New Orleans, LA — Education Reform Now Louisiana (ERN LA), a state chapter of the national nonpartisan think tank and advocacy organization Education Reform Now (ERN), today released its 10-Year Impact Report, highlighting a decade of progress advancing equity and opportunity for students and families across Louisiana.
Founded in 2015, ERN LA was created to tackle Louisiana’s enduring challenges in public education: persistent opportunity gaps, inequitable access to resources, and systemic barriers to student success. Over the past decade, ERN LA and its partners — Education Reform Now Advocacy (ERN-A) and Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) — have worked alongside more than 100 partners to advance bold policy solutions, elevate education champions at every level of government, and improve outcomes for students of color and students from low-income families.
“What began as a bold idea to challenge the status quo has grown into a dynamic organization impacting policies across the public education continuum, supporting 100 education champions up and down the ballot, and collaborating with over 100 partners to drive lasting change,” said Terrence Lockett, DFER LA’s Executive Director.
“This report is more than a reflection on what we’ve accomplished — it is a testament to what we can achieve together,” Lockett continued. “Each step forward has been shaped by the dedication of our team, the vision of our national organization, and the unwavering support of [our] partners.”
Highlights from the 10-Year Report include:
> Supporting more than 100 education champions in elections across Louisiana.
> Partnering with over 100 local and national organizations to advance policies rooted in equity, innovation, and student success.
> Advocating across five core policy areas: Public School Choice, Resource Equity, Talent Recruitment and Retention, Increasing Access to Higher Education, and Rigorous Standards and Accountability.
> Building on the lessons of post-Katrina education reform in New Orleans while pushing statewide solutions to close opportunity gaps.
Louisiana has made important gains since Hurricane Katrina, but systemic inequities remain. ERN LA’s vision for the next decade centers on ensuring every student — regardless of background or circumstance — has access to high-quality schools and the tools to thrive in today’s economy.
Part two of a four-part series of essays exploring how innovation, equity, and abundance can remake K–12 education for the 21st century.
For more than a hundred years, American public education has operated on a single blueprint: one system, one curriculum, one way of doing school. This centralized, standardized model, built in an industrial age that prized efficiency and control, became the default operating system of American education.
For a while (and for some), the system delivered: graduation rates rose, achievement gaps narrowed, and public confidence remained high. But those gains have stalled or reversed. Today, American students lag behind international peers on key metrics. Teacher dissatisfaction is surging. And families across the country, especially in low-income and rural communities, are searching for something different.
That search is leading them to new opportunities, increasingly facilitated by new funding models and by alternatives to traditional neighborhood schools. Since the pandemic, there has been a dramatic rise in states embracing Education Savings Accounts (ESA), and with the passage of the federal Educational Choice for Children Act (ECCA), parental choice is expanding throughout the country. And over the past two decades, charter schools have cemented their place in the American education landscape, outperforming their traditional school counterparts and helping to transform even the most challenged districts like New Orleans, Los Angeles and Camden, NJ. These innovations don’t just support better access. They lay the groundwork for something far more transformative: a new educational operating system that shifts power away from legacy systems and toward families.
A four-part series exploring how innovation, equity, and abundance can remake K–12 education for the 21st century.
We’re living through a moment of deep disruption—and extraordinary possibility.
For many, this is a time of profound unease. The ground beneath us is shifting; politically, economically, technologically, even culturally. Institutions we once relied on feel brittle. Trust is eroding. Our very democracy feels imperiled, tested by polarization, disinformation, and rising cynicism. The future feels uncertain, and many are rightfully asking whether the systems we’ve inherited are capable of meeting the moment. But history teaches us that when the old order begins to crack, it creates openings, not just for collapse, but for renewal. If we want to be agents for good, this is the time to step forward. And there is no place more urgent, or more foundational to that renewal, than K–12 education.
For over a century, America’s K–12 education system has operated on an industrial model: centralized, standardized, and built for scale. It was designed in an age of factories and hierarchies, when efficiency, uniformity, and top-down control were the driving principles. But that era has passed. Our economy and society have shifted from industrial mass production to networks and customization. To meet the needs of a changing world, our education system must do the same…
Anyone who works in advocacy knows that passing legislation is only the beginning of reform. The second step—rulemaking—is where laws are translated into practice and where the intent of a bill is either realized or restricted, depending on how agencies define the path forward.
This is especially true for the Educational Choice for Children Act (ECCA), which is included in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. As the first nationwide private-school choice program, it is designed to expand opportunity, especially for students and families who have historically had the fewest education options. Treasury’s rulemaking should honor that goal by ensuring consistency, fairness, and equity across participating states while preserving the flexibility needed for new approaches and school models to emerge. Read more at Education Next.
The Abundance movement has helped shift the focus of public policy from ideology to outcomes. It has exposed how our institutions, across sectors, are often structured in ways that prevent them from delivering the very goods and services they were created to provide. Housing is the clearest example. Despite broad consensus that we need more of it, entrenched processes, procedural veto points, and overregulation have made it harder to build. As a result, we have a shortage of one of the most basic necessities for a thriving society. Read more on our Substack.
For too long, the political Left has allowed the debate over school choice to be defined, and dominated, by conservatives. In doing so, we’ve not only neglected one of the most dynamic levers for equity and innovation in American education; we’ve also alienated the very families we claim to represent. It’s time to change that. It’s time for the Left to come to the school choice table, not to dismantle public education, but to help reinvent it for a new era.
A System Never Meant to Work for All
The American school system, from the outset, was not designed to meet the diverse needs of every child. It was built in an industrial age, for industrial-age goals. The “fathers of American education” believed in factory-style standardization and that the role of education was to rank and sort its pupils.
Their vision for schooling prioritized uniformity, top-down control, and compliance, not the development of each child’s potential. Even today, the machinery of American education reflects that legacy. Children are grouped in age-based batches, evaluated with standardized metrics, and taught in large, factory-like buildings.
