The first in a series of thought pieces about the kinds of schools and learning opportunities it may be possible to create in the coming decades.

American education is in a moment of possibility. Yes, we have been, and continue to be, in immensely challenging times — times that will have consequential effects on children, families, and educators for many years to come; times marked by the deepening of long-term societal fissures, including racial inequalities, health disparities, housing insecurity, and the decline of public institutions and infrastructure. And yes, in education, we are coping with the academic and emotional effects of the pandemic, years of low teacher morale and problematic working conditions, bitter conflicts over critical race theory, masks, and the rights of trans students, and ongoing efforts to privatize public educational resources. But we believe that these times are also creating the desire, the demand, and the readiness for something else. They have created an opening for us to imagine something new.

Our country now has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to make real progress toward a system of education that truly serves all students, providing the kinds of teaching and learning that enrich lives, spur innovations, and reflect a deep and abiding commitment to equity. As difficult as the COVID-19 crisis and racial reckoning of the past year and a half have been (and as difficult as they continue to be), they have made it clearer than it has been in recent history that the thriving of each of us is contingent upon the thriving of all of us and that we are only as strong as our least well-served individuals and communities.

Promising signs

Specifically, we see four signs that our society is on the cusp of a paradigmatic shift toward educational equity — not as an act of charity, or even to right historical wrongs, but because we are maturing as a society, and because we may finally be ready to create humane systems of education that support the development of all children.

An evolution in public attitudes

The protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd, in May 2020, pushed the American public to a threshold moment in its perpetual struggles over racial and economic inequality, not only in areas such as health, policing, and housing, but in education, too. Large and growing numbers of people have spoken out against unfair school disciplinary practices, unequal opportunities to take high-level coursework, history curricula that downplay the contributions of people of color, school policies that show bias toward transgender students, and stark disparities in college access, affordability, and quality. And while we have also seen an intense backlash against the Black Lives Matter movement, new and more inclusive curricula, and other calls for social change, we remain heartened by the extent to which Americans — from all backgrounds — have come to embrace efforts to promote fairness and equity in K-12 education.

We may finally be ready to create humane systems of education that support the development of all children.

Further, early findings from the 2020 U.S. Census show that the country’s population has continued to become much more racially and ethnically diverse than ever before — today, more than 40% of Americans identify themselves as people of color, including those identifying themselves as multiracial. Given this increasing diversity (and accompanying diversity among our political, economic, and cultural leaders), we can only expect to see movements for racial and economic justice continue to grow. To be sure, our country remains deeply divided on many issues, and we can’t expect to see political tensions or racial hostilities diminish in the near future. But over time, a larger and larger share of the public will demand that their schools provide equal educational opportunities to all students.

A fresh start for education policy

While a narrow focus on standards and test-based accountability has dominated educational policy for more than three decades, many state and federal policy makers have recently become willing, eager even, to rethink and expand their agenda for school improvement. No doubt, standardized testing will continue to have a place in public schooling. But for the first time in living memory, policy makers are discussing how important it is to balance the need for accountability with efforts to strengthen teachers’ preparation, professional status, and participation in decision making; to encourage greater variety in school models and educational pathways, and to value not only students’ academic achievement but also their mental and physical well-being, social and emotional development, and more.

Such an expanded vision of the goals of education also entails more openness to new and varied approaches to measuring student growth, teacher performance, and school quality, including greater use of formative assessments, performance-based exams, climate surveys, and more. So, too, does it encourage new thinking about the curriculum, including the value we place on the arts, career and technical education, family and community engagement, and preparation for civic life. Looking forward, we are confident that policy makers will increasingly come to view standards and accountability as just two among many tools that can contribute to the larger effort to improve our public schools, and not as the only or most important drivers of educational change.

Advances in educational research

In recent years, we’ve seen remarkable progress in the learning sciences — including research into human cognition, memory, attention, stress, emotional regulation, language processing, motivation, environmental effects on child development, and the social and cultural dimensions of learning. Further, we’ve seen major federal and philanthropic investments in high-quality educational research across various domains, including reading and reading disabilities, effective instruction in various subject areas, out-of-school learning, how school funding and resource allocation affect student outcomes, the root causes of unequal educational performance and attainment, and efforts to eradicate them. We’ve seen new insights into the multidimensional nature of learning, the value of culturally responsive instruction and efforts to confront racism in schools, and the benefits of providing students with a wide range of high-quality supports and services, from tutoring and counseling to college advising and career guidance. And we’ve seen a surge in thriving research-practice partnerships across the country, which suggests that in the coming years, local school practitioners will be able to count on educational researchers to be much more responsive to their needs and to play a much more helpful role in school improvement than ever before.

