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.
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.
In early 2025, the National Center for Education Statistics quietly announced a new record: 7.9 million public school students were identified with a disability under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).
A new report from the American School District Panel, a research partnership between RAND and CRPE, examines how districts define and facilitate civic learning in an era of political polarization, competing instructional priorities, and uneven state support.
Announcing a new forum for bold ideas to build momentum Proposals to eliminate the Department of Education (ED) have been a Republican talking point since Ronald Reagan first suggested it in the early 1980s.
The debate over how schools should teach about race heightened this week when the College Board released a framework for a new Advanced Placement course in African-American studies that reduced some of the content from a pilot version — content supported by hundreds of Black scholars and progressives but criticized by prominent conservatives.
Public schooling has always been politically fraught, but current disagreements over issues related to race, sexuality, gender, and Covid-19 have reached a tipping point.
