. Education Next, 24(2), 38-45.

For decades, the Democrats were “the party of education,” ringing up double-digit leads in polls asking Americans which major party they trusted most to handle education. During parts of the Clinton and Obama presidencies, that lead topped 30 points. Now, though, the Dems’ edge has shrunk to just a few points, with the occasional poll showing Republicans nosing ahead. Even so, an increasing share of voters have confidence in neither party when it comes to education.

What’s going on, and how should the parties respond? As we enter a hotly-contested election cycle, Education Next asked a few prominent thinkers to examine the dynamics behind the Democrats’ fall from grace and offer advice to the two parties on how they should shape their education agenda. On the left, Ruy Teixeira, author of The Emerging Democratic Majority and last year’s Where Have All the Democrats Gone?, sketches a path forward for Democrats. And on the right, Frederick Hess and Michael McShane, co-authors of the new book Getting Education Right: A Conservative Vision for Improving Early Childhood, K–12, and College, explain what it’ll take for Republicans to seize the opportunity before them.

Republicans Have a Chance to Unite the Party on Education

By Frederick M. Hess and Michael Q. McShane

Voter trust in Democrats on education has plunged to the lowest level in memory, after years of school closures, critical race theory, gender radicalism, student-loan forgiveness, and campus craziness. Yet, in the face of brewing discontent—as the party of government, spending, teachers unions, and the faculty lounge—they find themselves mostly promising to subsidize an unhappy status quo. This gives the Right—unburdened by ties with unions, public bureaucracies, and the academy—a historic opportunity to defend shared values, empower students and families, and rethink outdated arrangements.

When push comes to shove, though, Republicans have struggled to offer practical solutions. Especially over the past decade, their agenda has mostly been a drumbeat of platitudes: school choice, free speech on campus, resisting wokeism, and keeping Washington out. More choice, less Washington is a sensible mantra, but a mantra isn’t enough.

The fact that the go-to promise for GOP presidential candidates is “abolishing the Department of Education”—a 44-year-old, detail-free pledge that’s proven an exercise in empty posturing—underscores how much more is needed. (Practically speaking, the department is a holding tank for tens of billions in Congressionally mandated federal programs. “Abolishing” it wouldn’t accomplish much unless those programs were also addressed.) The real question is how Republicans plan to approach student lending, early childhood, culture clashes, credentialing, and other concerns. More on all that in a moment.

First, though, let’s confront the elephant in the room: former president Donald Trump, who seems likely to head the GOP ticket in 2024. It’s no great revelation to note that Trump approaches policy as performance art—with views an inch deep and inconstant. Education policy under a second Trump administration would depend on appointees and on which side of the bed Trump woke up that morning. Moreover, even if Trump returns to the White House, his prior tenure made clear that his attention to education is likely to be sporadic and fleeting. This all makes it less useful to focus on the standard-bearer than on the standard.

Now, we’re not political prognosticators. As we write, there’s still a long-shot chance that former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley might somehow claim the nomination. But whatever happens in the primaries, Republicans need a more coherent, robust, and winning agenda. What does that agenda look like?

It starts with broadly shared values and translates those into actions that address kitchen-table concerns. The intriguing opportunity here is that education may be one of the few areas where the fierce split between Trump’s populists and Reaganite conservatives can be most readily bridged. Both camps are skeptical of teachers unions, the college cartel, and calls to supersize Washington’s role in education. Both support empowering parents, want schools to embrace notions like merit and hard work, and believe borrowers should repay federal student loans.

The familiar narrative of our culture clashes can be misleading: while the legacy media does its best to dance around the fact, the broad public tends to lean right on hot-button value debates.

According to a recent Gallup poll, two-thirds of Americans are “extremely” or “very” proud to be American. The call for schools to embrace the jaundiced, “America the ‘Slavocracy’” view of history sketched by far-left icons such as Ibram X. Kendi and Nikole Hannah-Jones resonates with only a small (if vocal) community of academic elites and blue-state agitators. More than 90 percent of Democrats and Republicans alike agree that “all students should learn about how the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution advanced freedom and equality” and that “throughout our history, Americans have made incredible achievements and ugly errors.” And, as University of Alabama political scientist George Hawley, author of Conservatism in a Divided America, has documented, Republican voters have grown steadily more supportive of racial and religious minorities since 2000.

While the media made hay over Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law (a moniker they created themselves), Florida voters supported it by a margin of 61 percent to 26 percent when polled on the actual substance of the bill (which barred discussion of gender and sexuality in a non-age-appropriate manner in K–3 classrooms). In addition, more than two-thirds of Americans think that student-athletes should play on the team that matches their biological sex. Republicans are on principled, popular ground when they fight to allow students to play on sports teams, use locker rooms, and sleep in dormitories that reflect their biological sex.

This broad agreement carries over to another area that Republicans should lean into: promoting excellence, rigor, and merit.

Talk about an easy sell. More than 80 percent of Americans say standardized tests such as the SAT and the ACT should factor into college admissions, and 94 percent think that hard work is important. Republicans should defend advanced instruction, gifted programs, hard work, and the importance of earned success. California recently approved new math standards that recommend postponing advanced math classes until high school, and Oregon has paused its requirement that students demonstrate literacy and numeracy to graduate. As these trends continue in blue states and cities, red state leaders should be highlighting the achievements of students in magnet schools and working to help more students access advanced coursework in high school.

