issue: Education

Manno for DATIA K12: The World’s Education Scorecard on Life After High School

Posted on by Alyssa Brown

Every fall, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) publishes the closest thing the world has to an annual report card on education. The latest edition, Education at a Glance 2026, covers a wide range of topics, from how systems are structured, financed, and perform to its special focus on teacher shortages and how countries respond. It also includes a section that follows students after they leave high school, asking how far they went, whether they found work, what they earn, and what they can actually do.

The headline news is encouraging. In the United States, the share of 18- to 24-year-olds who were neither working nor in school or training fell to 14 percent in 2025, down from 16 percent a decade earlier. Some 52 percent of American adults ages 25 to 64 hold an associate degree or higher, above the OECD average of 43 percent. More young people are connected to something after high school than they were ten years ago.

But the averages hide a sorting that begins on graduation day. Among Americans ages 18 to 24, 46 percent are enrolled in some form of education, 39 percent are working and not in school, and 14 percent are doing neither. For those whose high school diploma is their final credential, the labor market is unforgiving.

Read more on Datia K12.

Manno for Real Clear Education: Goodbye to the One-School Student As K–12 Goes Modular

Posted on by Max Sherrill

“Where does your child go to school?” used to be an easy question to answer with the name of a building. That straightforward response is getting harder to give.

A growing number of families now build their children’s education from parts. A young person might spend three days a week at a microschool, take an online math course, join a homeschool co-op, and take a dual-enrollment class at the local community college. More and more often, an education savings account pays for some of it.

American K–12 education is going modular. And new studies show families moving faster than the categories we use to describe, count, fund, and judge schooling. That gap between how families behave and how our systems are built deserves more attention than it gets.

Read more in Real Clear Education.

Kahlenberg for The Atlantic: How the Culture War Put Public Schools at Risk

Posted on by Max Sherrill

For more than half a century after Milton Friedman proposed using taxpayer money to support students in private schools, the libertarian economist’s idea went almost nowhere. Republican presidents, including Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, pushed vouchers—which help parents enroll their children in schools of their choice, including private and religious schools, at taxpayer expense—as a way to liberate poor children from failing big-city school districts. Those efforts led to voucher initiatives in a smattering of districts, such as Cleveland, Milwaukee, and Washington, D.C. But in state after state, support for public schools—which take all comers and have historically played a crucial role in cultivating students’ common identity as Americans—was just too broad-based and too strong to get voucher-like programs approved on a larger scale.

In the past several years, though, voucher advocates have switched strategies to take advantage of the country’s ever-deepening political polarization. In 2022, the Heritage Foundation urged the voucher movement “to embrace the culture war” as a way of promoting school choice. As evidence of progressive overreach, the conservative think tank has pointed to “racial essentialism for third graders” and decried the presence in some school libraries of Gender Queer, a graphic novel that “features a picture of oral sex being performed on a sex toy.”

Conservative leaders in many state capitals have emulated Heritage’s tactics, and the tactical shift has helped persuade lawmakers to expand the supply of school vouchers. Amy Sinclair, the president of the Iowa state Senate, told an interviewer in 2023 that during the coronavirus pandemic, “many parents became aware of anti-American and explicit materials in their child’s classrooms and began to demand choice.” “There’s no reason why any students should have a woke agenda pushed on them,” Texas Governor Greg Abbott declared a month later at a rally for private-school-choice legislation. The following year, his Arkansas counterpart, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, promoted her school-choice efforts by declaring on X, “We need kids learning math, reading, and science—not woke nonsense.” Since the pandemic, voucher-like programs have proliferated, and they are now open to even the richest students. In 2021, no states had universal programs supporting private education with public dollars; by 2025, 18 did. The number of students using publicly funded private-school-choice programs has tripled since the 2018–19 school year.

Read more in The Atlantic.

Manno for The 74: So Many Credentials, So Little Value — What States Can Learn From Ohio’s Reboot

Posted on by Alyssa Brown

The gap between workforce policy ambition and the infrastructure that’s needed to make it a reality is a defining story in American workforce policy. Ohio is an example of this problem and the pathway to solving it.

Last year, about 9,000 Ohio high school students earned a retail sales and customer service credential. State records show employers were looking to fill exactly three jobs statewide that required it. Another 4,000 students earned a stack of emergency management credentials for a field with fewer than 300 openings.

These students didn’t do anything wrong. The problem belonged to a state that built an enormous credentialing system far before it had the tools and data infrastructure to know which credentials were worth earning.

