Progressives Talk Equity, But Where’s the Plan for Real School Change?

Whatever else the 2024 election results indicated, they did not end the United States’ core political predicament. It’s not asymmetrical polarization or gridlock (etc.), though those are certainly interwoven problems. Above all, U.S. democracy is struggling with a legitimacy crisis: We widely distrust our political institutions.

American Cynicism About Our Government Is Ruining Our Politics

And is it any wonder? Congress regularly fails to pass budgets on time, and countless pieces of legislation are overdue for reauthorization. The best intellectual case for representative government is that its institutions allow the public a chance to elect policymakers who promise to address collective, public problems. Practically, democratic institutions are strongest when they follow through and enact effective solutions to those problems.

That’s not a particularly complicated formula, but as I’ve argued before, the United States has been struggling to follow it for some time now. The country keeps showing the U.S. public that it will do nothing to comprehensively address gun violence at public schools, or address wealth inequality, or mitigate the impacts of climate change, and so on. That’s the source of Americans’ cynicism about their government—and it’s ruining our politics. Worse yet, this creates an amplifying feedback loop, wherein each failure to deliver policy answers contributes to the public cynicism that worsens political discourse that fuels still less effective policymaking, and on, and on, and on.

That’s why the path to a stronger, healthier American democracy doesn’t lead through divisive culture wars or active destruction of the federal government. No — it requires serious ideas that actually solve problems that hinder most Americans.

K–12 schools are among the most prominent public institutions for the average American family, so their success can play an outsized—and underappreciated—role in driving our collective faith in government.

This should be the guiding principle for progressive politics. Education policy is an excellent place to start: public schools affect the daily lives of tens of millions of families and their children every day. Tangible school improvements are a clear way to show Americans that public policy reforms work. And now is absolutely the time since U.S. public education is mired in a crisis of its own.

Democrats Need a New Organizing Framework for Education

For roughly a decade, the United States has been searching for a new organizing framework for improving schools. After the Every Student Succeeds Act replaced No Child Left Behind in 2015, the Bush—and Obama—era education reform movement largely evaporated—but no new paradigm has appeared to replace it. Progressives should make this a priority, as they have recently lost their longstanding trust advantage from Americans on public education issues.

The pandemic contributed to the thinning of Democrats’ education agenda. In 2017, the Biden administration’s initial K–12 priorities were equally straightforward and defensible:

1) Get all schools reopened for in-person learning

2) Provide resources to restore normalcy for students, families, and staff.

Here in 2025, it’s often forgotten that the administration’s American Rescue Plan devoted over $120 billion towards these two goals—and largely succeeded.

But now that schools have universally reopened and those funds have been spent, progressives have reverted to a loose set of baggy old ideas:

• Calls for more K–12 funding.
  
  
• Opposition to conservative culture wars, etc.
  
  
• They generally support increased and fairer funding for schools, larger early education investments, and stronger social services for families.

These are all fine ideas—but, notably, they require few changes from schools or districts themselves. 

When it comes to fixing the core machinery of how K–12 education functions inside the school building, progressives have little to say.

Progressives urgently need to develop a clearer, more precise answer for how to address public education’s challenges, not least because the right wing’s assault on public schools is very real.

At the state level, if conservatives aren’t censoring books and restricting K–12 curricula, they’re expanding voucher programs that move public education dollars into private education options.

Drawing clothes to cover picture book goblins’ butts (no, really) won’t meaningfully improve kids’ learning, and neither will conservatives’ complicated private voucher schemes.

Conservatives don’t have serious solutions for what ails public education—but they do offer families something like an answer to anxieties about children’s academic progress.

To be sure, this puts progressives in a bind. They’re rightly compelled to stand up for public schools, but polls show that majorities are dissatisfied with the quality of the U.S. education system. Pessimistic about their children’s future prospects and burned out after exhausting pandemic years, many families are impatient with public education’s status quo.

This pattern also shows up in key Democratic Party voting blocs. About a year ago, a Current Project poll of African American mothers found that while majorities had favorable views of their local public schools, nearly three-quarters of respondents were at least somewhat concerned about their children’s academic progress, and 56% had considered choosing (or actually chosen) a different school for their children that year.

In sum, while families might be interested in giving schools more resources, they’re also looking for ideas for reforming and improving how schools use those resources.

A New Progressive K-12 Agenda

A new progressive K–12 agenda needs:

A Focus on Fairness

Progressives are more attentive now than ever to the ways that systemic, historical biases encoded in housing, health care, transportation, zoning, environmental protection, and similar systems harm historically marginalized communities. It’s time to apply that same lens to public schools, which are also structurally biased against children of color, low-income families, non-native speakers of English, and other communities. As progressives push for more K–12 funding, they must also push for it to be used fairly and equitably, requiring greater investments in those students, schools, and districts who are struggling the most.

Clear, Comprehensive, and Transparent Data

Progressives need data to identify which schools need the most additional support. Fortunately, as the country’s schools and students clamber back from the pandemic, standardized tests are quietly popular again. Nearly all coverage of U.S. public education in the past two years has referenced “lost” or “incomplete” pandemic learning. In many cases, these gaps have been tracked by the tests that NCLB brought into U.S. public education. Without academic benchmarks — and tests to measure students’ progress — it would be more difficult to catalog the pandemic’s damage to schools.

Meaningful Accountability That Pushes Schools to Improve, But Gives More Support and Flexibility

More controversially, a serious K–12 reform agenda also requires accountability. This new agenda could define academic success for schools more broadly than NCLB’s narrow focus on math and reading assessments. It could include some of NCLB’s old ideas—requiring persistently struggling schools to revise their approaches to staffing, curricular materials, scheduling, and more. It could require schools struggling with early literacy outcomes to shift their curricula to match the established consensus on how students best learn to read.

But it could also offer persistently struggling K–12 schools and districts alternatives, like additional federal funding to help them launch targeted, high-quality pre-K programs, which have reliably been shown to improve students’ social and academic development. It could target after-school and summer learning funding for districts whose students need the most academic support. It could also provide larger federal grants to support districts willing to develop school integration plans.

These are just a few progressive ideas for improving public education. There are assuredly others.

Whatever they choose, progressives need to make it clear that full-throated support for U.S. public education is consistent with reforming it to advance equitable learning opportunities for historically marginalized children.