Evidence Into Action: A Public Education System Where Every Child Can Learn and Thrive
This blog is part of the Transforming Schools series, which shares effective practices and foundational research for educators, students, families, and policymakers who are reimagining schools as places where students are safe and can thrive academically, socially, and emotionally.
Nearly every weekday morning, roughly 50 million children walk through the doors of U.S. public schools. And each day we ask these schools to do something extraordinary: to educate every child—from every background—to a common standard of excellence, while also helping each realize their own individual potential. Designing a system that does both, at a national scale, has been the central challenge of American public education since its inception.
The system still falls short. Too many of our schools sort children more reliably than they develop them: Segregation by race and income has deepened over the past several decades, and funding gaps between wealthy and poor districts persist in most states—which means the children who need the most consistently get the least. At the same time, schools are having to absorb new pressures, including persistently high absenteeism rates, rising rates of mental health challenges, and the increasing influences of phones and social media on student well-being and engagement, as well as emerging artificial intelligence (AI) technologies.
Some might read these challenges as evidence that public education has failed. The tempting response is to give up on the public system and let the marketplace take over, to route public dollars toward private options on the theory that competition will succeed where other efforts have not (a new federal tax credit will soon test that theory at an unprecedented scale).
But this is a moment to recommit to public education, not retreat from it. As a nation, we have long held public education as a necessary public good, one that provides every child with the supports they need to fully develop into adulthood and contribute economically, socially, and civically. Our public school system is the strongest infrastructure the country has ever built for social and economic mobility—and one of the few institutions where children from different backgrounds learn to live together and find areas of connection in a pluralistic democracy. It is also one of the country's primary systems for building and sustaining the middle class. In a period of deepening division and widening inequality, walking away from our commitment to public education undermines our promise of equal opportunity and puts our shared national future at risk.
The next decade will shape what American public education becomes—its purpose, how schools are organized, how they relate to the communities they serve, and how well they can prepare the next generation of adults.
Elena Silva
The next decade will shape what American public education becomes—its purpose, how schools are organized, how they relate to the communities they serve, and how well they can prepare the next generation of adults. Our job now is not to cede to market forces or to merely recover from the past few years, but to concretely and creatively plan for what comes next. We cannot allow today's political and narrative battles to displace evidence as the basis of consequential educational decisions. We must remain focused on what we know leads to the best outcomes for children and youth. Decades of research on learning and development show us how to achieve both a high common standard for achievement and individualized learning for each child.
What we know
Learning is fundamentally relational. The brain develops through attachment and interaction, and students learn best when they feel safe and known, when instruction meets them where they are, and when strong relationships push them into and through struggle. This relationship-centered approach is not a soft alternative to academic rigor; it is its essential mechanism.
We can already see that the integration of AI into schools, classrooms, and homes makes the centrality of relationships for learning matter more, not less. While much of the public debate has focused on cheating and misinformation, the greater long-term risk is that technology displaces the human relationships on which learning depends. AI cannot know a child, nurture an environment, build a culture, or create and sustain a community. Children and youth who are navigating an information environment increasingly shaped by AI will need adults more than ever, which makes the role of educators and leaders more essential than ever in the history of our public education system.
Effective school design starts with how people learn. We also know what schools look like when they are organized around the science of learning and development. These schools enable structured time for educators to connect with students outside of classes and for teams of teachers who know their students well to collaborate. They respond to misbehavior by repairing relationships and keeping students in the community rather than removing them. They connect families to health care, counseling, and social supports. They ask students to apply what they know—to argue, build, investigate, and solve problems—and they assess learning through meaningful demonstration. They are staffed by educators who are prepared the way we prepare people for other demanding professions—through clinical, mentored learning—and who are in careers structured to reward staying in the profession and building expertise. And they are funded fairly, adequately, and according to student need.
Learning extends beyond the classroom. We also know that learning happens outside of school—in homes, libraries, places of worship, and community organizations; through work, volunteering, and apprenticeships; and increasingly through digital environments. The challenge is to connect these places and experiences in ways that make learning more relevant and give students more meaningful ways to apply and demonstrate what they know and can do.