Since 2019, Ohio has allowed high school students to earn a diploma by completing career and technical education coursework and receiving an industry-recognized credential rather than passing a state test. Students responded rationally, with credential attainment rising from 53,000 in 2019 to 170,000 in 2024.

Keep reading in The 74.

Manno for Community College Daily: The Readiness Paradox Community Colleges Can’t Ignore

Posted on by Max Sherrill

Community colleges can help close the readiness paradox, or the widening gap between finishing high school and being ready for what’s next. Three new national surveys show how wide it’s grown.

High school graduation rates are up. But graduates report they’re not sure what comes next. And community colleges, which enroll a large share of this population, are the first place that uncertainty shows up.

The share of public high school students graduating on time rose from 80% in 2011–12 to 87.4% in 2022–23, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, confirmed by K-12 Dive’s review of the same federal data. The Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University puts the longer arc at roughly two decades, from about 70% to today’s all-time highs.

That is a genuine institutional achievement. It means a larger share of students than ever before is arriving at community colleges with a diploma. But these same students are, by their own account, less sure why they’re there.

Seventy-seven percent of recent high school graduates say they feel only moderately, slightly or not at all prepared for life after high school, according to YouScience’s 2026 Post-Graduation Readiness Report. That’s up from 72% just a year earlier.

Read more in Community College Daily.

Manno for Washington Monthly: Thriving After High School: A Foundation to Build On

Posted on by Max Sherrill

The country finds itself debating what happens to young people after 12th grade. Is college worth it? Should high schoolers skip it for an apprenticeship? Is college still the ticket to the middle class or a debt trap dressed up as opportunity?

A new report from the American Academy of Arts & Sciences characterizes our times as “a moment of great national debate about the journeys people make after they receive their high school diploma.” What makes this contribution to that debate worth taking seriously isn’t that it settles the argument, but who is making it, and how.

Thriving After High School: Community, School, Service, and Work is the product of the Academy’s Commission on Opportunities After High School. Thirty leaders from K-12 and higher education, business, service, and philanthropy worked together for two years.

It’s worth pausing to consider where this cross-partisan report comes from, because that context changes how it should be read.

Read more in Washington Monthly.

Manno for American Thinker: Who Gets to Play?

Posted on by Max Sherrill

Americans typically think of sports as entertainment. But sports also have a social function that makes sports part of that reservoir of communal affection called social wealth.

That’s because sports give young people relationships, identity, and a place in school. They also give people something to talk about. But the students who might benefit most are often left on the sidelines.

A new study on “Sports Fandom” from More in Common finds that 71 percent of the most passionate sports fans use sports to connect with someone new, compared with 50 percent of moderately engaged fans, 28 percent of less engaged fans, and 13 percent of nonfans. More passionate fans also report more frequent contact with friends and family and less loneliness.

At a moment when Americans worry about isolation and social division, sports is a shared ritual and language that can cross differences of age, background, and politics.

Read more in American Thinker.

Manno for DATIA K12: Industry-Recognized Credentials Are a Stepping Stone, Not a Strategy

Posted on by Max Sherrill

A conservative U.S. Secretary of Education and a progressive teachers’ union president don’t often agree. But Secretary Linda McMahon told Congress a four-year college “is not for everyone,” and American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten said much the same in The New York Times.

Both are signaling the same shift away from “college for all” toward a question that is far from settled: What should replace it? For high schools, many states have answered with industry-recognized credentials, or IRCs.

The logic is appealing. Give students a portable, employer-recognized signal of workplace skill, like a welding certification or a nurse aide credential, and they can enter the labor market with something to show for their years in school.

Just over half of states now build IRC attainment into accountability systems. Ohio pays school districts up to $725 for every high-demand credential a student earns. Credential earning has climbed as a result. Twenty-six percent of the class of 2024 earned one, versus 2 percent a decade earlier.

Two rigorous state studies complicate that celebration and point to a single conclusion useful for any K-12 leader building or expanding an IRC program. A credential works as one rung on a career ladder. It fails when a school or state treats it as the whole ladder.

Read more in DATIA K12.

