How Democrats Can Win on Education Again 

The state of American student achievement is alarming. Test scores have been declining in most states for a decade or more. A third of the nation’s students can barely read by the end of middle school. Nearly a quarter are chronically absent.  

To address the crisis, the country must upgrade public education, where 90 percent of American children are educated. For much of the last 40 years, that was bipartisan work, nationally and in the states. Republicans in Washington played a leading role in reform as recently as the George W. Bush administration. A handful of southern red states—including Mississippi, Louisiana, and Tennessee—have improved student performance through a commitment to standards, high-quality curriculum, instructional support, and school accountability.  

But they’re exceptions. Today, most Republican leaders seem more interested in waging culture wars than in fighting for educational excellence. Donald Trump’s administration rarely mentions school quality or student achievement. Instead, it’s working to dismantle the Department of Education and to have the Treasury Department establish a national system to provide families with public funding for private schooling.  

Many voters no longer trust Democrats to improve education. The party’s wide, longstanding lead on the education issue has shrunk in some polls and disappeared in others, including in key battleground states.

Democrats, as a result, have an opportunity to rejuvenate public education and, in the process, strengthen ties with Black, Latino, and suburban women—voting blocs that care deeply about school quality. But Democrats are at war with themselves on education.  

Centrists have long supported the high standards, assessments, and accountability paradigms, as well as charter schools and other forms of parental choice in public education. Teachers’ unions and their progressive allies have largely rejected that agenda, arguing that more funding and efforts to address the causes and consequences of poverty are the keys to student success. The two factions rarely communicate. When they do, it’s usually to hurl insults. The historian Diane Ravitch embodies the Democratic divide. Once a leading education reformer, she’s now a prominent progressive critic of the centrist agenda, calling it a “hoax,” “quackery,” and a “hateful, calculated attack” on public education. 

The dysfunction is such that many voters no longer trust Democrats to improve education. The party’s wide, longstanding lead on the education issue has shrunk in some polls and disappeared in others, including in key battleground states.   

The irony is that progressive and centrist Democrats both have contributions to make on education. Public education desperately needs strengthening, but policymakers must address root causes by addressing the many hurdles in students’ lives that compound their challenges in classrooms. Centrists and progressives champion policies that, if combined, would raise student achievement, fortify public education, and win votes. But joining forces would require each to compromise and embrace elements of the other’s agenda they don’t like. Here’s what such a platform might include:  

Promote Public School Choice  

Republicans have gained ground on education by tapping into a reservoir of parental demand for more educational “freedom” through their support of public money for private schooling. Since 2022, Republicans in 17 states, educating nearly 50 percent of the nation’s students, have passed laws allowing any family—regardless of income—to pay for private schooling with tax dollars. The Trump administration’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act would create a comparable “scholarship” program at the federal level, beginning in 2027. 

But Democrats could outflank Republicans by backing more high-quality educational options in public education. Many of the new Republican choice initiatives lack accountability provisions, disproportionately serve affluent students, and have mostly failed to lift student achievement—features the forthcoming federal program is likely to share. By promoting a more responsible brand of school choice within public education, where the vast majority of the nation’s students are already enrolled, Democrats could make choice a reality for a far wider range of families—and voters. 

Public school choice is hardly a novel idea. Urban school districts have, for more than half a century, run magnet schools to attract students citywide through specialized academic programs designed to reduce racial segregation. Others have abandoned school attendance zones, allowing students to enroll anywhere within a school district’s boundaries. And charter schools have been public schools of choice since the early 1990s. They’re privately run (often by former school district teachers and principals) but publicly funded. Unlike private schools, they’re open to all students within a school district at no cost and subject to state standardized testing and other public oversight.  

But teachers’ unions and their progressive allies have attacked charter schools, wrongly equating them with private schools. It’s foolish to cling to that stance as public funding of private schooling proliferates. There are more than 8,000 charter schools nationwide. Why not take credit for the many strong ones and pledge to strengthen the rest through tougher performance standards and stronger oversight, rather than resorting to overblown rhetoric to undermine a meaningful source of public options? That’s the way to win favor with families and defend public education.  

The District of Columbia illustrates how traditional public schools and charters can collaborate. City leaders have replaced traditional public school attendance zones with a common enrollment system that allows families to select from a wide range of charter and school district programs through a single application process. Public school enrollment has risen steadily in the District of Columbia since the city introduced the concept more than a decade ago. A comparable application system powers public school choice in New Orleans.  

