(Illustration by Ibrahim Rayintakath)
In late 2024, we made the case that the ideas driving school reform, from “A Nation at Risk” through the No Child Left Behind era, ideas of choice, competition, and individual return, were inadequate for the pressing problems of education today: what kind of citizens a multiracial democracy requires, what kind of human flourishing public schools should enable, and how institutions can do this work amidst artificial intelligence, polarization, and inequality. These cannot be answered through piecemeal interventions, however well designed, but only by addressing the underlying issue of public education’s purpose.
At the time, we focused our argument on rebuilding the connection between public schools and democracy, because that’s where the need was greatest. We traced the history of education as a public good to America’s founding, with civic preparation as a central task of schools. Through this lens, it’s the turn in recent decades toward school as solely an individual benefit that seems ahistoric. But we also recognized that a debate about purpose must itself be democratic. More than a single answer, we need a conversation with many voices—some aligned, some dissenting, but all thinking hard about what public schools are for.
For this series, we asked 10 authors, with diverse but clear views, to grapple with the changing purpose of American public education. Danielle Allen gives a succinct, radical proposal that public education should prepare people to share power. Kim Smith lays out the shortfalls of the current system, while calling for a new social contract in an age of artificial intelligence. Matt Sigelman likewise takes up the question of AI, arguing that workforce and democratic preparation are the same project. Elizabeth Clay Roy shows us how civics should be lived not just learned, while Kaya Henderson emphasizes co-creating learning with young people. Frances Messano calls for a Marshall Plan for public schools. Mike Matsuda and Sonja Santelises show that durable changes have both technical and political dimensions. John Bailey contends that higher education gives us a model for pluralistic K-12 redesign. And Catherine Lhamon reminds us that the equal promise of public education is not given but hard-won, and in need of renewal.
The resulting question is not whether schools should serve individual flourishing, economic mobility, or democratic life. They must do all three. The harder question is what institutional form can cultivate individual liberty while still requiring young people to encounter, deliberate, and share power with those they did not choose. Our own answer is that public education must become more flexible at the edges, and more democratic at its core.
Agreements on the Future of Public Schools
At a time when the discourse on public schools stresses what’s broken, these articles show a surprising amount of shared ground. The authors differ in emphasis, but taken together their arguments suggest the outline of a broader, bolder vision for public education’s future.
First and foremost, we heard agreement that purpose matters. Frances Messano argues that in our rush to fix how schools are run we overlook why we have them—so miss an opportunity for deeper innovation. Matt Sigelman makes the case that orienting schools toward careers and democracy is mutually reinforcing rather than opposed—and that both purposes are needed. The theme is clear: we cannot deliver the scale of change public education needs unless we start with the purpose it serves.
The authors also asked a version of the same question: what does this moment ask of public schools? Four recurring challenges emerged: young people disconnected from school and one another; polarization and fraying civic health; the disruptive force of AI on both learning and work; and labor-market upheaval that makes preparation for the future feel uncertain. Together, these challenges call for more than incremental fixes; they call for public schools, a long-standing institution, to redefine their core mission.
Despite such challenges, we see real alignment about what we want for young people. Kim Smith writes of flourishing as the rightful goal of learning, while several authors use thriving in a similar way. Liz Clay Roy emphasizes agency, belonging, and moral courage. John Bailey and Matt Sigelman both discuss durable skills, at the intersection of jobs and civics. This is not to claim unanimity—Kaya Henderson points out that much of the content we teach is up for debate. But if we as a sector can stop describing the aims of education in the language of cut scores and measurement tools, and talk more about helping young people live lives of dignity and purpose, that would go a long way toward rekindling faith in public schools.
A fourth point of convergence is relative agreement on the early grades. Intentionally or not, the authors gravitated to reforms that affect teenagers or young adults: apprenticeships, community projects, public debate, and job skills training. Sonja Santelises put it bluntly—we largely know what works in the early grades, so we should just do it. This suggests a truce for education politics: stop relitigating the foundational years, execute with rigor and consistency, and concentrate our boldest redesign on the later grades, where the disagreements truly lie.
