Hoover Institution (Stanford, CA) — Teachers, education scholars, and policymakers gathered at the Hoover Institution on January 9–10 for the 2025 Hoover Institution Education Summit, to explore new ways of thinking about US K–12 education reform amid current and emerging challenges. Distinguished Research Fellow Macke Raymond convened participants, challenging them to think outside the box.
“How is it that a sector devoted to learning can’t seem to learn anything to make itself better?” asked Raymond to open the fourth annual conference.
Guiding the discussion was a new report from Hoover’s Education Futures Council that urges teachers and school administrators to place student achievement at the forefront of their efforts. Ours to Solve, Once — and For All, elevates public schools—instead of local school districts, states, or the federal government—to be the focus of the education system, and for principals and teacher to receive performance-based compensation, agency, and flexibility to adjust their approaches to advance student learning.
The report argues that the large, rigid, and burdensome regulatory regimes governing most of America’s public schools need to get leaner and incentive-oriented, prompting teachers and school leaders to expand their instructional skills. It recommends new approaches to the teaching occupation, with an emphasis on teachers developing “professional mastery” of their subject areas and producing exemplars and toolkits of outstanding practice.
The report notes what many of the conference speakers said repeatedly: that reforms in the education sector over the past forty years have been piecemeal at best.
The Nation’s Education Reform Journey
Explaining why education reform efforts have suffered from poor coordination and lack of effectiveness in recent decades fell to the first conference panel, where Hoover fellows Michael T. Hartney, Thomas Dee, Eric Hanushek, and Stephen Bowen spoke about America’s school reform journey since the US government’s 1983 release of A Nation at Risk.
Together, they spoke of developments in recent decades that have hampered efforts at reform. They estimate that A Nation at Risk spurred up to six thousand separate education reform efforts across the US in the four decades since its publication. However, the impact of these reforms is uneven.
The Education Futures Council report cites National Assessment of Education Progress data showing that between 1990 and 2022, fourth-grade math scores rose 10 percent, but between 1992 and 2022, fourth-grading reading scores stayed completely flat.
The problem with these reforms, the panel said, is they that they were piecemeal and ran up against entrenched interests, such as schoolteachers’ unions, which by 1981 represented up to two-thirds of all US public school teachers.
While school funding is often cited by education critics as a problem, the panelists pointed out that average spending per pupil is 400 percent more than it was in the 1960s, adjusted for inflation.
And entirely new challenges to education advancement have emerged just in the last few years. Hanushek cited his research on the cumulative impact of COVID-19 school shutdowns on lost earnings, which could reach 6 percent of the total lifetime earnings of some students if not corrected.
Dee also cited his findings that absenteeism from school has exploded since the onset of COVID-19, increasing 91 percent to roughly a quarter of all students in 2021–22.
Tectonic Shifts
After the panel discussion, participants heard from Research Fellow James (Lynn) Woodworth, who is tracking significant shifts in the makeup of communities across the United States.
Citing population demographics as one example, Woodworth explained how current and future trends will force school systems in many areas of the country to make significant changes. Additional changes in the economy, labor force, and education-choice policies will add to the pressure that communities face, though not everywhere and not all at the same time. The demand these changes will place on states and school districts to respond is unprecedented, Dr. Woodworth noted.
To learn more about the history of and progress made in the last four decades of education reform efforts, read A Nation at Risk + 40, released last year by the Hoover Education Success Initiative.
The Education Futures Council Report
During another session, members of the Education Futures Council, Jean-Claude Brizard, Andrew Luck, and Frances Messano, stepped on stage to talk about why school reform and improvements take so long and often show scant results.
Brizard, who led school districts in Rochester, New York, and Chicago, Illinois, now heads Digital Promise Global, a nonprofit dedicated to reforming education practices through technology. He recalled experiences in both jurisdictions that illustrate just how difficult it is to make changes in a public school district.
School district leaders often face pushback on reform efforts by elected school boards, elected school superintendents, teachers’ unions, and parents, with each group offering a different reason why they oppose these efforts.
Brizard said that in one instance, he got around those groups by hosting a monthly call-in show with parents on his area’s local NPR affiliate radio station, but even that wasn’t enough.
When lack of information about changes or the general state of things wasn’t the problem, complicated processes to dismiss poor teachers or principals was. And in other instances, he said, unions or other education stakeholders got in the way of what he thought were meaningful reforms.
He even questioned the notion of organizing schools into districts, asking if that practice itself was obsolete.
For her part, Messano said too many of America’s school districts consider enabling students to read and write proficiently as the highest standard they could ever expect to achieve, when the future requirements of workplaces and society in general will require pupils to demonstrate so much more than that.
And Luck, a former quarterback of the Stanford Cardinal and the NFL’s Indianapolis Colts (and now general manager of Stanford Football), said that we need to start looking at poorly performing students as products of a failing school organization, not the other way around.
Keynote: Mariano-Florentino (Tino) Cuéllar
Mariano-Florentino (Tino) Cuéllar, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told attendees about his own experiences with the education system and his time as a member of the Department of Education’s Equity and Excellence Commission from 2011 to 2013, alongside Eric Hanushek.
He said he took from that experience a fundamental lesson, that properly funding a school or district was only one piece of the puzzle; there must also be a plan for tracking outcomes and making school leaders accountable.
He also spoke of the disconnect between students’ guarantees to a quality education—required by state constitutions and other policies—and the wide gaps that exist between schools in wealthy and poor areas in access to important features of a modern educational experience, including technology, counseling, proficient teachers, and extracurricular activities.
Flipping the System
In a panel devoted to exploring the voluminous amount of rigid regulation that prevents growth and innovation in public schools, Philip K. Howard, author and chair of Common Good; Jim Peyser, former Massachusetts secretary of education; and Jeremy Tucker, superintendent of Liberty Public Schools in Missouri, asked how individual school leaders could begin to make improvements to their school’s workplace culture, regardless of the wider priorities of their school district.
Howard cited an example from the California sexual education curriculum, which now consists of a document that is 717 pages long. While it addresses a complex, delicate, and nuanced topic, Howard said that having such a lengthy manual guiding its instruction robs individual teachers of their own agency and good judgment.
Toward a New Professionalism
The final panel saw South Carolina teacher Patrick Kelly, Houston Schools superintendent Mike Miles, Evan Stone, CEO of Educators for Excellence, and Jenn Vranek of Education First Consulting discussing the teaching profession itself, apart from school systems or students and parents.
Vranek pointed to recent job satisfaction surveys that paint a dark picture of the teaching profession. While half of American workers say they are extremely or very satisfied with their jobs, only one-third of teachers are.
A full quarter of all teachers recently surveyed say they are planning to exit the profession, and only 16 percent of those surveyed would recommend the work to others.
Panelists said part of this pessimism derives from teachers’ being placed in a situation where they are responsible and accountable for pupils’ success without much assistance or guidance as to how to achieve success.
Educators who are held accountable for their pupils’ test scores but aren’t given support when their students are struggling become demoralized and start to fear accountability instead of embracing it as a way to improve.
Accountability measures in school systems must go hand in hand with resources and support that help address student needs, panelists said.