This structure has always failed some students, but in today’s rapidly changing world, it is failing more students than ever before. Post-pandemic data shows that fewer than one-third of American students are reading or doing math at grade level. In major Democratic-led cities, entire schools report zero students proficient in math. In education, the gap between progressive aspirations and progressive outcomes is staggering, and growing.
And yet, we still pour energy into defending the system itself, rather than asking whether it was ever built to do what we now demand of it.
We Need a System Designed for Students
If we want different results, we need a different design. That means embracing a 21st-century vision meant to modernize public education: one that is driven by innovation, focused on outcomes, and responsive to the unique needs of every learner, particularly those most in need. It means shifting from a system designed for standardization to one designed for personalization. From top-down mandates to community-led, bottom-up solutions. From empowering bureaucrats to trusting families.
School choice, properly structured, is one of the most powerful tools we have to make that shift. And we know it works. Study after study finds not only academic but also civic benefits when students enroll in non-district schools, whether public or private.
School choice policies give families the freedom to find an educational setting that works for their child, rather than forcing them into existing one-size-fits-all models that are based on outdated assumptions or geography.
School choice policies are also giving rise to a new and exciting movement. When designed well, school choice policies are helping to modernize education by catalyzing dynamic ecosystems of educational innovation, where entirely new bottom-up, community-driven, unbundled education models (like microschools) are emerging. Rather than forcing families to rely on established, slow-moving, bureaucratic systems, school choice is empowering families, educators and communities to create their own schools.
There’s nothing inherently conservative about school choice and community-driven innovation. On the contrary, they have deep progressive roots.
The Progressive Legacy of School Choice and Educational Freedom
School choice and educational freedom are tightly linked concepts, both rooted in the principle of trusting families and communities. Choice refers to funding models that allow public dollars to follow the child, opening access to a broader array of options: public charter schools, microschools, magnets, dual enrollment programs, hybrid models, and more. But freedom speaks to something even deeper: empowering communities to exert meaningful control over the kinds of schools and educational experiences available to them, rather than ceding that authority to distant bureaucracies and rigid school district boundaries.
For many families, especially those in historically marginalized communities, educational freedom means having the opportunity to build home-grown schools, to develop culturally relevant experiences, and to access specialized supports that reflect their children’s diverse needs. In this sense, school choice and educational freedom are about restoring agency to the very people progressives claim to serve, giving real power to parents and communities.
Progressives, of course, have long championed the aspirations of Black Americans and other historically marginalized groups. Yet when it comes to educational freedom, as Ashley Berner and others have pointed out, many modern progressives have lost sight of the fact that perhaps its strongest, most consistent voices have long come from precisely these communities.
As James Foreman, Jr. writes in, The Secret History of School Choice: How Progressives Got There First, the African American community has a long and deep tradition of fighting for educational freedom. During Reconstruction, newly freed Black Americans made education one of their highest priorities. Denied literacy under slavery, Black communities across the South pooled resources, built their own schools, and insisted on hiring Black teachers to lead them.
Some of these early schools received support from the Freedmen’s Bureau, missionary societies, and, eventually, state governments. But many were entirely community-run, early expressions of bottom-up innovation, rooted in the belief that schooling should reflect the values, culture, and aspirations of the families it served. As one contemporary observer noted, former slaves prided themselves “in keeping their educational institutions in their own hands.”
This belief in community-driven education persisted well into the 20th century. In the civil rights era, Brown v. Board struck down legal segregation but failed to deliver meaningful educational opportunities for many Black students, prompting progressive reformers and parents to once again call for bottom-up solutions. The 1960s community control movement in cities like New York demanded that local Black and Latino communities have the power to shape their schools, including curriculum, leadership, and staffing. Their goal was to transform public schools into something that both reflected and represented their values.
Later, in the 1970s, progressives experimented with new models like “open classrooms,” which emphasized student choice, flexible learning environments, and hands-on learning. These approaches sought to liberate students from rigid, top-down schooling and foster creativity and agency.
In the late 1980s, State Representative Polly Williams, alongside civil rights activist Howard Fuller, championed what would become the nation’s first modern school voucher program, explicitly designed to serve low-income families in Milwaukee. Notably, the legislation passed with the support of nearly every Black legislator in Wisconsin. In the 1990s, longtime Cleveland City Councilwoman Fannie Lewis successfully pushed for Ohio’s first private school voucher program, insisting that children in her community deserved the same opportunities as wealthier families elsewhere. And in the early 2000s, Mayor Anthony Williams supported the creation of a voucher program in Washington, D.C. For all of these leaders, school choice was about equity and parent empowerment.
Over the decades, in cities from Chicago to Newark to Los Angeles, whenever real options have genuinely been made available to them, working-class Black and Latino parents have consistently voted with their feet to seek options outside of the traditional public schools. Public charter schools, in particular, have emerged as one of the clearest and most successful expressions of this desire for alternatives. For many communities, charters have offered not only higher expectations and stronger results, but also the chance to build schools that reflect the values, cultures, and aspirations of the families they serve.
This demand for something different helped to fuel the growth of public charter schools and is now laying the foundation for the next generation of innovation. Building on the same impulse for autonomy, customization, and innovation, an entirely new set of models is emerging, often outside the traditional policy structures most familiar to progressives.
Today, perhaps the most exciting developments in progressive education are, ironically, taking place primarily in “conservative” states. During the pandemic, homeschooling gave rise to informal learning pods, which have since evolved into more formal microschools. These small, nimble learning environments are allowing educators and parents to become educational entrepreneurs, creating new, community-based schools, and designing programs that are tailored to the specific needs of their students.
