For much of the past three decades, education reform rested on a surprisingly durable bipartisan foundation, from the standards and accountability movement of the late 1990s and early 2000s through No Child Left Behind and into the Obama-era push for more rigorous teacher evaluations. That consensus was never without tension, but it held long enough to engender significant progress. Over time, however, it began to wear down, arguably reaching its last gasp in Washington with the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act. What followed was a mix of reform fatigue, rising polarization, and declining confidence in testing and accountability mechanisms, alongside a broader shift away from technocratic problem-solving. As that consensus frayed, so too did the assumptions that had long governed who should control what in public education.
The erosion of that confidence is visible in public opinion data. In the early 1970s, nearly two-thirds of Americans, across party lines, reported having “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in public schools. Fast forward to today, that figure has fallen to less than one-third overall, with confidence declining sharply in both parties, especially among Republicans. What has followed is not a clean ideological reversal, but something more fragmented and harder to categorize—one that is increasingly visible in debates over local control. The familiar lines that once structured education policy—between state and local authority—have blurred, and the red-blue divide on local control has begun to shift in a couple of unexpected ways.
First, the traditional red-blue roles around local control no longer map neatly onto today’s reality. Historically, red states prioritized local autonomy, framing it as a defense against state and federal overreach. That commitment has become far more selective. Several red states have taken a more prescriptive approach to schooling, from requiring the display of the Ten Commandments in classrooms to using funding incentives and state-vetted lists to steer districts toward preferred instructional materials. At the same time, many blue states now default to a posture of deference toward schools and districts, often reinforcing the influence of teachers unions.
Second, the culture war dynamics, though often criticized in education politics as a distraction, have, for better or worse, been a source of political energy, helping to galvanize parents and lawmakers in red states around issues that might otherwise struggle to gain traction, and weakening the case for local control. State takeovers offer a useful case in point. In Texas, for example, the state has asserted direct authority over Houston ISD and several other districts identified as persistently underperforming. While culture war debates have helped mobilize political engagement around race and gender conflicts, that energy has also spilled over into broader concerns about school performance and accountability. In contexts where education issues have become more visible and politically salient to parents and voters, lawmakers have stronger incentives to act decisively. In states where that level of engagement is lower, that kind of willingness to intervene is harder to generate.
Taken together, these examples suggest that the most important shift in education politics may not be a straightforward partisan realignment, but a deeper change in how trust is distributed across different levels of governance. In states like Texas and Tennessee, this reflects a broader readiness to turn public dissatisfaction into administrative action, whether through state takeovers or other efforts to shape specific practices.
In many blue states, by contrast, state action operates through more incremental and institutionally constrained channels. For example, Massachusetts leveraged regulatory actions instead of legislative wins to make reforms on educator licensure, teacher evaluations, and teacher compensation in districts under state receivership. There’s also indication that Oregon wants to do something about its dismal test results. Blue-state education reform is not absent, but it tends to look different in form and pathway. The result is a landscape in which local control remains rhetorically central but is increasingly contingent in practice.
To understand this shift, it’s worth turning to Rick Hess’s argument about the broader erosion of trust in educational institutions:
Through the late 20th century and the first years of this one, policymakers and the public mostly treated…the internal workings of schools with benign neglect. As much as educators decried the “intrusiveness” of No Child Left Behind or Obama-era teacher evaluation, neither initiative made much effort to influence school-level decisions around books, instructional materials, grading, curricula, staffing, or how to teach civics or history. Even “reformers” hesitated to insert themselves too deeply into the day-to-day work of schools... But the pandemic, populism, and the platforming of “anti-racist education” combined to upend this hands-off approach.
In our current environment, debates over issues like local control, school choice, or accountability have become less about the policies themselves and more about which actors are trusted to wield authority. The result is a negatively polarized system in which the same tools (e.g., district-level takeovers, tax credit scholarships) are embraced or rejected depending on which political coalitions favor them.
Seen through this lens, the red-blue flip on local control is best understood as a broader institutional realignment driven by declining trust, accelerated in no small part by prolonged school closures during Covid. That has important implications for the future of education reform. Efforts to rebuild agreement around the balance of authority in education will likely struggle unless they grapple directly with the question of trust—who holds it, who has lost it, and how it can be regained. Until then, debates over education policy will continue to be shaped less by shared goals than by competing judgments about which parts of the system deserve the public’s confidence.
