(Illustration by Ibrahim Rayintakath)
Kent McGuire and Matt Wilka are right. American public education is in a paradigm transition; the neoliberal era they describe overpromised and underdelivered, and the renewed democratic purpose they call for—preparing young people to think critically, sort fact from falsehood, and participate fully in a diverse democracy—is the right destination. Leaders in the reform era believed, in good faith, that if we could measure performance better and create more options, the system would improve. Those efforts produced real benefits: greater transparency, better data, clearer expectations, and new pathways for some students and families. But they did not deliver the scale of improvement, equity, or public confidence we promised.
The central challenge ahead is earning back trust. Trust from students who do not see their lives reflected in what schools value, from parents who are voting with their feet, from employers who no longer assume a high school diploma signals real capability, and from citizens who during the pandemic watched institutions they were told to trust falter when it mattered most.
That erosion of trust is visible across nearly every measure. Less than half of students say their schoolwork challenges them (49 percent) or aligns with what they do best (46 percent). Large majorities of Americans doubt their children will be better off than they are. Eighty-four percent of hiring managers say most high school graduates are not prepared for the workforce, and 80 percent believe readiness has declined. And only a third of lower-performing students say their civic learning helps them understand the world around them.
The next era of public education will be judged less by the elegance of its ideas than by whether it responds, with humility and pragmatism, to the people it exists to serve. It will not be a return to the old neighborhood school monopoly, nor a continuation of market reform under new names. It will be the construction of a pluralistic public system, disciplined by democratic purpose: one that earns back trust, protects civil rights, forms citizens, prepares young people for work and life, and treats public dollars as obligations to public goods.
The Trust Deficit Is Real
Four trends, taken together, describe the institutional moment we’re actually in.
The first is that the reform era underdelivered on its own terms. Decades of standards, assessments, accountability, and choice were sold as a path to higher achievement. The most recent national results tell a different story. Twelfth-graders just posted the worst reading scores since 1992 and the lowest math scores since the test began in 2005. Nearly half of all twelfth-graders scored below “basic” in both subjects. Lower-performing fourth- and eighth-graders recorded the worst reading scores in over 30 years, and the eighth-grade math achievement gap has reached the widest point in the test’s history.
The second is populism. A wave of populist energy has been building in American life for nearly two decades, rooted in a growing distrust of institutions that promised stability, mobility, and opportunity but too often fell short. Financial crises, the hollowing out of local economies, and credential inflation all deepened that skepticism. Education has not been immune and has increasingly become the target of this energy.
The COVID school closures were a radicalizing event. Parents who had long trusted schools to make reasonable judgments about their children watched those decisions unfold in real time, often inconsistently and with uneven results. The recovery has done little to restore confidence. On NAEP, the highest-performing students have made gains in math since 2022, while students below the 25th percentile continue to fall further behind. Federal pandemic relief funds provided meaningful support, but the best evidence suggests they offset only a fraction of learning loss: approximately one-third in math and one-quarter in reading.
What parents lost during this period was not confidence in a service. It was trust in the relationship. They watched a credentialed class make consequential decisions about their children, defend those decisions in the language of expertise, and then face no real reckoning when the outcomes came in. Schools were closed. Children were harmed—academically, developmentally, in their mental health. No one was held to account.
The third is demography. The institutional unit we call “the neighborhood public school” is being eroded by demography before any policy intervenes. The result is massive budgetary pressure on districts and a coming wave of school closures. Thirty-four states project K–12 enrollment declines between 2025 and 2031, with 11 losing 5 percent or more. The under-five population has dropped sharply since 2020, and the decline is concentrated in the places that have historically educated the most kids; large urban counties have seen an 8.1 percent drop in their 0-to-4 population, nearly double the national rate. The children entering the system over the next decade are already born, and there are fewer of them than the institution was built to serve. This is the floor under everything else. Whatever happens with reform, recovery, or innovation, the system will be educating fewer students, in fewer buildings, on tighter budgets, for the foreseeable future.
The fourth is the diversification of education options. Three years ago, no state had a universal school choice program. Today more than a dozen do, and a majority of US students live in a state where they qualify for some form of choice support. Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) alone have grown from fewer than 30,000 students in 2021 to roughly 488,000 today.
