It’s back-to-school season, with an estimated 47.2 million K-12 public school students and 3.2 million teachers returning to their classrooms. They come back to a K-12 system offering an expanding menu of public education choices for families (and teachers) that are leading parents to reshape public education. A Tyton Partners report dubs them “activated parents.” While COVID-19 accelerated this parent uprising, other longer-term forces set the stage for it.

Upheaval In The Making

Three factors have fueled a slow but relentless wave of K-12-activated parent upheaval, one that began before COVID-19 but gained unstoppable momentum during and after the pandemic.

• Expansion of public school choice. Over more than 60 years, K-12 policy changes have created a variety of public school choices for families. They now include options such as magnet schools, charter schools, microschools, learning pods, open enrollment, dual enrollment, course choice, tutoring, homeschooling, and career pathways programs. Moreover, families can mix-and-match these options. For example, more than a third of homeschool families also use traditional district public schools, and another 9% have a child in a charter public school.
• Rising dissatisfaction with public education. A Gallup poll shows that satisfaction with public education has declined. Between 2017 and 2025 , the share of adults satisfied with the quality of public education fell from 37% to 24%, reflecting a broader erosion of confidence in U.S. institutions. The 2025 Phi Delta Kappan poll reports that Americans’ confidence in K-12 public schools is at an all-time low. Only 13% grade them an A or a B, down from 19% in 2019 and 26% in 2004. Adults have more positive attitudes toward their local schools, with over 40% grading them highly.
• Public funding for private school access. Policy changes over more than 35 years in 33 states have created 81 different K-12 programs that give families public funding to cover the costs associated with private schools. These programs include vouchers, tax credits, and education savings accounts.

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On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall and began its destructive path through the Gulf Coast. New Orleans bore the brunt of the devastation, not only in the loss of homes and lives, but also in the destruction of its public infrastructure, especially its schools. Over the next two decades, the governance of New Orleans’ K-12 public schools underwent a significant reinvention.

This effort produced one of the most innovative and ambitious approaches to K-12 school reform in modern American education: a system of public charter schools funded by taxpayers and independently operated as schools of choice. This reinvention of the New Orleans K-12 public school system sparked a nationwide conversation about public school governance, autonomy, school choice, and accountability.

Now, with twenty years of evidence and the return of schools to a locally elected board, the question is no longer whether New Orleans succeeded or failed. What will U.S. K-12 public education learn from this unparalleled innovation to improve the lives of New Orleans’ young people? While the New Orleans model was born of crisis, the lessons it offers extend well beyond The Big Easy.

Tulane University economist Douglas Harris and his colleagues have led the effort to understand these lessons. Harris is the founding director of the University’s Education Research Alliance for New Orleans, whose reports serve as the primary sources of information for the discussion that follows.

Read more in RealClearEducation.

Finally—A Win For Political Bipartisanship

“We just expanded the definition of college,” writes Kathleen deLaski, capturing the spirit behind the new Workforce Pell legislation in President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed into law on July 4. The legislation extends post-secondary Pell Grant financial eligibility to short-term training programs that currently are not eligible to be paid for using federal aid.

While the Beautiful Bill Act passed with a mostly party-line vote, Workforce Pell has long had bipartisan legislative support at the federal level in both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. Additionally, this approach has strong support from many quarters, including working-class voters, broadly defined as those without a four-year college degree.

A Progressive Policy Institute/YouGov Survey of working-class voters reports that when given five options to choose what would most help them have a good job, career, and get ahead, the number one response of nearly half (46%) was “affordable, short-term training programs that combine work and learning,” followed by “more opportunities for apprenticeships with companies” (23%). Only 9% said a four-year college degree, which came in four out of five.

As Lisa Larson, CEO of the Education Design Lab, writes in Community College Daily, “Workforce Pell has finally become law after years of advocacy, stalled negotiations in Congress and a groundswell of support from educators, employers, and learners.”

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Teenagers from around the world enter the workforce blindfolded. They are intensely interested in future careers. Their expectations, though, are outdated because they are not aware of the career options available to them. Family background plays a significant role in shaping this mismatch, more than real-world insights or aptitude.

This news of teens adrift as they move from school to work is the central message from a new report released by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) on the State of Global Teenage Career Preparation. The report uses 2022 data from the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). It surveyed roughly 690,000 15- and 16-year-old students from more than 80 countries, including the U.S. OECD began collecting this data in 2000 with a smaller group of countries, which allows it to make comparisons over this time period.