A fifth and final point of agreement—and the entrée to our debate—is that the window for re-thinking school is wide open. In our initial article, we used Thomas Kuhn’s frame of paradigms to describe today’s moment of societal transition, when our old rules or institutions feel painfully insufficient, but no new consensus has yet replaced them. Moments like this, when we are clearer about what has failed than what comes next, are unusually open to bold ideas. They are also dangerous, vulnerable to ideologues and authoritarians, and those more eager to dismantle public education than rebuild it. Which is why clarity of purpose matters more than ever.
Beyond Tradeoffs: Defining What Schools Are For
Clarifying education’s purpose allows us to move beyond the false tradeoffs that characterize our current debate on schools. Rather than pitting hard skills against soft, careers against civic preparation, or rigor against well-being, the future of education depends on seeing these as interconnected goals.
For instance, the authors in this series rightly contend that civic and workforce preparation are not opposed, but part of the same project. Matt Sigelman cites jobs data to show that liberal arts skills like discernment, dialogue, and shared problem solving make up an increasing share of the roles workers hold as they advance in their careers. As AI compresses the early rungs of the career ladder, sending recent graduates into previously mid-career positions, these competencies will matter more, not less. As workers navigate careers with multiple transitions, learning how to learn new things, the hallmark of liberal arts, will gain significance. This reinforcement flows the other way as well. Multiple authors emphasized the formative role of work and apprenticeships for attributes like initiative, responsibility, and teamwork—all key for civic and community life as well as shaping an authentic sense of self.
A similar pattern pervades the conversation around screens, disconnection, and youth mental health. Limiting screen time or social media has its place, as does crisis intervention. But helping a young person thrive involves more than wellness interventions; it requires reshaping the environments and relationships that surround young people in ways that promote agency, belonging, and the felt sense that they matter to other people in their community. We call this feeling purpose, and it can be a powerful shield against disconnection. Cultivating purpose is active, best pursued in groups. Ideally it happens with people different from you. It needs productive struggle alongside reflection and support. And it speaks to something greater than yourself. The conditions that give rise to purpose also promote citizenship, and describe the rich, engaged learning experiences that all young people need.
Artificial intelligence may help break these tradeoffs. Frameworks like Durable Skills are helpful starts for naming the AI-resilient skills shared across work, civics, and personal development. But the next steps must get specific, like a recent project from Burning Glass Institute and AI-EDU to map which skills AI automates outright versus augments, because the lesson is not that core skills go away, but that they shift in emphasis. Take writing. Initial claims that AI would supplant all writing have tempered as we’ve seen the dangers of cognitive offloading and the importance of thinking through drafts. But AI will change writing, whether as drafting partner, editor, or surrogate. It will also make evaluating the claims of existing writing, especially writing done with the gloss of AI, even more important. The ancient Greeks called this art rhetoric, and used it to separate an argument that was sound from one that was smooth. The student who can do this for an AI’s output is the same one who can judge a demagogue’s. And it can’t be faked—this discernment depends on having done your own thinking first.
At a deeper level, AI can clarify what education is really for. John Bailey makes this point well. The common advice has been to prioritize the human skills AI struggles with. But chasing whatever AI can't do yet is a race we're bound to lose. A better target would be to ask what requires actual relationships with other humans. Danielle Allen gives the example of nonviolence as a relational capacity that is demanding precisely because it refuses the satisfaction of retaliation. The word satisfaction matters. It connotes the emotions and stakes that can only be stirred through human encounter. By contrast, arguing with an AI is impersonal; arguments in an online forum mostly so. But a well-structured classroom debate, face-to-face, on a real issue with real stakes, exposes you to the pressure of performance, the shame of being wrong, the pride of being right, and having to eat lunch and learn alongside fellow students after the debate is done. None of this can be outsourced, because it depends on the presence of other people who matter to you.
What It Means to Educate Toward Public Purpose
Flourishing, deeper learning, and durable job skills all describe how an individual benefits from an education. But the authors in this series concurred that education also matters as a public good: the foundation for a dynamic economy, strong communities, and healthy democracy. This agreement is notable—usually our debates on education’s purpose start and end with the individual. But if education is a public good, deserving of public dollars, we must define the capacities shared public life requires.
At its core, educating toward a public purpose requires schools that first teach what it means to share power and, second, do so across the differences that define our modern democracy. In describing this we hope to dissolve another false binary—that our only choices are pursuing education as a solely individual enterprise, or defending schools as public goods without attending to their real challenges.