But the most revealing signal didn't come from state legislatures. It came from families. In 2021, the expanded Child Tax Credit delivered monthly payments of up to $300 per child to households, with no strings attached. Families could spend it on nearly anything, and what survey research found is that they spent the money on education. Census Household Pulse data shows that in a typical week, more than 9 million families used their funds for schoolbooks and supplies, nearly 3 million for tuition, 2 million each for transportation and after-school programs, and 644,000 for tutoring. This wasn't an ESA campaign or a Heritage Foundation talking point. It was revealed preference from low-income families, many of whom were in blue states and deep-blue cities, many from communities of color, many from the very populations the equity debate claims to defend. Given unrestricted cash, they assembled a portfolio of educational supports, the exact model ESAs and microschools are now formalizing. Families were already thinking about education as a portfolio, not a place. The public system wasn’t organized to provide one.
These are not problems we can outpace by tweaking existing reforms. They describe the ground beneath us. The meaning of "public" in public education is changing. Trust has eroded. The question is no longer whether to respond, but what to build next.
What Schools Are For
Schools exist to form the next generation of citizens, neighbors, and workers. That formation has three parts: the values we broadly share, the foundational knowledge needed to participate in civic life and meaningful work, and the durable skills that enable a flourishing life. This is not a soft mission, and it is not a controversial one. It is the oldest and most demanding ambition American public education has ever held. James Madison put it plainly two centuries ago: “A people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.” That is what schools have always been for.
The modern reform era taught education leaders to care about outcomes, transparency, urgency, and innovation. Those habits are worth keeping. But over time, it also narrowed the definition of success toward what was easiest to measure, made it harder to sustain a shared language of public purpose, and at times encouraged us to think about students, families, and schools as individual actors rather than members of a broader democratic community. The result is an institution that often manages people instead of forming them and explains outcomes instead of answering for them.
The changing shape of education is not automatically a betrayal of public purpose, but neither is it automatically an expression of it. Pluralism can serve democracy, but only when it is disciplined by a strong public framework.
McGuire and Wilka point to the right destination, but the path runs through the relationships the reform era let fray. The challenge is that earning back trust is not a project of better messaging or stronger standards, it is a project of responding to the people the system exists to serve: to students who spent years collecting grades and credentials that promised readiness, only to arrive in college needing remedial coursework. To parents who have been told that the institution knows better than they do. To employers who have been told to believe in empty credentials. And to citizens who have been told that public education is best understood as a delivery system rather than a community institution. None of those failures is solved by defending the institution as it stands. All of them point to the same work: building one capable of carrying the formative mission through the conditions we now face.
AI Makes the Core More Important
This moment of institutional distrust coincides with the arrival of artificial intelligence (AI) systems capable of performing a growing array of tasks with superhuman intelligence. The temptation is to treat AI as another classroom technology, a tool to personalize instruction, plan lessons, support tutoring, or improve operations. All of that is real, and much of it will help. But it understates what AI actually is and what is at stake.
AI is not just a classroom tool. It is becoming an information environment, a labor market shock, and a civic challenge all at the same time, creating its own societal anxieties. It is becoming one of the primary ways people not only get answers to their questions but also form their beliefs, shaping how information is interpreted and presented. That shift could either strain an already fragile civic fabric or help rebuild a shared foundation of understanding. Which outcome prevails will depend on whether the next generation can use these tools with discernment.
There is also a temptation, in moments like this one, to argue that AI requires us to rethink education’s core purpose from scratch. The opposite is closer to the truth. AI makes the core more important, not less.
Writing is thinking. Prompting an AI system is, at its heart, the act of thinking clearly and saying exactly what you mean: framing a problem, supplying the right context, specifying what a good answer looks like, and providing clear feedback. The most powerful users of AI are not the most technical. They are the most articulate: the people who can frame a question well, give precise direction, and recognize a good answer from a plausible-sounding wrong one. That is why AI does not lower the value of literacy. It raises it. In the AI era, students who lack these skills will not fall behind slowly. They will fall further and faster, because the gap between those who can say exactly what they mean and those who cannot is amplified by a technology that uses language to harness intelligence.
Literacy alone is not enough. Students will also need the capacity to reason: to recognize when AI is confidently wrong, to test its outputs, and to ask better questions that surface assumptions. These are not just academic skills. They are the foundation of judgment, and judgment is what democracy requires. A democracy cannot function if citizens outsource it to systems they neither understand nor question. The irony of AI is that the technology many fear will make traditional academics irrelevant is precisely what makes literacy, numeracy, scientific reasoning, history, civics, and the humanities more essential.
AI could help students deepen their understanding of concepts, or it could weaken their cognitive abilities. Students will need to learn when to use these tools but also when not to use them, when to slow down, when to seek another human being, and when a decision requires judgment rather than optimization. At its best, AI should make learning harder, not easier, because it is through productive struggle that understanding deepens.
