“Microschools aren’t so micro anymore,” writes Linda Jacobson in The 74. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the growth of these K-12 learning models. They became a refuge for families facing school closures and challenges with remote learning. Their expansion is another important development in America’s K-12 education choice landscape.

What Are Microschools?

Microschools are often described as today’s version of the one-room schoolhouse. They typically consist of small, mixed-age student groups. They operate in traditional school buildings, homes, churches, and commercial spaces. They emphasize customized curricula, experiential learning, and a focus on mastery of content over standardized testing.

They take different organizational forms, including learning centers that follow a state’s homeschooling rules, private schools that charge tuition, a single charter school or a member of a charter network, or a traditional public school. Their learning calendars vary from being open year-round to part-time to following a typical academic year.

Read more in Forbes.

The Democratic Party has lost its way. A party whose very purpose has been to fight for working families has forfeited their trust and confidence. The losses are most obvious among white working-class voters. In 1960, John F. Kennedy won white working-class (noncollege) voters but lost white college graduates by two to one. In 2024, Kamala Harris lost white working-class voters by over two to one (67 percent to 31 percent) while winning white college graduates solidly

The self-flattering story Democrats have told themselves is that rising white racism explains the defection of white working-class voters. But that simple story was always undercut by data showing white racism has declined, not increased, in recent decades. And the fable was further undermined in the 2024 election by the defection of many Hispanic, Asian, and black working-class voters as well. The Democratic advantage among nonwhite working-class voters has declined sharply by 37 points since 2012. In 2024, the only net increase for Democrats compared to 2020 was among whites.

The party has sunk so low that it cannot beat the man who infamously inspired his followers to attack the U.S. Capitol, sat by while they created mayhem, and would, once back in office, pardon the attackers. Republicans have had a higher identification rate among voters than Democrats for the last three years, something that hasn’t been true for almost a century. Only 29 percent of Americans view the Democrats favorably according to CNN, the lowest rate since CNN began asking the question more than thirty years ago.

What went wrong for the Democrats, and what can be done about it? There are many answers to the first question, but fundamentally, much of it boils down to this: at a time when the life prospects of Americans are increasingly shaped by economic class, not skin color or gender, Democrats have moved in the opposite direction and time and time again prioritized racial and gender identity. Restoring the primacy of working-class priorities, on issues of culture as well as economics, provides the central path forward for a Democratic Party that wants to build a durable majority and restore its identity as the party of working people.

Read more in American Affairs.

America’s K-12 teachers have experienced a notable upswing in morale but have serious concerns about K-12 schools. That’s the central message about what teachers are thinking from two polls of public school teachers from Education Week and the Pew Research Center and one poll of public and private school teachers from EdChoice/Morning Consult.

These one-point-in-time snapshots help us understand teachers’ views of their profession and K-12 education. As the school year draws to a close and we observe National Teacher Appreciation Week, it’s valuable to hear the voices of teachers, as challenging and unsettling as some of their perspectives may be.

Read more in Forbes. 

America’s colleges and universities are under duress. At least 76 public or nonprofit colleges have closed or merged since March 2020, and some experts believe more are on the way.

A big reason for this trend is the “enrollment cliff.” This year, the number of high school graduates will peak at around 3.9 million and then begin a gradual descent that will result in about 13% fewer by 2041.

In response, many institutions of higher learning have recruited students from overseas to backfill the declining domestic enrollments. In the 2023-24 academic year, a record number of international students attended U.S. colleges and universities, marking a 7% increase from the previous year. Altogether, international student enrollment contributed $43.8 billion to the U.S. economy last year.

Read more in Forbes.

On April 30, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case that could compel states with charter school laws to authorize religious charters. Reporters from the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and The 74 said the court’s conservative majority bloc appeared “open to” religious charter schools.

Such a ruling would be bad for the country and deeply disruptive. It could upend the charter school sector, raising questions about the constitutionality of the federal charter school law and the laws in 47 states, all of which require charters to be nonsectarian. It could lead to blue states cutting back on charter schools and red states seeing a flood of religious charters open up, which would further balkanize an already divided country.

Is there any hope? The best outcome would be if one of the conservative justices — most likely Chief Justice John Roberts — ended up siding with the liberal justices and rejecting a requirement that authorizers must permit religious charter schools. The second-best outcome would be if policymakers took creative steps (as I outline below) to comply with an adverse Supreme Court ruling while preserving social cohesion and retaining for charter schools the flexibility they need to flourish.

Keep reading in The 74.

Celebrating National Charter School Week – May 11 to 17

“The federal Charter Schools Program has turned out to be one of the larger and more successful examples of government-supported research and development in the K-12 realm, in ways that have fostered considerable innovation,” writes K-12 policy expert Chester E. Finn, Jr. This year’s National Charter School Week celebrates the 30th anniversary of that Program’s first funding awards to charter schools in 1995. Nearly half of today’s charter schools have received Program funds.

The Charter Schools Program was created with the passage of the Improving America’s Schools Act, which “New Democrat” President Bill Clinton signed into law on October 20, 1994. The bipartisan Act was approved in the U.S House of Representatives by a vote of 289 to 128 and in the U.S. Senate by a vote of 94 to 6.

The program now provides federal financial assistance to open new public charter schools, expand existing high-quality schools, and increase access to school facilities. Current federal funding has reached $440 million, up from $4.5 million in 1995. The Trump administration has proposed increasing federal support to $500 million for the next funding year.

Read more in Forbes.

Early in my tenure at the education policy organization I founded, we barely had any money. No money meant no lobbyist, which left me, a complete stranger to the legislative process, to figure out how to pass meaningful policy.

A conversation I had with a Democratic legislator seen as an up-and-coming leader stands out among the blur of memories. He agreed to meet me at a local sandwich shop in downtown Jackson after I kept showing up at the Capitol, bright-eyed and brimming with optimism that Mississippi could, in fact, improve its public schools. I admit to feeling a little defeated that day after yet another uninspiring and unproductive education committee meeting, and I complained about it to him.

“Why don’t the Democrats seem to have any vision for education?” I asked in frustration. “Saying ‘no’ to everything the Republicans pose isn’t an agenda.”

“We’re the minority party,” he shot back. “It’s not our job to have a vision.”

I sat back in the chair, stunned, and thought to myself, “And that is exactly why you’ll always be the minority party.”

Read more in Real Clear Education.

At a time when the Trump administration is attacking diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies in K-12 schools and colleges and universities as part of a larger high-profile campaign against what Trump calls “woke ideology,” the press is faced again with the challenge of how to accurately report on these programs.

In the past, members of the media have not always risen to the challenge, downplaying education institutions’ economic incentives for racial preferences.

Polls show that most Americans support racial diversity in educational institutions, but most don’t like using racial preferences as the means of achieving that goal.

Read more in Kappan.