Canter in The New York Post: Blue states with strong teachers’ unions have lower student literacy levels: study shows

Posted on by Alex Terr

[…]

The assessment was conducted by the PPI’s Director of Education Policy, Rachel Canter, who spent nearly two decades in Mississippi advocating for systemic reforms, which transformed the state’s students from having among the lowest literacy rates in the nation to having some of the highest

And Canter’s study found one overwhelming and shocking throughline — the stronger the state’s teachers’ union the worse its student literacy scores were, results which did not exclusively follow party lines but strongly trended that way and often to the detriment of Democrats.

“Democrats, however, don’t often ask me how to replicate Mississippi’s success,” Canter said. “They ask if it’s possible at all, given the power of teachers’ unions in their home states.”

One reason for the disparity, Canter argued, is that states where teacher unions have a strong grip are slower to enact better programs.

She looked at 18 literacy policies recommended by ExcelinEd and found Democratic states had undertaken nine of them on average, while Republican and swing states had adopted an average of 13.5.

“States dominated by Democrats have been slower to embrace similar reforms,” Canter said. “Organized labor might explain some of this gap.”

Canter’s successes were a meteoric transformation of Mississippi’s students — in 2013 the state had some of the worst test scores for middle and elementary students in the country, but by 2024 they had climbed to seventh in literacy and 13th in math.

[…]

Read more in The New York Post

Manno for DatiaK12: What Happens When You Ask Students About AI And They Tell You the Truth?

Posted on by Max Sherrill

The devices are winning. Grades are covering for it.

Three-quarters of high school students say they misuse technology during class every day. A quarter say they’ve used AI to help them during a quiz or a test, an activity that’s supposed to measure what a student actually knows.

Those numbers come from a new Thomas B. Fordham Institute survey of just over 2,000 current and recent high schoolers.

The report is worth more than passing attention because the findings aren’t coming from watchdog researchers or worried parents. They’re coming from students, describing their own classrooms.

The picture the survey builds isn’t really about phones, or even about AI on its own. It’s about how those two things interact with school-issued devices and with grading policy to erase whatever used to keep them in check.

Two-thirds of students say YouTube is freely accessible on their school laptop. Nearly half say they’ve used AI to solve math problems outright, more than a third to summarize a book so they don’t have to read it, and a quarter to help during an exam.

Sixty-two percent of students spend the majority of their class time on a school-issued device. The more time students spend on those devices, the more likely they are to believe missing class won’t hurt their grade.

Meanwhile, the guardrails that might offset all of this are thin. Twenty-nine percent of students say they get partial credit for assignments they never turned in. Most say they can retake a test at least once if they don’t like their score.

All this taken together makes this more than just another AI story. It becomes a story about trust in the K-12 public education system.

Read more in Datia K12

 

Kahlenberg and Lin in Real Clear Politics: Higher Education Must Overcome Comforting Delusions

Posted on by Alex Terr

[…]

Earlier this year in the Wall Street Journal, Richard Kahlenberg, director of the American Identity Project at the Progressive Policy Institute, and Lief Lin, a PPI policy research fellow, offered dramatic evidence of scholarship’s corruption by progressive bias, with baleful implications for liberal education throughout the nation.

In “American Studies Can’t Stand Its Subject,” Kahlenberg and Lin argued that “many of the serious scholars who study America – its history, literature and culture – fail to provide a balanced and nuanced account of the country’s complex tale.” The authors’ Journal op-ed drew on their report, “The Distortion of American Studies,” for which they reviewed the almost 100 articles that appeared in American Quarterly – a peer-reviewed journal edited by scholars and published by Johns Hopkins University – over three years.

According to Kahlenberg and Lin, American Quarterly, “widely considered the country’s premier journal of American studies,” overwhelmingly featured scholarship that advances the outlook of “the academic left” by presenting “a one-sided and unrelentingly negative portrait of the U.S.” The authors report that “80% of articles published between 2022 and 2024 were critical of America, 20% were neutral, and none were positive.” Criticism “focused on American racism, imperialism, classism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia and transphobia.” Some scholarly attacks on America passed over into the absurd: “One essay posited that thermodynamics – the science dealing with the relationship between energy, heat, work and temperature – is ‘an abstract settler-capitalist theory that influenced the plunder of Indigenous lands and lives.’”

Kahlenberg and Lin “couldn’t find a single positive article” about America in the prestigious journal from 2022 to 2024. Not one contribution during that three-year period explored “American ingenuity” or examined “why as of 2020 the U.S., representing about 4% of the world’s population, won 42% of the individual Nobel Prizes since the awards’ creation in 1901.” Not one considered “why the U.S. was the first country to land a man on the moon.” Not one dealt with “America’s vanquishing Nazi Germany in World War II or the Soviet Union in the Cold War.” And not one contained a “discussion of why the U.S. is rated as the most desirable destination for immigrants across the world.”