With the rise of new funding models like Education Savings Accounts (ESAs), these microschools are able to sidestep bureaucratic constraints and they now have a financially viable pathway to scale. While the microschool movement is still relatively new, these schools are offering families a rapidly growing array of highly personalized, community-driven options that are directly responding to the needs that district schools were never designed to meet.
For progressives truly committed to equity and self-determination, school choice and educational freedom are not a departure from our values, they are expressions of them.The fight to give communities more control over their lives has always been central to the progressive project, whether in labor, housing, health care, or civil rights. Education should be no different. Empowering families, especially those long denied agency, to shape their children’s schooling is a natural extension of that legacy. Rather than ceding this space to others, progressives should reclaim school choice and educational freedom as part of our own tradition: one that trusts communities, honors diversity, and fights for systems that serve people, not the other way around.
Choice, Itself, Is a Progressive Value
At its core, school choice should not feel foreign to progressive principles; progressives already champion choice in many other areas of public policy and personal freedom.
We defend reproductive freedom with the rallying cry: my body, my choice. We champion the right to love whom you choose, to marry whom you choose, to express your identity as you choose. As Ravi Gupta has pointed out, in areas like health care, we strongly support the right of Medicaid recipients to choose their own doctor or hospital, even if that provider is privately owned. With housing, we support Section 8 vouchers that allow families to rent apartments in privately-owned buildings rather than being restricted to public housing projects.
In higher education, progressives have never opposed Pell Grants or GI Bill benefits being used at private or religious universities. In early childhood education, we are perfectly comfortable with child care subsidies flowing to private, nonprofit, or faith-based centers. In all of these areas, we recognize that public dollars can serve public purposes even when delivered through private institutions, so long as those dollars are accompanied by guardrails that protect the public interest.
And yet, when it comes to K-12 education, the single most important engine of opportunity in America, many progressives suddenly abandon this commitment. We impose strict monopolies, limit parental agency, and treat any form of educational choice as a threat to our values. In doing so, we resist giving low-income families the same range of educational choices that wealthier families already enjoy.
The inconsistency is glaring. If we trust families to make decisions about their own bodies, their own partners, their own health care, housing, college, and child care, why not trust them to make decisions about their children’s K-12 education? Why defend a system that offers the most options to those with the most privilege, while limiting the agency of those with the least?
A Spectrum of Choice
One reason progressives should stop fighting school choice is that there’s no single model of what it looks like. Choice exists on a spectrum, and many of its forms are not only compatible with progressive values, they’re actively advancing them.
Public Charter Schools: Publicly funded, independently operated, and subject to public accountability, charter schools serve almost 4 million students today. Research shows that urban charter networks, particularly those focused on underserved communities, have produced significant learning gains for low-income students and students of color.
Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) and Tax Credit Scholarships: Though more controversial among progressives, these models offer families direct control over public dollars for approved educational services. ESAs can fund access to private schools, tutoring, microschools, online courses, and more. While the use of ESAs and scholarships is most associated with private schools, states are allowing ESAs to be used at traditional and public charter schools as well.
Microschools and Learning Pods: Perhaps the most exciting development in education today, microschools are small, often community-run learning environments that blend personalized instruction with flexibility and autonomy. Many are being launched with ESA support, but traditional districts are now exploring them as well.
Unbundled Education and Hybrid Learning: A growing number of families are customizing their children’s education by combining multiple learning providers, such as community classes, in-person tutors, enrichment centers, and online courses, into a coherent educational experience. This “unbundled” model often operates through hybrid learning hubs, youth-serving organizations, or part-time microschools and is expanding rapidly thanks to flexible funding structures like ESAs. These approaches allow families to build highly personalized, dynamic educational paths and have been particularly attractive for students with special needs and/or unique talents and interests. As these new models mature, traditional and public charter schools might participate in these models as well.
Magnet Schools, Career Academies, and Dual Enrollment: These district-run options offer specialized curricula, from STEM to the arts to vocational training, and allow students to pursue their passions and access college-level work. They are often popular with families who want alternatives within the public system.
Open Enrollment: Policies that allow students to attend schools outside their assigned zone, even across district lines, are a simple way to expand access without creating new schools. These policies de-couple housing from education and they also seek to de-criminalize the practice of “address sharing.” Yet many districts still resist these reforms due to bureaucratic inertia or political pressure.
District Schools: Traditional district schools continue to serve the majority of American students, and for many families, the neighborhood district school is their first choice, especially when it delivers a great education. A well-managed, innovative, and responsive district school must remain an important part of any equitable choice system.
Reconnecting With “Core” Democratic Voters
Support for school choice is not a niche position. It is a mainstream one, especially among the voters Democrats most need to re-engage. According to EdChoice, 65% of Americans support ESAs, including 76% of school-aged parents, 60% of Blacks, and 66% of Hispanics. Support for charter schools is similarly strong, with 62% of all Americans in favor, including 60% of Blacks, 62% of Hispanics, and 70% of parents.
Interestingly, the “purple” state of Pennsylvania has been engaged in a fairly unique conversation on choice since 2022 when then-candidate Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, expressed support for private school choice. Having been engaged in an active and very public debate on the issue over the past few years, Pennsylvanian Democrats’ attitudes towards choice are especially noteworthy. A 2024 poll by DFER and SurveyUSA provides an intriguing breakdown of where voters stand on choice in Pennsylvania.
This poll confirms what many others have concluded: support for private and public school choice is strong across the board. The vast gap between the support from voters and the lack of support from elected Democrats should be a deep concern for the party! Notice the markedly higher net support for choice among voters who have steadily drifted away from the party in recent years.
