Quentin Tarantino knows more about 1970s cinema than I know about anything. That was the thought that stuck with me when I put down the celebrated filmmaker’s book Cinema Speculation (which I missed when it came out in 2022).

Now, knowing my readers as I do, I suspect many of you are thinking, “So what?”

Allow me to rephrase. Tarantino exhibits a seamless fusion of passion, precision, practicality, and depth about filmmaking. It got me musing about the tired tropes that so often dominate our education debates.

The expletive-dotted narration in Tarantino’s book feels different from most of what passes for expertise or analysis in 2025. He doesn’t speak with the abstractions of academics or pundits. His musings are not the polished talking points of politicos or the make-it-up-as-you-go rambling of podcasters. And he seems incapable of the inch-deep posturing of influencers and hot-take artists. What Tarantino offers is something more grounded, deeply versed in history and context.

Tarantino’s knowledge of genres, movies, actors, scripts, and studio machinations is staggering. Writing of director Don Siegel, Tarantino explains that “the rogue law enforcement officer” is the “quintessential Siegel protagonist” and proceeds nonchalantly to list:

Not only Dirty Harry, Madigan, and The Verdict’s Grodman, but Eastwood’s Coogan in Coogan’s Bluff, Michael Parks’s Vinny McKay in Stranger on the Run, as well as David Niven’s comical Scotland Yard Inspector in Rough Cut (even in Siegel’s two espionage films, The Black Windmill and Telefon, his protagonists, secret agents working for MI6, the KGB, and the CIA, all end up going rogue inside their own agencies).

He talks about a half-century-old film I’d never even heard of, and which was made before he could drive, with the uncanny accuracy of a veteran insider: “The supporting cast of The Outfit is filled with one terrific actor’s face after another (Timothy Carey, Richard Jaeckel, Sheree North, Marie Windsor, Jane Greer, Henry Jones, Bill McKinney).” He adds, “The Outfit was one of the last films made under the tenure of MGM studio head James Aubrey . . . [who] was pissed off at the way the New York and Los Angeles critics had treated his slate of MGM films. So he began opening new MGM movies regionally first.”

Tarantino shows the same effortless fluency when talking about an array of cinema-adjacent topics. He observes, “In the eighties, inside the pages of Fangoria magazine, it was horror film movie directors that were its readers’ heroes, along with special effect makeup artists (Tom Savini, Rick Baker, and Rob Bottin). That was a drastic difference when compared to Forrest Ackerman’s Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine, the leading horror movie mag of adolescents ten years before.”

I can’t think of many education experts who can discuss the broad sweep of contemporary education research or practice with that kind of cool familiarity, much less the ins-and-outs of pedagogy and curriculum circa 1970.

Yet, at no point did I feel the urge to tell Tarantino, “Hey, go touch the grass.” He’s certainly a weird dude, but he comes across as remarkably down to earth. His love of cinema bloomed early, when he was dragged (as a five- or six-year-old) to a dizzying array of grown-up films. It’s clear that love is rooted in those memorable L.A. nights and his knowledge is deeply personal. There’s no distinction here between engagement and expertise. They’re two sides of a single coin.

Tarantino’s narrative reminded me of the vibe I used to get when I’d listen to Vince Gilligan, creator of Breaking Bad, discuss screenwriting, photography, editing, camera equipment, production design, and casting on the show’s official podcast. Gilligan would start riffing on all the details involved in some elaborate crane shot that I’d never even noticed, and he’d do it with such lucidity and enthusiasm that I’d emerge with an urgent desire to go rewatch it so I could figure out what he was talking about.

The genius of Tarantino and Gilligan isn’t just about the 10,000 hours of practice. It’s not even just about artistry or craftsmanship. It’s something more primal, more human. It fuses passion, technique, practical experience, and a fastidious attention to detail.

As I read Tarantino’s book, I found myself noodling on some of our familiar fights in the ed community about experiential learning vs. academic instruction, or skills vs. content knowledge.

These tensions are real, but they also seem to suggest we have to pick a side when meaningful learning is a product of both.

While enthusiasts for “21st century skills” argue that educators needn’t worry overmuch about “mere facts,” an intensive fascination with detail is the signature of engaged learning. We see this routinely with kids when they first discover dinosaurs, football, or the Disney canon. They gobble up particulars and regurgitate them (endlessly). Harvard’s razor-sharp Jal Mehta has explored this kind of “deeper learning” at great length, noting that schools do far better at cultivating rigorous passion in extracurriculars than in the academic core. Go watch a well-run football practice and you’ll see engaged learners intensely focused on mastering skills and knowledge. The engagement is embedded in the hard work.

Champions of academic rigor, on the other hand, are frequently dismissive about concerns that a narrow focus on measurable achievement can yield alienating, mind-deadening instruction.  Facts, details, and specifics can (and should) be interesting. Way, way back when I taught world geography in high school, I was always struck that my 9th-graders loved the time we’d spend memorizing countries and geographical features. They liked wading into clear, knowable particulars that helped them make sense of the world. The same held for my 10th-graders in economics when it came to taxes, budgeting, and investing. But this means champions of rigor need to appreciate what makes knowledge come to life.

A lot of our debates presume that we need to choose between passion and precision, that we need to answer the question, “Are you on team ‘Love of Learning’ or team ‘Actual Learning’?” But maybe we’re thinking about this wrong. What if the better question is, “What would it look like to be on Team Tarantino?”

Frederick Hess is an executive editor of Education Next and the author of the blog “Old School with Rick Hess.”

Clint Bolick, the 44th Justice of the Arizona Supreme Court, joins Paul E. Peterson to discuss how the Supreme Court has shifted its stance on school choice and religious freedom in education in the United States over the years.

Follow The Education Exchange on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or here on Education Next.

— Education Next

Twenty twenty-five has been another banner year for the education freedom movement. Six new states were added to the list of those offering private-school choice programs to all students, bringing the total to 19. Still, of the programs enacted this year, only two fully allow all students to participate in a choice program by guaranteeing funding for them to do so—an indispensable benchmark of universality. As school choice policy becomes mainstream, advocates should look beyond universal eligibility alone and home in on universal funding.

Funded eligibility, which measures the percentage of students who can participate in a choice program based on available funding, is a factor of true universality. While any student may technically apply to participate in Utah’s education savings account (ESA) program, for example, scholarships are only funded with an $80 million appropriation. With accounts funded at $8,000 each, this means no more than 10,000 students—less than 2 percent of Utah’s student population—can participate in the program in a given year. With funding so limited, Utah’s program is a far cry from universal.

And Utah is not alone. Of the 19 states that allow any child to participate in a choice program, just eight back up that promise with the necessary funding. Put another way, about 45 percent of students nationwide are eligible to apply to participate in a private-school choice program, but states have only dedicated enough funding for roughly 20 percent of U.S. students to benefit from such programs.

Nobel laureate Milton Friedman, the father of the modern school choice movement, envisioned an education marketplace where families could choose from countless options, thereby improving all offerings. That vision requires states not only to create choice programs but also to ensure that funding follows each student. This is a framework for transformative education reform.

The most successful education choice programs are backed by steady, reliable funding sources, like the state’s education budget or general tax revenue, and are designed to grow automatically as more families sign up.

Fortunately, several states have taken major steps in that direction this year. But others still have a long way to go.