Of course, Republicans struggled in 2022 and 2023 despite favorable conditions, especially in purple and blue states. They alienated suburban centrist voters with lousy candidates, a refusal to denounce Trump’s offenses and conspiracy-mongering, and a stance on abortion at odds with post-Dobbs public sentiment. In short, Republicans have shown themselves prone to fumbling away opportunities. Doing better will require shrugging off slogan-driven groupthink in favor of workable solutions to practical concerns.

There’s a world of difference, for instance, between arguing that pornographic books on gender identity don’t belong in middle school libraries and trying to bar high school seniors from reading Beloved. If Republicans don’t firmly draw that line, they’ll be successfully (and perhaps justifiably) tagged as “book banners.” The same distinction holds for critical race theory: it must be made clear that stopping schools from imposing race-based affinity groups or promoting DEI-inspired racial caricatures via worksheets on “white privilege” is not intended to stymie history teachers from delving into hard questions about race relations in America. Republicans must do a better job of appreciating and making these distinctions.

What to Do?

The reason we’ve focused first on “culture war” issues is that education is deeply entangled with questions of core values. (A reluctance to confront this, we think, helped undermine well-meaning reform efforts in recent decades.) But Republicans must translate shared values into appealing principles. We’d start with four principles that span the schism between populists and Reaganite conservatives and that have allowed Republican governors as ideologically and temperamentally diverse as Ohio’s Mike DeWine, Arkansas’s Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Virginia’s Glenn Youngkin, Iowa’s Kim Reynolds, and Florida’s Ron DeSantis to rack up big, popular successes:

Extend choice in K–12 education. The political case for parental choice has never been stronger. Especially after the pandemic, broad majorities of voters support an array of choice options. Yet the traditional case for school choice is limited by the fact that the lion’s share of parents like their own child’s school. The way to square this circle is by recognizing that even “satisfied” parents want more options, ranging from phonics-based reading instruction to a blend of home-based and in-school learning. Focus on maximizing options for all families (via education savings accounts, course access, charter schooling, and more), not on soundbites about blowing up “failing” local public-school systems.

Promote transparency. Parental empowerment requires equipping parents with choices—but these choices mean little without transparency. State reading and math tests are crucial, especially in an era of grade inflation and “grading for equity” that can make it hard to know how students are faring. Transparency also requires helping parents know what their child is being taught and by what name teachers are addressing them. (Today, simply trying to ascertain such things can subject parents to harassment and vilification.) Republicans should support policies that require parental notification and consent before schools administer intrusive surveys or transition a student’s gender identification in class.

Be the party of reading and math. After decades during which junk science and education-school ideologues shaped the nation’s approach to reading, support for research-based reading instruction is surging—with happy results. This has been driven by policymakers willing to take on education schools and their progressive dogma. A similar effort is needed in math, where the devotees of the newest “new math” argue that kids don’t need to know computation (see “California’s New Math Framework Doesn’t Add Up,” features, Fall 2023), correct answers don’t matter, and advanced math is racist. GOP governors should lean into these fights, demanding that schools, teacher training programs, and curriculum designers heed the science on reading and the fundamentals of math. In Washington, Republicans should make clear that federal funds will be directed to programs that actually work.

Broaden pathways to employment. There’s widespread enthusiasm for better, more useful career and technical education. This is fueled both by concerns about the cost of college and by the sense that college today is, for too many, less a source of opportunity than an expensive hurdle to employment. Today, even for jobs like manning a rental-car counter, employers routinely treat college degrees as an all-purpose hiring credential. This can be addressed by improving career and technical education and by reforming the legal and policy conditions that lead employers to put more weight on paper credentials than on knowledge, experience, and skills. While there are well-established legal perils when relying on other more-precise hiring tests, the courts have turned a blind eye when employers use degrees in that same fashion. This asymmetry has turned higher education from a potentially useful avenue to acquire valuable skills into a mandatory exercise in ticket-punching. Across the land, Republican governors and mayors should join the growing list of their peers who have removed degree requirements for many or most state jobs. In Washington, it’s worth revisiting statutes and regulations regarding the use of degrees and working with employer organizations to develop and validate hiring tests that will pass judicial muster.

Parents are profoundly practical people. They’re not interested in abstractions when it comes to their own kids. That’s why school choice took off in the wake of the pandemic; it was no longer a theoretical exercise but a response to maddening, overwhelming frustration. As noted earlier, education is an area where there are straightforward, principled ways to appeal to populists and traditionalists alike. We think that’s very much a consequence of practicality. For instance, the focus on excellence and transparency can address both populist frustration with politicization and traditionalist concerns about academic achievement. Expanding pathways to employment appeals both to traditionalists worried about workforce needs and populists eager to shrink the footprint of colleges they view as indoctrination factories.

Opportunity Knocks

This is only a start, of course. Republicans have been mostly playing defense on several issues where it’s time for them to get off their heels and take the lead.

