(Illustration by Ibrahim Rayintakath)
Public schools need to change. Such a statement is common to pieces written about American education and is usually followed by an author’s preferred remedies—such as strengthening standards, improving tests, and paying teachers more. Such interventions may seem reasonable, but they overlook the fact that purpose matters when we think about systemic change. What we as a country believe to be the purpose of education informs whether we think schools are effective and what they need to get better at doing.
We have spent our careers working in and with public schools, both charter and district, K-12 and postsecondary, as researchers, teachers, parents, nonprofit leaders, foundation executives, and government officials. We understand how hard systemic change in education can be.
Yet we believe a window of opportunity exists if we see educational change through the lens of paradigms. Popularized by the philosopher Thomas Kuhn, paradigms describe the unwritten rules or assumptions that underlie the questions we ask or solutions we pursue in an area of society.1 Paradigms often refer to economic eras but exert significant influence over educational change as well. During the Keynesian era of the mid-20th century, for instance, an abiding belief in governmental problem-solving made way for significant investments in public systems, including education.2 By contrast, a skepticism of government and faith in free markets during the neoliberal period gave rise to school reforms focused on choice, standards, and competition that continue today.
Paradigms span decades and shift when the prevailing paradigm fails to respond to major challenges in the world. For example, the Great Depression discredited the preceding paradigm of laissez-faire economics, while the Keynesian paradigm ran a ground amid unrest and stagflation during the 1960s and ’70s. The ensuing times of transition between paradigms are messy, marked by turmoil and opposing worldviews vying for prominence. We believe that we are now entering a transitional period, in which the prevailing, neoliberal paradigm is cracking under strain and populism and authoritarianism are competing to replace it.
Recognizing this transitional period presents an opportunity to advance new ideas, new values, and new models for our public schools. The purpose of public school has evolved over time, and each evolution has brought about a new set of assumptions about how school improvement should happen. We argue that many of today’s educational challenges stem not from individual policies but from a broader conflict about the purposes of education. Without addressing purpose, many current reforms—however well intentioned—seem unlikely to succeed. This article attempts to reframe education’s purpose away from the recent market-based assumptions of neoliberalism and toward a renewed civic purpose for education in a changing society. We try to make the case for why public schools still matter to democratic preparation, what kinds of shifts are needed to equip young people to be full participants in our society, and how this effort might be carried out across the country’s diverse contexts. These categories form the basis of an agenda for large-scale positive change, which we hope will spark more organizations and individuals to engage in similar work.
Public Education and the Political Economy
History show a close connection between economic and educational paradigms in which prevailing social conditions and norms shape the mission of public schools. For instance, the nation’s Founding Fathers espoused the need for an educated citizenry to sustain their democratic experiment and stressed the cultivation of virtue alongside apprenticeships for careers.3 With some exception, these benefits were extended to young, wealthy white men, since the US Constitution considered them full citizens. Through the first half of the 1800s, access to public education varied widely by social status and state of residence, mirroring the laissez-faire paradigm of that time. Massachusetts was a notable outlier, where public-education proponent Horace Mann advanced a system of secular public schools wherein academic education was organized by grade level and encompassed the cultivation of sound character and civic-minded, democratic values.
Through Reconstruction and the industrialization of the US economy, public schools remained largely segregated by gender, race, class, and ability status. These periods shared a distinct emphasis on creating training-based education to prepare the workforce for an increasingly industrialized economy. This change reflected, among other things, the new power of private industry in shaping education policy, along with a nationalistic desire to assimilate immigrant students to American ways of life.4 Subsequently, the Progressive Era of the early 1900s was marked by a backlash against corporate exploitation of workers, the effects of which informed the expansion of primary education to high school as part of the core design of the public school system. Theorists of this era, like John Dewey, played a prominent role in conceiving schools as democratizing institutions and engines of social reform.