A growing demand for ambitious teaching and learning

We’ve also seen an emerging consensus, among educators across the country, that schools must provide all students with a rich curriculum and high-quality instruction that lead to a deep mastery of sophisticated ideas and skills. In past decades, education reformers tended to swing back and forth between competing sets of guiding principles. For a time, they would rally behind calls for more student-centered instruction, efforts to detrack the curriculum, and a focus on preparing students for civic life; then the pendulum would swing back again toward direct instruction, rigid tracking, and an emphasis on college readiness for some students and a transition to blue-collar jobs for others. Each round of reform would generate a lot of excitement but not much long-term change. And as a result, most of our public school systems have continued, decade after decade, to provide a high-quality, well-funded college-prep experience to a select few students (most often affluent and white) and low-level or middling instruction to everybody else. In recent years, however, we’ve seen a fundamental shift in the demands our society places on education, and this gives us reason to hope that we’re experiencing something very different from just another swing of the pendulum.

There’s nothing new about the societal demand that all students have meaningful opportunities to study challenging material, develop a strong sense of agency and autonomy, make the most of their individual talents, abilities, and efforts, and have an educational experience that builds on their cultural and linguistic resources. But “what is new,” as Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine (2019) put it, “are the external expectations of what the school system needs to produce.” Perhaps for the first time in our history, argue Mehta and Fine, we’ve reached a broad political consensus on the need to make genuine improvements across all of our schools and on behalf of all of our children. Given the kinds of highly literate, knowledgeable, creative, and interpersonally and interculturally competent citizens and workers our country — indeed our world — now requires, all of us have an interest in ensuring that all children have access to vital learning opportunities.

Challenges to confront

The changes we’ve described — in public attitudes about race, advances in educational research, openness to new kinds of educational policies, and a growing consensus around the need for more ambitious teaching and learning — create conditions that can support unprecedented improvements in education. And yet, this moment of great promise is also one of potential peril. For if we can’t figure out how to provide equitable opportunities and develop the full potential of all young people, and if we can’t figure out how to reduce inequality and create the space for all to learn and thrive, then we will surely witness our own undoing as a cohesive, vibrant nation.

One danger is that as we slowly and haltingly come out of the pandemic, we will revert to a “normal” that, for many of our young people, has always been less than adequate. If we reopen our school buildings without also reconsidering our educational goals and principles, then we will only repeat our familiar mistakes, providing yet another generation of young people with unequal opportunities to learn.

Equally concerning is the danger that as our nation becomes more diverse, and as greater numbers of us demand equal educational opportunities, some of us will hold even more tightly to harmful beliefs and assumptions about our fellow citizens. For far too long, Americans have tended to ascribe deficits to students who’ve experienced intergenerational poverty or who belong to nondominant communities. Far too often, the most fortunate among us have blamed others for their own misfortunes, denigrating the values and cultural traditions that sustain children and their families in difficult times. And far too often, our schools have allowed both explicit and implicit forms of racial, cultural, and linguistic bias to harm our students, undermining their confidence, damaging their psyches, subverting their achievements, and robbing them of opportunities. Further, the tone of our political and social discourse has become increasingly nasty and unpleasant in recent years, rife with efforts to belittle and dehumanize rather than persuade and seek consensus (McGhee, 2021). Take, for instance, the recent debates about critical race theory (CRT) in schools. In denouncing CRT, critics have not raised concerns about the academic, social, and emotional needs of young people so much as they’ve sought to “other” and demonize people they perceive as their opponents, often dismissing what we know about the complexity of teaching, learning, and identity. So we must ask ourselves: As educators, what can we do to rehumanize our classrooms, building greater understanding of and respect for individual students and the diverse families and communities from which they come? Even as we strive to reimagine and improve public education, how should we address the racism and other forms of bias that will no doubt continue to fester in and around many of our schools?

