To CRPE followers, colleagues, and friends: Happy 2025!
Longtime readers will know that CRPE prides ourselves on “thinking forward.” We do make straight-out predictions from time to time, but mostly, we look around the corner at looming trends, debates, and developments and consider what it would take to get the best outcomes possible for students.
To state the obvious: change is coming. The U.S. has elected a new president who is talking about wholesale changes, including within our education system. CRPE is fiercely nonpartisan and takes no organizational position on the incoming administration. We weren’t pro-Trump nor pro-Kamala—but we are pro-change. For over 30 years, we have documented how inequality and low productivity are hardwired into public education. We have written reams of papers on the absurdities inherent to how we deliver public education. In fact, we just submitted a paper to the Senate HELP Committee detailing how such absurdities harm students.
We have documented the “blank stare of bureaucracy” and demonstrated how well-intentioned people and policies have created schools and school systems where affluent children do well, but disadvantaged children fall further behind the longer they are in school. We have studied how expansive, fast-growing special education programs are failing students in these programs while also masking a broader failure to meet students’ individual needs. We have documented the growing demand for school choice and written about labor unions and advantaged parents shutting down public school choice programs, even when the choice programs in question are high-quality and within their local districts.
For nearly five years, we have documented the disastrous impact of prolonged school closures on young people and the failures of an overly rigid, politicized, outdated public education system. Early in the pandemic, we warned that online learning, if not rolled out with the most vulnerable students in mind, would impact them the most negatively. We called for strategic and innovative staffing and resource deployment, including community/school teams and individual learning plans for every child, to address the extraordinary variation and intensity of need. We revealed the widespread demand among families, students, and educators for more joyful, equitable, personalized, and relevant schools to emerge out of the ashes of the pandemic. We also followed families and teachers who created small-group learning pods to keep kids safe from infection and provide individualized help.
But we also documented how public school districts faltered when it came to keeping kids engaged while schools were closed and, once schools reopened, to restoring dire learning losses. Districts walked away from learning pods and other innovations. Reality drowned out aspirations for personalization, just-in-time interventions, and accelerated grade-level learning, as neither students nor teachers consistently attended school, and schools, like other institutions, suffered from broken norms and loss of political support. Five years later, many big-city districts struggle to deliver regular classroom instruction and keep labor peace, just as enrollment declines and the end of federal ESSR support undermine their finances and destabilize their leadership. In short: the system isn’t working.
There is no question that public education needs to change. The real question is: what kind of change should it be? Doing away with the Department of Education taps into the vein of discontent but won’t fix any of the issues mentioned above. Similarly, federal programs to expand private school choice programs will embolden and excite supporters of choice; however, decades of evidence show that simply telling families they can choose schools does not address the inequities and dysfunctions built into our education system. Private and charter schools are too small to take on all the kids who need options; crudely designed and poorly funded voucher programs are insufficient to generate a new supply of quality schools. Choice is a positive factor but not magic. In fact, without attention to essential enablers like parent information, transportation, fair admissions, funding levels, new school creation, capacity-building, and performance measurement, choice can further exacerbate existing challenges.
So then, what could work? In our opinion: a brutally honest assessment of what it would take to finally address our system’s dysfunctions and inefficiencies, lack of adult accountability, lack of adherence to effective, proven practices, and inability or unwillingness to implement emerging innovations. We and others have many ideas about how to make public education “future-ready.” The Bi-Partisan Policy Center has launched a new commission to tackle the human capital crisis in America, and educational reforms will be central. The tech sector and a new Secretary of Education could bring fresh ideas. I hope these and other groups will look beyond tired calls for deregulation and cost-savings and look at true institutional reforms that have proven successful before and could forge new ground in a highly decentralized and change-resistant education system.
My plea to all of us who are concerned—as we should be—about the state of the American student is to take the first step toward meaningful change: admit we have a problem and listen to how different people see it. Next, commit to taking a hard look at how this problem came to be and what would actually make it better. You’ll hear more from us over the coming year on those fronts. We’ll be producing more about why the absurdities of the system exist, how to make school choice work for all families, what kinds of inventive staffing solutions produce results, and how tools like AI might address the problems that have long plagued public education.
So here’s to a change-filled 2025. May it be bold, informed by evidence, straight to the heart of the matter, and inventive beyond traditional ideologies. May we finally stop the academic and developmental bleed-out from the pandemic and start delivering what people want from our public education system.