The idea of schools as a public good accelerated under the mid-20th-century Keynesian paradigm. Federal investments such as the 1944 GI Bill and the 1960s Great Society programs expanded education access to preschool through postsecondary learning, particularly for veterans, students experiencing poverty, students learning English, and students with disabilities.5 This policy push for equitable access found a corollary in judicial action—most notably, the 1954 Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education decision, which struck down racial segregation, at least by law. Brown compelled a significant push to desegregate the nation’s schools on the assumption that creating a more level playing field for children of color would increase high school graduation rates, access to postsecondary education, and, ultimately, upward mobility for these students. While all these midcentury reforms had their differences, the core theme of access held constant, along with the underlying belief that schools should prepare all students for full economic and civic participation.
One year after Brown, however, the seeds for a competing vision were planted. In 1955, economist Milton Friedman penned “The Role of Government in Education,” which proposed exchanging the all-access public school system for one of vouchers, in which parents could choose to send their children to a variety of privately run institutions and in which the role of government would be limited to funding vouchers and setting minimum standards for quality. Perhaps unsurprisingly, segregationists would soon use various voucher schemes to evade Brown’s edict for racial integration, channeling public funds into private, white-only schools.
Friedman’s essay laid the groundwork for the modern school-choice movement, even though its ideas remained on the fringes of policymaking in the 1960s and ’70s. School reformers instead continued to focus on social determinants of learning, such as reducing child poverty and increasing school funding. But as they did so, the Keynesian consensus was dissolving beneath them, as economic shocks, inflation, and social upheaval all contributed to a sense of a country off course and in need of drastic change. Amid this malaise, Friedman’s core ideas—that government was the problem and the free market was the solution—gave a ready, easy answer.
In the 1980s, the libertarian principles of Friedman and his Chicago School colleagues fused with the pro-business, deregulatory agenda of the Reagan administration to establish the neoliberal paradigm that would continue to predominate through the 2016 election.6 In education, the 1983 publication of A Nation at Risk spoke of a “rising tide of mediocrity” and warned the American public of imminent danger if we did not strengthen our curricula and increase high school graduation and college attendance rates. Political focus shifted from equitable access to improving student performance, abetted by a host of reform tactics that deemphasized education for social good and gave greater resources and attention to education for economic competitiveness.
From Tests to Turmoil
Neoliberal influence on public education reached its peak in the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) era of the 2000s and early 2010s. The NCLB Act of 2001 reauthorized the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the long-standing federal education law that authorized funds for public educational instruction and materials, with the addition of federal support for various forms of school choice, national standards, and high-stakes testing.
The neoliberal paradigm has cracked, but it has not crumbled. And this instability marks our current transition period, which has brought much graver threats to American democracy. The confluence of economic pain, demographic change, and new media has proved fertile ground for authoritarian leaders to champion resistance to government.
These reforms, some of which continue, shared several principles of market and business theory. First, reformers construed school improvement as a problem of performance management. The role of government was to set clear goals for student learning and a common way to measure progress (e.g., summative tests). By applying pressure through a mix of punitive measures (closing schools, firing teachers) and incentives (merit pay), government officials would prune away underperformers and steer the public school system toward excellence.
Second, consistent with the logic of performance management, reformers saw individuals—or individual schools—as the fundamental units of analysis, rather than the policy and institutional structures in which they existed. Officials required students to be evaluated through standardized tests and judged teachers and schools by how much student test scores improved. Officials paid less attention to systemic discrimination and structures of equality—specifically, the circumstances of students from high-poverty or nonwhite neighborhoods. Accordingly, students, teachers, and schools from neighborhoods with higher poverty and higher proportions of students of color were more likely to be labeled as failing and to face punitive measures.
Third, reformers saw school choice and competition as force multipliers for school improvement. Instead of supplying more resources or paying more attention to context or structure, the government would remove restrictions on who could operate schools and create a market signal of quality among different schools (test scores) that parents could understand. Parents, as customers, would rationally choose high-scoring schools, in turn creating a virtuous cycle of competition. All schools within a district and region would compete to improve, the most successful would expand, and the least effective would close their doors.