Criteria 1: Learning to Share Power
Danielle Allen introduces an essential frame, that democracy itself is an exercise in power sharing, particularly with people we did not choose and may not like. So too are most aspects of work and community life. Sharing power rests on mutual respect and belonging. It relies on the exercise of agency that does not infringe on the agency of others, on disagreeing without dominating your opponent. Done well it invites collaboration, requires compromise, and cannot be outsourced to AI. Education, therefore, serves its public purposes when it prepares citizens to share power.
This echoes a central quandary today’s young people will face: what it means to share power in an AI world. On our current trajectory, wealth and power will concentrate to a few firms and individuals, particularly as AI creates more value absent human inputs. Basic rules like firm ownership and taxation may prove inadequate, while new forms of cooperation to defray AI risk will be needed. If we still want to live in a democracy, rather than being ruled by a circle of oligarchs and their omnipotent machines, the path forward is new ways of sharing power.
But where can people learn this capacity? Schools are the obvious answer, but they can credibly teach power sharing only if they practice it. That means confronting a crisis of trust cited across the series: among families who doubt schools meet individual needs, students who question school’s relevance, communities wary of the latest reforms, and a public uncertain that success in school still leads to success in life. To be fair, institutions all face declining trust. Even as national trust in public education has fallen, most families still trust their local public schools. But the problem is real, and recalls a bedrock democratic principle—government derives its power from the consent of the governed.
Multiple authors arrive at the same solution: schools must be willing to co-create more of the learning experience with students, families, and the surrounding community. Kim Smith describes a new social contract based on entrusting families and learners with more agency and flexibility. Liz Clay Roy argues that civic formation happens only when learners shift from spectators to active participants. And Kaya Henderson predicates her essay on reconstructing schools alongside young people. Co-creation is how schools put power sharing into practice. It reflects Danielle Allen’s core claim as well, that freedom is not merely being left alone, but having a meaningful hand in shaping the institutions that shape your life.
The best way to teach young people to share power is to practice doing it. We can start by gathering better student feedback, shaping learning for relevance, and inviting students into school decision-making. After all, young people are the actual experts on their school experience, from playground dynamics to classroom rigor and belonging, and we would make real progress on mental health and absenteeism—not to mention academics—if we spent more time asking students what they want from school, trusting their answers, and endeavoring to follow through. None of this is about abdicating adult wisdom, but about having the humility to recognize we don’t hold all the answers.
A final note on sharing power: it’s not just for kids. Schools are more than places of learning; they are civic institutions. They offer a physical space to come together, hold meetings, greet your neighbors, celebrate football games or artistic endeavors. They are also a focal point for relearning how to share power. Promising local experiments have sprouted nationwide: community schools in California, participatory budgeting in Arizona, and school board reform in multiple communities. Education is one of the few areas in which almost all Americans have experience; we should use this common ground, rocky as it may be, to practice the deliberation democracy requires.
Criteria 2: Learning Across Difference
Co-creation and the practice of sharing power don't happen in a vacuum. They unfold within an American democracy that demands certain capacities of its participants, including the ability to disagree productively across difference. This, according to many authors in this series, is a lost art. Catherine Lhamon writes of leading federal Civil Rights enforcement after the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks, watching with horror the proliferation of hate on college campuses, and realizing that as a nation, we had forgotten how to disagree. Sonja Santelises cites a similar pattern in Baltimore’s K-12 schools—the democratic cosplay of students who show up to protest a school board meeting and receive an adult pat on the head, but who are wholly unprepared for the rigor of public pushback and leave feeling disillusioned, not empowered.
Both examples recall Frederick Douglass’ warning, in his 1857 West India Emancipation address, that “there is no progress without struggle,” and wanting otherwise is to “want crops without plowing up the ground; want rain without thunder and lightning.” Productive struggle is intrinsic to learning and democracy alike, yet we live in a society that avoids it. Our news media sorts by partisan preference; algorithms urge us into echo chambers; apps cater to needs real and imagined. And AI chatbots and companions, as Kim Smith and other authors warn, always validate our preferences, mimicking human attachment without the friction that teaches us to manage conflict.
If friction is the point, it follows that we cannot truly learn to share power if we only encounter people who think and look like we do. To illustrate what democracy fully asks of us, Danielle Allen recalls Martin Luther King Jr.’s distinction between desegregation and integration. Desegregation, which we often call diversity, means physical proximity. While backed by strong evidence, desegregation is only a partial answer, and risks, in King’s words, a school where students sit “elbows together but hearts apart.” Integration is the harder, more affirmative process of lived equality, of learning to hold the humanity of another student in your heart, particularly when their views or background differ from your own.
