No one wants to talk about excellence in public schools

How new fads in education reform reproduce old inequalities, and harm our politics | Theories of Progress, 03

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How did we get here?

Neither major party seems to care about excellence in education — not really, not in a way that translates into serious policy. Democrats have abandoned it for equity theater. Republicans have abandoned it for embarrassingly easy culture war wins. And American students are caught in the middle, their education held hostage by a political system that has forgotten what schools are actually for.

This is a story about how we got to this impasse, and what it might take to get out.

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Part I: The Democratic Retreat from Excellence

Democrats were once the party Americans trusted on education. That trust has eroded, and it’s worth understanding why.

The progressive education reform movement has become laser-focused on equity — specifically, on closing achievement gaps between demographic groups. On its face, this sounds reasonable. Who could object to helping struggling students catch up? But in practice, this focus has come at the expense of effective pedagogy and educational excellence. Worse, many of the reforms pursued in equity’s name actually reproduce the patterns of injustice they claim to address.

The Moral Logic of Progressive Education Reform

To understand how progressives think about education policy, you have to understand their moral framework. For progressives, excellence measures — absolute gains in student learning — don’t have what Freddie deBoer calls “social justice valence” unless they also address relative disparities. A reform that raises all boats equally leaves the achievement gap unchanged, and therefore fails to address the underlying injustice progressives care about.

Freddie deBoer is Wrong and Education Reformers Must Care about Learning

This creates a strange asymmetry. Progressives cannot applaud excellence measures unless they also close gaps. But they can applaud apparent equity measures even if they don’t improve learning at all. The social justice framing is morally primary; gifted students are already doing well enough and are not objects of serious concern.

The result? Excellent students get abandoned. Gifted and talented programs are cut. Selective admissions are eliminated. And the focus shifts entirely to reducing disparities — even when the methods used to reduce those disparities don’t actually help anyone learn.

Biting the Hand That Feeds

There’s a bitter irony at work here. The most educated progressives — the ones driving these reform efforts — are themselves insulated from the harms of the bad pedagogy they support.

As the parties have become more polarized by education level, progressives are increasingly those who did well in school, often effortlessly, often because their parents were also highly educated and supported learning at home. It is easy for these reformers to take pedagogy for granted. If they or their children could already read well before entering school, they may not see the failure of whole language instruction for children who don’t learn what they need at home.

This is the central tragedy of progressive education reform: the people making the decisions are precisely the people least affected by them. They can afford tutors when public schools fail. They can move to better districts. They can pay for private schools. The costs of their experiments are borne by the families who have no such options.

Constructivism: The Theory That Sounds Good, But Isn’t

The pedagogical theories progressives are drawn to sound like equity wins that also help learning. They do neither.

Consider Jo Boaler’s approach to math instruction, which deemphasizes memorization of basic facts and promotes open-ended “discovery” learning. Or Lucy Calkins’ whole language approach to reading, which rejects systematic phonics instruction in favor of having students “discover” reading through exposure to literature. Both approaches are marketed as more engaging, more creative, more equitable than traditional methods.

The problem is that they’re not backed by the science of learning. Decades of rigorous research show that explicit instruction — clear, systematic teaching of foundational skills — produces better outcomes than constructivist approaches, especially for struggling students. The students who can “discover” mathematical concepts or “pick up” reading naturally are the ones who already have strong foundations built at home. The students who most need structured instruction are precisely the ones most harmed when it’s withheld.

And so the methods marketed as equitable actually widen achievement gaps. Wealthier students can afford better instruction outside of school; poorer students cannot. The progressive education establishment has spent decades promoting approaches that systematically disadvantage the students they claim to care most about.

When “Equity” Isn’t About Achievement

When progressives aren’t focused on equity in academic achievement, they’re often focused on other kinds of equity in the school setting — which frequently manifest as culture-war issues that are wildly out of touch with median voters.

Discipline. Progressive educators have pushed hard for “restorative justice” practices that minimize suspensions and expulsions. The theory is that traditional discipline disproportionately affects minority students, and that restorative approaches are both fairer and more effective at changing behavior. The reality is much messier. Many restorative justice implementations have led to chaotic classrooms, with teachers unable to remove disruptive students and struggling students unable to learn in the resulting environment. Parents — including minority parents — consistently support stronger discipline than progressive reformers advocate.

Curriculum. Progressive educators have pushed for curricular changes involving critical race theory, ethnic studies requirements, and “culturally responsive pedagogy.” Whatever the merits of these approaches in principle, in practice they often arrive as mandates that districts must implement before addressing basic reading and math deficiencies. When parents are worried about whether their kids can do arithmetic, telling them the curriculum now includes mandatory modules on systemic racism reads as tone-deaf, at best. It makes parents question whether the district has their children’s best educational interests at heart.