Back the Basics 

Nothing matters more to parents of young children than ensuring their kids can read. And a lack of foundational reading and math skills puts students on narrower trajectories in school and beyond. But U.S. schools have long used a second-rate method of teaching reading called “balanced literacy,” which has students memorize words or guess them based on context clues. States as different as Mississippi and Maine have introduced a stronger model that combines the systematic teaching of sounds and letters with reading materials based on history, science, and other academic subjects. The strategy, backed by a vast body of reading research, pays meaningful dividends for students when implemented with sufficient teacher training. Research is also pointing to a strategy for teaching math that combines conceptual understanding with memorization of math facts and procedures. This emerging consensus upends a long-standing belief in education circles that teachers must choose between teaching conceptual knowledge and procedural fluency.  

If Democrats made a strong, very public case for the new, research-backed math and reading strategies—if they launched something of a modern-day back-to-basics campaign—many more teachers would embrace them because they want their students to be successful. 

Many progressives and teachers’ unions have been slow to back the new research-based strategies out of loyalty to traditional instructional strategies and because they believe individual teachers should have the autonomy to choose their teaching methods. With national reading and math scores lagging badly, that’s not a winning argument. In the current political climate, defending public education requires improving it. 

If Democrats made a strong, very public case for the new, research-backed math and reading strategies—if they launched something of a modern-day back-to-basics campaign—many more teachers would embrace them because they want their students to be successful. And the campaign would likely be a winner with parents—and voters—in blue states and red.  

Champion More Advanced Classes  

Another way for Democrats to signal that the Party is serious about student achievement would be to back a new model of “gifted” education. Millions of talented, hard-working students, many of them low-income kids or students of color, don’t get the advanced learning opportunities they deserve; one study found that high-achieving students from the wealthiest 20 percent of U.S. families are six times more likely to receive gifted-and-talented services than equally high-performing students from the poorest 20 percent. A dearth of high-quality advanced programs has put the nation at a competitive disadvantage in the global economy. It has slowed social mobility by denying capable students the academic grounding they need to prosper in school and beyond. And it’s a reason why many families of color favor private-school choice programs. 

The concentration of white and Asian students in advanced programs has spawned a movement among progressives to dismantle gifted-and-talented programs, exam schools, and other advanced programs because they promote racial and economic segregation in public education. That’s an unfortunate response, since it would continue to deny opportunities to the very students equity advocates rightly want to help. Instead, Democrats should embrace excellence and equity. They should back talent development and expand the range of qualified students who participate in it—by creating pathways into advanced programs beyond a single test score or teacher recommendation, and abandoning the scarcity mentality that forces too many talented students to compete for too few seats. There’s no reason why heavily populated urban and suburban school districts should provide only a handful of advanced programs in elementary and middle schools.  

North Carolina was the first of several states to address the problem. In 2018, the state passed legislation granting advanced learning opportunities to students who score at the highest level on standardized math tests starting in grade three. The policy increased Black students’ participation in advanced math by 78 percent between 2021-22 and 2025-26 and increased Hispanic participation by 65 percent. The opportunity for Democrats is substantial. Backing a new, more expansive vision of talent development in public education would allow them to make a case to voters that they reject the rationing of academic opportunities in public education and that they want every student to go as far as their talents and hard work will take them.  

Champion a National Tutoring Corps  

 If a new blueprint for gifted education would help many more students get ahead, Democrats could help struggling students catch up by championing a national tutoring corps. High-quality tutoring has long been a successful teaching strategy. But it has mostly helped students from families with the resources to pay for it. One measure of that reality: the number of private, for-profit tutoring centers in the U.S. more than tripled between 1997 and 2016, to nearly 10,000. The COVID-19 crisis rewrote the tutoring equation. State and local education leaders desperate to help students rebound academically post-pandemic launched scores of new tutoring programs in public schools nationwide, at no cost to families—supporting a far wider range of students than tutoring had in the past. But the federal COVID-19 relief funding that fueled the tutoring expansion has ended, and the Trump administration and congressional Republicans have proposed slashing other sources of federal support. Democrats should step into the void by championing a national tutoring infrastructure. There’s a big body of research showing meaningful learning gains from high-quality, in-school tutoring. It brings communities into schools as tutors, provides students with much-needed mentors, and parents of every political persuasion value the support. So do teachers, a core Democratic constituency. 

Promote a New Picture of School Performance  

Nothing has divided Democrats on education more sharply than the use of students’ standardized test scores to rate schools and hold educators responsible for the results. Teachers’ unions and progressives have attacked the strategy since its introduction under the federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. For centrist reformers, who supported NCLB as a way to shine a brighter light on school performance and encourage reform, it’s a non-negotiable, a lifeline for low-income students and students of color trapped in failing schools. They made a strong argument. You can’t improve what you can’t measure. We can’t expect student performance to rise if we can’t be honest about how much children know compared to what we expect them to know. Hence NCLB’s requirement that every state build a school “accountability” system.  

