The tension between public education as a civic institution and education as a vehicle for social justice is difficult to resolve. It doesn’t arrive as a policy change. It enters quietly, through teacher training programs, professional development, and curricular “recommendations.”
Another day, another curriculum controversy. This time, it’s in Philadelphia.
In a report for The Free Press, Frannie Block reveals that the city’s school district has created a controversial eleventh-grade world history course and other social studies materials with assignments and lessons that encourage students to reinterpret U.S. and world history through the lens of systemic injustice and activism. Students are asked to select a song to replace the national anthem after reflecting on racism and, when studying the Civil War, to understand that “racist attitudes played a foundational role in the formation of American identity.” Other lessons frame westward expansion and the Cold War in terms of American supremacy and racial exclusion, encourage students to view U.S. foreign policy through the lens of racism, and describe wartime propaganda as creating a manufactured sense of national unity. A unit in world history teaches that economic inequality shows “the need for systemic changes and equitable economic policies.” The unit examines “the intersections of climate justice, economic justice, anti-fascism, and human rights.”
The most important line in Block’s piece, however, is also among its most easily overlooked. This curriculum is not required for Philly teachers, merely “recommended,” she writes, “which means they have the power to decide whether to follow it in their classrooms.”
There are two ways to respond to this. You might choose to be reassured. At least the district isn’t mandating the content. No one is forcing teachers to use it. But this invites a second thought, potentially more urgent and troubling: Hold on a second. Who gives teachers—public employees with prodigious influence over a captive audience of other people’s children—the license to choose such a politically charged curriculum? And how were school district personnel empowered in the first place to create such an aggressively political curriculum at taxpayer expense? What democratic process or recognized public authority gives them this permission? Philadelphia’s social studies materials were not created surreptitiously. Block quotes Ismael Jimenez, the district’s director of social studies curriculum, who said, “Every child should walk into a classroom and feel the revolution stirring in the air because that’s what real education is: liberation with a syllabus.”
To state the matter mildly, it’s unlikely that a majority of Pennsylvanians agree with that vision for their schools, or that they would endorse revolution at public expense within a school district staffed by government employees.
This forces us to confront a seldom-examined tension that is baked into the culture of teaching and the structure of public education. Education is widely assumed by Americans to be a politically neutral government service focused on impartially equipping students with knowledge and skills they need to be independent and productive adult citizens. Yet many teacher preparation programs explicitly train educators to “teach for social justice” and commit to challenging systemic inequities. And those commitments are situated within a professional culture that is uniquely well-suited to advance them, if teachers are so inclined.
As I’ve noted elsewhere, no category of public employee enjoys more freedom, flexibility, or insulation from democratic oversight than teachers. A bus driver cannot choose to drive for social justice, disregarding his assigned route; a police officer cannot patrol a different beat if he perceives a more urgent need in a different neighborhood. By contrast, teachers—and those in their states and local districts who develop materials for classrooms—possess almost unlimited authority to shape what students read and hear by choosing texts, guiding classroom discussions, and selecting resources to reflect their educational priorities or philosophy. Those unfamiliar with classroom practice (and even some inside) assume that public education is a top-down enterprise: states, districts, or school boards choose a curriculum, and teachers robotically deliver officially sanctioned lessons. It’s simply not so. The vast majority of classroom teachers create, customize, or simply download teaching materials from the Internet with no meaningful oversight or controls for fairness, accuracy, or quality.
To be clear, there are good reasons for teachers’ operational flexibility. It enables educators to differentiate instruction, respond to local contexts, and craft lessons that resonate with students. Done well, it reflects professionalism and skill. But there is no limiting principle. It is only when controversies like this one in the City of Brotherly Love erupt into public view that we’re forced to reckon with the conflict between public education’s status as an ostensibly neutral government function and the field’s conception of itself as anything but neutral.
Nor is this a new or novel tension. Twenty years ago, a comprehensive American Educational Research Association (AERA) review observed that “conceptualizing teaching and teacher education in terms of social justice has been the central animating idea for education scholars and practitioners who connect their work to larger critical movements.” In that framing, the teacher is not merely a professional educator, but also an activist committed to diminishing the inequities of American society. So, too, are some number of the “education scholars” who participate in curriculum development.