The core principle that flows from this—learning to share power across difference—also gives us a way to assess the democratic capacity of different school forms. An AI tutor, smart but sycophantic, clearly fails the test. So do K–12 vouchers: they let families exit, but they don't build the muscle of disagreeing productively within a shared institution. We recognize the legitimate frustration some families feel toward school, with exit a signal that a public system is not sufficiently responsive to the people it serves. But is the solution to move toward sameness? Is reducing the capacity of all schools to educate toward democracy, or to turn a democratic institution into a consumer good the answer, especially when democracy is under strain? We think the solution to a democratic shortfall is building more responsive, co-creative institutions—more democracy, not less.
This test cuts both ways. A public school can be diverse in its enrollment but segregated in its halls, tracked in its classes, and full of students who share a building but not power. A student given a perfectly personalized pathway, tuned to their existing interests and values, might emerge with excellent test scores but impoverished in their capacity to negotiate difference or share power. But a school in which diverse families co-construct a shared experience is not just preparation for democracy, it’s embodiment. This is a high bar—both practically and ethically ambitious—but it creates the sort of thick, durable purpose that could sustain public schools as their aims shift in an AI world.
Hub and Spoke: A Design Principle for Public Purpose
Over two centuries ago, James Madison argued in Federalist No. 10 that the cure for faction was not to extinguish the liberty that created it, but to control its effects. Applied to rearchitecting public schools, we want a system that cultivates individual interests, gives learners agency, and prepares them to live choice-filled lives. This is the flame of liberty worth keeping. But the founders also knew that liberty unchecked would divide us, and lead citizens to abuse power rather than share it. We want an institution strong enough to hold a diverse polity together, and counter the forces pulling us apart.
We think of this as a “hub and spoke” public system. Today, secondary schools are mainly hubs—single buildings, relatively unchanged, where the majority of a young person’s learning is meant to happen. Several authors in this series point out, rightly, that one building cannot contain the full range of experiences young people need. But nor is the answer only spokes—places and pathways that let each family pursue opportunity on their own, often with others who already think and live like they do. We need both: spokes tailored to the individual, and hubs for learning and reflection across difference. The relationship between the two makes the system work.
Spokes are about agency and exploration. Learning might happen through service, an outdoor expedition, addressing a community problem, attending a public microschool, or participating in an intercultural exchange. Substantial time is dedicated to work-based learning and apprenticeships for all students, not just those pursuing trades. Spokes can be physical places outside the school walls but online spaces too—an AP statistics course for the rural student without access to a nearby teacher, or an AI simulation of ancient Athens. Done well, spokes make education permeable, letting young people pursue interests, build social capital, encounter adult worlds, and learn through doing. While we focus on young people, spokes also expand opportunities for adult reskilling and lifelong learning.
If spokes are exploration, hubs are a home to return to. Common knowledge, stable relationships, family connections, belonging and formation of purpose. In a hub, learners reflect on what the spokes taught them and make meaning together. It’s where students interning at a local bank, volunteering at a church, and painting a public mural all explain to each other what they are learning, what values they hold, and how their emerging purposes exist together. A hub is diverse in every sense, a sandbox to practice power sharing across difference, where the skills learned are the ones only human interaction can teach. Hubs are also where students co-construct what’s next—plotting learning roadmaps based on their strengths and passions, with mentorship from educators, to be pursued both at the hub and across its surrounding spokes.
Building blocks of this vision exist already, and suggest it’s worth pursuing. Remake Learning in Pittsburgh spreads learning across an ecosystem of local institutions. CivLex fosters a similar ecosystem for civics in Lexington. Community schools and collective impact both rely on coordinating the assets that a community already has. Full-district career pathways and dual credit models provide a starting point for connecting K-12, college, and work-based learning. And Big Picture Learning, with its focus on advisories, relationships, and internships, comes the closest we’ve seen to doing all of these at once.
