Schools Should Pursue Excellence

The Education Progress Manifesto

Introduction

For over half a century, inspired by visions of equity, American education has pursued an intoxicating dream: that with the right policies, the right funding, the right teaching methods, we could make every child learn the same ideas, the same way, at the same pace. We have spent hundreds of billions of dollars on that dream. We have oriented every education school in the country around it. We have passed sweeping policy based on it, both national and local. And, step by step, over three generations of determined effort, we have buried that dream under a mountain of failed experiments.

A different vision, though, has lingered around the edges of this system: it is possible and worthwhile for students at all levels to push themselves to their limits. Different learning speeds are not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be embraced. Education is not a one-size-fits-all endeavor through which all should be dragged dully along a single path. It is a never-ending upward climb along which people should be enabled to proceed as far and as fast as they can.

This tension between Equity and Excellence has long defined education, but the dominant frame in education schools has set excellence aside altogether. The time has come for a fundamental reorientation. One-size-fits-all has failed: not once, not twice, but for three generations. Progress in education cannot mean pushing all kids into the same mold and neglecting those who break it. To reignite the flame of progress in schools, we must embrace the pursuit of excellence.

Policy in the No Child Left Behind Era: A Race to the Middle

In 2001, an overwhelming bipartisan majority passed the worst education policy in decades: No Child Left Behind, a bill based on the idea that all children should be expected to learn at the same pace. It doled out punishments and rewards to schools based on what percent of students could meet arbitrary thresholds, asserting on the basis of nothing but a wish that it could get all schools to the same arbitrary thresholds within 12 years. This both punished educators serving disadvantaged students—blaming them for the students’ slower paces—and encouraged the systematic neglect of above-average ones—who, after all, were already past the thresholds schools were told to care about. Year after year, it failed to meet its targets. It did not fail because of complex implementation issues. It did not fail because people did not try hard enough. It failed because it was based on a lie: that all kids should learn at the same pace.

At the same time, “detracking”—forcing fast and slow students into the same classrooms and expecting teachers to somehow differentiate instruction—has become the common wisdom among groups of educators like the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and in school districts around the country. San Francisco waged a years-long battle to prevent any of its eighth grade students from learning algebra. Cities like Seattle and Boston dismantled their gifted programs.

Often, objective measures of performance themselves become targets, as educators find it easier to smash the thermometers than to change the temperature. Universities perennially look for excuses to abolish entrance tests, kicking against their own findings that those tests work before reluctantly slinking back to them. Activists have waged the same wars against high schools with admissions tests, targeting some of the best free schools in the country—from Thomas Jefferson in Virginia to New York’s Stuyvesant, Philadelphia’s Masterman to San Francisco’s Lowell High School. At the same time states weaken these schools, they often ban alternatives altogether, forbidding charter schools from using comparable tests.

A Legacy of Failure

Though this cultural change has accelerated rapidly in the last decade, this is not merely some recent “woke” phenomenon. It is the culmination of generations of policy failure, now entrenched into both law and bureaucracy. Today, the consensus in education schools has diverged far from the goals of students who want to excel and parents who want to help them. Every attack on "gifted" programs or selective schools comes dressed in unobjectionable progressive verbiage and backed with the force of a great hegemony: local groups often weakly protest but can seldom do more than delay the capture. What happened?

In education research, funding, and curriculum design, bad ideas won out.

Fragments of the battles involved go back decades. In the 1960s, the federal government commissioned the most expensive education research project in history, comparing elementary school curricula against each other. One program, Direct Instruction, defied all the conventional wisdom: teachers taught in ability-grouped, orderly classrooms, drilling kids via whole class call-and-answer approaches. When Direct Instruction clearly outperformed the rest on preliminary measures, it was a “horrifying surprise” to many of the established education figures funding the study. As a result of lobbying, the study’s final results aggregated all its programs together, obscuring the success of the most effective approaches and producing a headline result that the study had failed. From there, people moved on.

In 1985, based on the theory that funding would close education gaps, a judge ordered enormous spending increases in Kansas City Schools, tripling the district’s budget and enabling them to run through a wish list of everything they could dream of to close the gaps. They built new schools, created a busing plan, and reduced the student-teacher ratio to a record low nationwide, throwing money at the problem for more than a decade. But when the Supreme Court ordered a reversal in 1995, the district’s test scores had not improved, its black-white gap had not closed, and it was no more integrated than when it began.

That same year, a movement to “detrack” schools—removing advanced classes—took off with the release of Jeannie Oakes’s book Keeping Track. Letting stronger students go faster, Oakes alleged, was inequitable, and before long education schools and education policy circles agreed. That the best evidence at the time indicated that ability grouping helped the strongest students and did not harm the weakest ones did not matter. The consensus had been set.

The driving force behind all of these policy adjustments was not empirical: it was ideological. When each failed in turn, the data slipped through the cracks, and people soon forgot. Even now, each time people backtrack after causing damage via detracking or removing standardized tests, the results are framed as a surprise from new data: We didn’t know, but it was worth a try. Now we do. But each time, with amnesiac consistency, the same approaches return.

Why Bother?

Here's the cynical take, articulated most persuasively by Freddie deBoer: Education doesn’t work. None of it matters. Kids who start ahead stay ahead. Kids who start behind stay behind. No policy fixes it. No funding fixes it. No intervention works. So why bother?

But look closer.