Democrats earning less than $50k per year vs. Democrats earning more than $150k per year
Net support for Private School Choice: 48 to 14
Net support for Public Charter Schools: 48 to 19
Democrats with only a high school degree vs Democrats with a 4-year college degree
Net support for Private School Choice: 49 to 18
Net support for Public Charter Schools: 44 to 28
Black voters vs. White voters
Net support for Private School Choice: 57 to 19
Net support for Public Charter Schools: 58 to 20
Hispanic voters vs. White voters
Net support for Private School Choice: 22 to 19
Net support for Public Charter Schools: 41 to 20
It would be simplistic to blame Democrats’ recent struggles with working-class, Black, and Latino voters solely on education policy. But it is no exaggeration to say that education has become ‘Exhibit A’ of what’s gone wrong with our party. Democrats’ misalignment on education policy is not only un-democratic and morally troubling, it is strategically disastrous for a party looking to reconnect with working-class, Black and Hispanic voters while trying to shed its increasingly elitist image.
We don’t need to surrender to Republican framing on choice, but we do need to recognize that the ground is shifting. Republican-led states have already moved aggressively to expand school choice, and many voters, particularly working class folks and families of color, are responding enthusiastically. Democrats must be careful not to be completely left behind.
Being anti-choice not only undermines Democratic values, it is also a political loser.
A Progressive Vision of School Choice
To reassert leadership on education, progressives must do more than say “no” to Republican choice plans. Democrats are rightly skeptical of an entirely hands-off approach to schooling, but continuing to reject school choice outright is a strategic mistake. We need to lay out a proactive, progressive vision of choice that can help modernize American education.
That starts by breaking the monopoly of the traditional, top-down system and making room for bottom-up, community-driven innovation. The point is to not only allow but to actively empower communities to create new and different school models, such as microschools, that are more capable of meeting the unique educational needs of each child.
Next, we must design choice programs that are actually accessible to the families most in need and that those families have the tools they need to make informed decisions. A choice program that essentially amounts to a subsidy for wealthy families and that locks out the working class, not only causes inflationary pressure but is a terribly regressive use of public dollars. Choice programs, even universal ones, should be designed to ensure that low-income families are also benefitting from these expanded options.
Just as we must empower families, we must also elevate educators. Too often, teachers are asked to work within rigid systems that limit their creativity and judgment. In a progressive vision of school choice, teachers are not cogs in a bureaucratic machine, they are trusted professionals, school founders, and learning designers. Many of the most innovative schools today, such as charters, microschools and hybrid hubs, are being created by former public school teachers seeking the autonomy to do what’s best for students. A reimagined education system should give more teachers the opportunity to lead, innovate, and build schools that reflect their values and expertise.
In addition, school choice should not be a free-for-all. We know that, in and of itself, choice does not magically produce better outcomes. Therefore, expanding choice must go hand-in-hand with reaffirming our commitment to accountability. This does not mean imposing the same heavy-handed mandates that have stifled innovation and tied the hands of educators in traditional districts. It does, however, mean ensuring clear reporting on student learning, equitable access, and the responsible use of public funds. Families deserve transparency about how schools are performing, and the public deserves assurance that investments are driving real outcomes.
Finally, we must also work to transform the traditional school system, not just offer an escape from it. Every family deserves access to great schools, and many will choose their neighborhood school if it delivers on that promise. That requires peeling back layers of bureaucratic, regulatory, and legal constraints that currently prevent even well-intentioned public schools from adapting and innovating.
In an ecosystem designed with equity in mind, the ultimate goal isn’t to dismantle public education. The point is to reimagine and modernize it, so that it works for every student, not just the fortunate few. If we get this right, the lines between “traditional” and “non-traditional,” “public” and “private,” will eventually disappear. What will matter most is whether students are learning, families are empowered, and communities are being served.
This vision isn’t hypothetical, it already exists and succeeds in other countries. As Ashley Berner notes, the U.S. is an international outlier in its insistence on uniform, government-run schools. In contrast, most democratic nations, from the Netherlands to Canada to Sweden, fund a range of school types, including community-based, faith-based and nonprofit-run schools, while maintaining high standards for academic outcomes and financial transparency.
These pluralist systems reflect a deep commitment to equity, personalization and community empowerment: they trust families with real choices and hold every school, regardless of model, accountable for results.
School choice is not about ceding power to markets, it’s about restoring power to parents and communities.
This isn’t corporate reform, it’s localism. That is the future of education, and it’s time for progressives to shape it, not shun it.
A Call to Action
This is not a moment for tinkering around the edges. We are living through a moment of profound transformation, not just in education, but across society, technology, and governance. As David Brooks recently observed, many Democrats “…have not fully internalized the magnitude of this historical shift. They are still thinking within the confines of the Clinton-Obama-Biden-Pelosi worldview.” But the ground is shifting beneath us. And whether Democrats are ready or not, the “tumult of events” will propel us in a new direction.
Americans are looking for something different and yet, our education policy has been dominated by establishment thinking: more money to do more of the same, top-down mandates, centralized bureaucracy, and insider political alliances that disregard the interests of families, educators and communities. This has to change!
The post-pandemic landscape has laid bare the fractures in our education system: chronic absenteeism, widening learning gaps, and millions of students falling further behind. These aren’t temporary setbacks, they are the symptoms of systemic failure. Our existing education systems are fundamentally misaligned with the needs of our time.
A truly progressive education vision starts by inverting the current power dynamic. It means breaking with the old command-and-control model and instead, empowering parents, teachers and communities to build the schools they need from the ground up, schools that reflect their values, respond to their realities, and are accountable to their aspirations.
This reimagined vision of education must be based on the understanding that, as Robin Lake writes, “public education is a goal, not a particular set of institutions.” The point of public education is to meet the individual needs of every child, not to sustain the system itself. Rather than focus on the false binary between “public” and “private,” we should explore all options, regardless of governance type, that meet the diverse needs of families.
This is not a retreat from progressive principles, it is a return to them. The fight for educational freedom, family agency, and community empowerment has always been a central part of our story. When shaped by our values, school choice can be one of the most powerful tools in that fight.