Teachers, in this model, hold significant responsibility but also more role diversity than in the current system. Educators might act as content experts. They are also guides for inquiry, who know students deeply and help them to co-create learning experiences. Most importantly, teachers are shapers of our civic future. They treat, as Mike Matsuda says, each classroom as a microcosm of society. They are well-trained experts in rhetoric and constructive disagreement; they foster belonging yet encourage curiosity; they instill the discipline to seek truth but question certainty. When students spend time in spokes, who counts as an educator expands further, with learning led by job supervisors, community mentors, and more. All of these shifts will require investment. But as AI takes over more transmission of basic knowledge, it’s worth setting a high bar for what stays human—mentoring a community project, guiding an apprenticeship, adjudicating a passionate debate. This model needs more teachers, not less, but is more flexible, relational, and rewarding—and the work it requires is a cost worth choosing.
Finally, the hub and spoke system resists privatization by design, not by accident: a central guarantee runs through it. Public dollars, public rights, and public accountability all flow through the hub, even as students fan out to learn in workplaces and other private settings. The same logic should apply to credentialing: it should follow learners to where they decide to make their mark, not just reward them for sitting where adults place them. When it comes to budgets, much of what is hard about a hub and spoke structure—scheduling, transportation, and coordination across sites—is rapidly becoming easier with AI. Over time, we could see a shift, from the sums districts spend on logistics and central offices, to pushing more dollars closer to students and supporting a highly skilled cadre of teachers.
The Limits of Design
A hub and spoke design is one idea for fusing the private and public purpose of schools. At the same time, we are wary of treating reform as only a design problem. Yes, design matters. But by centering design and process, we can give ourselves permission to underplay politics, culture, and history. As Catherine Lhamon reminds us, the public schools of Prince Edward County, Virginia, did not close their doors in 1959 because of ill-designed pedagogy or poor strategic planning. They closed them because enough white families did not want to comply with Brown v. Board of Education and share schools with families who were Black. It took a full five years of advocacy, litigation, and public outcry before federal action restored the educational rights of nearly 2,000 Black children.
This problem reverberates today. In 2023, reporting uncovered an Ohio neo-Nazi homeschooling network boasting thousands of members, with lesson plans ranging from baking a cake for Hitler’s birthday to teaching students to say sieg heil in unison. Ohio Department of Education officials reacted with alarm—but concluded they had no power to intervene and the group could continue operating, since the state did not allow public curricular oversight of Ohio’s homeschools. A few months later, when the tumult died down, Ohio’s legislature voted to weaken homeschooling regulation still further, citing the importance of deregulation and parental rights.
Of course this example is extreme—most private educational settings do operate from a place of virtue and good intent. But the further you move from a public guarantee, the easier it becomes to bend truth, spin knowledge, or even peddle hate. This is not a question of a few well-placed guardrails atop a system made for sorting. The problem is structural—a system that treats education as a private choice will always struggle to protect its public purpose. As America’s public schools grow more diverse—the percentage of white students fell from 61% in 2000 to 45% in 2023—these pressures will multiply. We are optimistic that new ideas, like the hub and spoke structure, will provide fresh ways for thinking about old problems of race and class, or tribe and creed. But history warns us that design alone is not enough; the march toward fuller Civil Rights has more often taken legal challenge, federal enforcement, persistent organizing, and moral courage.
We see a more subtle critique of design from Sonja Santelises. In discussing the conceptual benefit of rewarding students based on mastery of material rather than time spent in class, she notes the real challenge that a course in Baltimore Public Schools, even if it confers the same learning as a course offered at an elite private school like Phillips Exeter, will never send the same prestigious signal. No well-designed assessment or competency-based badge will close this gap. No process of convening local leaders will be sufficient. It’s a problem of power, class, and culture, not design. But it’s also a question of how we understand education’s purpose.
This gives us a path forward. If the authors in this series are right—that the competencies that will matter most in an AI-rich labor market are the same as those required by democracy—then diverse contexts gain a new advantage. An elite private school can teach wonderful things. But it is structurally limited in teaching power sharing across difference, because its prestige depends on exclusion. Baltimore is not so limited. As AI compresses complex knowledge work and the value of mere credentials starts to decline, the diversity of Baltimore can become a democratic strength—if we choose to cultivate it seriously. This shift won’t happen tomorrow, not in three years, and possibly not for decades to come. But this is the aspiration of a public education worth defending: an institution whose strength is precisely the difference it holds together.