Of the states advancing choice this year, New Hampshire is the star. It joins the ranks of Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, and West Virginia in offering a choice program with universal funded eligibility paired with universal eligibility and options. The Granite State’s Education Freedom Account Program, enacted in 2021 with an income limit, had already ensured the program was consistently and fully funded and offered families broad flexibility in how they may spend program dollars. Now, without imposing limits on who may participate, the program stands to deliver the kind of education options families need.

By removing the income limit, the percentage of eligible students in New Hampshire increased from 48 percent to 100 percent in one fell swoop, guaranteeing seats for approximately 183,200 students statewide. And because the program continues to be formula funded, families are not at the whim of a year-to-year legislative appropriation. While the state technically implemented a new enrollment cap, the cap increases automatically with demand, which promises access for all.

Meanwhile, in Indiana this year, lawmakers passed a bill that eliminated the income cap on its Choice Scholarship Program, giving 100 percent of students statewide funded eligibility. Although a modest increase from its previous coverage of 98 percent, the new law makes the program accessible to nearly 1.2 million Hoosier students.

Of those states expanding or enacting new choice programs in 2025, Tennessee claims the next highest funded eligibility rate. The Volunteer State funded a new ESA program offering universal eligibility with a $144.2 million appropriation, boosting the number of students able to participate from 4 percent to 6 percent. Roughly 35,000 Tennessee students statewide will now have access.

Following Tennessee is Wyoming, which expanded its existing ESA program to offer universal eligibility and funded the program with a $30 million appropriation. The percentage of students who can participate in a Wyoming choice program rose to 5 percent (from less than 1 percent), covering 4,286 students.

Idaho enacted its first private-school choice program this year, opting for a refundable tax credit with universal eligibility. Funded with a $50 million appropriation, the number of students who can participate in an Idaho choice program will sit at 3 percent, or approximately 9,429 students.

Perhaps the flashiest storyline came from Texas. The Lonestar State’s $1 billion ESA program will serve a maximum of 95,329 students and is poised to become one of the nation’s largest programs by volume. Still, in a state with over 5 million K–12 students, even a $1 billion funding cap remains limiting. The percentage of students who can participate in a Texas choice program is presently just 2 percent—tied with Missouri, a state lacking a program with universal eligibility. While Texas’ path to universal funding remains a challenge, to maximize choice’s positive impact, it is a cause worthy of advancing.

Speaking of Missouri, it is one of three states (along with Mississippi and South Carolina) that expanded choice this year but fell short of reaching universal eligibility. Choice in these states remains quite limited in size and scope; all have a funded eligibility rate of less than 10 percent.

There is much to celebrate about the progress in advancing private-school choice this year. Not long ago, a state allowing any student to apply to participate in a choice program was almost unheard of. Now, that is quickly becoming the norm. Still, most programs lack the necessary funding to cover all demanded scholarships, and funding mechanisms fail to offer families confidence that programs will last year after year. To fully realize education choice’s potential and ensure all families have options, universal eligibility must be paired with a funding mechanism that ensures access for all.

Ed Tarnowski is a policy and advocacy director at EdChoice, where Colyn G. Ritter is a senior research associate.

There’s a lot of handwringing about what the hell America’s young people are thinking. They’re deeply anxious about the future. They’re shockingly comfortable saying that it’s okay to use violence to stifle speech. They’re skeptical of democracy. They exhibit a disturbing affinity for socialism.

This isn’t good. And while it can be easy to slip into grumbling—“Damn kids, get off my lawn!”—every generation goes through this handwringing. As we turn into our parents, it’s easy to forget how worrisome our parents found us.

That doesn’t mean the concerns are misplaced, though. I think they do go beyond the inevitable “kids today” grumbling. But many of us who worry about the next generation are too eager to point fingers and far too reluctant to shoulder our share of the blame for where things stand.

We need to devote far more attention to our role in fomenting this malaise. This certainly includes the way so many teachers and professors have adopted a narrative of “America the Awful” and how education leaders reflexively embraced a world of one-to-one devices, in which staring at screens has become central to the school day.

Today, though, I want to look outside the classroom and focus on the real-world civic education that we’re delivering to our youth every day. A reasonable observer could conclude that America’s leaders are striving to deliver a lesson in dysfunctional democracy, irresponsible stewardship, corrupt capitalism, and disdain for the rule of law.

We’re in the midst of a government shutdown. Why? Republicans and Democrats can no longer resolve policy differences without lapsing into brinksmanship. It’s been over a quarter-century since Congress passed all its appropriations bills on time. Never in their lives have today’s college students seen a year when Congress fulfilled its primary responsibility. At this point, things only get done via executive action or by Congress stretching the budget reconciliation process to the breaking point so that a frail, temporary majority can cram big changes into law via (what was supposed to be) an accounting mechanism.

There’s a dispiriting sense that self-dealing is no longer something that’s surprising or especially shameful. The Government Accounting Office reports that over $300 billion was stolen from pandemic relief programs, and it’s met with yawns. Companies gobbled up vast sums from the Biden administration’s CHIPS Act and Inflation Reduction Act, promising to expand their chip production or build electric car charging stations and then . . . didn’t. This has all generated astonishingly little outrage, embarrassment, or introspection. Meanwhile, President Trump is treating the White House like an all-you-can-grab buffet, even as he shakes down Intel, big tech, and big law firms by proffering favors and making threats. None of this bolsters faith in the integrity of free markets or the fairness of capitalism.

Then there’s the combination of avarice, self-interest, and inertia that have produced a staggering national debt of over $37 trillion. The debt is up by $1.8 trillion just this year and has more than doubled since 2009. We’re paying $900 billion in interest alone this year—that’s 1 out of every 8 dollars the government spends (or about $2,500 for every single American). The lion’s share of this spending funds health care and retirement for older Americans (as well as some shockingly routine fraud). Indeed, the government is closed because Republicans (who added trillions of debt this summer) and Democrats (who added trillions under Biden) are squabbling about whether to borrow even more money to extend “temporary” health care benefits adopted as an “emergency” response to the Covid pandemic. Oh, and today, very few policymakers or advocates evince consistent concern about any of this. If you’re under 25 and paying attention, you’ve got reason to be skeptical of democracy and anxious about the future.

Then there’s the spectacle of lawfare that has become shockingly routine. Remember when President Biden had great fun mocking Trump for being stuck in court as Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg pursued him in a transparently political exercise? Or when Colorado Democrats tried to use a, umm, creative reading of the 14th Amendment to keep Trump off the state’s ballot? And there was plenty more. Well, Trump promised scorched-earth payback, and he’s delivering. Attorney General Bondi shucked her way through federal prosecutors until she found a Trump loyalist willing to drag former FBI Director James Comey into court on laughable charges. Trump, who once led rallies in chants of “Lock her up!” when it came to Hillary Clinton, is now calling for the arrest of Chicago’s mayor and Illinois’s governor for opposing his plans to deploy troops in the Windy City. I could keep going, with Letitia James, the FCC commissioner imitating Tony Soprano, the Attorney General threatening the wrong kinds of speech, the president’s lawsuits against media companies . . .

All of this has fueled a toxic spiral of tit-for-tat and one-upsmanship. While we have seen plenty of furious partisan condemnations of the other tribe for its transgressions, there’ve been precious few voices willing to consistently and publicly hold both sides to a standard. The folks who do deserve our praise. Instead, they wind up bitterly denounced by their former allies without winning the tribal applause that awaits whole-hearted converts to a given side.