It’s time to meet this moment with urgency and imagination. If we want a modernized education system that works for every child, especially the most marginalized, progressives should not resist this vision, we should lead in bringing it to life.
It’s time to come to the school choice table, not as reluctant guests, but as the architects of a better way.
For decades, Democrats have led on education—but today, that leadership is slipping. In this new piece, DFER CEO Jorge Elorza outlines a bold new path forward rooted in innovation, accountability, and choice: the Abundance Agenda.
Originally published by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute
After years of declining voter trust on education, the Democratic party is at a crossroads. Once the party of working-class families and public schools, we now trail Republicans on these issues nationally. The cause is no mystery: Voters see a party mired in ideological battles and bureaucratic inertia, unable to deliver results where it matters most—in the classroom. In poll after poll, we’ve watched our advantage erode as Republicans position themselves as the champions of school choice and the new party of education.
We can turn this around, but not with incrementalism. Not with the same talking points or the same debates about inputs. The moment demands a new governing framework and a bold recommitment to outcomes.
The abundance agenda offers that path. It challenges the progressive status quo and calls for outcome-focused, innovation-oriented governance that produces rather than merely regulates.
Nowhere is an abundance mindset more urgently needed than in K–12 education. Our public education system is stagnating. We spend nearly $1 trillion annually, yet only a third of students can read or do math at grade level. In major cities like Baltimore, entire schools report zero students proficient in math. The gap between our aspirations and our outcomes has become a credibility crisis. And for working-class families—those we claim to champion—the crisis is most acute.
To once again become the party of education, Democrats must offer a compelling new vision and an abundance lens offers a clear guide. After a “century of sameness” in education, we must reimagine how the entire system is designed. That means transforming a rigid, stagnating system into one that is dynamic and designed to continuously improve.
This can be set in motion by building an education system based on three foundational pillars: innovation, accountability, and choice.
Innovation means unleashing new school models and education technologies that meet the diverse needs of students and families. The U.S. education system was designed for stability and standardization and built for a twentieth century economy. Today’s students need radically different tools, environments, and approaches that can more nimbly be provided by different models such as charter schools, learning pods, microschools, AI-powered tutors, and career academies. Democrats should lead in developing and scaling these models in alignment with our values. But innovative new models are not enough—they must exist within a system designed to scale what works and discard what doesn’t.
Accountability means focusing on outcomes, period. For too long, our systems have rewarded inputs—spending levels, staff ratios, compliance reports—without asking the most important question: Are students learning? We need metrics that matter, systems that self-correct, and leadership that makes tough calls when outcomes fall short. At a systems level, accountability is not about punishment; it’s about feedback loops that drive improvement. Without real feedback, innovation stalls and choice becomes hollow.
Finally, choice means empowering families to select the educational environment that best meets their needs. While Republicans have seized this mantle, Democrats must reframe choice on our terms: equitable, transparent, and accountable. We should support high-performing public charters and magnet schools. We should explore education savings accounts (ESAs) and tax-credit scholarship programs that prioritize low-income families, civil rights protections, and public oversight. And we should embrace enrollment systems that increase access across district boundaries, not just within them. Choice must function within a system where quality is visible and options are genuinely different.
Distilled to its essence, an abundance mindset calls for a Democratic education agenda that pushes for:
Innovation so that we can figure out what works,
Accountability so that we only fund what works, and
Choice so that families can decide for themselves what works.
This is not a call to abandon public education. It is a call to reimagine it. Most parents don’t care whether a school is district-run, chartered, or private. They care whether their child is learning, growing, and thriving. A modern Democratic education vision must be quality-focused and governance-neutral.
Over the past decade, too many national Democrats have avoided education debates altogether, wary of controversy or conflict with entrenched interests. But silence is no longer a strategic option. Republicans have made education central to their campaigns, they are reshaping state systems in real-time, and they have gained a political edge. For both policy and political reasons, the Left cannot ignore K–12 education policy any longer.
We will have thirty-eight gubernatorial elections in the next eighteen months. In each race, Democrats should present a strong education agenda—not as a culture war talking point, but as a platform for delivering the results that families are looking for. Our candidates must present voters with a clear new direction on education policy:
Innovation over stagnation, excellence over compliance, families over special interests, and abundance over scarcity.
Democrats have always believed in the power of education to change lives. The abundance agenda invites us to update that belief for a new era. It asks us to deliver—not just fund. To experiment—not just defend. To lead—not just react.
Our children cannot afford another decade of deferred reform. We must replace a “century of sameness” with dynamic systems that innovate, evolve, and deliver. Doing so would be good policy and politics for Democrats.
In the wake of last year’s election, Democrats are facing a moment of reckoning. A dominant narrative has emerged that we have lost focus, failed to deliver, and that our brand is broken. If we are looking in the mirror with honest eyes and want to reconnect with the working class, we must acknowledge that our party is in need of a serious overhaul. I am in the camp of folks who believe that neither changing our messaging nor tweaking our policy positions will suffice. We have strayed from the values that made us the party of the working class and we are now in need of not only new ideas, but a new framework to guide us in a better direction. I believe that Abundance can be that guide.
For the past year, I have enthusiastically followed the rise of the Abundance Movement. It inspires us to imagine a dramatically better world and it conveys a grounded optimism about our ability to create it. But what I like best is that Abundance is about outcomes, not ideology— Abundance is about Getting Big Things Done.
At the heart of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book is an insightful critique of modern day progressivism. They make a compelling case that progressives, while well-intentioned, have come to embrace an approach to governance filled with regulatory, bureaucratic, and procedural hurdles that makes it hard to get anything done. In addition, they argue that progressives have focused too much on redistributing existing resources and have underestimated the power of innovation, technology and market incentives to expand the pie. In essence, Liberals have gotten in their own way; by making it too difficult to govern, innovate and produce, they have undermined their ability to deliver on their own political and social goals.