Finally, perhaps the greatest danger has to do with our own lack of imagination, particularly when it comes to our assumptions about how, when, and where education takes place. It’s worth noting that by forcing school buildings to close, leading to a dramatic increase in the amount of time children spend with their family members, the COVID-19 crisis has reminded us that the education that occurs at home is not merely supplemental to what goes on at school. For a year and a half, many families have taken on significant new teaching responsibilities, not only by helping their children complete their school assignments but also by having them participate in daily household routines, talking with them about current events, giving them informal instruction in history and civics, providing them with moral guidance, and engaging them in social and political causes. For most of human history, this is precisely how most teaching and learning occurred. And long after the pandemic ends, we ought to keep in mind that education takes place well beyond our classrooms and schools. For example, we should permit ourselves to consider forms of assessment that illuminate the learning that goes on in the community, at work, and online. When discussing educational improvement, we should allow ourselves to think big about, for example, new national service initiatives that offer high school and college credit for participating in community-based projects (such as local efforts to create green and renewable resources, or promote racial reconciliation, or improve access to high-quality childcare). Likewise, and building on the crisis response networks they created to provide food and other assistance during the pandemic, schools should consider new ways to engage with their communities, taking on more active roles in local leadership, the arts, youth development, housing integration, and so on. In short, we must remind ourselves to look across the gulf that typically divides our schools from our neighborhoods.

A year of reimagining

All of this is to say that we’ve arrived at an unusual moment in American education, one that invites us to reimagine every part of our work and share bold ideas about the kinds of classrooms, schools, and learning opportunities we hope to create in the coming decades. Not every bold idea is a good one, however. As we reimagine education, it’s important to stick to the realm of the possible, grounding ourselves in the best available research into how children learn and develop, how teachers improve, how school systems change, how much money it costs to provide high-quality educational programs, and on and on.

To that end, we’ve invited a number of leading scholars to contribute to a series of thought pieces (to be published in Kappan over the next several months), in which they peer ahead 25 years, give free play to their imagination, and describe their most realistically hopeful vision for an equitable and just future for American education. Further, and to continue the conversation, we have invited many other scholars and thought leaders (representing various academic disciplines and professional roles) to respond on the Kappan website (kappanonline.org) with their comments, critiques, and elaborations.

We’ve asked each contributor to respond to one of the following questions: What will the goals, the scope, and the shape of the preK-12 curriculum look like in 25 years? What kinds of teaching and learning will be most prevalent? How will we assess the performance of students, teachers, and schools? How will the teaching profession have changed? How will our public schools interact with families and local community organizations, government agencies, businesses, health care providers, and other institutions? How will we fund public education and ensure the equitable allocation of educational resources? And what will have changed about the infrastructure of educational policy, governance, and decision making?

Our goal is to describe a set of possible futures that can inform and perhaps inspire the next generation of practitioners, researchers, advocates, and policy makers as they think through their plans and priorities for education. As you’ll see in the coming months, these pieces are not meant to offer firm predictions of what our schools will look like in the year 2047. Rather, they aim to provoke, inviting us all to think deeply and creatively about the kinds of educational systems we hope to create.

Note: This series is supported, in part, by the Spencer Foundation.

References

McGhee, H. (2021). The sum of us: What racism costs us and how we can prosper together. Random House

Mehta, J. & Fine, S. (2019). In search of deeper learning: The quest to remake the American high school. Harvard University Press.

U.S. Census Bureau. (2021). 2020 US population more racially and ethnically diverse than measured in 2010. Author.

This article appears in the October 2021 issue of Kappan, Vol, 103, No. 2.

Watch the video

The Spencer Foundation teamed up with Phi Delta Kappan to publish a series of thought pieces about the kinds of schools and learning opportunities it may be possible to create in the coming decades. Grantmakers for Education organized a series of conversations members around the themes being explored. Join funders, researchers, educators, students and advocates in exploring what may be possible.

American education is in a moment of possibility. Though we have been, and continue to be, in immensely challenging times that will have consequential effects on children, families and educators for many years to come, our panelists believe that these times are also creating the desire, the demand, and the readiness for something else. They have created an opening for us to imagine something new.

Speakers: Lennon Audrain, Candidate for Phoenix Union Governing Board and PhD Candidate, Arizona State University; Joe Gothard, Superintendent, St. Paul (MN) Public Schools; Na’ilah Suad Nasir, President, Spencer Foundation; Hirokazu Yoshikawa, Courtney Sale Ross Professor of Globalization and Education, New York University. Moderator: Dr. Joshua Starr, Chief Executive Officer, PDK International