With naked tribalism leaking into Instagram and TikTok feeds (in tightly curated dopamine snippets), there’s little evidence the younger and older generations even have a shared vision of the American project. We’re drowning them in public debt because we (their parents and grandparents) are unwilling either to curtail our benefits or to pay our own way. We’ve broken the machinery of government in no small part because too many in positions of influence treat time-tested institutions like personal platforms or opportunities to line their pockets. Restraint has broken down, and each side feels vindicated by the misdeeds of the other.

Honestly, if I were a teen or a twentysomething watching this unfold, I might have trouble mustering much faith in our institutions or values, too. I’d certainly be skeptical of educators who yammer about foundational principles when our leaders evince such blatant disrespect for those values in practice. Indeed, I might regard faith in democratic norms or free markets as a sucker’s game, best left to those ill-informed or naïve enough to ignore the evidence they can see with their own eyes.

Here’s where I come out: As you know, I do firmly believe in the American project and its time-tested values. But that’s why I’m so damn tired of hearing talk about civic education from those unwilling to acknowledge these failings and call out their own tribes’ misconduct. Those on the left failed miserably at this task over the past half decade, and those on the right are failing miserably today. And those who tried to do better—think Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema, Liz Cheney, or Mitt Romney—have been heckled off the stage. The need is not just for individuals of character but for funders, organizations, and allies that can support them.

Anyone committed to civic education needs to step up, ditch the aspirational happy talk, challenge those who are fueling our toxic zeitgeist, and build the institutions that can support them. Even if schools and classrooms got everything right (and I’m not holding my breath for that), it wouldn’t do much good if students continued to see civic leaders rewarded for flouting the demure norms their teachers championed.

Forget action civics. This is civic education in action.

Frederick Hess is an executive editor of Education Next and the author of the blog “Old School with Rick Hess.”

As soon as I step onto South Florida Autism Charter School’s (SFACS) sprawling campus, nestled in the outskirts of Miami, I’m greeted by the school’s principal, Tamara Moodie. She’s overseeing one of the school’s three different arrival schedules, split between its elementary, middle, and high school grades. Moodie exerts a calm yet commanding presence in the hallways of SFACS. She asks a high schooler named Chase, along with a staff member, to guide me on a short tour of the school.

Chase, wearing the school’s red uniform hoodie, sports a paper crown adorned with the words “King Chase.” As he leads us up the staircase, he tells us about a ring he won at a Chuck E. Cheese restaurant the previous weekend. We make our way through the hallway, and I notice I can see inside of each classroom through large clear windows—transparency is a hallmark here. Another student, emerging from an elementary class with his teacher, tells us he won the recent school spelling bee with the word “giggle,” which he then proudly spells.

SFACS’s facilities include a large therapy area filled with play equipment, a dance room, and, so that students can practice life skills, a model studio apartment complete with a fully equipped kitchen, bed, TV, and closet.

Later I visit a 12th-grade classroom, where the students have recently returned to their desks after leading the annual senior parade. SFACS adheres to a three-to-one student-to-staff ratio; its classrooms are permanently staffed by three instructors—one primary teacher and two paraprofessionals—overseeing nine students.

Today, they’re learning about the difference between “wants” and “needs.” Their teacher reads short stories with examples such as “Ryan needs a coat” and “Ryan wants to play video games.” The young people assigned to this classroom, like all the students at SFACS, occupy the severe end of the autism spectrum. Their IQ scores are below 68 and they live with various cognitive, speech, or mobility impairments. Many have difficulty sitting at a desk for extended periods of time. From my vantage point in the back of the classroom, the instructors’ unwavering dedication to their students, who require nearly constant one-on-one attention, is on full display. As the lesson progresses, the assistant teachers shift from desk to desk, eliciting example sentences and providing encouragement to each student. When one nonverbal student grows restless, one of the teachers guides him to a chart on the wall where he uses pictures to convey various emotional and physical needs.

Moodie, along with a group of community leaders, founded the school in 2009 to provide families in South Florida with the region’s first public school for students with autism. First housed in a library and enrolling 81 students, the charter school moved into its current two-story facility in 2021 and now serves nearly 300 students. With the help of a fundraising arm and multiple related nonprofits, including an adult center housed within the school building, SFACS also provides resources and services, from housing to employment, for people with severe autism. Students can remain at the school through age 22, after which they have the opportunity to transition to the adult center.

“We treat the whole family,” Moodie likes to say. She even hosts and often personally leads family learning sessions on Saturday mornings on topics affecting the autism community. The school’s cafeteria, meanwhile, is partly staffed by parent volunteers. Because of its tight-knit community and wraparound model—they now serve individuals as old as 40—enrollment at the school is especially limited.

SFACS is one of at least 36 charter schools in Florida dedicated to serving students with special needs, the highest number in any state. While some schools only require students to have an Individualized Education Program (IEP) to enroll, others, like SFACS, further limit eligibility to students who are taught through a modified curriculum, have a specific diagnosis such as autism, or have additional cognitive or behavioral differences.

Florida, long a self-professed haven for education choice, specifically allows charter schools to focus on special needs students, or “exceptional students,” in their enrollment process (across the country, states vary widely on the permissibility of enrollment preferences for charter schools). Some of Florida’s earliest charter schools, like Princeton House Charter School in Orlando, were private schools for students with disabilities that took advantage of the law and converted to charter status in the late 1990s. For decades, families of students with special needs in Florida have also benefited from a specialized education savings account for exceptional students, which can be used to cover private school tuition or services such as therapy.

Meeting a Critical Need

Florida’s culture of school choice has seeped into its greater education community. SFACS’s autonomy, Moodie recounts, was supported from the start by Miami-Dade County’s public school district. The school has also benefited from the state’s funding formula, which significantly multiplies base funding for students who require the most intensive and personalized learning services. While there may be a financial incentive for charter schools to enroll students with special needs, the greatest benefit has been to the students themselves. In traditional public schools—and especially in charter schools that lack the same level of financial support—the amount of physical resources and services available at SFACS would be out of reach.

In the U.S., students receiving special education services now make up at least 15 percent of the public school population, a figure that has doubled over the last four decades. Diagnoses of specific learning differences, such as autism, dyslexia, and ADHD, are on the rise. Yet special education students continue to struggle academically and behaviorally compared to their peers—they are more frequently disciplined and referred to law enforcement, and they report being harassed or bullied at rates that exceed their share of enrollment.

Across the country, teacher shortages are most pronounced in special education, driven by the increasing number of students receiving services and by the adoption of more labor-intensive service models. Teachers report being underprepared to meet these students’ unique needs. In Florida, during the 2021–22 school year, exceptional student education as a subject represented 16 percent of all courses taught by teachers not certified in the relevant field. Out of more than 60,000 total ESE courses, nearly 9,000 were taught by teachers not certified in special education.

Before founding SFACS, Moodie served as education director of a $45,000-a-year private school for students with disabilities. At that time, few public school options existed for parents of children with special needs, and she saw many students leave the school when tuition became unsustainable for their parents. Today, the SFACS community is made up of families seeking an alternative to their traditional school districts, which many parents felt were unprepared to teach their children. Some have moved near the campus, even from other states, to take advantage of the school’s extensive wraparound services. Moodie says that as many as 30 prospective families tour the school each month, hopeful for a spot.