That’s why examples like the one Block highlights are not aberrations. They’re inevitable. When public school teachers are not encouraged to see themselves first and foremost as public employees and state actors, when they regard themselves free agents, and when ideologically charged materials are promoted without oversight or democratic vetting, the results are predictable. No board votes. No public hearings. Just quiet diffusion of politically-charged content from central office to classroom, and a professional culture—not universal, but not uncommon—that has been acculturated to see politicization not merely as uncontroversial, but appropriate and even a professional requirement.
To be sure, this could work in the opposite direction just as easily. The same permission structure that allows teachers and central-office mandarins to build lessons around the 1619 Project or Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States also allows them to select PragerU or materials from 1776 Unites as they do every day and uncontroversially.
The louder debates over “book bans” and anti-DEI legislation often dominate headlines. But those controversies, for all their heat, are more visible and easier to adjudicate. The tension between public education as a civic institution and education as a vehicle for social justice is harder to resolve, precisely because it is stamped on education’s DNA. It doesn’t arrive as a policy change. It enters quietly, through teacher training programs, professional development, and curricular “recommendations.”
Public schools are among our most important civic institutions, essential to both individual opportunity and democratic life. But they cannot be both a core government service and a platform for personal or political expression. The tension between those roles has been allowed to fester unexamined for too long. The result is a steady erosion of public trust—not because Americans don’t value education, but because they can no longer be certain whose interests it serves. If schools want to reclaim that trust, they must first be clear-eyed about the role they play. And then act like it.
In an earlier post, I explained why high school teachers need more support to increase reading assignment length. So how might district and school leaders provide this support? Here are four suggestions.
1. Protect (or even add) time for in-class reading. Anecdotally, English language arts (ELA) students are spending more time reading together in class. That’s not a bad thing, as it creates opportunities to monitor student comprehension, address challenging passages in real time, and model fluent reading. Given students’ struggles with core reading skills and the fact that they’re ever less likely to read on their own, it’s crucial for schools to carve out time for boosting reading skills and attention spans.
But instead of allowing reading to siphon time from all the other ELA work, build in time dedicated to reading. In high schools, double periods are fairly common for science, but in ELA they mostly serve students who need significant intervention. Why not create double periods for all students to spend more time reading?
Yes, additional reading time would necessarily take time away from something else. But—especially as reading scores continue to decline among younger students—if we want to see these struggling readers attempting whole books again by college, they’re going to need to spend more time reading. Being able to read longer texts matters not only for ELA, but also for history, science, and other subjects.
In my time as an ELA teacher, some of the most memorable days were those spent reading together. My freshmen delighted in exclaiming, “Villian, thou diest!” while wielding (very fake) weapon props to enact Roderigo and Cassio’s fight, and my juniors collapsed into giggles shrieking at Abigail Williams’s imaginary birds. These experiences boosted students’ engagement and comprehension simultaneously.
A double period—or block scheduling—would have allowed us to read these scenes and immediately debrief with discussion or writing: How does Shakespeare develop his characters? What is Arthur Miller implying about McCarthyism? A longer ELA period allows more opportunity not only for reading together, but also for ensuring comprehension.
2. Set schoolwide expectations for longer assigned readings. More school-day reading minutes are necessary but not sufficient; after all, students could simply read a larger number of short texts during that time. Similarly, using a curriculum centered on complete books is also vital but not the whole story (pun intended), since schools can and do cherry-pick excerpts from any curriculum.
That’s why building-level administrators and department chairs should also facilitate a culture shift toward longer reading assignments.
In the schools where I worked, the number of books I taught was a direct result of my department’s standard practice. Where I did my teaching residency, we taught a complete novel or play every unit (six to eight weeks); in my next school, it was two to three a year; in my last school, my class read only one play and one novel all year. Short stories, poems, and excerpts hardly prepare students for the book-a-week expectation typical in college. Teachers and students need established expectations that they will regularly complete whole texts.
3. At the same time, foster school culture around reading books for fun. As I told my students, reading is a lot like running. To improve, you need to do it regularly, starting with manageable distances and then building up. And just as it’s easier to start running in pleasant weather, it’s also easier to build reading stamina with an enjoyable book. Not every student has the interest, time, or energy to read for fun outside of school, but it’s worth pointing out that it doesn’t have to be The Scarlet Letter to be a book. Young adult works like Salt to the Sea (historical fiction), Black and White (contemporary fiction), and One of Us Is Lying (mystery) all served as engaging “gateway” novels for my students.