Abundance offers a home for those of us who share broadly progressive aims, who not only want to enhance government’s capacity to deliver but also believe market-based solutions should be enlisted in the effort, who believe in the power of innovation and in technology’s ability to accelerate progress, and who, ultimately, want our policies to lead to real, material improvements in people’s lives.
The political moment we are living through is beyond sobering and the Republican Party’s lurch towards authoritarianism is genuinely terrifying. On the other side, I am dismayed by the disarray within the Democratic party and am deeply concerned about our ability to effectively push back against Donald Trump’s excesses. America needs a strong Democratic Party, and my hope is that a move towards an Abundance mindset – with its focus on effective governance, innovation, and increasing supply – will allow us to reinvigorate our brand, actually deliver on progressivism’s promise, and reconnect with working class voters who have drifted away.
To date, the Abundance community has offered plenty of important insights to help our party course-correct on a range of issues, including housing, transportation, and energy. Applying an Abundance lens to education policy, however, is virtually tabula rasa space. This paper is an attempt to start filling that void.
Working class voters disproportionately count on government to help them access great schools, and a strong education agenda has to be part of the Democratic policy mix that wins those voters back. Following Klein and Thompson’s example, I do not provide a long wishlist of policies that should be part of the Democratic education agenda. Instead, I heed their invitation to ask some important questions: Why do we not have an abundance of high-quality, highly-desirable schools? What does it take to create them?
It is my hope that this paper provides a helpful framework for using an Abundance lens to answer those key questions.
Education Politics
Before applying an Abundance mindset to education, it is important to understand the current political dynamics of education policy. Ten years ago, Democrats enjoyed a +26 point advantage over Republicans on voter trust on education and were widely regarded as the “Party of Education.” In a radical swing, polls now have us underwater (-3) on the issue, and it is very much possible for us to slide even further. It is clear that on education, Americans are not buying what we are selling. As the party seeks a broader reset, there now exists a political imperative for Democrats to fully re-think our approach to education.
It has been roughly a decade since a national Democratic leader prioritized education reform. Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama made education central to their agendas, but following the election of Donald Trump, Democrats distanced themselves from policies even remotely associated with his administration, including education reform. When President Biden took office, his focus on K-12 education was limited to inputs with little attention to outcomes. Biden invested historic sums into K-12 education but there was little accountability for the results it produced.
The reasons for our diminished standing in voters’ minds are not hard to see. Many Americans believe Democrats kept schools closed too long during the pandemic, that we have focused too much on ideological battles, and have focused too little on classroom success. Meanwhile, too many Democratically-run cities and states are home to failing schools, sluggish Covid recovery, widening achievement gaps, and students who are unprepared for the future.
Republicans have capitalized on our inaction, in particular by championing school choice and making education a centerpiece of their national and state-level platforms. They see the same polling data we do—education has become a winning issue for them, and they are pressing their advantage. Separately, Democrats have opposed Republicans’ agenda, but we haven’t offered a compelling alternative. Sadly, Democrats find themselves today with no clear national education vision.
Democrats must acknowledge, on the one hand, the political ground we have lost on education and, on the other hand, the immense potential of delivering education systems that live up to our aims. Reversing course will not be easy and it will force us to reconsider old positions, question long-standing alliances, and make educational outcomes a political priority once again.
Education Policy
Aside from the political aspect of this work, it is important to also appreciate the depth of the education crisis. As a nation, we spend nearly $1 trillion annually on education, and education is one of the top two line items in most state budgets. But, year after year, students’ academic results remain shockingly low while our international peers outpace us.
Nationally, only about 30% of fourth graders can read at grade level, and the recent NAEP scores showed that, despite the amounts we spend, the gap between the top and bottom 25% of students continues to widen. In some cities, entire schools have no students performing at grade level, such as in Baltimore where 23 entire schools have reported zero students doing math at grade level. Zero! Unfortunately, Baltimore is not an outlier. Districts throughout the country, from Baltimore to Chicago to Los Angeles and beyond, suffer from deep dysfunction and poor results. The education crisis reaches every corner of the United States.
Yet, despite these glaring failures, year after year, there is little to no accountability for performance. Instead, in a Kafka-esque turn, failing schools often receive more funding, and when those investments fail to deliver results, it is used as the basis for providing even more funding. We remain stubbornly committed to funding more of the same things when instead we should be asking ourselves some critical questions. For example, why do California and New York spend more per student on education, yet perform worse than Texas and Florida?
Over the past ten years, Democrats have sadly come to accept and tolerate this failure. We have abandoned the spirit of innovation that gave birth to new school models and changed lives at scale in New Orleans, Camden, Washington, D.C., and many other places. We abandoned the urgency of reform that led to strong accountability measures that narrowed achievement gaps. It’s as if we gave up trying to fix America’s schools. This is not the spirit of endless ingenuity, innovation and progress, and it is not what will bring working class Americans back to our party.
As a party, we have touted educational inputs, such as how much we spend on education, but have been mostly silent on outcomes. We must shift our focus from convincing folks that we “care,” to convincing folks that we will “deliver.” For Democrats to reclaim the mantle of the Party of Education, Americans must believe that our education agenda is laser-focused on outcomes and on creating a diverse supply of great schools for them to choose from!
A System-Level Challenge
The problems in education are deeply systemic. Public education in the U.S. has been structured for stability, not continuous improvement. Schools operate under rigid bureaucracies, with workforce rules and regulations that limit flexibility, and with funding models that reward compliance over excellence and innovation. Our education system is neither designed to rapidly and continually improve nor to produce an abundant supply of great schools. Quite the opposite.
The result, predictably, has been stagnation.