We were early participants in these neoliberal reforms: Matt worked in a charter school emphasizing testing and parental choice, while Kent helped to architect standards-based reforms in private philanthropy and in the federal government. Most reformers of the era operated with good intentions. Few educators woke up thinking about broad concepts of choice or competition. However, while many of us in the sector focused on the daily work of improving schools, we collectively lost sight of education’s slow but steady drift from its democratic function.
Two decades later, we would also argue that NCLB and similar neoliberal efforts had not lived up to expectations. This is not the same as saying that every initiative failed. We saw important improvements: States built new data systems to pinpoint learning needs, researchers quantified the importance of high-quality teachers, and NCLB exposed racial achievement gaps. But the counterpoints are also telling. The most used data came from high-stakes tests, which resulted in narrowed curricula both topically and favoring basic skills, while giving teachers little help to improve instruction.7 Quality teachers do matter, but educator satisfaction and the prestige of the profession have each declined in recent decades.8 And the structural remedies that helped to reduce racial and economic gaps in the Great Society era—such as school funding and desegregation—were largely ignored during neoliberal reforms, despite a rapidly diversifying student population.9 Progress on closing gaps has correspondingly stalled, while aggregate achievement has plateaued in the past 15 years.10
Responding to these trends, the education sector has pulled back on some aspects of neoliberal reform while holding fast to others. Topics such as equity, social and emotional learning, and career pathways have supplanted standards and accountability at the center of the debate. Education philanthropy, once a unified ally of neoliberal policies, has fragmented, aiding the diffusion of new ideas but also scattering funder influence across disparate strategies. With regard to policy, the 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act moderated NCLB’s focus on accountability, while both Republicans (declining support for national standards) and Democrats (declining support for charter schools) have retreated from consensus neoliberal views.
Neoliberalism has likewise receded in the political economy. In fact, the first major crack in NCLB’s armor came not from education but from the Tea Party movement’s fervent opposition to the Common Core State Standards in the early 2010s.11 Whereas rank-and-file conservatives had largely supported (or been indifferent to) the neoliberal trajectory of education reform until that point, the Tea Party marked a surge of populism and ethnonationalism that would engulf the political right. Economic populism has likewise ascended on the left—best represented by US Senator Bernie Sanders’ 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns—and recent years have brought together strange cross-partisan bedfellows on issues of trade, labor, and industrial policy.
The neoliberal paradigm has cracked—not crumbled. But this current transition has brought much graver threats to American democracy. The confluence of economic pain, demographic change, and new media has proved fertile ground for authoritarian leaders to champion supersized individualism and resistance to government as a return to an idealized past. These trends accelerated during COVID-19, as concepts from scientific denial to medical freedom moved to the conservative mainstream, unified by the idea that individual rights should surpass all else. Of course, individualism, as Alexis de Tocqueville famously observed, is the quintessential American ideal, but it serves democracy only when coupled with a responsibility to the common good—a lesson lost in recent years.12
In education, what started in 2020 as declarations of parental rights against school closures, masks, and vaccines spread quickly to the firestorm over critical race theory.13 Individual parental rights have since become pretexts for banning books, discriminating against LGBTQ+ students, and whitewashing curricula of any mention of racism or similar so-called divisive subjects that provide comprehensive accounts of US history. Statewide candidates have won office wearing intolerance as a badge of honor, while down-ballot races like school boards have become subject to organized national efforts to push an antiequity agenda. Lest this be seen as a phenomenon solely of red states, research has shown a chilling effect on student learning nationwide: Two-thirds of teachers report that they have limited their classroom discussion of political or social issues for fear of punishment or public harassment.
Of course, once you discredit a public institution, you can dismantle it. As distrust for education has risen on the ethnopopulist right, the idea of helping parents to leave that system, left over from the school-choice days of neoliberalism, has become a ready solution. This precedent has led to an increase in efforts to defund public schools outright, plus a rise in voucher bills across state legislatures. And while ethnopopulists and neoliberals diverge ideologically, this fusion on a political-wedge issue like school choice is exactly what we would expect as one socioeconomic paradigm makes an uneasy transition to the next.