[…]

Read more in Real Clear Education

Kahlenberg and Lin in New Republic: Dems Want to Regulate AI. But Will AI Money Divide Them?

Posted on by Alex Terr

[…]

At the centrist Progressive Policy Institute, Richard D. Kahlenberg and Lief Lin pen a new report on “Teaching American Democracy,” probing “where civics [education] went wrong” and how to “revitalize” it. One of the recommendations: “All states should require three years of American Democracy, just as they typically require three years in math and reading. Helping all students understand who we are as Americans and why,” Kahlenberg and Lin write, “is of enormous importance in a country where liberal democratic norms are under steady attack—as important as literacy and numeracy.”

[…]

Read more in The New Republic

Manno for Real Clear Education: School Satisfaction Reaches All-Time Low

Posted on by Alex Terr

Americans’ satisfaction with K-12 education has fallen to 32%, the lowest level Gallup has recorded in its 27-year trend, while dissatisfaction has climbed to a record 67%.

The September 7, 2026, Walton Family Foundation/Gallup poll shows satisfaction down 11 points over two years, driven largely by a 19-point drop among Democrats since the start of President Trump’s second term. Independents are down 10 points and Republicans down 6 points. Only 20% of respondents rated schools favorably on preparing students to think critically and solve problems.

Any single poll invites the question of whether it’s an outlier. This one isn’t.

A second survey, the most recent available Phi Delta Kappa Poll, released in August 2025, asks a different question and comes from a different pollster. It has Americans grade schools like a report card rather than rate their satisfaction. It finds the same decline under a different name. Just 13% of respondents gave the nation’s public schools an A or B, with scores falling every year since 2017.

A third measure comes from Gallup’s separate 2026 annual survey of confidence in U.S. institutions, released in July 2026, which asks a different question. It’s not about satisfaction or a grade but about how much confidence Americans have in “the public schools” as an institution. That poll puts confidence in schools at 27%, a point above its all-time low.

Read more in Real Clear Education

Ideological Wars Have Contributed to the Decline of Civics Education, New PPI Report Finds

Posted on by Alex Terr

Time for a Renaissance in Teaching the American Political Tradition

WASHINGTON (September 10, 2026) — Nearly four in five American eighth graders score below proficient in civics, the federal government spends roughly 100 times less per student on the subject compared with STEM, and about one-third of Americans under 30 say democracy is no longer a viable system of government. A report released today by the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) argues those phenomena are connected, and calls for rebuilding American civics education from the ground up.

The report, titled “Teaching American Democracy: Understanding Who We Are as Americans and Why” and authored by Richard D. Kahlenberg, director of PPI’s American Identity Project, and Lief Lin, a policy analyst at PPI, makes two top-line recommendations: rebrand the course now called “civics” as “American Democracy,” and require three years of it in high school, the same as most states require in math and reading.

“Across the country, civics education is falling short on all fronts,” said Kahlenberg. “Without a course that teaches students who we are as Americans and what makes America unique, the nation is unlikely to regain its place as the world’s leading example of how a multiethnic liberal democracy can flourish.”

The report documents deficits on three fronts:

  • On knowledge of American government … the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress found 79% of eighth graders below proficient in civics and 86% below proficient in U.S. history, the weakest results of any subject tested.
  • On belief in Democracy … 31% of Americans ages 18 to 29 agreed that the country should explore alternatives to democracy, compared with 5% of those over 65, and four in 10 young Americans describe the founders as villains rather than heroes.
  • On voter participation … U.S. voter turnout trails the OECD average, and only a quarter of Americans report a strong sense of belonging to a community.

Kahlenberg and Lin trace the decline to five failures: ideological fights that have drained state standards of content and chilled classroom debate, chronic underfunding and weak accountability, poor teacher preparation, a failure to teach students what life in nondemocratic societies actually looks like, and cuts to extracurriculars such as debate and student newspapers that build civic habits.

The scale of the neglect is measurable. Elementary classrooms devote 16 minutes a day to social studies, against 89 minutes for reading. All 50 states test reading and math, though only 21 test social studies. Nearly half of states earn a “D” or “F” from the Fordham Institute for their civics standards, U.S. history standards, or both. And 65% of teachers nationally report limiting classroom discussion of political and social issues, including 55% of those facing no state or local restriction at all.