Still, I have mixed feelings about class time for students’ choice reading, even when whole books are required. Fully independent reading can foster conditions for both zoning out and disruptive behavior. And I want to love the idea of book clubs, where small groups each read a different choice text, but in practice, the logistics can be difficult (how will students be rigorously but fairly assessed? What happens when some students can focus for a full twenty minutes, while others can barely make it to five?).
Yet, there are other ways that teachers can encourage choice reading of whole books, including outside class. At my last school, teachers posted classroom signs indicating what they were currently reading for pleasure. Whether I was reading the goofy thriller Dial A for Aunties or a biography of Genghis Khan, my little notes inspired discussions about all sorts of books. Those informal moments may not pique every child’s interest, but opportunities for conversation about books offer an entry point for some. And, as we know, reading outside the classroom matters for reading achievement in school.
In schools with a library and librarian—unfortunately, now out of reach in many places—it’s worth spending class time connecting students to those resources. A librarian might visit and highlight books to check out. Class outings to a library, whether the school’s or a public one, can encourage kids to pick something to read outside of school hours, or maybe even if they (gasp) finish their classwork early.
4. Rethink test prep. Most standardized ELA tests ask students to respond to excerpted texts, whether through multiple-choice or written response questions. In anticipation of the dreaded Regents exam, for example, my students would read a rapid-fire series of short passages to practice identifying various literary devices. Can you identify and analyze the purpose of similes in this paragraph? Good! Onto the next excerpt.
This testing mechanism is neither ideal nor necessary—Question 3 of the AP English Literature exam avoids it—but revising major assessments is a tall order. As a more modest approach, schools can revisit how they conduct test prep. Students can practice the skills they’ll need throughout a longer assigned text. They can identify symbolism just as well in Fahrenheit 451 or Fences as they can in a shorter passage and, what’s more, they can explore it in more depth in an extended text, ideally even better preparing them for an assessment (if that’s the short-term goal). In fact, I’m particularly wary of teaching excerpts because a student cannot fully understand a literary device or an author’s message without looking at the text as a whole. Assigning complete books better serves both short-term (test prep) and long-term (humanities education) purposes.
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High schoolers need to read full books so that college students have the skills and stamina to read full books, whether those are novels, textbooks, or historical documents. But teachers can’t make change in a vacuum; they need structural and cultural support to make it happen.
After years of declining voter trust on education, the Democratic party is at a crossroads. Once the party of working-class families and public schools, we now trail Republicans on these issues nationally. The cause is no mystery: Voters see a party mired in ideological battles and bureaucratic inertia, unable to deliver results where it matters most—in the classroom. In poll after poll, we’ve watched our advantage erode as Republicans position themselves as the champions of school choice and the new party of education.
We can turn this around, but not with incrementalism. Not with the same talking points or the same debates about inputs. The moment demands a new governing framework and a bold recommitment to outcomes.
The abundance agenda offers that path. It challenges the progressive status quo and calls for outcome-focused, innovation-oriented governance that produces rather than merely regulates.
Nowhere is an abundance mindset more urgently needed than in K–12 education. Our public education system is stagnating. We spend nearly $1 trillion annually, yet only a third of students can read or do math at grade level. In major cities like Baltimore, entire schools report zero students proficient in math. The gap between our aspirations and our outcomes has become a credibility crisis. And for working-class families—those we claim to champion—the crisis is most acute.
To once again become the party of education, Democrats must offer a compelling new vision and an abundance lens offers a clear guide. After a “century of sameness” in education, we must reimagine how the entire system is designed. That means transforming a rigid, stagnating system into one that is dynamic and designed to continuously improve.
This can be set in motion by building an education system based on three foundational pillars: innovation, accountability, and choice.
Innovation means unleashing new school models and education technologies that meet the diverse needs of students and families. The U.S. education system was designed for stability and standardization and built for a twentieth century economy. Today’s students need radically different tools, environments, and approaches that can more nimbly be provided by different models such as charter schools, learning pods, microschools, AI-powered tutors, and career academies. Democrats should lead in developing and scaling these models in alignment with our values. But innovative new models are not enough—they must exist within a system designed to scale what works and discard what doesn’t.
Accountability means focusing on outcomes, period. For too long, our systems have rewarded inputs—spending levels, staff ratios, compliance reports—without asking the most important question: Are students learning? We need metrics that matter, systems that self-correct, and leadership that makes tough calls when outcomes fall short. At a systems level, accountability is not about punishment; it's about feedback loops that drive improvement. Without real feedback, innovation stalls and choice becomes hollow.