A recent Florida policy, however, has limited parents’ ability to enroll their students at the school. As required of all states by the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA, Florida offers an alternate assessment for students with disabilities who are unable to participate in the regular state assessment; however, the state restricts eligibility for this option to students with an IQ score below 68. This constraint is designed to comply with federal law, which caps such assessments at 1 percent of a state’s student population. Since SFACS is built specifically around Florida’s alternate curriculum and assessment for students with significant cognitive needs, those who could benefit from its services but don’t meet the IQ threshold for an alternate assessment are no longer eligible for enrollment. The use of IQ tests to determine school eligibility, particularly for students with significant cognitive disabilities, has sparked controversy and widespread criticism among the charter leaders I spoke with in Florida.

Sandra Figueredo beams when she talks about her son Joaquin’s experience at SFACS. Now 14, he began at the school in kindergarten and has been with the same group of students ever since. He loves music class, playing basketball, and the school’s life skills program—his mother says he now wants to make his bed and put on cologne every morning. He’s also a member of the Key Club, which organizes community service projects such as beach cleanups. While Figueredo describes Joaquin as “not completely verbal,” the school has enabled him to forge longstanding friendships.

Joaquin was diagnosed with autism when he was two and, before coming to SFACS, was placed in an autism cluster at his first public school. His mother says she was concerned by the level of “babysitting” and stigmatization he experienced in those early years, something made more difficult for a parent just learning to navigate public schools’ complex language around special education. After connecting with a parent advocate at her school district, Figueredo recounts, an IEP meeting that would normally last 20 minutes turned into two hours—she had finally found someone to help her ask the “right questions” about her son’s education. Not long after, another parent at her school told her about SFACS. Figueredo applied immediately, and Joaquin was accepted for the last seat in his grade that year.

Now, Figueredo is fully involved in Joaquin’s IEP development, just as the staff is thoroughly invested in his overall growth. “Dr. Moodie is very engaged with the staff and with everything that goes on at the school,” she tells me, “you know everybody’s responsible for their part because they’re held accountable.” Both she and Joaquin, who wants to pursue a career in music, are excited for the future, and SFACS’s continuing adult services give Figueredo peace of mind. “Here, they keep learning,” she tells me.

When asked if she has advice for parents of neurodivergent students in the public school system, Figueredo responds: “If you think something doesn’t sound right, don’t accept it just because it’s coming from a place of authority. You are your child’s first advocate.”

Jeff Skowronek, who leads a network of three specialized charter campuses in the Tampa area known as Pepin Academies, is passionate about the role of these schools in the education landscape. Pepin Academies exclusively serve students who require more complex or frequent accommodations, but whose needs are not as severe as those of students at SFACS. Skowronek calls it a “middle ground” for local families seeking better options for their kids.

Pepin Academies is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year and, like SFACS, its schools have thrived when partnerships with local school districts have been strong. “To me it’s what charters are supposed to be,” Skowronek continues. “What is a gap in traditional schools that funding and time don’t allow them to close? Let’s create an innovative way to tackle it and work with the district to be successful.”

Separate Settings vs. Inclusion

Specialized charter schools do have their critics—starting with the issue of inclusion. Special education in American schools is governed by the principle of “least restrictive environment,” a component of IDEA, which requires schools to educate children with disabilities alongside children who are nondisabled “to the maximum extent appropriate” unless “the nature or severity” of the disability makes it impossible.

IDEA, however, leaves the exact circumstances of the least restrictive environment undefined, creating a gray area that continues to fuel debate among educators and researchers. For some advocates, “full inclusion” of students with disabilities into general education classrooms, no matter their specific disability, is a civil rights imperative akin to racial integration. They point to research showing students with disabilities do better academically when placed in general education settings.

Other researchers, like the Vanderbilt University psychologist Douglas Fuchs, have long countered this claim. In his most recent paper, Fuchs shows that studies promoting inclusion overlook both the differences in the nature of disabilities between students placed in separate versus generalized settings and their prior academic abilities. Some students with disabilities do thrive in general education classrooms, he allows—but that doesn’t mean all students, especially those needing intensive services, will achieve more in a general education classroom. Further research has corroborated Fuchs’s findings that the benefits of inclusion for students with disabilities are, at best, inconclusive.

Moodie agrees that the debate over inclusion overlooks the profound differences that exist between the individuals we label as students with disabilities. Even at her own school, she points out, “no two kids with autism are the same.” Instead, it’s more helpful to consider the individual supports and goals spelled out in those students’ IEPs, which should be collaboratively developed by parents, teachers, and specialists. These, rather than more traditional academic metrics like test scores, are a more accurate measure of success for students with more severe needs.

At the start of the school year, for example, 51 students at SFACS and its associated adult center, ages 5 to 28, were unable to use the toilet independently. “I made it a mission,” Moodie explains, “to get every kid and adult toilet trained.” In March, the school was over halfway to achieving that goal. “To me, that’s how you measure success,” Moodie continues, “being able to be independent—that’s what ‘successful’ looks like.”

In fact, Florida’s specialized charter schools generally opt out of the state’s traditional school grading system and instead choose to receive its School Improvement Rating, which is designed for alternative schools and those that exclusively serve students with special needs. Instead of a school grade—which would be based primarily on student test scores and ill-suited to an environment in which most or all students receive an alternate curriculum—schools receive ratings of “unsatisfactory,” “maintaining,” or “commendable.” For the 2024–25 school year, Florida’s specialized charter schools overwhelmingly received a rating of “maintaining.”

Although Florida charter schools overall have demonstrated positive results, assessing the performance of specialized charter schools poses a challenge due to the less stringent standards of the state’s School Improvement Rating. That system, however, provides an alternative model of accountability, which has long been the north star of the charter movement, by emphasizing students’ specific needs rather than top-down standards.

Nevertheless, concerns about exclusion and a lack of accountability have prompted education experts to raise questions about the separate settings offered by specialized charter schools. The Center for Learner Equity, a research and advocacy organization for students with disabilities, has suggested such schools “may run counter to longstanding goals to provide students access to inclusive learning environments.” Their latest report on specialized charter schools nationwide, however, reveals no evidence that these schools violate federal laws or subvert the doctrine of least restrictive environment.

Skowronek, formerly an associate professor of psychology at the University of Tampa, responds to this criticism by pointing to the array of tailored academic opportunities and extracurricular activities available to students at Pepin Academies. “We’re trying to meet the elements of a traditional environment,” he explains, “but in an environment that’s set up to maximize their success. If we determine that success isn’t being met in other environments, and I try something different and I’m met with success, haven’t I fulfilled the goal of providing the least restrictive environment?”

It’s difficult for outside observers to generalize about specialized charter schools given the range of special needs they serve and the variety of education models and settings they offer. Nonetheless, The Center for Learner Equity has urged charter authorizers and state policymakers to hold such schools accountable to equally high standards as other public schools and to ensure they provide access to inclusive settings when appropriate.

Specialized charter schools for students with special needs remain rare: Ohio, Texas, and Florida collectively account for around 40 percent of total nationwide enrollment in such schools. Ultimately, school districts are responsible for ensuring students with special needs receive a free, appropriate public education, as guaranteed by federal law. Across the country, specialized non-charter public schools, managed either by individual districts or states, are not uncommon. In some cases, districts may even pay for external providers, such as private and out-of-district schools, when a student’s needs can’t be met in district.