In sum, the neoliberal education reform era—first by redefining education’s purpose toward individual returns, and second by falling short on grand promises of improvement—created long-term conditions for people to leave public schools and label them as failing. As a result, simply repeating the school reforms of past decades, but doing them better, appears unlikely to succeed. The changes that we need can flow only from a bolder, broader purpose for public schools in our changing multiracial democracy.
Renewing Education’s Purpose
While the successor to neoliberalism remains uncertain, we see a moment of opportunity to seed a renewed vision for the purpose of public education. This frame should support a more vibrant democracy, as well as broad sociocultural shifts: A society bound by common purpose, not just individual aims. An economy that values cooperation as much as competition, and human thriving alongside growth. A politics that inspires pluralism over polarization. And a citizenry that can participate fully in these arenas, no matter one’s starting point. This vision should not exclude the lessons from neoliberalism and prior iterations of the capitalist model. Innovation, economic dynamism, fair footing in the marketplace—all these and more are aspirations worth striving for.
(Illustration by Ibrahim Rayintakath)
A renewed purpose for education flows from these democratic ideals while responding to larger shifts in society. We suggest two fundamental goals for what this renewed democratic purpose for education should be:
Prepare young people to thrive in a diverse, changing democracy. | It’s difficult to imagine long-term, durable improvements to civic life unless today’s young people are prepared to think critically, sort facts from falsehoods, grapple with ethical questions, and work together across lines of difference. This task means reversing a decades-long trend in which schools have paid little attention to the knowledge, skills, and dispositions of civics, and returning education, in the words of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, to its role as the “safeguard of democracy.”
Renew the public purpose of schools for our broader society. | Elevating the civic preparation of young people can strengthen our communities and democracy, yet a broader set of contextual questions includes whether this democratic purpose can become widely shared among education decision makers and the public. After all, following decades of emphasizing schools’ individual economic returns, even talking about education as having a common purpose is akin to recalling a forgotten language. What, then, is the purpose of public schools to our changing and diverse democracy? These questions need addressing, broad as they may be. Such an endeavor should not just strengthen education as a public good but anticipate new shifts, such as artificial intelligence, that will buffet schools and their graduates in the years to come.
Renewing the democratic purpose of public schools does require structural change. Several decades from now, if public schools still focus on transmitting basic facts and procedures for jobs that computers can do better, public education will become irrelevant. But if schools can evolve and impart knowledge, skills, and values so important that a future economy and democracy would not survive without their presence in its citizens, then a strong case for public schools endures.
Determining the form of future schools will take time and should be informed by many educators trying new things and learning what works best. To facilitate this process for improvement, we have identified the following five guiding principles as a starting point for a more democratic educational experience.
Education should impart democratic knowledge, skills, and dispositions in a time of civic crisis. | Effective democratic preparation has multiple parts. Students need a baseline knowledge of the history and function of our country’s democratic processes and institutions, which could range from the rights and responsibilities of citizens to understanding the federal separation of powers to how to petition local government to increase community green spaces. Knowledge is the most basic element of civic learning but on its own tends to be insufficient for promoting pro-civic behaviors, such as voting.14 Democratic skills, however, complement foundational knowledge by teaching young people how to engage productively with others and with the forces shaping our society, including the ability to distinguish fact from falsehood and work constructively with those who hold opposing views. Finally, democratic dispositions refers to holding positive orientations toward participating in civic life, such as respecting diverse perspectives, recognizing mutual dignity, and cultivating political friendship.
Promising initiatives such as the Roadmap to Educating for American Democracy already provide guidance to educators on how to apply this approach to civic preparation in their classrooms. Several existing learning frameworks might also be extrapolated to democratic learning. For instance, the popular “4 Cs” framework (collaboration, creativity, critical thinking, communication) has been adapted by districts like Anaheim Union to include civic preparation. The Deeper Learning approach, which encourages students to think critically and apply knowledge to novel contexts, was developed with career preparation in mind but applies well to building civic skills and dispositions. And the newer Durable Skills model, from America Achieves, focuses on the confluence between high-demand employee skills and those that students need for broader success in life. These frameworks demonstrate that effective democratic preparation supports the attributes young people will need to thrive in future jobs.