Student-loan forgiveness was a bit of progressive dogma that candidate Joe Biden did not embrace during the campaign, but as president he promoted an illegal half-trillion-dollar giveaway to the advantaged and the affluent. Republicans have done well to call out this “solution” for what it is: an expensive way to fuel college price hikes, encourage students to take on more debt, and treat taxpayers like suckers.

At the same time, the underlying problem of college costs is real and absolutely needs to be addressed. State officials who fund and oversee public universities should step up. They should champion efforts to reduce staff, boost teaching loads, and accelerate time-to-degree (such as by exploring three-year bachelor’s degrees). They should tackle a stifling accreditation system that protects mediocre incumbents and imposes prohibitive costs on potential new alternatives. They should demand good data on the costs and student outcomes of various institutions and degree programs. Federal officials should insist that colleges tapping federal student loans have “skin in the game,” repaying taxpayers when their former students default.

During his much-admired tenure as president of Purdue University, former Indiana governor Mitch Daniels managed to freeze tuition for over a decade. It can be done.

In early childhood education, President Biden tried to spend $400 billion to promote universal pre-K in his Build Back Better push, and Republicans successfully blocked the effort. They were right to do so, as it was going to be a giveaway to the unions and early-education advocates. It would have driven up the cost of care, needlessly bureaucratized early education, and ultimately dropped kids into impersonal centers—in other words, it would have created a de facto additional grade of elementary school.

That said, parents are frustrated with their early-childhood options. Childcare is expensive. It can be of suspect quality. It can be hard to find providers that align with parental schedules. Working parents who’d like to be home with their young children find themselves compelled to put their kids into center-based care.

In a party looking to attract parents, one would think that Republicans would muster a meaningful counterproposal. They did not. But that doesn’t mean that they cannot.

Republicans can embrace choice-based policies such as education savings accounts in early childhood education; nurture a rich array of community and work-based arrangements; reduce regulatory burdens that stymie faith-based and low-cost providers; and ensure that funding doesn’t penalize families that choose “family, friend, or neighbor” care.

Then there’s the fraught relationship between the GOP and the individuals whom Americans look to for guidance on schooling: the nation’s teachers. It’s remarkable, if you think about it, that conservatives—who tend to energetically support front-line public employees such as cops and who have a natural antipathy for bureaucrats and red tape—have had so much trouble connecting with teachers. Like police officers, teachers are well-liked local public servants frustrated by bureaucracy and paperwork.

Republicans who have stood up for parents troubled by bureaucratic malaise, cultural adventurism, and unsafe schools should extend those same intuitions to the nation’s teachers. They should champion discipline policies that keep teachers safe and classrooms manageable. They should fight to downsize bloated bureaucracy and shift those dollars into classrooms and teacher pay. They should challenge expensive and onerous licensing regimes that keep qualified and talented teachers out of the classroom. And they should make clear that with parental rights come parental responsibilities, which means parents partnering with teachers to ensure that their kids are in school, respecting their teachers, getting a good night’s sleep, and doing their homework.

This is an opportunity for a divided Republican party to reassure Americans that it is the steward of shared values. As it becomes more of a working-class party, the GOP has ever less reason to defer to the cultural pieties of education elites and ever more cause to insist that early childhood and higher education be accessible, affordable, cost-effective, and attuned to workforce realities. Education is the path to economic opportunity and moral fulfillment, and it’s an issue with deep symbolic resonance in American life. The GOP can win over new constituencies while signaling that the party is serious about inclusion and opportunity.

Republicans should work to empower families, defend broadly shared values, emphasize achievement, and challenge self-serving cartels. They should also strive to ensure that early childhood education is accessible, affordable, and anchored in communities. If Republicans do so, we predict that their efforts will become a case study in doing well by doing good.

Frederick Hess is director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and an executive editor of Education Next. Michael Q. McShane is the director of national research at EdChoice. Their latest book is Getting Education Right: A Conservative Vision for Improving Early Childhood, K–12, and College.

Democrats Should Focus on Education Issues that Matter to Voters

By Ruy Teixeira

Why are Democrats fumbling the issue of education, which they have dominated for many years? There are multiple reasons: they mishandled the Covid-related school closures, they are letting the culture wars distract from the core mission of schools, and they are downplaying the importance of merit and academic achievement. Before I discuss how the Dems could effect a turnaround, let’s dig deeper into these missteps and unfortunate trends.

The school closures went on way too long. Democrats, far more than Republicans, worked to keep public schools closed during the Covid pandemic—longer than in other advanced countries and far longer than was justified by emerging scientific understanding of the virus and its effects. Pushed by their allies in the teachers unions, Democrats ignored the justified warnings that extended school closures would severely harm student learning and social development, especially for poorer children. The returns are now in, and it is clear that the warnings Democrats ignored were, if anything, too mild.

This was no minor error made by Democratic officials in the fog of pandemic confusion but a profound tragedy for millions of children that could have been avoided or at least substantially mitigated. To add to the shameful episode, parents in many communities around the country who wanted the schools reopened faster were frequently demonized by progressives as heartless, anti-science right-wingers who didn’t care about public health. The wounds from this still fester today.