While the government plays a significant role in safeguarding the rights of students with special needs, Floridians have long affirmed their faith in parental choice. It’s the primary reason why, in a state that claims to be first in the nation in education freedom, specialized charter schools have proliferated. This growth reflects parental demand for education options as much as the education needs of students. Furthermore, the limited progress of the decades-long school accountability movement has only added to parents’ hunger for alternative educational experiences for their children. And behind that hunger lies a compelling question: Aren’t schools ultimately accountable to parents?

Viewed through this lens, specialized charter schools have been remarkably successful.

Moodie and the rest of SFACS’s leadership have bold plans for the future. They’ve recently opened a new campus for grades K–5 in South Miami and have started construction on an additional building next to their main facility. The new space, which Moodie affectionately calls her “YMCA for autism,” will include expanded therapy rooms, a fitness center, and a pool designed to teach water safety to their students. They’re also opening small businesses to create employment opportunities for their adult learners.

Moodie hopes these expanded services will continue to ease the burden on families. “Our parents are our biggest advocates,” she says. It’s not hard to see why.

Thibaut Delloue is a policy fellow at the Florida Charter Institute.

Suggested citation format:

Delloue, T. (2025). “Inside Florida’s Charter Schools for Exceptional Students: How parental choice is reshaping special education in the Sunshine State.” Education Next, 25(4), 14 October 2025.

Matt Sigelman, the President of the Burning Glass Institute, joins Paul E. Peterson to discuss online courses and certificates, and how many are not delivering the skills employers need.

Sigelman’s report, “Holding New Credentials Accountable for Outcomes: We Need Evidence-Based Funding Models,” co-written with Mark Schneider, Shrinidhi Rao, Scott Spitze, and Debbie Wasden, is available now.

Follow The Education Exchange on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or here on Education Next.

— Education Next

In one form or another, the school choice movement has been around a long time. But it has never received a shot in the arm like the one it got with the federal scholarship tax credit provision in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which became law last July. That provision includes the most ambitious choice initiative to date: a credit of up to $1,700 for individual taxpayers who contribute to scholarship-granting organizations for private-school tuition.

Not surprisingly, some public school advocates reacted with despair on social media:

“School choice is a tactic conservatives use to defund public education and create barriers for upward mobility.”

“School choice is a way to destroy public education and eventually push public tax dollars to private schools which are used to segregate students.”

“Vouchers are a tax break for the wealthy.”

“Giving money to [private] schools is stealing from public education, and I don’t want a dime of my money going towards it.”

Nor were policymakers immune, as reported in K–12 Dive:

[S]chool vouchers “sweep aside civil rights protections, support segregation, decimate public school budgets, and do not improve student outcomes.” 

[T]he school choice program “will divert billions of taxpayer dollars to private religious schools that indoctrinate and can discriminate against students and their families based on the schools’ beliefs.”

Amidst all the negative rhetoric, this insightful comment stood out:

“If we are going to keep public schools, school administrators need to figure out a new delivery model. All-in-one schools are increasingly not what people want. If districts don’t adapt, private schools will continue to gain popularity, regardless of how good or bad they are.”

I could not agree more.

I have spent over 50 years as a public school educator. I know now is the time for public school leaders to embrace and learn from competition, not fear it.

Learning from the Competition

In his classic “The Power of Vision” video (1991), futurist Joel Barker asserted that the genesis of paradigm shifts resulting in profound changes may often come from people with no previous credibility in the field.

Public schools urgently need a new generation of visionaries who are not bound by past practices but open to guidance from those outside traditional public education.

Learning What Private-School Parents Want

In December 2023, EdChoice asked private-school parents why they chose their schools. Their top two priorities were a safe environment (50 percent) and academic quality (47 percent).

A November 2024 OpinionatEd poll amplified these findings by revealing that voters, regardless of party or demographics, supported connecting K–12 education to future jobs and careers so that all graduates will be prepared to contribute to the community.

Academic quality, a safe environment, and real-world readiness are not outlandish expectations. Public school leaders would be wise to heed these findings and intentionally and aggressively seek interest convergence among public and private-school stakeholders centering on exactly how to integrate their desires into a shared vision for each particular school.

Empowering Stakeholders to Plan for and Implement Goals

There is no template. To mirror one of the distinctive features of private education, plans must be tailored specifically to the expectations of the parents in each school. This may mean expanding advanced coursework, niche programs such as STEM or language immersion, a stronger sense of care and belonging, curricular flexibility not found in public schools, more diverse extracurricular experiences, or expanded community connection and service.

To learn parents’ precise expectations concerning academic quality, a safe environment, and real-world readiness, public schools should hold forums in communities where parents are likely to take advantage of the tax credits. Then, based on what they’ve learned, leaders can begin the essential work of implementing the suggestions.

As new initiatives are rolled out, the next step is forming a guiding coalition of public and formerly private-school parents. They are charged with evaluating how programs could more impactfully address parental desires for better academic integrity, safety, and real-world preparedness, and the ways the school could improve nurturing and expanding the partnerships.

A third step is to mount an aggressive campaign to inform the entire community about the new spirit of open communication with both old and new stakeholders. While an information campaign does not take the place of action, it is necessary to communicate to the whole community the school’s desire to learn from an expanded group of stakeholders and actually put that knowledge in place.

Developing a consensus about definitive next steps will not be as easy as writing the global goals, but the attempt is worth the effort.

Years of experience have taught leaders that collaborating with people from a variety of perspectives, including critics, requires active listening to others’ views, clear and calm communication, empathy, and focusing on solutions rather than dwelling on problems.

The most promising aspect of engaging stakeholders is that both progressives and conservatives wholeheartedly embrace schools building genuine partnerships with families and communities toward mutually agreed-upon goals and actions. This can be a “win-win” if done honestly and sincerely.

To be successful, however, school leaders must, as one leadership advisor put it, “lead with their ears and not with their mouths.” The ability to listen more than speaking to stakeholders is a crucial quality in leadership.

Public School Leaders Have Choices, Too

Parents now have an expanded variety of school choices, but so do public school leaders: a growth of purposeful schools that are more responsive to all parents’ wishes.

Public school educators like me can continue to lament what they perceive to be unfair attacks on public schools, or they can embrace competition; respond to private school parents’ expectations; address their concerns forthrightly through focused implementation; and enhance former private school stakeholders’ credibility by giving them credit for the improvements.

The best part is that, when leaders take these actions to improve their schools, all students will benefit.

Dr. Ronald S. Thomas was a teacher and school and district leader in Maryland’s inner city, suburban, and rural schools for 32 years. Since 2001, he has been a faculty member in the Towson University educational leadership department.

Last summer I taught a graduate-level education policy course. During a discussion of the achievement gap, I referenced a provision in the No Child Left Behind Act. The students stared blankly. It was late in the day, so I thought the problem was that statutory language can be a sedative. I spiced things up by referencing Lean on Me and Stand and Deliver, two education-related Hollywood films that energized the accountability movement. Again, stony faces.

The students noticed my confusion. One asked sheepishly, “Stand and what?” Then it occurred to me: None of these students had even been born when Congress was debating NCLB in 2001. In fact, for the students born in 2003, Stand and Deliver (1988) is as distant as the black-and-white The Hustler (1961) is for me.

I realized my two-fold challenge. I had to explain policy history and show why it was relevant today. My students, after all, were shaped by the battles over Common Core, Covid, online learning, and the value of four-year degrees. The education news they consumed focused on DEI and AI. My touchstones—A Nation At Risk, the Charlottesville Summit, adequate yearly progress, ESEA waivers, Race to the Top—were not theirs. I had to work overtime to make them care about things from my era that I had assumed to be definitive.