Finally, choice means empowering families to select the educational environment that best meets their needs. While Republicans have seized this mantle, Democrats must reframe choice on our terms: equitable, transparent, and accountable. We should support high-performing public charters and magnet schools. We should explore education savings accounts (ESAs) and tax-credit scholarship programs that prioritize low-income families, civil rights protections, and public oversight. And we should embrace enrollment systems that increase access across district boundaries, not just within them. Choice must function within a system where quality is visible and options are genuinely different.
Distilled to its essence, an abundance mindset calls for a Democratic education agenda that pushes for:
This is not a call to abandon public education. It is a call to reimagine it. Most parents don’t care whether a school is district-run, chartered, or private. They care whether their child is learning, growing, and thriving. A modern Democratic education vision must be quality-focused and governance-neutral.
Over the past decade, too many national Democrats have avoided education debates altogether, wary of controversy or conflict with entrenched interests. But silence is no longer a strategic option. Republicans have made education central to their campaigns, they are reshaping state systems in real-time, and they have gained a political edge. For both policy and political reasons, the Left cannot ignore K–12 education policy any longer.
We will have thirty-eight gubernatorial elections in the next eighteen months. In each race, Democrats should present a strong education agenda—not as a culture war talking point, but as a platform for delivering the results that families are looking for. Our candidates must present voters with a clear new direction on education policy:
Innovation over stagnation, excellence over compliance, families over special interests, and abundance over scarcity.
Democrats have always believed in the power of education to change lives. The abundance agenda invites us to update that belief for a new era. It asks us to deliver—not just fund. To experiment—not just defend. To lead—not just react.
Our children cannot afford another decade of deferred reform. We must replace a “century of sameness” with dynamic systems that innovate, evolve, and deliver. Doing so would be good policy and politics for Democrats.
Long-running efforts to increase academic achievement for girls in middle- and high-school math seemed to be bearing fruit by 2019. However, pandemic educational disruption reversed this trend, with both NAEP and TIMSS test results in 2023 showing a far sharper decline in math test scores for girls than for boys. Additionally, female students remained underrepresented in upper-level STEM courses, STEM majors, and among those pursuing careers in STEM fields at both points in time. Researchers interested in continuing the pre-Covid rise for girls recently tested a two-pronged approach aimed to improve math performance: tutoring and female role modeling.
The research team focused on ninth grade students taking Algebra I in five high schools in an unnamed urban school district in New England during the 2021-22 school year. The district intended to offer tutoring fully in-person and solely during the school day via a special math intervention block. However, a lack of available local tutors ended up requiring virtual sessions at three of the schools, including after school hours. Tutoring groups ranged in size from one to three students per tutor. The analytic sample included 422 students (half of them girls) and 23 tutors (39 percent female). The researchers randomly assigned students to either same-gender or opposite-gender tutors. Seventy-six percent of students were Hispanic, 45 percent were white, and 33 percent were Black. Among the tutors, 43 percent were Black, 34 white, and about 2 percent Asian. The vast majority of students (89 percent) were low-income, 18 percent had Individualized Education Plans, and 37 percent were classified as having Limited English Proficiency. Among the data gathered for all students: math course grades, school attendance, and overall achievement data for the prior school year; tutoring attendance and two skills assessment scores at the beginning and end of the tutoring program; and an end-of-year student survey administered by the tutoring provider.
Girls paired with female tutors reported significantly higher STEM interest (0.73 standard deviations) compared to those assigned to male tutors and were 3.9 percentage points more likely to pass their Algebra I course with a C- or better. The effects appear stronger for girls working with tutors in-person as opposed to virtually, and during the school day as opposed to after school. However, there was no impact of tutor gender on end-of-program assessment scores or on students’ attendance patterns.[1] The researchers do note that ongoing Covid concerns contributed to inconsistent school and tutoring attendance, including an overall high rate of chronic absenteeism at all five buildings.
Interestingly, the researchers don’t land on any huge takeaways or suggest broad policy prescriptions based on these findings. In fact, in an interview with EdWeek, research team member Carly Robinson said that matching students and tutors based on any singular factor like gender or race could actually have “potential negative impact” on outcomes. Educator quality, experience, training, and previous success cannot be overlooked. Instead, she encourages schools to make sure that all students can see people like themselves within the ranks of strong and successful adult role models around them. “Ensuring that your tutor base or educator base is more diverse and represents the students who they’re working with,” she said, “would allow for that sort of exposure and role modeling,” especially in STEM areas. For girls, “being exposed to a female tutor who represents the pathway that they could take is impactful.”
