CRPE analyzes how politics—especially polarization and partisan divides—impact enacting and sustaining meaningful education reform. Political dynamics have often hindered progress, stalling promising innovations and narrowing the space for bipartisan solutions. Our work examines these tensions, identifies strategies to navigate them, and highlights opportunities for leaders to move reforms forward despite political headwinds.
School districts are struggling to create both equitable and fundamentally different outcomes for young people through incremental improvements. The alternative is transformational systems change, when school districts redefine their purpose and operations through a coherent strategy to ensure every school is a high-quality, empowering place for all students to thrive—but this remains rare.
State education agencies (SEAs) are being asked to do something they have rarely been asked to do before: lead. As the federal government’s influence over education recedes, leaving confusion in its wake, calls for guidance, clarity, and strategic direction are shifting to states.
As the United States marks its 250th anniversary, civic learning is having a moment—but new data suggest that more support is needed to move students from knowing the basics to participating in civics learning and practice within their communities.
Fifty years ago, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) promised to bridge the gap between what students with disabilities need and what the public education system was designed to provide.
In American education, the scars of the “accountability wars” still run deep. More than two decades after the federal No Child Left Behind Act established punitive, high-profile accountability requirements for America’s K–12 schools, states and districts remain wary of debates over testing, student performance, and school improvement.