But there were problems with rating schools primarily on how many of their students pass state tests, as NCLB mandated. The strategy ignored the reality that test scores tend to track family income, thereby penalizing schools with many low-income kids and demoralizing educators in them. Setting absolute goals that low-income schools couldn’t meet required elected officials to make politically painful decisions to shut down schools in struggling communities. And the federal requirements layered more standardized testing on schools in middle- and upper-middle-class neighborhoods that parents came to resent. 

There’s a big body of research showing meaningful learning gains from high-quality, in-school tutoring. It brings communities into schools as tutors, provides students with much-needed mentors, and parents of every political persuasion value the support. So do teachers, a core Democratic constituency. 

Teachers’ unions and their progressive allies were already opposed to the new testing regimes when the Obama administration made financial aid to states in the wake of the 2008 recession dependent upon states rating teachers on their students’ test scores—at the same time the administration introduced tough new national achievement tests. The move enraged teachers and their unions and, together with conservatives’ opposition to federal education mandates, forced Obama to sign 2015 legislation that greatly watered down NCLB’s school-improvement incentives. Since then, student achievement has declined nationally.   

Democrats should back a new generation of school accountability systems that place increased weight on how much schools grow student achievement during a school year, regardless of students’ starting point, as Mississippi, Louisiana, and other states do. And researchers say school climate, the depth of the curriculum, and other features are key contributors to student success and should be measured to drive school improvement. Congress gave states a green light to use the broader metrics a decade ago. But proficiency rates on standardized tests still dominate measurement systems because they’re easy to interpret, are relatively inexpensive, and have long been the coin of the educational realm.  

A new model for measuring schools would maintain a role for traditional test scores but reduce their primacy and elevate student growth and other measures known to drive school improvement, pressing policymakers to act on the opportunity Congress gave them a decade ago when it replaced NCLB. This could be a way to forge common ground among Democrats on the incendiary issue of testing. Centrists preserve statewide standardized testing. Progressives get a greater commitment to school improvement. By backing the bargain, teachers’ unions could counter their reputation as defenders of an indefensible status quo in public education. The political headline would be compelling: a new system for measuring schools that would strengthen public education. 

Bring Communities into Schools  

Teachers’ unions and their progressive allies have long sought to partner public schools more closely with local children’s hospitals, housing agencies, mental health clinics, food banks, and other resources. This community school model, they rightly argue, would create a more coherent network of student support and thus a stronger foundation for student achievement. The coronavirus pandemic hammered home the long-standing reality that many students have physical and emotional health needs and other challenges in their lives that undermine learning. One example: Asthma has long been a major contributor to chronic student absenteeism, which has skyrocketed in the wake of the pandemic. But many schools today lack even full-time nurses. One national model of the community concept, the nonprofit Communities in Schools, has been in operation for 49 years and currently serves more than two million students in 3,590 schools across 29 states. It works with schools on everything from vision and dental screenings to student mentoring and helping parents find mental-health counseling and other resources. A CIS school representative works with teachers and principals to tailor the support to individual schools and then manages the programs so educators can focus on education.  

A Harvard research center study recently found higher test scores and fewer suspensions in schools that had partnered with CIS for three years. High school graduation rates climbed by 5 percent, and community college matriculation rose by 9 percent. CIS and other community school models are expanding in states as different as Florida and California.  

But many centrist Democrats haven’t embraced the strategy. Schools should stay in their lane, they argue, and work on the academic side of student success. And students’ challenges outside of school shouldn’t excuse educators from striving to educate them to high standards. They’re right. Schools should prioritize academic achievement. Tracking student performance and improving schools are central to that work. But so is addressing students’ very real needs, as a growing body of research makes clear. A Democratic commitment to a major national expansion of community schools, combined with a pledge to strengthen academic quality, would resonate with many low-income and working-class voters struggling to overcome the challenges in their children’s lives. 

Two and a half decades ago, Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts and Representative George Miller of California, two of the era’s most progressive congressional Democrats, worked with party centrists, congressional Republicans, and the George W. Bush administration to craft NCLB, one of the most far-reaching federal legislative initiatives to strengthen public education in the nation’s history. Bill Clinton and other southern Democrats had laid the foundation for the partnership by lifting their states’ education systems through policies embraced by both educators and reformers—work that helped propel Clinton to the White House. NCLB was far from perfect, solving some problems in the nation’s schools but creating others. But it helped lift student achievement. And it signaled Democrats’ commitment to the nation’s students. With the Trump administration having abdicated its leadership role in strengthening the nation’s public schools, Democrats can craft a school agenda that draws on both progressive and centrist playbooks to make meaningful improvements for millions of students—and to make education a Democratic issue again. 

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