Education should transmit and support students in understanding widely used facts in a world where facts are contested. | A shared set of facts is perhaps the lowest common denominator of a good education and functioning democracy. But amid the rise of misinformation, AI-altered media, and partisan echo chambers, our common fact base is fragile. As research shows that most students (and adults) still struggle to identify misinformation, several states have passed bills establishing media literacy as a skill for students to critically evaluate the information they encounter online.15 Schools can deepen and expand these kinds of efforts by helping students of all ages understand what makes information a fact, what constitutes valid expertise, and how facts can help to solve problems across subject areas.
Education should give students new ways of thinking about societal problems. | Climate change, inequality, and polarization are foremost among the unintended consequences of neoliberalism, but they will not be solved within the constructs that created them. We sorely need a successor paradigm more capable of dealing with these cataclysmic challenges. While history suggests that what comes next will include some version of the capitalist model, what this looks like remains unclear.16 American capitalism could, for instance, follow in the autocratic footsteps of Hungary or China, combining authoritarian control with moderate market freedoms. Or we could pursue the social democracy most associated with Northern Europe, mixing a market economy with a strong safety net.
Past paradigms show how capitalism can manifest in vastly different ways. Yet as a society we too often mistake neoliberalism as capitalism’s only possible form and reflexively label any deviation as socialism.17 Part of this tendency is political, but it should come as no surprise that today’s youngest citizens, who have been particularly ill served by neoliberalism, take the most negative views on capitalism’s potential to improve their lives. Public education can play a role in addressing this perception—not by dictating a set of beliefs, but by encouraging young people to think for themselves about more creative sets of societal choices beyond those imagined by previous generations. Such inquiry holds great promise for actually engaging students in relevant learning. After all, the fallout from neoliberalism weighs heavily on how they see their future. This type of learning can build on other principles, including stronger preparation for teachers to facilitate dialogue on contentious topics, an appreciation for the role of facts in decision-making, and new curricula that help young people to expand their thinking about power, wealth, morality, choice, and freedom as early in their education as possible.
Education should inculcate shared civic values. | Teaching values during the school day can make people, regardless of ideology, feel uncomfortable and risks either veering toward religiosity or avoiding any mention of values at all. Yet cultivating democratic values has been one of the strongest threads throughout public education’s history and is a discipline worth renewing. America’s democratic tradition also gives us a rich well of values to draw from—i.e., liberty, equality, justice, pluralism, and respect for others across differences. Education’s challenge is to renew the meaning of these democratic values for the diverse student body attending today’s schools. At a time when society has forgotten how to constructively disagree and resolve conflict, we need young people to learn how to identify and share their own values while recognizing that others might hold different ones. Since schools remain a rare common space that brings together people from different backgrounds, preserving this objective as a public good seems central to building tolerance and reducing polarization in society at large.18
Recentering democratic values in school curricula will take significant changes, both practical and cultural, along with training for educators to do this kind of teaching well. We will also need to address structural impediments to civic values like tolerance and belonging, including racial segregation. Despite research showing the benefits to learning of integration across racial groups, school segregation steadily increased in the neoliberal decades of reform post-Brown. Yet, as Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote in his 1974 dissent to Milliken v. Bradley, “Unless our children begin to learn together, there is little hope that our people will ever learn to live together.”
Education should reinforce the skills of human thriving. | Artificial intelligence is forcing us to rethink what it means to be prepared for economic and civic life. Educators have been rightly attentive to the near-term challenges and opportunities of AI, such as reducing cheating or improving adaptive software. As AI increasingly affects most jobs, we will need to identify and cultivate the competencies young people need to do work alongside or augmented by AI. These AI job competencies—such as collaboration, reconciling disagreement, and assessing facticity—map closely to the democratic skills and the workforce skills frameworks mentioned previously.