Privileging politics over pedagogy. The culture wars rage on in the schools. Democrats argue that it is all the fault of the Right, who they say wishes to “ban books,” prevent children from learning about slavery, and subject gay and transgender-identifying children to bullying and worse. Progressive educators and school systems, on the other hand, simply stand for a modern, inclusive education that no decent, unprejudiced person should oppose.

This is disingenuous in the extreme. Over the last decade, and especially after the George Floyd summer of 2020, there has been a concerted effort by many school systems and educators to promote “anti-racist” education that goes way beyond benign pedagogical practices such as teaching about slavery, Jim Crow, the Tulsa Race Massacre, redlining, and so on. Instead, pedagogy itself is to be infused, from top to bottom and in every subject, with concepts drawn from the anti-racist playbook. As noted by sociologist Ilana Redstone, these concepts include the assertion that “[a]n unwillingness to recognize the full force of systemic racism as determining disparities between groups is a denial of the reality of racism today (and evidence of ignorance at best and racism at worst).” An army of diversity, equity, and inclusion consultants have stood at the ready to assist school systems in training their staff and teachers to implement this creed and incorporate it into their curricula.

This is politics, not pedagogy as traditionally and properly understood. It has little to do with what most parents want schools to do: develop their children’s academic skills and knowledge base so they can succeed in the world. Democrats have been hurt by their increasing identification with this ideological project rather than the traditional goals of public education.

Downgrading merit and educational achievement. Consistent with this ongoing politicization of educational practices, there has been a concomitant downgrading of academic merit and standard measures of educational achievement, especially standardized tests. In the name of fairness and “equity,” school systems in Democratic-controlled states and counties have taken steps to de-emphasize such measures as a means of evaluating students and controlling admissions to advanced courses, programs, and elite schools.

It hasn’t quite reached the “all shall have prizes” stage, but the message to aspiring students and parents who see educational achievement as their route to upward mobility and success in life is clear: students can no longer rely on hard work and objectively good academic performance to attain their goals (see “Your Neighborhood School Is a National Security Risk,” features, Winter 2024). Other priorities of the school system may take precedence, reducing the payoff from their performance. This does not sit well with most parents, who see it as public schools’ responsibility to encourage and reward their children’s talent and hard work. Democrats have been hurt by their diminishing association with what parents care about the most.

Getting Their Groove Back

In light of all this, is it possible for Democrats to regain their mojo on education during the 2024 election cycle? I think it is, though it will require changing their approach considerably from current practices. And it’s worth doing so. Even if education is not a central issue in the presidential contest, it is sure to loom large in many congressional, gubernatorial, and state legislative races.

Here’s how Democrats can decisively change their current image on education and rebuild their advantage on the issue.

Get ideology, whether from the Left or Right, out of schools. Voters are sick of the culture wars around schools. Overwhelmingly, they just want children to get a good education based on standard academic competencies, not instruction in a politically inflected worldview. Democrats must assure voters that the former is their number-one priority. Just as they oppose attempts from the Right to inject their ideology into schools by restricting critical discussion of American history and society, so they must also oppose efforts by those on the Left to impose their views on curricula and analysis of social issues. Neither is appropriate. The job of schools is to give students the tools to make informed judgments, not tell them what those judgments should be.

Articulating this point would signal to voters that Democratic politicians understand what the real priorities of schools should be. But they shouldn’t leave it at that. They should advocate the addition of something positive to schools—that is, to “teach kids what it means to be an American,” in the words of Albert Shanker, the pathbreaking president of the American Federation of Teachers in the late 20th century.

By doing so, Democrats could dissociate themselves from the jaundiced and divisive attitudes of many progressive activists and embrace instead an approach emphasizing what students have in common as Americans. As education scholar Richard Kahlenberg writes, civics instruction in public schools should embrace (or get back to) teaching

the core of the American Creed: the veneration of liberty and equality promised by the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. . . . The Declaration and Constitution provide, as the Fordham Institute notes, “a common framework for resolving our differences even as we respect them.” . . . In emphasizing America’s distinctive system of governance, students can appreciate a shared American identity focused on shared values that counters both right-wing white identity politics that sees only white Christians as “real Americans” and left-wing race essentialism that sees a person’s race, ethnicity, gender, and religion as far more important than what citizens have in common as Americans.

Maintain high achievement standards for all groups, even while seeking to close racial disparities. The Democrats have a merit problem, and that has infected their approach to schools and schooling. The traditional Democratic theory of the case ran like this: discrimination should be opposed and dismantled and resources provided to the disadvantaged so that everyone can fairly compete and achieve. Those who were meritorious would be rewarded; those who weren’t would not be.

Democrats have lost interest in the last part of their case, and that abandonment undermines their whole theory. Merit and objective measures of achievement are now viewed with suspicion as the outcomes of a hopelessly corrupt system, so rewards should instead be allocated on the basis of various criteria allegedly related to social justice. Instead of dismantling discrimination and providing assistance so that more people have the opportunity to acquire merit, the real solution is to worry less about merit and more about equal outcomes—“equity” in the parlance of our times.

But here’s what ordinary voters believe: “Racial achievement gaps are bad and we should seek to close them. However, they are not due just to racism, and standards of high achievement should be maintained for people of all races.” This statement was tested in a nationwide poll of more than 18,000 registered voters by RMG Research and elicited 74 percent agreement versus a mere 16 percent disagreement. In Wisconsin, the statement generated agreement by 91 percent of Republicans and 64 percent of Democrats.