Admissions. When Harvard’s admissions office described Asian applicants as lacking personality, we saw how elite institutions can violate civil rights while claiming to promote equity. The pattern of discriminating against high-performing Asian students in the name of diversity has been replicated at selective high schools across the country — from Stuyvesant in New York to Thomas Jefferson in Virginia. These policies paper over old racial myths with new ones, all while claiming the mantle of social justice.

The Political Consequences

The political consequences of this approach have been severe. Democrats have hemorrhaged trust on education — an issue that was once a pillar of their electoral coalition. David Shor and other Democratic strategists have warned for years that the party’s education positions are electoral poison, but the warnings have largely gone unheeded.

The teachers’ unions — major players in Democratic fundraising and organizing — have been consistent advocates for many of the most unpopular progressive positions, from keeping schools closed during COVID to defending curricula that parents find alienating. Democratic politicians, afraid to punch left, have generally deferred to the unions rather than to the median voter.

The result is a doom loop. Progressive education policies alienate parents. Parents flee to charter schools, private schools, or the suburbs. Public school enrollment declines. The political coalition that supports public education weakens. And the institutions that remain double down on the very approaches that caused the flight in the first place.

Meanwhile, the Southern states that have embraced evidence-based literacy instruction are seeing real gains — gains that serve as a political embarrassment to blue states that should be outperforming them. This is how issues and institutions transform from reliable political architecture into ammunition for one’s opponents. Chris Rufo doesn’t have to be a good batter when Democrats keep serving up wiffle balls!

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Part II: The Republican Absence of Vision

Republicans have had easy pickings. Rejecting bad progressive ideas has required no serious thought about what should replace them.

When conservatives reject the DEI focus in education, they can claim to be re-centering excellence as the guiding goal. When they reject progressive culture-war overreaches, they can claim classrooms are for learning, not politics. But this rhetorical positioning allows Republicans to appear pro-excellence without actually advancing the policies, pedagogical techniques, and curricular changes that matter.

Winning by Saying No

Consider the political arithmetic. (I’m sorry this is so clunky, I’m really not a math guy. Metaphors, though!) When Democrats introduce a bad idea, we go from zero to minus-x. When Republicans defeat that bad idea, we go from minus-x back to zero. Republicans can claim victory — they stopped something harmful! — without having accomplished anything positive in a cumulative, genuinely progressive way.

But American education wasn’t some excellence utopia before DEI. The same constructivist pedagogies that progressives now wrap in equity language have been undermining student learning for decades. The same ed-school orthodoxies that produce today’s “culturally responsive” curricula produced yesterday’s “whole language” instruction. Defeating the latest progressive fad is necessary but nowhere near sufficient.

Republicans don’t have to outrun the bear. They just have to outrun Democrats. And right now, Democrats are making that very easy.

The School Choice Escape Valve

The positive vision Republicans do offer is school choice — vouchers, charter schools, education savings accounts. The theory is that market competition will drive improvement: parents will choose better schools, forcing bad schools to improve or close.

There’s something to this. The ability to exit a failing school is valuable, and competition can spur innovation. The One Big Beautiful Bill’s new national voucher program represents a significant expansion of this approach.

But school choice alone doesn’t solve the underlying problems. Charter schools and private schools draw from the same pool of teachers trained in the same ed schools with the same bad pedagogical theories. Many charter schools use the same constructivist curricula as the public schools families are fleeing. The escape valve lets some families get out, but it doesn’t fix the pipeline.

And school choice, as currently implemented, risks abandoning the students stuck in dysfunctional public schools. Not every family can navigate voucher programs or find transportation to better schools. The market vision, in its enthusiasm for choice, can become indifferent to those who have no good choices available.

The Southern Surge as Exception

There is one genuinely positive development on the Republican side: the Southern literacy surge. States like Mississippi and Alabama have adopted evidence-based reading instruction — systematic phonics, explicit teaching, regular assessment — and seen dramatic improvements in student performance. We can thank Karen Vaites for comprehensive coverage of this genuinely positive development.

This is what a positive vision for education actually looks like: identify what works, implement it systematically, measure the results, and adjust. The Southern states did this not by fighting culture wars but by taking the science of reading and curricula implementation expertise seriously.

If more red states adopt this playbook, it could represent a genuine transformation. But so far, the Southern Surge remains an exception. Most Republican education policy remains defined by what it opposes rather than what it represents.

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Part III: The Trump Distortion

Into this already dysfunctional landscape has come the Trump administration, whose approach to education policy has been ... aggressive.