This has implications for teaching as well. AI should not become another mandate layered onto an already overburdened profession. Used well, it can create more space for the human work of teaching: conversation, feedback, mentoring, encouragement, and the building of trust. Used poorly, it risks narrowing learning even further to what can be automated, measured, and managed.
In that sense, AI does not introduce a new question. It sharpens an old one. It can either deepen the mistakes of the reform era or help us correct them. The real danger is that we repeat a familiar pattern: adopting powerful tools before we are clear about the purpose they are meant to serve.
So the AI question is ultimately the education question. What kind of people are we trying to form? What knowledge must they share? What skills will help them flourish? What habits will help them govern themselves and live with others? What public obligations attach to public dollars, regardless of whether learning happens in a district school, charter school, microschool, tutoring, online program, or hybrid model? Can students use these powerful tools without surrendering judgment, agency, or democratic responsibility?
Plural Forms, Public Purpose
If the formative mission of education is the right destination, the harder question is the institutional vehicle that carries it. McGuire and Wilka largely treat the public school as the default container for democratic preparation. But we already have a working example of a system that serves a public purpose through plural forms. We built one in higher education.
American higher education, even with its faults, is still among the most admired systems in the world precisely because it is plural. Public flagships and regional universities. Community colleges. Private nonprofits and religious institutions. HBCUs, tribal colleges, and minority-serving institutions. Online programs, stackable credentials, and career-connected pathways.
These institutions differ widely in mission and design, yet they are held together by something deeper than their differences: a common purpose. A community college and a research university pursue it in very different ways, but both are understood to serve the public good Madison described, forming capable people who can earn a living, sustain a community, and govern themselves.
That shared purpose is protected by a framework: Pell grants for low-income students, federal student aid, civil rights protections, accreditation, and transparency requirements. What makes the system public is not that the government runs each institution. It is that this purpose, and the public commitment to access, fairness, and honest information that protects it, is incorporated across every institution that participates.
A community college in rural Oklahoma, a Jesuit university in Chicago, a women’s college in Mississippi, and the University of Michigan all serve different students in different ways. We do not treat that diversity as a failure of public purpose. We treat it as the system working.
This example matters because it offers a different way to understand what is happening in K–12. The changing shape of education is not automatically a betrayal of public purpose, but neither is it automatically an expression of it. Pluralism can serve democracy, but only when it is disciplined by a strong public framework.
Higher education’s lesson is not that structure does not matter; in fact it proves that it does. It is that purpose travels through structure when the framework is clear. Civil rights protection, transparent outcomes, quality assurance, and a shared commitment to preparing students not just for work, but for participation in a democratic society. That framework is what makes pluralism work and what causes it to fail when it is absent. The for-profit college crisis, rising costs, and deepening stratification are not arguments against pluralism itself. They are evidence of what happens when public purpose is weakly enforced or inconsistently applied. Any serious effort to extend this model to K–12 must take those lessons seriously.
The broader pattern, however, is already visible. ESAs, tax-credit scholarships, and a growing mix of microschools, hybrid programs, tutoring, and specialized services are beginning to function in K–12 much as Pell grants do in higher education: as public investments that follow students into a wider range of learning environments. In practice, families use these funds for a mix of tuition, tutoring, online coursework, therapies for students with special needs, transportation, and instructional materials, assembling an educational experience that extends beyond any single institution.
The question is whether we will build the framework that allows this shift to serve a democratic purpose rather than erode it. That framework must be clear and non-negotiable: strong civil rights protections, real transparency about outcomes, meaningful access for the families who need it most, and quality oversight that distinguishes genuine educational opportunity. Without it, pluralism fragments and trust erodes. With it, pluralism can expand opportunity while strengthening democracy.
Conclusion
A century ago, Horace Mann argued that the common school could form a common people. McGuire and Wilka are right to remind us that the formative ambition behind that vision is more necessary than ever. But “common” no longer means “uniform,” and it has not for some time. A community college in rural Oklahoma and a public flagship in Michigan can both serve the public good. A district school and a microschool can both prepare a student to think clearly, evaluate evidence, and participate in democratic life. The form is not the purpose. The form serves the purpose, when we hold it accountable to the purpose.
That is the work ahead. We will need to hold the formative mission steady while the institutional vehicle for that mission changes shape. We will need to build a public framework strong enough to make pluralism serve democracy rather than fragment it. And we will need to earn back trust by responding to the people the system exists to serve. Earning back trust is not a strategy. It is the discipline of meeting people where they are and serving the public good through whatever institutional forms can carry it.
Read more stories by John Bailey.