“America has an extraordinary tale to tell,” said Lin. “Instead of students yawning about our country’s story, we need to take pride in our democracy and teach how our nation’s ups and downs over the last 250 years created a government envied by the world.”

Kahlenberg and Lin’s recommendations for the federal government include:

  • Creating a Race to the Top competition that rewards states for content-rich standards, nonpartisan hands-on learning and robust classroom debate
  • Reviving substantial federal funding along the lines of the Civics Secures Democracy Act, which would authorize $1 billion annually, with guardrails against politicized curricula
  • Requiring state participation in the NAEP civics and U.S. history exams every two years, so state-by-state comparisons become possible
  • Earmarking a share of Title II-A professional development dollars for civics and history. In 2020-21, 47% of districts spent none of that money on either subject
  • Funding grants to expand enrollment in AP Comparative Government, so students learn firsthand what life without democracy looks like
  • Providing competitive grants to Title I schools for debate teams, student newspapers, and programs such as the We the People competition

At the state and local level, the authors point to models already working: exemplary standards in Alabama, California, Massachusetts, Tennessee, and Washington, D.C., Utah’s Local Innovations Civics Education Pilot Program, and the Massachusetts law requiring every eighth grader and high school student to complete a student-led, nonpartisan civics project.

Read and download the report here.

Founded in 1989, PPI is a catalyst for policy innovation and political reform based in Washington, D.C. Its mission is to create radically pragmatic ideas for moving America beyond ideological and partisan deadlock. Find an expert and learn more about PPI by visiting progressivepolicy.org. Follow us at @ppi.

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Media Contact: Ian O’Keefe – iokeefe@ppionline.org

Teaching American Democracy: Understanding Who We Are As Americans and Why

Posted on by Alex Terr

America has an extraordinary tale to tell. In a world of kings and queens, the founders created a revolutionary system of self-governance aimed at honoring political equality and human liberty. Legendary fights erupted over how to empower a functioning government without threatening the freedom of individuals and how to address the country’s gravest failure to live up to its own professed values — chattel slavery. Learning about the American political tradition ought to be exciting for students, especially since the ideals underpinning the Declaration of Independence still fuel today’s battles for social and economic justice.

Yet for as long as schools have been teaching the topic of “civics,” it has evoked yawns from young people. Worse, students perform abysmally on the subject. At a time when liberal democracy in America is under enormous stress, school boards, states, and the federal government must rethink how we pass on America’s civic inheritance.

This report lays out the disappointing civics outcomes for students, outlines where civics went wrong, discusses promising practices that localities and states can replicate, and ends with recommendations for a federal role in revitalizing civics education. (A separate PPI report will address the best ways to teach an honest and hopeful account of American history.)

We have two top-line recommendations. First, educators should rename the course now known as “civics” as “American Democracy.” The new nomenclature signals that school children are not learning merely about one type of government among many, but about a thrilling advancement for liberty and equality in the history of the world. The course will explain not only how the American system works but will draw upon the historical drama of how it came into being, and why. Having said that, American Democracy will differ from American history in important ways. It will focus on that subset of American history that explains the development of our liberal democratic system as opposed to the broader topics covered in American history such as economic, technological, and cultural developments, American foreign policy, frontier expansion, and the like. Conversely, unlike history classes, American Democracy will help students engage in the contemporary practice of self-governance through hands-on learning.

Second, all states should require three years of American Democracy, just as they typically require three years in math and reading. Helping all students understand who we are as Americans and why is of enormous importance in a country where liberal democratic norms are under steady attack — as important as literacy and numeracy.

Read the full report

Manno for Daita K12: What the New International PISA Scores Actually Tell District Leaders

Posted on by Alex Terr

American 15-year-olds just posted their worst international reading scores in a quarter century, though it was also one of their best relative rankings in decades.

Untangling how this happened is the real lesson of the most recent international test results for district leaders who have to explain them to school boards, parents, and teachers.

The Programme for International Student Assessment, or PISA, is administered by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. It tests what 15-year-olds can do in reading, math, and science and includes 760,000 students in 91 countries. Its 2025 results report that U.S. reading scores fell 14 points since 2022, near a 25-year low. Math and science held roughly flat.

Because most other countries fell by similar or larger margins, the United States actually rose in the international rankings. That makes it a good-news story built on a bad-news backdrop.

Read more in Daita K12