Democratic politicians should fearlessly endorse this statement and assure voters that they are all about high standards, high achievement, and how they go together in successful schooling. Democrats should forthrightly oppose the watering down of academic standards in the name of equity and defend elite programs based on academic merit and rigorous tests. The latter is particularly important for reaching Asian voters and stopping the ongoing decline in their support for Democrats.

Provide more choice within the public school system. Public schools have been losing students lately to private schools and homeschooling, as misplaced priorities and academic failures in many public schools have some parents heading for the exits. That typically means they aren’t happy with the public school their child is assigned to. An obvious way to mitigate this problem is simply to give parents more choice of where they can send their child to school, through both more options within the local school system and a wider array of charter schools.

More choice is especially important for low-income parents whose children generally do not fare well when attending schools that lack a middle-class presence. This calls for a concerted effort to widen public school choice so that all low-income children have access to theme-based non-selective magnet schools, diverse-by-design charter schools, and other high-quality options that attract students across economic levels.

Democrats ignore parents’ interest in choice to their peril. Polling by Education Next shows support for choice options such as charter schools, universal vouchers, and vouchers for low-income families going up in recent years (see “Partisan Rifts Widen, Perceptions of School Quality Decline,” features, Winter 2023). This support is particularly strong among Hispanics, low-income households, and especially Blacks, who are the demographic group most interested in vouchers. If Democrats wish to counter GOP appeals to their most loyal constituency, they must convince these voters that their strong interest in more choice can be met within a reformed public school system.

Promote affirmative action by class, not race. In the wake of the June 2023 U.S. Supreme Court decision striking down race-conscious college admissions, Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison declared, “This is a devastating blow for racial justice and equality. . . . We condemn the Supreme Court’s decision to end these affirmative action policies and make it even more difficult for Americans to access higher education. While this decision is a setback . . . it is not the final word.”

This is exactly the wrong approach for Democrats to take. Rather than implicitly or explicitly pledging to resist the law of the land, they would be far wiser to use the decision as an opportunity to rebrand themselves as the party of America’s working class—the entire working class.

Start with the brutal fact that racial preferences are very unpopular. For instance, the spring 2023 SCOTUSPoll, sponsored by Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Texas, found 69 percent of the public agreeing that private colleges and universities should not be able to use race as a factor in admissions, compared to 31 percent who favored the practice. The same question about public colleges and universities elicited at 74–26 split. Pretty definitive.

Why is this? It’s very simple. Most voters, especially working-class voters, think racial preferences are not fair, and fairness is a fundamental part of their world outlook. They actually believe in Martin Luther King Jr.’s credo that people should “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” In a recent University of California Dornsife survey, this classic statement of colorblind equality was posed to respondents: “Our goal as a society should be to treat all people the same without regard to the color of their skin.” The sentiment elicited sky-high (92 percent) agreement from the public, despite the assaults on this idea from critical race theory and the likes of Ibram X. Kendi and large segments of the Democratic Left.

The way for Democrats to get back in touch with voters on this issue is clear: advocate replacing race-based affirmative action with class-based affirmative action, instead of overtly or covertly trying to preserve the former. Class-based affirmative action would boost proportionately more Black and Hispanic students than white ones, thereby making up at least part of the losses in Black and Hispanic representation that follow from eliminating race-based consideration.

But it would also boost some disadvantaged white students, and that would be a good thing, both substantively and politically. As President Barack Obama memorably put it in 2008: “I think that my daughters should probably be treated by any admissions officer as folks who are pretty advantaged. . . . I think that we should take into account [in admissions] white kids who have been disadvantaged and have grown up in poverty.” In other words, a Black kid who grew up in a poor neighborhood in Baltimore and a white kid who grew up in a shattered working class neighborhood in Ohio are both more deserving of a boost than upper-middle-class kids of whatever race.

That would strike most working-class voters as eminently fair. It is especially fair in light of the breathtaking lack of economic diversity at elite schools. That’s why it’s important to think of class-based affirmative action as not just a substitute for a race-based system that would accomplish some of the same goals. It would be in and of itself a step toward pushing back against the incredible class bias of elite education. As David Leonhardt put it in his New York Times column:

Economic diversity matters for its own sake: The dearth of lower-income students at many elite colleges is a sign that educational opportunity has been constrained for Americans of all races. To put it another way, economic factors such as household wealth are not valuable merely because they are a potential proxy for race; they are also a telling measure of disadvantage in their own right.

This approach could turn affirmative action from an issue that divides the working class into one that potentially unites it. Given how Democrats have been hemorrhaging working-class voters, this change of focus seems like a wise course of action.

Restoring Strength

Taken together, the four steps outlined here could decisively change the current Democratic brand on education, which is steadily losing altitude, into one that would restore their historic strength on the issue. To be sure, taking these steps would require some political courage, risking the wrath of the progressive activists who have helped power their success in recent low turnout, off-year elections. But 2024 will be a far different electoral environment where the views of activists will be less important and those of ordinary voters more so. Democrats would be wise to place their bets on the latter by taking these steps and charting a new course.