To meaningfully move the needle, we need to move beyond piecemeal interventions and address the core structural deficiencies that prevent schools from adapting rapidly and improving. Too much standardization, regulationand bureaucracy limits variety and experimentation.There is virtually no accountability for results, as the same programs get funded year after year regardless of performance. And, where there is some form of public accountability, it often has the perverse effect of creating a culture of compliance that stifles innovation. Last, because most parents have few real alternatives, schools face little competitive pressure to improve. Without systemic change, new programs—even when effective!—fail to make a meaningful impact on outcomes for kids.
How Democrats Should Approach Education: Three Essential Elements
We, as a party, must change our approach to education, and I believe that a spirit of Abundance can guide the way. How do we unlock previously unimagined possibilities and expand the supply of great schools? By designing education systems that, instead of stagnating, are internally dynamic and continuously evolve to produce better results. We can set this dynamic in motion by tapping into America’s spirit and capacity for ingenuity (innovation), by reorienting our focus from inputs to outcomes (accountability), and by enlisting market-driven pressures to align incentives in the right direction (choice).
Democrats should build our education agenda on three core pillars: innovation, accountability, and choice.
– We must push for innovation, so that we can figure out what works. – We must push for accountability, so that we only invest in what works. – We must push for choice, so that families can decide for themselves what works.
At a “systems” level, these three elements, dynamically and endlessly interacting with each other, have the potential to create radically different kinds of education systems: ones that offer more variety, have self-correcting mechanisms, and continually evolve to produce better results.
Pillar #1: Innovation
Our education system is outdated, designed for a world that no longer exists. Despite advancements in technology and our understanding of learning, schools today look much as they did a century ago. To determine what schools of the future should look like, we must regain a spirit of educational innovation and create a startup-style ecosystem that helps education entrepreneursdevelop and scale a greater supply of new and different approaches to education.
– Encourage and provide funding to increase the supply of new school models, including charter schools, learning pods, microschools, hybrid education, and unbundled learning. – Help to develop and rapidly deploy the most promising practices, in traditional schools and outside, to accelerate their pace of replication. – Remove barriers to innovation by reducing unnecessary regulations, reforming restrictive teacher contracts, and breaking the culture of compliance that has taken hold in education bureaucracies. – Energetically support educators to explore and expand access to AI and technology-driven learning that personalizes instruction and enhances student engagement. – Reform teacher-training programs to treat teaching as a high-skill, practice-based profession and reform compensation systems to treat teachers like professionals and not like assembly line workers.
Abundance Message: We should utilize a startup-style approach (do-learn-iterate) to exercise our innovation “muscle,” support the creation of new models (including microschools), and help the most promising models scale and replicate. We must believe that American ingenuity and educational innovation will help reveal previously unimagined breakthroughs. Education must evolve from a “century of sameness” to “systems that adapt.”
Pillar #2: Accountability
Accountability is complex and it means a lot of different things. At a systems level, accountability doesn’t necessarily mean testing regimes or micromanagement—it means focusing on continuous improvement and student-centered results. Politically, it is about having a sense of urgency, it is about shifting our focus from inputs to outcomes, and it is about refusing to write a blank check for things that are not working.
As we move schools along the continuum of Poor-Fair-Good-Great, there are different approaches required at each stage. Lower-performing schools might require more oversight while better-performing schools might require more flexibility. The one constant, however, should be that our support for schools be coupled with a push for continuous improvement.
– For the lowest performing schools, tie funding to performance—invest in what works, and stop funding what doesn’t. Period! – Insist on students mastering the basics yet, beyond that, allow for different ways to measure “performance.” – Thoughtfully reform traditional accountability systems, often in the form of regulations and contractual provisions, that prevent educators from innovating. – Allow school leaders the flexibility to employ genuinely different educational philosophies into their practices. – Reform tenure systems to ensure high-quality teaching, making it easier to reward great educators and remove ineffective ones. – Limit the practice of social promotion and ensure that students are truly prepared before advancing forward.
Abundance Message: Despite increased investments, the gap between the top 25% and bottom 25% of academic performers continues to widen. We must acknowledge that our approach is not working and regain a sense of moral urgency to try new things. Our North Star should be outcomes for kids, period. We will make all the necessary investments, but only if those investments are showing results.
Pillar #3: Choice
The United States is the outlier among democracies in prioritizing district schools above all other models. Democrats, in particular, must stop defending the status quo and should employ both government-based and market-driven strategies to address our education crisis. Empowering parents should be a central focus and we must constantly remind ourselves that parents don’t care about governance models—they care about results.
– Support public charter schools and enthusiastically help the highest-performing schools replicate and expand to meet demand. – Explore innovative funding models such as education savings accounts (ESAs), vouchers, and tax credit programs. Instead of rejecting them offhand, how do we shape these tools to align with Democratic values? + e.g. putting the most needy families first, protecting civil rights, and having public accountability. – Expand high-quality options within the public school system, through magnet schools, career academies, dual enrollment, inter- and intra-district choice, universal enrollment systems, and more. – Provide parents with clear, transparent information to help them make informed choices, as savvy consumers, about their children’s education.
Abundance Message: There is no one-size-fits-all solution to education. To meet kids’ diverse needs, we should empower parents and provide them a broad array of genuinely different options to choose from. In doing so, we should be quality-focused and governance-neutral.
A Framework vs. A Policy Agenda
I wish to stress that these three pillars (Innovation, Accountability, and Choice) should not be thought of as a “policy agenda.” Rather, they create a framework, based on Abundance principles and systems-thinking, to redesign how education is organized and to ultimately produce better outcomes.
I am in contact with educators, advocates and policymakers, on an almost daily basis, who are doing the hard work of developing and implementing brilliant ideas that drive results for kids. There are, for instance, programs for innovative high-dosage tutoring; initiatives to rewrite state accountability systems; and bills to eliminate historic school district boundaries. These are among a countless number of smart policies that should make up part of a “policy agenda.”
However, what I believe has been missing for Democrats is the development of a broader education vision that not only delivers for students but also translates readily into a cohesive political message.