This is also the challenge faced by Joseph Viteritti in his new book, Radical Dreamers: Race, Choice, and the Failure of American Education. There is already a mountain of monographs on race and schooling. But Viteritti’s hill is even steeper: He aims to revive the left’s dying support for school choice by recounting the thinking of four primary figures who were born between 1929 and 1941 and whose intellectual contributions came mainly in the late 1960s through the early 1990s. The book’s supporting cast of five or ten other individuals are creatures of the same bygone era. If that’s not enough, most of the characters are far from household names, one (Diane Ravitch) has renounced most of the positions the author supports, and another (Derrick Bell) was a force behind arguably the most polarizing education topic of our time (critical race theory).

But if anyone deserves the chance to climb this hill, it’s Viteritti, an accomplished scholar of education history, policy, and law who also worked in several big-city school systems. His writing influenced my own arguments about replacing urban districts. Such was my respect for his work that I invited him to present at a charter school gathering I organized in 2005 and a White House convening on urban faith-based schools that I shepherded in 2008.

* * *

Viteritti is a man of the left. He makes this clear in his asides about abortion, Donald Trump, income inequality, LGBTQ issues, and the Roberts Court. As he writes in the preface, “If you want to read a story that validates the essential components of critical race theory, stick with this one.” His four primary characters—Ravitch, Ron Edmonds, Jack Coons, and Howard Fuller—are of the left as well. Though the author’s motivation is familiar (frustration at America’s inability to significantly improve education outcomes among disadvantaged kids), his policy focus is unusual, at least nowadays. He wants a narrow form of school choice, one directed at only the most in-need families. Unfortunately, America’s left largely opposes private-school choice and has shown little interest in charter schools as a vehicle to create new options for urban students. And the right wants to significantly expand universal choice, supporting policies that enable all families to access a vast array of options.

As a person of the right, I don’t think Radical Dreamers will convince many conservatives. Nor do I think many progressives will sign on. Animus toward school choice on the left is now de rigueur, despite ongoing efforts by groups like Democrats for Education Reform to shift their party’s stance. But I suppose there could be a revival among progressives of New Deal–era or Catholic-social-teaching liberalism that understands faith as a valuable contributor to efforts to help the poor. Or perhaps the left’s new abundance movement will come to see opposition to choice as another of the New Left’s unwise commitments that thwart opportunity and equality. Only time will tell on these scores.

Though Radical Dreamers is a solid work of contemporary policy history, it often reads as an apologia or memoir. It is an extended explanation, using Viteritti’s own career for storytelling purposes, of why the author’s ideology led him to adopt and retain his unpopular but principled views on school choice.

So while it may not be effective advocacy, Radical Dreamers is an often compelling chronicle of strong-willed, independent-minded progressives interested in K–12 schooling during the second half of the 20th century. These thinkers and doers, working in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education, looked beyond the contemporaneous battles over bussing and funding formulas. Though the four primary figures and the cast of supporting actors had very different backgrounds and priorities, they largely agreed on the importance of creating effective schools and empowering families. That led many of them to a shared appreciation of choice. Their non-tribal approach should serve as an example for today’s researchers and policy practitioners. As Viteritti writes, “A common characteristic shared by all the principal actors is a painful honesty that drives people like them to tell others what they do not want to hear regardless of the consequences.”

* * *

Viteritti begins with his 1978 arrival in the chancellor’s office of the New York City Public Schools. From there, the book tracks how a variety of influences shaped the author’s scholarship and policy work. Ronald Edmonds, famous for the “effective schools movement,” was serving as deputy chancellor at that time and became his “unofficial tutor.” Edmonds helped Viteritti develop a model for understanding school politics that carries throughout this book. It’s built on the difference between clients and constituents. The former are the families and students a system serves; the latter are the powerful individuals and groups to which the system’s leaders are actually accountable. Part of the appeal of school choice, in the author’s view, is that it turns clients into constituents.

Edmonds—and the prospects of choice—had a major influence on Viteritti because of the growing consensus in the 1960s and 1970s, thanks to studies by James Coleman and Christopher Jencks, that schools could only do so much. Outside-of-school factors largely determined kids’ futures. Because of Viteritti’s knowledge of this academic literature, he was drawn to Edmonds’s research on schools that work for the disadvantaged. The book’s funniest passage recounts Edmonds’s grudging inclusion of texts he detested on a reading list he distributed to staff in the chancellor’s office. Viteritti wanted the list to be balanced, and Edmonds obliged while insulting the works via annotations. The reader will understand when the author writes, “Ron could come off as opinionated because he was. He was articulate and erudite and wanted you to know it.”

I learned the most from the chapter on Jack Coons, a law professor at UC Berkeley, whom Viteritti credits with convincing him of the progressive approach to choice. Though Coons is mostly known for his work on school finance, he organized a group of academics and advocates on the left to fight for choice. The chapter includes enlightening discussions of how Coons’s work intersected with Coleman’s, his role in Serrano v. Priest (the landmark 1971 California school-funding case), and his ongoing debate with Milton Friedman about why school choice is valuable and how it should be brought to life. Though I prefer Friedman’s take to Coons’s, I agree wholeheartedly with Viteritti’s view that “a parent’s lack of discretion over the education of a child, in a larger systemic context where others can exercise it, reinforces a sense of powerlessness among the unrich.”

If anything in the book will convince today’s progressives to embrace school choice, it’s probably the two chapters dedicated to Howard Fuller. They are full of gripping stories from Fuller’s remarkable career dedicated to empowering the underserved. That section begins by declaring, “Howard Fuller shares Derrick Bell’s conviction that American society is incurably racist” and “Fuller’s career is a living exhibit of critical theory.” The reader will learn of Fuller’s upbringing in the Deep South and upper Midwest, his early civil rights work, his role in creating Malcolm X Liberation University, his superintendency of Milwaukee’s schools, his founding of the Black Alliance for Educational Options, and more.

Though some on the left still caricature school choice as a nefarious effort by the rich and connected to destroy public education, Fuller’s career—consistent with Viteritti’s view—demonstrates that support for choice can grow from a sense that those without means gain power and influence when they can control education decisions. This agency includes starting schools, running schools, directing school dollars, choosing schools, and holding schools accountable, and it leads to a new, dynamic, pluralist system that better serves the marginalized. As Viteritti describes Fuller’s view, “His approach was a complete rejection of the ‘One Best System’ common school model we inherited from the 19th-century Taylorists, those same reformers who had deemed the factory to be an optimal workplace.”

In my view, the most memorable part of the book are the pages dedicated to Diane Ravitch. The author and Ravitch had a productive scholarly partnership in the 1990s. Viteritti appreciated Ravitch’s work on high standards, accountability, and choice and admired her independence of mind. They collaborated on a number of projects and both supported vouchers for disadvantaged students. “We proposed that all students who attend a school targeted for closure should be awarded a means-tested scholarship and that nonpublic schools participating in the choice program must not charge tuition above the value of the scholarship.” His fondness for her scholarship and their partnership comes through—which makes the chapter dedicated to Ravitch’s volte-face all the harder to read.