Ruy Teixeira is a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

This article appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Hess, F.M., McShane, M.Q., and Teixeira, R. (2024). The Party of Education in 2024: Will it be the Democrats? The Republicans? Or neither? Education Next, 24(2), 58-65.

Questions surrounding the application of Title IX to transgender students have been roiling education politics for nearly 10 years. In 2016, the Obama administration tried to settle one aspect of the issue without public input by declaring in a Dear Colleague Letter that transgender students must be able to use bathrooms matching their gender identity. That effort only generated more conflict and was quickly rescinded under President Trump. The Biden administration not only essentially reinstated the Obama administration’s rule, which is being challenged in court, but also is trying to expand its reach via proposed guidelines on transgender participation in athletics. While its approach on the latter is more cautious and more open to public input, it is unlikely to be any more successful.

In April 2023, the U.S. Department of Education proposed a rule that seems designed to satisfy no one and is sure to generate litigation. Instead of announcing via a Dear Colleague Letter that it would impose its standards by fiat, as the agency has often done, it offered a brief opportunity of 30 days for members of the public to comment. And comment they did, with more than 132,000 statements pouring in. The agency is expected to release a revised rule soon, but the volume of comments and the shifting political landscape are likely slowing the process.

The proposed rule says that “policies violate Title IX when they categorically ban transgender students from participating on sports teams consistent with their gender identity” but “that in some instances, particularly in competitive high school and college athletic environments, some schools may adopt policies that limit transgender students’ participation.” In short, you cannot exclude transgender athletes except when you can.

So, when can you limit transgender students’ participation? The proposed rule says that “one-size-fits-all policies that categorically ban transgender students” violate Title IX but appears to offer a sliding scale: restrictions in elementary school “would be particularly difficult to justify” but may be permissible in high schools and colleges. Schools, the administration conceded, need “flexibility to develop team eligibility criteria that serve important educational objectives, such as ensuring fairness in competition or preventing sports-related injury.” Beyond that it does not offer any real guidance. However, saying that fairness or safety could justify restricting access concedes that biological sex does in fact matter for athletic performance.

That concession has angered transgender advocates who say that excluding transgender athletes for any reason is unacceptable discrimination. Additionally, many have claimed that being biologically male does not confer any demonstrable athletic benefits. In the end, it is not surprising that the Biden administration did not accept that claim, since almost all conflicts about the fairness of transgender sports participation stem from biological males competing in female athletics.

Another often-raised concern is that women and girls playing contact sports face safety risks if they must compete against biological males who have transitioned. And questions about biological females competing in male sports seem to center around their safety rather than the safety of the other athletes.

Beyond safety, of course, there is the question of whether transgender participation deprives females of other opportunities. If transgender athletes consistently outperform other athletes, biological females could be denied the chance to win scholarships or succeed in athletic events. That is, in fact, the claim of four female high school athletes in Connecticut who have challenged their state’s policy of allowing transgender athletes to compete in the category matching their self-identified gender. After being dismissed for lack of standing, that case is now under review by the entire Second Circuit Court of Appeals.

The Biden administration proposed rule also skirts a whole host of other thorny issues, such as whether religious schools that participate in state athletic leagues could be excluded because they have religious objections to having their students play against transgender athletes. As the regulation is written, they would presumably have to compete against teams with transgender athletes or forfeit the opportunity to play in state-sanctioned leagues. The rule would also seem to compel females in all schools to share locker rooms with athletes with male reproductive anatomy.

The proposed rule drew a range of reactions, including complete disapproval from hardliners on both sides of the issue—those who want states to require students to compete based on their biological sex and those who want no restrictions on the ability of students to compete in the sex category they identify with.

Given the controversy surrounding the proposed rule—and Congressional disinterest in weighing in—it’s not hard to imagine the issue being decided by the U.S. Supreme Court. While one might expect the conservative majority to be unsympathetic to mandating transgender participation in female sports, Justice Neil Gorsuch did write the opinion in 2020’s Bostock v. Clayton County, which was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts, finding that the word “sex” in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 also protected workers from discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. Since Title IX was written in 1972, also long before anyone could have imagined its application to transgender students, the Bostock ruling would seem to imply that sex should be interpreted the same under both laws. But the court might also declare that gender identity in athletic competition raises entirely different questions than in employment.

In fact, the proposed rule provides a roadmap for the court to do this. By admitting that biology does in fact matter for safety and fairness, the rule gives school districts extraordinary latitude to create regulations that would exclude transgender athletes. That is why it is so vague about what should guide the schools. And if a school district decides that it wants transgender students to participate in the category matching their identity, parents who oppose such a policy would have a powerful tool to fight back politically and legally. They might point to evidence from studies, such as one published in the journal Sports Medicine, showing that “the muscular advantage enjoyed by transgender women is only minimally reduced when testosterone is suppressed.” Thus, transgender female athletes would almost inevitably have a competitive advantage in contact and non-contact sports relying on strength and speed, while in contact sports there would also be safety concerns. Those issues largely do not arise under Title VII.