What I attempt to lay out in this paper, as such, is a guide for how our education policies should fit into a broader vision. I believe this framework is not only dynamic and powerful enough to govern on, but also clear and cohesive enough to campaign on.
Education Champions
One of the greatest barriers to meaningful education reform is that the political incentives do not typically align. No single person is politically accountable for education, and rarely does anyone get voted out of office for persistently failing schools. On the other hand, disrupting the status quo is almost certain to incur the wrath of powerful stakeholders—teachers’ unions, bureaucrats, community activists, and local political leaders—without any guarantee of political reward. Education reform is risky, and many elected officials avoid it altogether.
In the absence of a clear national agenda, if real change is to occur, executives—especially governors—are in the best position to lead. Governors oversee their state education systems, they bring an executive mindset, and they hold themselves accountable for results. Over the past decade, Gov. Jared Polis has been the lone Democratic governor who has consistently prioritized education reforms, but it is encouraging to see a new generation of Democratic governors (e.g., Shapiro, Moore, Meyer, Kotek, Stein) following his lead. Executives have the ability to set the agenda, drive policy, and single-handedly catalyze change.
We will have 38 gubernatorial elections in the next 18 months and I predict that education will play a more prominent role than it has in the recent past. We urge every candidate to develop a strong education agenda that embraces an Abundance approach; namely, one that is hyper-focused on delivering results. Whether our party reverses its slide on education depends, first and foremost, on the leadership of our Governors.
The Future: A Democratic Education Vision for 2028 and Beyond
This is a pivotal moment. America’s education system is facing massively disruptive forces, and its future will look different than its past. In fact, its future must look different than its past.
Republicans are aggressively prioritizing education reform, passing sweeping voucher laws, and positioning themselves as the party of education. However, their approach is not without risks. Things will invariably break, and as the party in power, they will have to own the consequences.
When that moment arrives, Democrats must be ready. We must develop a compelling alternative vision, on education and otherwise, and we must convince voters of our ability to deliver the things they want.
Democrats must reconnect with our own core values on education policy and we must deliver real results for the people we aim to help. We must believe that American ingenuity is capable of producing new breakthroughs. We must insist on educational excellence in every single setting. We must empower parents to make informed decisions about what is best for their own children. And, we must believe we can indeed create an abundant supply of “better” and “different” schools throughout our country.
Embracing a politics of Abundance will not be easy, particularly since we will need to overcome the intense advocacy of vested stakeholders. These anti-reformers will bring a scarcity mindset and focus on what they stand to lose. But we no longer have the luxury of deciding whether or not to adopt a new approach; it is now a political and policy imperative for us to do so!
America needs us to be strong, and our families need us to deliver. In this moment of reckoning, an Abundance mindset mixed with a dose of courageous political leadership, can help make this the moment of our renewal.
March 20, 2025 (New York, NY) — Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) CEO Jorge Elorza released the following statement in response to the Trump Administration’s Executive Order regarding the Department of Education:
“Donald Trump released an executive order today declaring that the ‘Secretary of Education shall, to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law, take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return authority over education to the States and local communities.’
It is important to note that this executive order is based on a deep misunderstanding of how education works in our nation. The vast majority of the authority over education in the United States already rests with states and local school districts. Most of the funding for schools comes from their local communities and states, not from the federal government. The Department of Education has no power to dictate curriculum in schools or to tell teachers what they can and cannot teach.
This Executive Order sets out to fix the wrong problem.
The recent NAEP results revealed that academic achievement between the upper and lower 25% of students has continued to grow wider. As the United States continues to lag behind our international peers, the Trump Administration should be concentrating its efforts on addressing the lingering crisis of learning loss and the widening of the achievement gap. Instead, their actions will complicate the distribution of essential funding, reduce support for the most needy students, make it more difficult to track student achievement, and reduce enforcement of civil rights protections. This will put severe strains on state and local education budgets and will only add to the ongoing academic crisis.
Despite these challenges, DFER will continue our advocacy to reform stagnant education systems, to demand high-quality school options, such as public charter schools, and protect the civil rights of every student. This executive order will sow additional chaos and disorder at a time when Democrats and Republicans should be working together to strengthen education for all students and families. America’s students deserve better than this.”
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To be clear, the President does not have the authority to eliminate the Department of Education, which was created by an Act of Congress and thus cannot be eliminated without the approval of Congress. The same is true of transferring major programs, such as Title I, IDEA, and Federal Student Aid. Any path to eliminating or significantly restructuring the agency will almost certainly require bipartisan support in Congress, which is not a real possibility in the current Congressional landscape.
Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) works to get Democratic leaders to embrace and enthusiastically champion innovative, evidence-based, high-quality public education options for all students, particularly students of color, students from low-income backgrounds, and other historically underserved students. Learn more about DFER, or Find an Expert and follow us on Twitter.
March 11, 2025 (New York, NY) — Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) CEO Jorge Elorza released the following statement in response to the Trump Administration firing over 1,300 employees at the Department of Education:
“The Trump Administration’s decision to fire more than a thousand employees at the Department of Education strips away critical support that millions of students and families rely on.
This careless act puts children’s education at risk. Schools will now struggle to secure resources for teachers and students, directly impacting the quality of their education. National standards to evaluate and ensure quality outcomes are now in jeopardy, and civil rights violations will go unchecked. College students who relyon federal financial aid programs will face delays and disruptions, which will impact their ability to access higher education and will limit their future opportunities.
Make no mistake: this decision will cause direct harm to students and families. These reckless actions, without any plan for progress or accountability, will sow more confusion and lead to poorer outcomes for kids.
DFER will continue to push for evidence-based policies that improve student outcomes, close achievement gaps, expand access to high-quality public school choice options, and protect the civil rights of every student. We urge lawmakers, educators, and advocates to join us and take a stand against these harmful policies. The future of our students is on the line.”