An Agenda for Purpose
What will it take to create a system that is more flexible at the edges and more democratic at the core, that advances individual flourishing alongside public purpose? We can’t claim this will be easy. In fact, it would be far simpler to give every student an AI tutor, or each family a check and wish them luck. But the bolder, more creative project is to re-found an institution around the full purpose this moment calls for—the attributes that democracy and human flourishing require, that future careers demand, and that no tool can replace. Three lines of work—form, ideas, and beliefs—outline where we might begin.
Start with experiments in form. A hub and spoke model is one way to architect a future education system, but is hardly the only one. What matters is that community schools, apprenticeships, dual enrollment, civic projects, and new approaches to co-creation shift from being scattered reforms to coherent parts of the same public system. States and regions can pilot hub-like spaces for power sharing across difference, along with spoke-like infrastructure for flexible exploration. Schools should experiment with co-creation from the classroom to the school board. And every experiment needs public protections to ensure that flexibility does not become sorting by another name. If the discourse on school reform can feel too small, this paints a richer picture of what innovation can become.
We also need a movement of ideas, guided by the shared recognition that when designing a system, understanding its purpose matters. The workforce field has made real progress in naming the skills young people need, even as these skills are changing. Democracy holds requirements of its participants just as much as the workforce does, and we should treat them with equal rigor. The same holds true for personal purpose and flourishing. We need a robust intellectual project to better define these requirements, understand the experiences that nurture them, and develop guidance on how to do them well. Foundations, universities, think tanks, companies, and nonprofits all have roles to play. But the most important ideas will come from young people themselves, supported by adults, informed by prior knowledge, and equipped with the creativity that comes from seeing old problems with new eyes. Young people also live their lives as an integrated whole, not in the separate circles of education, workforce, mental health, and democracy that define our funding streams. Philanthropy, therefore, has a particular obligation to foster common cause across complementary ideas, and to build a broader coalition than just one field can muster.
The hardest work is changing beliefs—the assumptions and values beneath any school or system, where paradigms exert their quiet pull and change is hardest and most lasting. For decades, we’ve absorbed the ideas that education is a personal endeavor, that its purpose is to acquire basic facts and knowledge, that new technology always makes it better, and that its system is a bureaucracy to escape more than improve. A renewed agenda must challenge these assumptions directly. That will take more than programs. It will take stories, evidence, public argument, and visible examples of schools that are both more flexible and more democratic. Again, philanthropy has a special role to play, with the patience and capital to sow the seeds of a different paradigm. But the deeper work belongs to all of us: to recover the belief that public education is not merely a service families consume but a shared institution through which citizens learn what they owe one another.
Building Schools Worth Defending
Consider a thought experiment: if American public schooling did not exist, could we create it? It’s hard to imagine we could. In our rush to say what’s wrong with public education, we forget how remarkable it remains, that within a single public institution a school-age child can move across 50 states, with over 13,000 districts, to one of nearly 100,000 public schools, and receive an education free of charge. With K-12 public schools today serving 50 million students and employing over 6 million adults, there’s a strong case to be made that, for all its shortfalls, public education remains the broadest shared institution in American life.
To say that public schools are worth defending is not to defend the system as it stands. Too many students are disengaged. Too many families feel unheard. Too many educators are exhausted. Too many schools reproduce the inequalities they are meant to overcome. But nor should we abandon the public promise. The lesson of this series is that education's purpose is larger than any one reform agenda has allowed. Schools must prepare young people for work, but not only work; for individual flourishing, but not private fulfillment alone; for democracy, but as practice not abstraction.
Frances Messano calls for a Marshall Plan for public education. The original Marshall Plan was not charity; it was an investment in institutions, held together by shared ideals, in the conviction that free societies had to be built and not left to circumstance. This is the scale of commitment this moment asks of us, to rebuild not just an institution, but the beliefs that give it life.
The schools that meet this moment will look quite different from the ones we inherited. They will be more flexible, more porous, more connected to the world beyond their walls. They will give young people more agency, more chances to pursue meaningful work, more ways to build knowledge through experience. But they must also become more public, more integrated, and more democratic: places where difference is strength, progress grows from struggle, and power is truly shared. In an age of artificial intelligence, inequality, loneliness, and polarization, we will need many places where young people can discover who they are. But we also need places where they learn how to live together. This is the promise still worth fighting for. This is what public schools, at their best, can be—schools worth defending.
Read more stories by Kent McGuire & Matt Wilka.