The author recounts a 2010 dinner during which Ravitch dropped the bombshell. “She was about to publish a new book—and it would refute just about every policy position we had taken together during our eight-year partnership at NYU.” Viteritti proceeds—to his credit—to even-handedly describe her trilogy of anti-reform books. In a sense, the chapter reads as a non sequitur: After 160 pages of defending school choice from a progressive perspective, the author adds an entire chapter detailing a famous progressive’s turn against school choice. I suspect Viteritti’s scholarly integrity forced him to include it; after citing Ravitch’s influence, he probably felt duty-bound to engage with her apostasy. He states bluntly, “Notwithstanding her positive attitudes toward Catholic institutions as well as some charter and independent private schools, Ravitch decisively had changed her mind on choice. She was now making arguments that she had previously rebuffed.”

The Ravitch story is important for another reason. Throughout Radical Dreamers, Viteritti expresses frustration that school-choice policy is no longer geared toward the most disadvantaged families. The expansion of tax-credit scholarship programs and the advent of education savings accounts (both primarily in red states) have given more and more choices to non-poor families. The market-oriented vision of choice championed by the right is now just about the only game in town. I wish the author had openly grappled with why this is the case: Because conservatives tried for 30 years to partner with progressives to create means-tested voucher programs in America’s cities and were continuously rebuffed. The right’s turn to universalizing choice in the 2020s can only be understood in the context of progressive leaders’ determined, generations-long opposition to choice and the abandonment of choice by independent-minded progressives like Ravitch.

This fact, though not what progressives want to hear, does highlight two great virtues of Viteritti’s work. The author has stuck by his principles even though they’ve fallen out of vogue on his side of the aisle, and he has provided the intellectual history for any future independent-minded choice-curious progressives.

Andy Smarick is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a writer for the Substack Governing Right.

Suggested citation format:

Smarick, A. (2025). “The Progressive School Reform Voices Crying in the Wilderness: Profiles of the courageous few on the left who championed choice read today like ancient history.” Education Next, 25( 4), 9 October 2025.

This pair of thoughtful, earnest, well-researched books revisit the eternal issue of public-school governance along with the interminable debate over the virtues, failings, and seeming immortality of local school boards.

In brief: Ohio State political scientist Vladimir Kogan contends that local control of schools as it has evolved in the United States inevitably places adult interests ahead of student needs and thus subverts all serious efforts to boost achievement. Meanwhile, Scott R. Levy, a lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a long-serving school board member, argues that elected local boards are not only the soundest means of governing public schools but also an antidote to polarization and fragmentation in these troubled times.

Kogan’s case for change plays a tune I’ve long hummed—and I believe that kids would fare better if America danced to it, though we often stumble when we try.

Way back in 1984—on the heels of A Nation at Risk—the late (and much missed) Denis Doyle and I wrote in The Public Interest:

Local school boards . . . have with rare (albeit welcome) exceptions not moved vigorously to diagnose the qualitative maladies of their schools or to prescribe remedies. And it is that neglect, compounded by the failure of the education profession to frame the right questions and suggest the best answers to the laymen on the school boards, that has prompted state officials to seize control of the process of educational reform.

Four decades later, that’s still true, though the unevenness of state-level responses to America’s education failings led Washington to assert greater control, as in No Child Left Behind (2002), Race to the Top (2009), and other federal initiatives. It’s the nation, after all, that’s at risk, not just Kentucky or Louisville.

Yet the currents of state and local control run deep in our K–12 waters, and it turns out that practically no one wants Washington to run—or even supervise—their schools. So Uncle Sam has done a lot of backpedaling.

Today the president and congressional majority seek (in the words of an executive order from Trump) to “return authority over education to the States and local communities.” They and many others also seek to empower parents to make key education decisions—including choice of schools—for their children. But one hears little, save from school board members themselves, about putting elected local boards more firmly in the driver’s seat. And forthcoming research from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute shows once again how distant remain the priorities of many board members from the achievement-boosting changes needed by their students and the nation.

Kogan shines laser-like attention on student achievement as the core work of schools and—channeling John Chubb and Terry Moe’s classic 1990 work, Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools—faults traditional governance by local boards on grounds that its political imperatives force it to pay greater attention to adult concerns and interests. It is indeed true that “kids don’t vote,” and elected officials nearly always cater to the grown-ups that do.

Therefore, Kogan writes, the structure must change, leading him to moot four reforms, three of them familiar, the fourth more audacious (if rather vague). He would abandon the Progressive-era belief that off-cycle board elections help keep politics out of education—a belief that’s demonstrably false in most places—and instead hold them in November of even-numbered years when turnout is greater and less apt to be dominated by teachers unions and other vested interests. He would buttress marketplace forces and give parents more choices. And he’d simplify and clarify the reporting of school performance, with particular emphasis on “value-added” data rather than simple proficiency scores, so that parents, community leaders, voters—and education leaders—can better understand which schools are doing a good job and which aren’t.

Kogan’s cheekier proposal—which feels somewhat contradictory to the first three—is to “sacrifice some amount of democratic control” over schooling “if doing so produces better schools.” Here he tantalizingly argues (mostly through analogy to housing, regional planning, and central banking) that better decisions sometimes get made when insulated from voters and politicians. Noting that “local control of the schools” as it has evolved in the United States isn’t mandated by the Constitution—which never mentions education—he declares that reforms designed to advance student learning should continue to be considered even when they circumvent that familiar form of governance.

For his part, Scott Levy offers a dozen worthy suggestions for improving the functioning as well as the span of control of local school boards: curbing state and federal interference, recruiting stronger candidates to run, providing better training for those who win, improving relations with the superintendent, and much more. He cites ample research and draws on much direct experience, even if the combination sometimes leaves him equivocating on specifics, such as whether it’s better to hold board elections in November than in spring. The autumn calendar, he notes, causes neophyte board members to arrive late in the budget cycle, for example, and deep into the school year. He also points out that escalating more decisions to the state (or federal) level doesn’t necessarily reduce the influence of adult interest groups because they can simply shift their attention and influence to legislatures. That matches my own experience on the state board of education in deep blue Maryland with its veto-overriding Democratic majority in both houses and the ever-vigilant Maryland State Education Association riding high in Annapolis.

Levy’s sincerity and good intentions shine through every page, and devotees of “local control of the schools” will applaud his book. Yet it must be noted that the author’s four terms on a school board were in a small, wealthy district in mid-Westchester County, the sort of calm, leafy community where one can still sometimes glimpse the Progressive ideal in operation: nonpolitical local gentry selflessly seeking what’s best for children and taxpayers (and perhaps their real-estate values). Yet such places have little in common with Chicago and its greedy, powerful, strike-happy teachers union often aligned with mayors, aldermen, and the local power structure, or with Los Angeles, where for decades the union has defeated board members who dare to push for big changes.

As I nod in agreement with Kogan’s very different prescription for governing U.S. schools, I can also spot many states and communities that have been planting elements of it over the past quarter-century, most notably the creation of almost 8,000 charter schools that generally operate outside the control of the local school systems in which they’re located and that are attended by children whose parents choose them. Though many charters belong to networks or management companies, often spanning district and state lines, they typically embody a new form of local control that has little resemblance to traditional school boards. Private-school choice also removes control from local boards, and such programs are burgeoning—mostly in red states so far, although a new federal tax-credit program for individuals who donate to scholarship-granting organizations may prove hard for blue-state leaders to resist.