The longer-term question, however, is how the purpose of education will need to change when many of today’s prestigious jobs, especially those resting on knowledge work or information processing, become obsolete. The design of capitalism may also change if autonomous AI evolves to create economic value absent human inputs, or if universal basic income supplants wages from labor. We need to start thinking now about different dimensions of human thriving in this increasingly AI-based world and begin to imagine new educational designs accordingly. This work is mostly still conceptual, but two things feel certain: First, the work should start from the most foundational qualities of being human, from caring to creativity, and second, equipping young people with the ethical capacity to decide not what technology can do but what it should do can help preserve the human agency and autonomy we will need to flourish.
First Moves and Practices
The purpose of schools has changed before and will change again. Neoliberalism itself did not appear overnight but grew from a decades-long strategy from academics and philanthropists to cultivate people, institutions, and ideas, until the turmoil of the 1970s created an opening for influence and power.19 While we’ve documented extensively the flaws of neoliberalism, we do admire the patience and coordination of its early adherents. We see an analogous task for renewing the purpose of public education today.
Reaffirming the purpose of public schools in the United States is a task for all of us. We all have some connection to the public school system. Anyone can imagine their work with young people as civically important. Rather than weaponizing education to deepen political divides, we need to remind ourselves of the real benefits of public schools.
First, renewing the democratic purpose of education will require significant conceptual field building. This starts with imagining new or reframed ideas for how the purpose of public schools can support a changing democracy. Our article is one such effort, but more, even competing, education frames are needed from academia, think tanks, and educators working at the intersection of public schools, democracy, and technological disruptions to the labor market. We expect that the initial audience for this movement of ideas will be influencers and policy makers. A linked but more movement-based set of strategies will be necessary to engage teachers, parents, and the public.
Ideas, however, do not spread themselves, and the fragmentation of academia creates a barrier to building critical intellectual mass at any one institution. This deficiency will need addressing, whether through individual institutional support, the seeding of professional networks, or the creation of new think tanks or similar intellectual centers. The role that the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation played in the genesis of neoliberalism offers an instructive example.20
Research into problems of practice is required to complement the work of theory—for instance, how to build civic identity and belonging in diverse settings, how civic skills align with workforce competencies, or how the field of artificial intelligence ethics might apply to secondary-school curricula. Graduate schools of education are particularly suited to this work, given their domain expertise and their ability to apply research to educator preparation.21 In another example of effective support for teachers, the Educating for American Democracy (EAD) project drew on a network of more than 300 scholars to create a K-12 history-and-civics curriculum that translated democratic knowledge, skills, and dispositions into digestible standards and engaging lessons. EAD has also sponsored multiple pilot programs for creative approaches to elementary-grade history and civics instruction.
While conceptual field building will take time to mature, significant innovation and experimentation must also be undertaken at the level of practice. (The EAD example bridges these domains.) Some of this work involves strengthening the democratic preparation of young people directly. Other cases concern new openings for rethinking the role of schools in society. Consider the following examples:
Community schools | Community schools integrate traditional education with social and health supports, family services, and community participation. They received new interest following COVID-19 because of their attention to health and mental health needs; the federal government and states like California now support their expansion. We hope to see a renewed appreciation for the interdependence of education with other social determinants of learning, as well as policy solutions and practices that knit together these different segments of the community.
Civic learning | Spurred by the same threats to democracy we have explored, some states and districts have responded not by banning books but by expanding civic learning.22 In 2022, Congress also increased federal funding for civic learning through the Civics Secures Democracy Act, though this funding remains minuscule compared with other priorities.23 To build this momentum, we recommend expanding civic preparation beyond just history and social studies. For instance, in the network of Democracy Schools in Illinois, educators work across disciplines to convey factual knowledge of democratic functions, the rights and responsibilities of citizens, and fluency in technology and society. Additionally, young people will also need schools and communities that develop agency and self-efficacy, curricula that promote inquiry into problems relevant to their lives, educators who are trained to nurture civic skills, and policies that fully fund this work’s potential.