However, the politics surrounding the issue are also changing. The fact that the Biden administration did not offer a categorical rule like Obama’s did and allowed public comments indicates more than a little uneasiness, which could presage a further retreat. A recent Gallup poll found that the percentage of Americans who think that students should play on teams that match their biological sex has risen to 69 percent today from 62 percent in 2021 and that only a minority of Democrats—47 percent—think that transgender students should be able to play on teams that match their gender identity. The looming presidential election could thus also be influencing the administration’s delay. Ultimately, the Supreme Court might decide the matter—that is, unless politics decides it first.

Joshua Dunn is executive director of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville’s Institute of American Civics at the Howard H. Baker

This article appeared in the Winter 2024 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Dunn, J. (2024). Splitting the Baby Worked for Solomon, but It Won’t for Biden. Education Next, 24(1), 6-7.

As k-12 schools officials struggle to address a post-Covid surge of student misbehavior and violence, they must also navigate rapid swings in civil rights directives from the U.S. Department of Education. A decade ago, the Obama administration issued lengthy guidelines on bullying, sexual harassment, and racial disparities in school discipline. It also launched hundreds of protracted investigations to enforce these demands. The Trump administration withdrew many of these guidelines, and substantially reduced the number of systemic investigations. The Biden administration has promised to return to a more aggressive approach to civil rights rulemaking and enforcement. A year ago, the Department of Education proposed new rules on sexual harassment, and announced new guidelines on discipline for students with disabilities. In May 2023 the departments of Justice and Education took yet another step, releasing a policy statement with the enigmatic title, “Resources on Confronting Racial Discrimination in Student Discipline.”

Neither a formal regulation or even a standard guidance document, “Resources” describes 14 investigations of school discipline practices completed by the Department of Education between 2012 and 2022. It includes an account of an academy in Arizona that told a student with an Afro to get a haircut. It also include the case of a school district in Utah that referred a Black student to law enforcement while giving a white student a conference for the same offense. Oddly, the two departments insist upon the limited legal significance of their report: “It does not constitute final agency action, and it does not have an immediate and direct legal effect. It does not create any new rights or obligations, and it is not enforceable. Neither the Departments’ investigations nor the summaries included below constitute a binding precedent.” “This document,” they explain, “is for informational and technical purposes only.” What guidance, then, does this report offer? Largely a set of steps school districts can take to stay in the departments’ good graces.

To understand the ongoing controversy over school discipline mandates, it is important to recognize just how limited the federal government’s power is in this area. Outside of special education, the federal government only has authority to prohibit disciplinary practices that discriminate on the basis of race, national origin, or sex. (The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, in contrast, creates specific rules for disciplining students with individualized education plans). In 2014 the Obama administration launched an aggressive effort to substantially curtail use of out-of-school disciplinary measures (that is, suspensions and expulsions), which many claim have no educational value and contribute to the “school-to-prison pipeline.” But the only way federal regulators could address the issue was by claiming that these punishments were being applied in a racially discriminatory manner.

There is no question that if school officials punish a Black student more harshly than a similarly situated white student, they have engaged in unlawful discrimination and violated Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. But what does “similarly situated” mean? Not only that the two students engaged in the same type and degree of misconduct, but also that they had a similar history of prior transgressions. Proving “different treatment” requires detailed investigation of individual cases. Given the subjective nature of many forms of misbehavior and the fact that most such behavior is viewed only by a few people, seldom are these easy calls. Consequently, the Obama administration’s 2014 Dear Colleague Letter announced that schools “also violate Federal law when they evenhandedly implement facially neutral policies and practices that, although not adopted with the intent to discriminate, nonetheless have an unjustified effect of discriminating on the basis of race.” A school’s disciplinary policies and practices would be deemed to have an “adverse impact” on minority students if those students are “disproportionately” punished at higher rates or “subject to longer sanctions or more severe penalties.” Once that prima facie case has been made, the school bears the burden of demonstrating that its policy is “necessary to meet an important educational goal,” and that there exist no “comparably effective alternative policies or practices that would meet the school’s stated educational goal with less of a burden or adverse impact on the disproportionately affected racial group.” The Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights explained that it would take a particularly hard look at policies that “impose mandatory suspension, expulsion or citations” for specified offenses, especially truancy. Such punishments, federal regulators strongly suggested, are seldom either “necessary” or “effective.”

Black students are subject to disciplinary action more frequently than white, Asian, or Hispanic students. This might be the result of discrimination, but it might also be a consequence of difference in socio-economic status, family structure, neighborhood influences, youth subcultures, and policies adopted by schools in high-crime areas. Although the 2014 Dear Colleague Letter acknowledged that racial disparities “may be caused by a range of factors,” its “disparate impact” analysis said little about them. Its primary goal was to curtail the use of out-of-school punishments. The Trump administration withdrew that Dear Colleague Letter in 2018. The Biden administration subsequently announced that the withdrawal was “under review.”

The 2014 Dear Colleague Letter was announced by the Assistant Secretary of Education for Civil Rights Catherine Lhamon. When she was nominated to regain that position in 2021, she told a Senate committee, “it’s crucial to reinstate guidance on the topic.” What is most notable about the 2023 document, though, is the extent to which it backs away both from the 2014 Dear Colleague Letter’s “disparate impact” analysis and from its blanket condemnation of out-of-school punishments. Helpful suggestions have replaced legally binding obligations. Although this shift does not preclude a return to the aggressive enforcement strategy of the Obama administration, it does seem to signal a more conciliatory federal approach to discipline issues as public schools struggle to respond to heightened levels of violence and misbehavior.