The effects of mounting choice on student achievement have been measurable but mostly modest, with the greatest benefit going to needy youngsters liberated from under-resourced urban schools. Yet a handful of communities have been transformed, with—for example—half the students in the District of Columbia now attending charter schools and the mayor ultimately in charge of both charters and the traditional district.

The most ambitious example was post-Katrina New Orleans, where local control was entirely replaced by a state-operated network of independent charters and universal school choice. Gains were indeed made—Kogan terms them “remarkable”—though the governance arrangement that produced them has since been replaced by a quasi-return to the status quo ante.

Kogan’s dozen pages on New Orleans explain why: a mix of racial politics (resentment of an arrangement imposed on a majority-Black city by a cadre of mostly white state officials) and the loss of local teacher jobs as the union was sidelined, corrupt practices were suppressed, and hundreds of outsiders flooded into the Crescent City. It’s nearly impossible, he shows, to get away from public schools’ role as a major source of public employment or from local communities’ deep-seated habit of controlling their own schools.

Far from the lower Mississippi, we see many examples of decisive local pushback against state takeovers of every sort, whether in New Jersey, Michigan, or Illinois. This gravitational tug toward decentralization has its counterpart at the national level, where every expansion of federal influence over K–12 education has been followed by a loosening of control. This pendulum started swinging long before Trump, including in the year before his first election, when bipartisan majorities in both the Senate and the House passed the Every Student Succeeds Act, pulling most of the teeth from No Child Left Behind and reverting to states to decide what (if anything) to do about their low-performing schools and low-achieving students. (That’s what enabled the Maryland teachers union to defang moves by the state board to intervene in the Old Line State’s many such schools.)

Nor is it just teachers and their unions that resist change. Out of touch as many school board members may be with the education needs of their students, they number more than 80,000 and want to stay in power. So do the local superintendents that they employ, the hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats who administer their districts, and the scores of others who depend on those districts for jobs, contracts, property values, and much else.

The broader public, too, has grown accustomed over two centuries to local control of public schooling, and many of today’s ardent education reformers also press for decentralization, though they aim to shift power not to school boards but to schools (for example, by expanding charter schools) and to parents (for example, through vouchers, education savings accounts, and tax credits). This, however, comes with mounting resistance from left and right to the standards-and-testing regime—another NCLB legacy—that informs the accurate tracking of school and student performance that Kogan (and I) see as essential for informed parents and a well-functioning education marketplace.

Step forward, step back. Yes, Vlad Kogan has a persuasive plan for putting kids first and boosting their achievement, and yes, there’s been movement in many places to adopt part of that plan. Yet history, the profound inertia of the K–12 behemoth, and most of the facts on the ground show that Scott Levy’s approach continues to have immense traction. Insofar as we’re stuck with this colossus, the powers that be would do well to heed his recommendations for improving it. I don’t expect them to make a huge difference—but I don’t see anywhere to go except up.

Chester E. Finn, Jr. is Distinguished Senior Fellow and President Emeritus of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and Volker Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

Suggested citation format:

Finn, C.E. (2025). “School Governance Redux: Two books present distinct approaches to reforming local control of public schools.” Education Next, 25(4), 7 October 2025.

From the Office of Rachel Maddow
United States Secretary of Education
Oct. 6, 2029

Dear College President,

I hope you’re having as much fun as I am during this wild stretch as your U.S. Secretary of Education. And things are about to get even better!

Today I’m pleased to extend an invitation to join the Ocasio-Cortez administration’s new “Education Zone for Excellence and Equity”—henceforth to be known as the Platinum-Plus EZPass^TM for federal postsecondary funding. Modeled on the “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” that the Trump administration rolled out in October 2025, the EZPass^TM is updated, improved, and includes a fantastic suite of ALL-NEW features!

Some of you may have missed your chance to join President Trump’s “Compact” four years ago. At the time, my predecessor and two senior White House officials sent a 10-page letter to college leaders asking them to promise their institutions would adopt a five-year tuition freeze, require a test for admissions, combat grade inflation, cap international enrollment, protect right-wing speech, and more. Signatories were promised priority access to both federal funds and administration officials.

We’re taking that core idea and fine-tuning it in the EZPass^TM to ensure that the conditions are serving the interests of all Americans and not just dark-money oligarchs.

Here are the half-dozen commitments that colleges will need to make if they wish to join the “Compact for Postsecondary Excellence and Equity” and get the perks of EZPass^TM membership:

• Guarantee a Tuition-Free Education for All Working- and Middle-Class Students. (We’ll be seizing the assets of the oligarchs to cover any shortfalls.)
• Invest in Mental Health and Student Support Services. (The administration prioritizes culturally competent mental health services as well as student wellness, food security, and housing stability.)
• Defend Academic Freedom from Political Interference. (We reject directives that interfere with teaching race, gender, climate change, and the truth about American history.)
• Promote Labor Rights for Campus Workers and Adjunct Faculty. (It’s essential to support unionization efforts while taking steps to ensure fair wages, benefits, and working conditions.)
• Advance Equity in Admissions and Campus Life. (Time to eliminate our test and GPA obsession in favor of holistic admissions practices that promote inclusive, equitable access.)
• Make Colleges Climate Leaders. (Let’s leverage campus resources to create climate action plans, divest from fossil fuels, and lead on sustainability education and innovation.)

You may be wondering, “What does it take to join the Platinum-Plus EZPass^TM program?” It’s as easy as 1-2-3. First, any president browbeaten into signing Trump’s compact just needs to disavow that decision and unwind any policy changes. Second, fill out the online form (or have ChatGPT do it for you—we don’t care). Third, sit back and enjoy the PERKS.

Believe me, you won’t want to miss those perks! As it was under the Trump administration, institutional leaders who sign up will get priority access to White House events and discussions with officials. We’ll also throw in “Keeping It Cozy with AOC” fleeces for your leadership team and a personal invite to my monthly “alphabet soup” lunch with the NEA, AFT, AAUP, ACLU, and AG Mamdani. And you might want to announce that all federal student debt is forgiven for your current and former students, as President Ocasio-Cortez is preparing an executive order that will forgive all loans for anyone who attends or has attended an EZPass^TM institution.

“This is too good to be true!” you must be gasping. Well, straighten your tams and hold onto your tassels, there’s still more. The dozen campus leaders who most effusively demonstrate their enthusiasm for President AOC’s agenda will be invited to a special “Celebrating Higher Ed’s All-Stars” dinner with the president and her top donors (think Trump crypto dinner—but BETTER!). The first twenty research institutions to roll out a climate plan approved by my office will get access to a special day-long “working session” with the research impresarios at the Department of the Interior, Department of Energy, and the National Science Foundation. Signatories will also be invited to be part of our “National Civic Engagement” strategy, featuring White House confabs with Bluesky influencers and a chance at special competitive grants for mission-aligned voter registration and mobilization.

I want to be very clear: This is nothing more than your friendly Department of Education extending an open hand. No one should think I’m trying to “make an offer you can’t refuse,” because that’s just wrong. But see, you got a nice little university there, and it would be a shame if something happened to it. Indeed, as my predecessor, former Secretary Linda McMahon, put it to college presidents four years ago, “Institutions of higher education are free to develop models and values other than those below, if the institution elects to forego federal benefits.”

In AOC’s America, this is what democracy looks like. Now, it’s time to get with the program.

Warmly,

Rachel Maddow
U.S. Secretary of Education

Frederick Hess is an executive editor of Education Next and the author of the blog “Old School with Rick Hess.”