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At a recent dinner party with people who would define themselves as “very liberal,” someone asked me whether my new center-left employer was uncomfortable with my long record of advocacy for charter schools. “No,” I shrugged, “because charter schools are public schools.”

“But they aren’t real public schools,” he chided.

I’ve had this same conversation dozens of times in the last twenty years, and it goes to the heart of the debate now about private school choice. What makes a public school “public”? What does it mean to provide children with a “public education”?

Ask most Americans to define “public schools” or “public education,” and you’re likely to get a response that goes something like “public education happens at public schools; public schools are schools everyone can go to, they’re free, and they have to follow the rules set by the government.”

Read more in RealClearEducation.

“We need to offer the coming generations an education in morals as rigorous as their technical and career education,” writes political and cultural commentator David Brooks in The Atlantic. What might be the foundation for the main elements of this rigorous education in morals?

As I thought about this question, I kept returning to two of my parents go to maxims, directed to me—and my siblings—on a regular basis. They offered me a springboard to answer this question.

The first maxim was, “Use your common sense.” The second maxim, meant to reinforce the first, was one of the worst things they could say about someone: “That person doesn’t have any common sense.”

As a young person, I was attracted to the simplicity of these maxims, though not always sure how to apply them as I navigated my way around Collinwood, our Italian-American neighborhood in Cleveland, Ohio. They have been with me for over 70 years, shaping my perspective on life.

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Teenagers around the world are adrift as they near high school graduation. They are deeply interested in future careers, but their expectations are outdated, and they have little awareness of their actual professional options.

That’s the message of a new report, The State of Global Teenage Career Preparation, by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. The report surveys approximately 690,000 15- and 16-year-old students from more than 80 countries, including the United States. Here are five key insights from the report:

• Roughly 4 out of 10 students are unclear about their career expectations, double the number from about a decade ago.
• Almost half (49%) agree (35%) or strongly agree (14%) that school has done little to prepare them for adult life.
• There’s a gender gap in students’ aspirations to work in sectors like information technology and health care. For example, around 11% of boys report that they will work in information technology at age 30, compared with 1.5% of girls.
• Job preferences focus on a few, well-known professions, such as teaching, psychology and sports. For example, around half of girls and 44% of boys report that they expect to work in one of just 10 jobs, with little change in career preferences since 2000.
• The majority of young people don’t get connected to workforce professionals who can help them understand the opportunities available to them. Only 35% report attending a job fair, and just 45% visited a workplace.

Read more in The 74.

More than seven out of 10 U.S. adults give a grade of C or worse to K-12 public schools’ efforts to prepare students “to be good citizens.” History and civics 8^th-grade test scores are at an all-time low. On the other hand, there is strong support and narrowing political differences between Democrats and Republicans on the importance of civic education, especially students learning civics and history.

In 2026 we will celebrate America’s 250th anniversary commemorating the signing the Declaration of Independence. As we prepare for this event, we should acknowledge both the worrisome and good news and continue to advance efforts that increase students’ knowledge of civics and history.

Troubling News

There are worrisome signs that patriotism, civic knowledge, and civic education are declining. A Gallup poll in 2023 found that 39% of U.S. adults were extremely proud to be an American, compared to 55% in 2001 when the question was first asked. This was essentially unchanged from the 38% record low in 2022. When combining those extremely or very proud, the number dropped from a high of 90% in 2003 to 67% in 2023. There also is a divide on patriotism between younger and older Americans. While 50% of adults aged 55 and older said they are extremely proud to be American, 40% of those aged 35 to 54 and 18% of 18- to 34-year-olds said the same.

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Do Americans want an education system in which the quality of children’s schools depends largely on their family’s wealth?

Not likely. Yet in Republican-dominated states, that’s exactly what the future holds. This is arguably the most profound change in American education since the development of universal public education over a century ago.

Over the past five years, 14 states have passed laws creating universal vouchers, often known as Education Savings Accounts — public money families can use to pay private school tuition. All are Republican states: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, Louisiana, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming. Two more, Oklahoma and Idaho, have passed refundable tax credits available to all families.

Every family in those states is eligible, or will be within a few years, for somewhere between West Virginia’s $4,600 and Texas’s $10,500 a year per student. Counting programs limited to low-income students, more than half of all K-12 students in the U.S. now qualify for some form of voucher.

Read more in The 74.