We've spent over fifty years with a system whose core goal is not to lift students, but to close all gaps between them. Education schools have aligned policy and research towards that end, dismissing, deprioritizing, and attempting to discredit everything else. But why would you expect that to work? You can’t eliminate individual human variance with policy any more than you can legislate away height differences.

If your goal is to close all gaps and leave every student at the same level, education doesn’t work, and we have a fifty-year policy graveyard reminding us of that.

But what if, instead of pretending differences don't exist, we built an adaptive, responsive system that embraced them? What if our goal is to raise the ceiling, to see just how high each child can reach? If that’s the goal, we’ve barely begun to imagine how well education can work.

We’re ready to try the policies that education schools don’t like. Direct instruction works. Acceleration works. Ability grouping works. Aristocratic tutoring works. The pursuit of excellence is not only possible, it is pleading to be tried. We already know what changes to start with—the failure to implement is one of will. We’re ready to do the work.

What Can We Do?

Our purpose is to understand the core features of schools and learning communities that allow students to pursue excellence, to map out and execute a step by step plan to get there, and to tear down every cultural, policy, or information barrier in the way. If you think excellence matters, we want to work with you.

Some fights are defensive. If a school district refuses to provide accelerated classes, if a city pulls support for its brightest students or tears down the standards for the schools it has, or if a university feels pressure to remove admissions tests, we’ll fight the changes adamantly and openly. In a war between a flawed status quo and backsliding, we will fight to defend excellence within the status quo.

But defense isn’t enough. We need to be proactive in building a new corpus and community: a new institution studying the transmission and production of knowledge, skills, and character that education schools have neglected.

Those who study education quickly realize the surprising shallowness and inaccuracy of existing knowledge and practice: the curriculum and research output of education schools are driven by ideologically driven visions and fads. Most of the best information is found on isolated blog posts, within neighboring disciplines like cognitive psychology and behavioral economics, and in books written decades or centuries ago. As our project develops, we will organize and expand this knowledge to create a framework education schools have not.

For example, we see the potential in ability-focused education over age-locked education: curricula and structures tailored to meet kids where they’re at and push those kids as far and as fast as they want to go. Moreover, education and culture are powerful tools of human enhancement. We know some children learn to read at 2 or 3, much earlier than schools imagine. We see unknown-but-critical periods of development for skills like absolute pitch or language, things children have limited windows to learn. We want to discover and publish these various developmental insights, designing interventions to scaffold children’s growth in a way that maximizes their potential.

This also includes defending unpopular but necessary systems of order and discipline. You can’t accelerate kids who aren’t in their seats. When schools ban phones, enforce detentions, or require hall passes, they're not opposing excellence. They're creating the conditions that make it possible, and without them—as our lowest-performing schools remind us daily—teaching itself becomes impossible. The progressive dream of unstructured learning environments has failed our brightest and our most vulnerable students alike.

Our goal is not marginal change. We’re not just here to debate whether algebra belongs in the eighth grade. We’d rather fight to find and support every child capable of learning it in the third grade. We want a world where excellence–and not its opponents–is sitting at the wheel.

To do this, we will focus on both the global and local levels: building a collective frame of research, policy, and advocacy while simultaneously building a network of students, educators, and parents who see potential for local improvements and want to find others to join the fight.

This is not a project of dividing kids into the gifted haves and ungifted have-nots. We will not preselect the chosen ones and let the rest fall by the wayside. Instead, we will ask every child where they are, where they want to go, and what will get them there. We will not pretend aptitude differences do not exist, but our task is to understand and lift them all: not imagining all kids can or should reach the same level, but enabling each to run as far and as fast as they choose.

There is no tradeoff between an excellent education and an excellent childhood. Far too many kids have lost far too much time and spirit in schools that neither knew nor cared what they could achieve.

We’ve tried No Child Left Behind. It’s time for No Child Kept Behind.

Our Principles

These principles guide our work:

Excellence should be accessible, and exceptional outcomes are achievable.

Schools should teach to ability, not age.

Progress is constrained by interest over intelligence.

Growth requires measurement.

Order enables excellence.

Education serves students first.

Get Involved

If you’re reading this, you probably know something’s broken. Maybe you’re a teacher watching bright kids wither, or struggling to give 30 kids at different levels the attention each one deserves. Maybe you’re a parent whose child is miserable in school, or the student learning more from the internet than in class. We want to work with you.

Over the next few weeks, we will begin rolling out articles paving a concrete direction forward. We want to make this a hub for research, advocacy, and debate focused on the best ways to help interested students push farther, faster. The more people get involved, the more we can do to advance those goals.

Here’s how you can join:

1. The first and simplest step: Sign up for our mailing list to get new posts and updates about our work.

2. Join our Discord server. We intend to use the server both to coordinate activity between staff and volunteers and to create the most serious online community for people focused on educational excellence. Whether you’re a parent looking to connect with like-minded families, a teacher looking to provide students more than the default, a passionate autodidact looking for people who share your drive to improve, or simply a curious onlooker, you’re welcome to join in.

3. Do you have ideas, relevant skills, or a passion for building a culture of excellence? We want your help. Please fill out this volunteer form. We’re looking for people interested in writing posts, conducting academic research or examining policy questions, identifying and leading local reform efforts, and all else that may be useful.

4. If you want to see this project flourish, consider donating. The Center for Educational Progress is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, reliant on independent donations to grow. We intend to expand to four full-time team members and rapidly build out infrastructure for research and policy work. Donations will go to paying guest authors and incoming team members.

5. For other ideas, email us at centerforedprogress@gmail.com.

Excellence in education has received far too little focus for far too long. The time for change is now.