By focusing on case resolutions that span the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations, the report seeks to downplay the obvious policy shifts of the past decade. Most of the policy changes recommended in the report are sensible and relatively uncontroversial. They include

• Collecting and regularly reviewing data on disciplinary actions to identify possible discrimination;
• Establishing clearer, less subjective rules on what constitutes misconduct and appropriate the punishments for various levels of misconduct;
• Making sure that school policies are consistent with state law;
• Reducing the role of School Resource Officials (i.e. law enforcement personnel with arrest power located within schools) in routine disciplinary matters;
• Improving communications with parents, especially those with limited English proficiency;
• Developing alternatives to out-of-school punishments;
• Providing better training to school personnel;
• Hiring more school counselors and mental health professionals; and
• Providing students with “tutoring, afterschool and summer learning, and enrichment programs to help students make meaningful academic and behavioral progress.”

Note that most of these items are worthy aspirations, not enforceable rules. Whether schools will have the resources and the commitment to put them into effect is one big question. How the Department of Education will try to nudge them in that direction is another.

Why has the department retreated from its hardline 2014 stance? Perhaps the White House has pressured the department to avoid hot-button educational issues prior to the 2024 election—as it seems to have done with the department’s recent proposal on transgender students’ assignment to sports teams. So far, though, we have little information on the nature of the debate within the administration. Nonetheless, it is possible to identify four factors that likely influenced its deliberations.

The first is growing alarm among school officials and parents about post-Covid disorder in our schools. According to a report by the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center, “Schools across the country are reporting increased levels of misbehavior, including fights and more serious acts of violence.” A survey conducted by Education Week’s Research Center found that “nearly half of all school and district leaders (44 percent) say they are receiving more threats of violence by students now than they did in the fall of 2019 . . . [T]wo out of three teachers, principals, and district leaders say that students are misbehaving more these days than they did in the fall of 2019.” In this context, restricting the availability of disciplinary measures would encounter strong resistance.

The second is concern among rank-and-file teachers about their own safety and the difficulty of maintaining order in classrooms and hallways. The department’s 2014 Dear Colleague Letter initially received support from the national leadership of teachers’ unions, but eventually drew angry opposition from teachers subject to lengthy investigations and restrictions on out-of-school punishments. With teachers facing greater threats of violence within the classroom, such opposition could not be ignored—especially since it comes from a key Democratic constituency.

Third, initial research on the main alternative to out-of-school punishments—restorative justice—found that this approach to dealing with misbehavior falls far short of its supporters’ expectations. Subsequent to the 2014 Dear Colleague Letter, the RAND Corporation sponsored two randomized control studies comparing schools that instituted restorative justice programs with those that employed traditional disciplinary practices. RAND’s study of several schools in Maine found that “the middle-school student who received Restorative Practices Intervention did not report more school connectedness, better school climate, more positive peer relationships and developmental outcomes or less victimization than students in control schools did.” A second, more extensive study of schools in Pittsburgh found that the number and length of suspensions declined in elementary schools instituting restorative justice programs. However,

Despite fewer suspensions, academic outcomes did not improve in PERC schools [those instituting restorative justice programs]. At the middle grade level (grades 6-8) academic outcomes actually worsened in the treatment schools. Neither did we find fewer suspensions in middle grades. . . . We did not see fewer suspensions for male students, for students with individual education plans, or for incidents of violence or weapons violation. Neither did we see a reduction in arrests.

According to a summary of the evidence in The Hechinger Report, “The biggest insight from the Maine study was how hard it is for schools to implement restorative justice even after days of teacher training, monthly consultations and visits by coaches.”

Finally, studies of the implementation of the Obama administration’s policies found a wide gap between the policies announced in formal agreements between school leaders and federal officials on the one hand, and the actual practices of teachers and principals on the other. Within a single school district, compliance and reporting differed substantially from one school to another. That experience suggests that without substantial support from teachers and principals on the front lines, directives on discipline from Washington are likely to be ignored.

The fact that federal regulators have addressed the school discipline issue by describing the results of past investigations rather than by issuing explicit rules emphasizes the central role that such investigations play in federal civil rights policy. Especially during the Obama administration, the Department of Education has used lengthy and intrusive investigations to pressure schools to sign detailed resolution agreements. The process was the punishment, and federal policy was in effect the sum of these individually negotiated agreements. The May 2023 report does little to constrain the Department of Education. But it seems to indicate that the department has adopted a more nuanced and pragmatic approach to the school discipline issue than it did a decade ago.

Shep Melnick is the Thomas P. O’Neill, Jr. Professor of American Politics at Boston College and author, most recently, of The Crucible of Desegregation: The Uncertain Search for Educational Equality (University of Chicago Press, 2023).

This article appeared in the Winter 2024 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Melnick, R.S. (2024). Behind Biden Administration’s Retreat on Race and School Discipline, Real Concern on Student Behavior: Even the teachers are alarmed about fights, violence. Education Next, 24(1), 50-55.