(Illustration by Ibrahim Rayintakath)
We editors at SSIR do not publish themed issues. We do not ask our community to write about a topic, such as impact investing or health care, for an upcoming magazine. Instead, we rely on our community to tell us the subjects that so enthrall their attention that they want to write about them for us.
But as we ready a package of articles for an issue, a motif can sometimes emerge, as it did with this issue. The theme of our Fall 2024 issue is education.
The US philanthropic sector spends an enormous amount of money on education—$88 billion in 2023 alone. But the impact of such largesse is often hard to discern. As it is, $58 billion of that total goes to higher education, too often to wealthy universities that do not need the added funding. The remaining money that is spent improving K-12 education, typically based on the pet ideas of the relevant foundation or high-net-worth individual, reflects gambles on interventions that may not actually be effective, even if they can be scaled. US public education is an enormously complicated, diffuse, and politicized system, with competing interests and parties negating each other’s efforts. It is not an easy field in which to make progress.
Our two cover features suggest, however, that headway can be made in the face of such divisions by targeting big problems that are acknowledged across partisan lines and can serve as the focus for galvanizing supermajority support to solve them.
In “Graduation Nation,” Bob Balfanz and John Bridgeland tell the tale of the 20-year nationwide effort they co-led to boost high school graduation rates. Back at the turn of the century, more than a quarter of all students did not graduate from high school with their class. High school dropouts were far more likely than their graduating peers to fall into unemployment, poverty, and incarceration, at terrible cost. Across red and blue states, legislatures, governors’ mansions, and presidential administrations, the campaign succeeded in reversing dropout rates, although it didn’t quite reach its goal of a 90 percent national graduation rate by 2020. Their story attests to the potential of transcending partisanship and institutional inertia to target a universally recognized problem and make progress on it.
Kent McGuire and Matt Wilka from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation see similar potential for massive progress in US education in the coming decades. In “A Democratic Vision for Public Schools,” the pair argue that we are entering a new post-neoliberal era, where new paradigms of governance and public problem-solving are being born. They articulate a civic-minded vision of education as a public good that serves our democracy. All Americans who worry about the future of their republic can find something to support here.
Finally, do not miss our Viewpoint section: Bruno Manno makes the case for apprenticeship programs as an alternative pathway to college for young Americans to acquire the skills they need to succeed; and Jeffrey Kennedy and Simon Pek argue that deliberation, not debate, is the model of free speech we should embrace for higher education.
Read more stories by David V. Johnson.