The following is an excerpt of an article that was originally published on the Progressive.
But media pundits and reporters ignore it, and Republicans are trying to kill it.
Recently, opinion pieces in mainstream media outlets have begun speculating that education policy will be an important factor in the 2026 midterm elections, and that Republicans are owning the Democrats on the issue.
In October, The New York Times pundit David Brooks urged Democrats to reprise bipartisan policy ideas from the Clinton-Bush-Obama years of governing schools based on how their students scored on standardized tests. Drawing from recent assessments that show test score gains in a few Southern states, Brooks concluded, “the party that dominates the rural areas [i.e., Republicans] has a proven educational agenda while the party that dominates the urban areas [Democrats] doesn’t.” Similarly, in The Hill, Ben Austin, a former campaign staffer for Kamala Harris, lamented that Democrats “have lost their way” on education, because “it is politically untenable for Democrats to oppose all forms of school choice when Republicans are offering a free market smorgasbord of choice.”
What these commentators ignore are the results of a quiet revolution in blue states—and a few red states—that are implementing a school improvement plan commonly called the community school approach. A community school uses an evidenced-based strategy to improve student outcomes by drawing from the resources and voices of the surrounding community to support the full range of needs and interests of students and families. This approach, in which policies and programs are developed based on community input and multifaceted student outcomes rather than just test scores, is the antithesis of what has driven bipartisan education policies for the past thirty years. Up until now, education policy has emphasized top-down, heavy-handed governance and privatization schemes such as charter schools.
In 2021, California launched a $4.1 billion grant program to spur a two-year expansion of community school implementations across the state. The grants of up to $500,000 per school annually are used to help sustain or expand existing community school initiatives.
The same year, Maryland enacted its Blueprint for Maryland’s Future that included, among other measures, implementations of the community school strategy in schools across the state that have the highest concentrations of low-income students. In New York City, more than one in every four public schools is a community school.
The early results of efforts to measure the impact of community school initiatives have been impressive so far.
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Jeff Bryant is a writing fellow and chief correspondent for Our Schools. He is a communications consultant, freelance writer, advocacy journalist, and director of the Education Opportunity Network, a strategy and messaging center for progressive education policy. His award-winning commentary and reporting routinely appear in prominent online news outlets, and he speaks frequently at national events about public education policy. Follow him on Bluesky @jeffbinnc.
Photo Credit: 2nd Lt. Darren Domingo via Wikimedia Commons
