America has built a crowded opportunity system. But it hasn’t yet managed to build a clear opportunity map that guides people through that system.

The U.S. now has more than 1.85 million credentials, from high school diplomas and college degrees, to short-term credentials, industry certifications, badges and other certificates, according to Credential Engine.

They’re offered by more than 134,000 providers, with $2.34 trillion invested annually in education and workforce development. They vary in quality, market value and connection to further education or work.

But more options don’t automatically create clearer choices. For example, a student may not know which certificate leads to a family-sustaining job. A displaced worker may not know whether a short-term program connects to an apprenticeship, a promotion or a degree. An employer may say it needs skills but not know how to translate that need into a program, credential or hiring pathway.

So America has no shortage of career pathways. But it does have a navigation problem. And community colleges can play a practical role in solving it.

Read more in CC Daily

The pandemic may be over, but the K-12 education emergency it left behind has entered a new phase.

That’s the central message of the new Education Scorecard report by researchers at Harvard, Stanford, Dartmouth, and its partner organizations.

It’s more than an update to the story of pandemic learning loss, showing that America’s K-12 academic problem didn’t begin in March 2020 with COVID. The country entered a learning recession around 2013, when progress in reading and math achievement stalled and then declined.

Read more in Datia K-12

National Charter Schools Week (May 10 to 16) rightly focuses our attention on the millions of students attending public charter schools. Less attention goes to the federal program that helped make much of that growth possible.

Today, charter schools are often treated as a partisan education fight. But the federal Charter Schools Program, or CSP, has a more practical, bipartisan story. Congress created it in 1994 as part of the Improving America’s Schools Act, the Clinton-era reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

Created to help launch new charter schools, replicate strong models, and support facilities financing, CSP remains a modest federal tool with a large public purpose: helping communities create more quality K–12 public school options.

It remains the only federal program specifically dedicated to expanding public charter school choice nationwide. The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools describes CSP as a catalyst that helps educators and communities create new public school options rather than a federal effort to run schools from Washington.

Read more in Flypaper

Charter schools are now an enduring part of American K-12 public education. It’s time for policymakers and K-12 stakeholders to stop the foolish argument about whether these schools should exist. They’re here and aren’t going away. The real question is what the next phase of chartering should aim to achieve.

There are several answers to that question. I think one at the top of the list is figuring out how to use the tools that chartering developed, like performance contracting, authorizing, school-level autonomy, mission-driven governance and better measures of student success, to modernize all of U.S. public education for a changing economy and society.

No doubt, some of this has already occurred, as the charter idea has increasingly shaped mainstream expectations about how public schools should operate. — for example, innovation zones and portfolio school management. The challenge now is to ensure that chartering becomes a quality-and-opportunity strategy for all of K-12 public education.

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Many donors want to create genuine educational opportunity for young people who have too few good K–12 public school options. They see strong schools as an integral part of a healthy civil society where families exercise agency, communities build trust, and young people gain the knowledge, habits, and relationships they need to participate in American life.

This year’s National Charter Schools Week invites donors to look beyond the ubiquitous political debate on charter schools and focus on how they can create more charter schools that are flexible, accountable, and built around student and family needs.

That combination of freedom plus accountability in the service of families and kids was the original charter idea and remains the reason charter schools continue to matter.

Read more in Philanthropy Daily

The most important charter school story today isn’t how many students they serve or whether they outperform district schools. While those questions matter, they’re too narrow. National Charter Schools Week invites us to talk about the bigger story of how the charter school idea has reshaped American K–12 public education.

When the charter idea emerged in the early 1990s, it was framed as a way to create independent public schools of choice with more freedom over how they operated but more accountability for what students learned.

In 1999, that goal led National Urban League President Hugh Price to propose that policymakers “charterize all urban schools” to liberate them from “stifling district bureaucracy” and give them “the latitude to operate.”

While charter schools haven’t replaced traditional K–12 public schools, they’ve done something arguably more consequential. They’ve changed what families, educators, and policymakers expect from all public schools. What was a boutique innovation is increasingly a baseline expectation.

Read more in Real Clear Education

July 4, 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and the colonists’ claim to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The year 1776 also recalls a quieter but significant anniversary. Adam Smith published An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, giving the modern world a language for thinking about markets, productivity, and prosperity.

Before Smith wrote about markets, though, he wrote his The Theory of Moral Sentiments. There he explored sympathy—our capacity to enter into the feelings of others—and the moral discipline of what he called the “impartial spectator.” That discipline was not mere politeness. It involved learning to govern one’s passions, judge one’s conduct as others might judge it, and become fit for life among free and equal persons. Smith’s insight was that liberty depends not only on institutions and incentives, but also on habits of self-command and regard for others that no market can create on its own. He understood that commercial society rested on moral and social foundations it did not itself create.

A free society must ask not only how wealth is produced, Smith teaches us, but how it is shared, accessed, and made usable in ordinary life. Today, those questions are relevant to one of the biggest problems we face: what some have called “the loneliness crisis.” Revisiting Smith’s writings can help demonstrate that this crisis of disconnection is not merely a public-health concern or a matter of loneliness, but a civic and cultural problem with implications for self-government.

That requires attention not only to economic and human capital, but also to social wealth: the relationships, habits, associations, friendships, local loyalties, and institutions that help people find belonging, weather hardship, and turn learning into opportunity. Social scientists often call this social capital, but the two ideas point to much the same reality. If economic wealth describes a nation’s productive assets, social wealth describes the civic and moral reserves that make freedom workable and prosperity widely accessible.

Read more in Life and Liberty