It's Time to Get Serious About Scaling Success in American Education

American education discourse has a masochistic streak. We obsess over failing schools, incompetent teachers, and disengaged students. We recite statistics about learning loss and international rankings like a liturgy of doom. Meanwhile, the real story—schools that work, teachers who excel, students who thrive—gets buried under our addiction to crisis.

This isn't just counterproductive. It's destructive.

Here's the paradox that should make us pause: Americans hate education in the abstract but love it in the specific.

Poll the nation and we sound apocalyptic about schools. Poll parents about their own child's school, and most are satisfied. They trust their teachers. They see growth. They vote for bond measures. They volunteer, they'll cut you if you try to end their sports programs, and in some cases, they wield the political muscle to hire and fire their superintendents. The disconnect reveals something profound: our national narrative about education is divorced from reality—or at the very least, the relationship is complicated.

I've been an education advocate since 2006, primarily focused on how our system fails marginalized students. I've chased every reform trend, from wholesale system overhauls to school choice solutions. But touring exceptional schools has always been my strategy for not losing my mind. I went hard on that last year because the messy national food fight over education was—and still is—depressing, unserious, and hostile to science.

Visiting schools that work and interviewing their communities of students, parents, and educators has crystallized an old truth:

If we're serious about educating all children—especially those furthest from opportunity—we must learn from success as relentlessly as we study failure.

Last week in St. Louis, I visited three public schools that demolish our favorite myths about what's possible and renew my faith in a positive education agenda.

City Garden Montessori

City Garden Montessori proves discipline doesn't require authoritarianism, and parent engagement isn't a luxury of affluence. In a city long scarred by segregation, this diverse-by-design school radiates joy and delivers rigor without compromise. Young people from very different backgrounds thrive together in defiance of what we're told about the inevitability of cultural polarization.

Lafayette Prep

Lafayette Prep shows what happens when adults share a common language and vision. Their teachers uniformly talk about the power of collaboration, mutual support, and the relentless pursuit of closing the belief gap. Spend time there and you'll see the importance of designing schools with systems that address predictable issues and create the structure of a learning community. Every intervention for staff and students follows clear protocols. It's not charismatic leadership—it's systematic excellence.

Believe Academy

Believe Academy may be the most radical simply because it refuses false choices. Too often, we tell Black families they can have warm, culturally affirming schools or academically rigorous ones—but not both. Believe Academy chooses both, sending students to college while celebrating their full humanity. They push young people toward high expectations for education, career, and life without looking like a no-excuses prison designed by people who fear and distrust students more than they love them. They constantly expose students to experiences beyond their limiting environments while maintaining a place that feels more like a family than a school.

None of these schools relies on miracles or martyrs. They rely on methods—trial, error, facts, and design.

We must break free from this cycle of complaint. We can't dissect dysfunction with forensic precision while treating success like an accident. This isn't scholarship—it's avoidance. Critiquing failure feels productive while demanding nothing of us. Studying success requires the harder work of replication.

The questions that matter aren't "Why are schools broken?" but "Where are they working—and how do we scale that?"

• What specific practices help children from trauma backgrounds learn?
• Which collaborative structures make teachers more effective?
• How do high-performing schools maintain academic ambition without sacrificing student identity?

I've visited hundreds of schools since 2006. The exceptional ones don't offer magic—they offer proof. Living, breathing proof that excellence for all students is achievable. But only if we study it with the same intensity we bring to studying failure.

Our children deserve better than our pessimism. They deserve our best ideas, replicated at scale. That starts with changing what we choose to see.

It's time to get serious about success.