SOURCE: Joshua Bleiberg et al., “The Impact of Tutor Gender Match on Girls’ STEM Interest, Engagement, and Performance,” retrieved from Annenberg Institute at Brown University (May 2025).
[1] While data are provided for the boys in the sample in appendices, there is no written analysis or discussion of them or comparisons made to the girls’ outcomes.
The “college wage premium” is typically defined as the difference between average wages earned by workers with a four-year degree versus those earned by workers with a high school diploma. For decades, the premium for degree completers has been substantial, and remains so today. However, research shows the gap has recently plateaued and a new working paper tries to pinpoint the causes.
Researchers Zachary Bleemer and Sarah Quincy (from Princeton and Vanderbilt, respectively) start by confirming the existence and trends of the college wage premium using data going all the way back to 1900. Sources include the U.S. Census, military test score records, and a raft of longitudinal surveys from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. College data come from IPEDS, College Scorecard, and previous research. While their findings confirm generally positive wage returns for college completion over the last century, not all students benefit equally. They determine that the college wage premium received by lower-income Americans completing degrees has halved since 1960, a troubling trend they call “regressivity.”
Their analysis largely rules out student readiness as a major factor, showing that the rich-poor test-score gap within the college-going population has been roughly flat (about 10 percentage points) since 1965. They conclude that ability-based selection is unlikely to explain this regressivity to any great degree. Instead, Bleemer and Quincy zero in on three factors that they say combine to explain 80 percent of the observed regressivity.
First, the institutions where lower-income students are concentrated—what they call “teaching-oriented public universities”—have declined in funding, student retention, and economic value for graduates since 1960, relative to research-oriented public institutions.
Second, lower-income students have been disproportionately enrolling in community and for-profit colleges since 1980 and 1990, respectively, rather than in higher-value four-year non-profit institutions. The main problem with increased community college enrollment for lower-income students (the gap between bottom- and top-tercile student enrollments has been 20 percentage points for decades) is that capable students shun higher-value four-year institutions to their detriment, while the poor outcomes of for-profit college students—including a sky-high dropout rate and post-graduation earnings that are often lower than individuals with only a high school diploma—are well documented.
Third is the difference in major choices among higher- and lower-income students. Students from the bottom parental income tercile declared majors of similar value to their top-tercile peers in the 1980s and 1990s, but they are today declaring majors that annually pay about 4 percentage points less, including those in the humanities.
What does all this mean? Bleemer and Quincy are not overly pessimistic in their assessment, saying that regressivity is likely “not a permanent feature” of postsecondary education, given the “wide range of policy changes affecting both college supply and demand” in recent years. They note the contraction of community college enrollment since its peak in 2012, the phase-in and phase-out of race-based affirmative action, the boom-and-bust cycle of for-profit colleges (although they could boom again), and ongoing changes in federally-subsidized financial aid programs. The authors recommend additional research to “disentangle the importance of each policy to the various channels that have generated regressivity” over time.
However, while the paper’s findings might indicate a putative end to regressivity, they aren’t necessarily good news for the college wage premium generally. Any number of other connected factors could serve to render college degrees less valuable in the future—an end to the historic signaling function of college degrees among employers, the impacts of K-12 grade inflation on true college readiness versus readiness “on-paper,” and the receding of the old “college for all” mentality. To solve both problems, perhaps we should encourage community colleges to return to their previous incarnation as tech schools, and make sure that students of all socioeconomic statuses who want a traditional college experience go to the four-year schools that are good at providing high-value degrees.
SOURCE: Zachary Bleemer and Sarah Quincy, “Changes in the College Mobility Pipeline Since 1900,” NBER Working Papers (May 2025).
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Jon Valant —director of the Brown Center on Education Policy and a senior fellow in Governance Studies at Brookings—joins Mike to discuss his recent analysis of the federal tax credit scholarship initiative included in the Republican budget bill and its potential to open the door to waste, fraud, and discriminatory practices. Then, on the Research Minute, Adam shares a Belgian study comparing the cognitive and non-cognitive effects of work-based learning within different vocational education arrangements.
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