Affirming curricula | As attention to the role of race in American life has risen over recent years, educational publishers, districts, and states have increased their adoption of curricula and other educational resources that reflect the diverse backgrounds and cultures of today’s student body. While the backlash against equity in education has certainly led some publishers to remove references to race and gender, most are looking for guidance on how to maintain their focus on culturally sustaining practices. Data testify to the effectiveness of more affirming materials, and we see curricular improvement as an important step toward building student belonging and self-efficacy in school and beyond.
Student voice | Student voice refers to students’ expression of perspectives on and experiences with issues that matter to them, both in and outside school. Research shows that the cultivation of student voice can improve school engagement and performance, while students who develop their voice in high school are more likely to vote, volunteer, protest, and run for office as adults.24 Expanding student voice has been a recent focus in the education sector; efforts range from student surveys on school experiences to learning about and helping address community challenges to participating in youth organizing and movement building. By building student voice, schools can prepare young people to exercise their civic voice and to participate more fully in democratic life.
Supporting the democratic preparation of young people within diverse communities is a necessary complement to the national work of ideas and practice. It also reflects the significant power that both states and school districts hold in America’s decentralized education system. We have seen from our work across the country that different states have varying starting points for how they prepare young people for democratic life. Illinois, mentioned previously, has a strong network of Democracy Schools. California has invested deeply in community schools. Both Alabama and Massachusetts scored as “exemplary” in a recent ranking of state civics standards. Other states boast supportive policies for civic learning, while some are starting from scratch. These differences can be opportunities for learning and best-practice sharing among state officials, superintendents, principals, and teachers.
At the community level, polls show that Americans trust their local public schools more than they do public schools overall—mirroring the greater trust people hold for local institutions in general. While polarization is certainly a barrier in some communities, these data suggest that opportunities for Americans to come together are greatest close to home. Over the coming years, philanthropists, governments, and local citizens can do more to help parents and community members have conversations across lines of difference about what they want for their children in school and beyond. Some tools for these dialogues exist already. For example, the “portrait of a graduate” process engages a broad range of community members in determining what attributes they want to see in their high school grads (good citizens, critical thinkers, etc.). While more research is needed, early reports suggest that these kinds of deliberative processes can reduce local acrimony and provide a foundation for collaboration.
Schools with Civic Purpose
Reaffirming the purpose of public schools in the United States is a task for all of us. We all have some connection to the public-education system. And while not everyone who works in education teaches civics, anyone can imagine their work with young people as civically important. If you’re a teacher, for instance, how can you cultivate in students the art of disagreement without disparagement? If you work on social and emotional learning, what might it mean to foster belonging and self-efficacy not just in school but in our democratic system? And if you work outside education, on voting rights and democracy, how might a more informed citizenry sustain reforms like voting over time?
Seeing education with a democratic lens likewise opens a new set of possibilities. Instead of reacting to controversy by sanitizing or censoring what’s being taught, schools can lean into teaching complex ideas and subjects in an age-appropriate manner, recognizing them as opportunities to better engage students in learning, help them to weigh different perspectives, and prepare them to wrestle with the issues they will soon face as voters.
Rather than weaponizing education to deepen political divides, we need to remind ourselves of the real benefits of public schools. In the earliest days of our country’s founding, a chief purpose of education was to prepare citizens and ease the dangers of faction within a divided democracy. This idea of a civic purpose for public schools has ebbed and flowed throughout history and is in urgent need of renewal in this time of rising polarization. Public schools that foster an appreciation for history and the skills and dispositions for citizenship must be part of the long-term solution to the democratic challenges that we face today. As we look to a future full of possibilities, we must envision human qualities for thriving that mirror those of democratic renewal, such as agency, empathy, curiosity, cooperation, critical thinking, and creative expression. All of these traits are intrinsic to healthy relationships and a healthy society. Nurturing these qualities in young people will help create the rich, immersive, relevant learning experiences that all students deserve, and upon which the sustained health of our democracy depends.
Read more stories by Kent McGuire & Matt Wilka.