Burning It Down

The administration’s approach to the Department of Education has been less reform than demolition. DOGE-initiated cuts gutted the personnel needed for basic functions — like producing the annual Condition of Education report that Congress has required since 2002. Whether these cuts were legally valid is now beside the point; you can’t wave a magic wand to reconstitute departed researchers and statisticians.

Public blunders, private mischief, and the great 2025 education squeeze

The administration has conflated two different goals: making government more efficient and eliminating progressive policies. These overlap in places but are not the same thing. Cutting the staff who compile education statistics does nothing to advance any conservative policy goal; it just makes it harder to know what’s happening in American schools.

DEI as the Only Issue

The administration’s fixation on DEI has crowded out attention to everything else. Fighting with universities over diversity statements, investigating admissions policies, threatening funding cuts — these actions dominate the education news cycle.

Meanwhile, the education establishment has responded by doubling down on DEI practices, sometimes openly defying new regulations and state laws. The result is a mutually reinforcing spiral where both sides treat DEI as the only education issue that matters.

The tragedy is that many Americans are sufficiently disgusted with elite education institutions that they’re content with “burn it all down” as a result. When Harvard and Stanford have spent years promoting policies that seem designed to alienate ordinary parents, schadenfreude at their difficulties is understandable. But “own the libs” is not an education policy. The question of what should replace the current system remains unanswered.

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Part IV: What’s Being Left on the Table

Both parties are leaving enormous political opportunities on the table.

Polling consistently shows that Americans — including majorities of all minority Americans — support gifted education, acceleration for advanced students, and rigorous academic standards. They support discipline policies that keep classrooms orderly. They want their kids to learn to read and do math. These are not controversial positions among actual voters, even if they’re controversial among education policy elites.

The party that credibly commits to evidence-based instruction, high standards, and meeting students where they are — rather than where ideological frameworks say they should be — has a significant political opportunity. The party that actually delivers results, as Mississippi has for reading, will have a compelling case to make.

The Stakes Are Higher for Democrats

The stakes are asymmetric. Democrats control the institutions that drive education policy and research: the ed schools, the teachers’ unions, the professional associations. This gives them both more responsibility for the current mess and more capacity to fix it.

But it also means that the ideological capture of those institutions constrains what Democratic politicians can advocate. Ed schools remain captured by constructivist theories. Unions remain committed to policies that protect member interests over student interests. Critical education theories have become the default framework for thinking about schooling in progressive spaces.

For Democrats to credibly reset on education, they would need to confront these institutional interests. That’s politically difficult — but the alternative is continued erosion of public trust in public education.

The CEP Vision

This is where we come in. The Center for Educational Progress has been developing a positive vision for educational excellence that either party could adopt:

Meet students where they are. This means ability grouping, acceleration for advanced learners, and remediation for those who need it. It means abandoning the “one-size-fits-all” model that holds back fast learners and fails to support struggling ones.

Embrace the science of learning. This means explicit instruction in foundational skills, systematic phonics for reading, practiced fluency for math. It means deferring discovery-based approaches until students have mastered the basics.

Measure what matters. This means regular assessment to inform instruction, honest reporting of results, and accountability for outcomes. It means resisting the temptation to lower standards in the name of closing gaps.

Let every student advance as far and fast as their curiosity and determination will take them. This is the vision we’ve been developing — and it’s a vision either party could champion.

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Part V: A Path Forward

Educational excellence should be a bipartisan issue. But right now, both parties have left the field. This creates an opportunity for whichever party is willing to seize it.

For Republicans: “We actually have a positive vision that promotes what we care about — the learning and development of our children. And the pedagogy we support is backed by the research. Democrats claim to be the party of ‘trust the science,’ but in education, that’s clearly false. We are the party you can trust to follow the evidence.”

For Democrats: “We are returning to the positive vision of education that you used to trust us for. Republicans don’t have a positive vision — just criticisms of progressive excesses. We see now that we ignored the science of learning, and that even if our motives were moral, the effects were worse. We still care about disadvantaged children, but now we know the right way to help them learn. We’re righting the ship for all children.”

Either script could work. Everyone seems to be focused on… everything else, though. (And I’m also not a political consultant. Just a lawyer — but not a barred one (yet)!)

American students don’t care about any political posturing. They just want schools that teach them to read, to calculate, to think. They want the chance to advance as far as their talents will take them. Whether they know it or not.

Neither party is currently offering that. But one of them could. Or both! The iron is hot, and the opportunity is there for the taking. Who will strike first?

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Thomas Briggs is the (Interim) Executive Director and Director of Operations at the Center for Educational Progress.