Public schools designed on these principles already exist, and they show it in their achievement, attendance, and discipline results. These schools show that a common standard of excellence and attention to each child's development are not competing goals. The problem is that these schools remain exceptions, and our policy infrastructure is not built to take these exceptions to scale.
What we must do
Start early. We have made significant progress expanding public investment in early learning— but that investment has not yet been sufficient to provide all families with access to high-quality, affordable early care, nor is it fully connected to what happens when children enter elementary school. While state-funded preschool now reaches more than a third of 4-year-olds, preschool and the early grades still function as separate worlds in most places. The prekindergarten through 3rd grade span is a critical point of leverage to align access, quality, educator preparation, curriculum and instruction, and the conditions in which young children learn. Connecting these years allows public investments in the early years to build on one another, to prevent gaps before they widen, and to ultimately shape children's ongoing learning and life trajectories.
Build for and with educators and leaders. Educators matter most, so we must build and support them, not just hire them and hope they succeed. States and districts should involve teachers and principals in designing reforms, strengthen preparation and ongoing professional learning, increase the time for educators to plan and work together, and create career pathways that allow experienced teachers to grow within the profession. Teacher residencies offer one evidence-based example: A growing body of research suggests that residency-trained teachers feel better prepared, receive stronger ratings from principals, and are more likely to remain in teaching. Expanding high-quality pathways such as residencies and apprenticeships—and helping make them affordable through service scholarships, grants, and loan forgiveness—can also make teaching more accessible to talented candidates who may not otherwise be able to afford the price of becoming an educator.
Design schools and systems around how children actually learn. Schools should be designed around what we know about learning and development: the importance of strong relationships; rigorous, engaging, and applied learning; and continuity across the transitions that shape a child's trajectory. States and districts should give schools the flexibility to organize time and learning around these conditions, to create more personalized environments, and to structure learning in ways that support sustained and deeper inquiry. Assessment and accountability systems should reinforce these aims by valuing the depth and demonstration of learning. Expanding relationship-centered, community-connected school designs can help more students experience the conditions research shows they need to thrive and support strong connections between a child's family and their school.
Fund public education fully and fairly. None of the above is possible without adequate and equitable funding. Ensuring a genuine opportunity to learn simply costs more in some communities than in others, and a funding system that ignores this has decided in advance which children it will serve well. School finance is among the most powerful economic mobility policies we have, with clear evidence that targeted and sustained investment in students from low-income families increases their lifetime earnings and reduces poverty.
What comes next
We know a lot more about how children learn and develop than we did when many of our education systems were designed. We know what it takes to prepare and retain excellent educators. We know how schools can be organized around relationships, belonging, meaningful learning, and connection to the world beyond the classroom. We know that resources matter, and that inequity in resources produces inequity in opportunity. And we know that effective and promising approaches already exist in communities and their public schools across the country and internationally.
What we don't have yet is an infrastructure—built on what we know works—that enables those practices to become the norm across public education. We need research that reaches the people who set policy and design practice. We need policymakers at the federal, state, and local levels to set the conditions that give state, district, and school leaders the flexibility and support to act on evidence. We need practitioners whose experience in classrooms and schools feeds back into the next round of research. And we need government and philanthropy to recognize and invest in that cycle as public infrastructure, not as disparate programs or individual projects.
That is the work of the next decade. Done well, this work will build a public education system that provides every child with the opportunities, relationships, resources, and learning experiences they need to thrive in school and beyond.
Building this system is a collective responsibility. Communities and families bring knowledge of their children and the conditions in which they live. Teachers and school leaders bring the relationships, expertise, and judgment that make learning possible. States determine the conditions in which schools operate, from funding formulas and educator preparation to standards, assessment, and accountability. And the federal government has responsibilities to support states in these efforts, including directing resources to communities and students with the greatest need and maintaining the research and data infrastructure that makes it possible to learn and share what works. It also means guaranteeing and protecting the civil rights of every child.
Tomorrow morning, 50 million children will walk through the doors of America's public schools again. They deserve a nation that treats their success and well-being as a shared responsibility and a public education system that is strong enough to make that commitment real for every child.