K–12 education and preschool policies and practices—the technology of human capital formation—have not escaped the ideological divide in America. Despite numerous partisan differences on many questions, scholars and informed observers broadly agree on a range of facts, trends, and key policies. This essay surveys the education landscape, attempting to locate a consensus evaluation of topics including teacher pay, racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps, school choice, and accountability.
Key Takeaways
- Human capital is central to democracy, economic growth, and social mobility. Giving up on educational success is not an option, even though the path forward is not clear.
- The base of credible education research is growing rapidly, with increased data collection and emphasis on causal methodology. Yet translating research to improvements in practice remains a major challenge, due to variation in local contexts and the difficulty in scaling educational strategies.
- Education has long been a growth industry in the United States, with the number of students rising, expenditures as a percentage of GDP doubling between 1950 and 2010, and student achievement showing steady progress. But public schools have reached an inflection point: since 2010, these trends have turned downward—a slide that cascaded when the COVID pandemic struck—posing major challenges for the years ahead.
- Inequities have lessened but continue to abound in American schools. Racial, ethnic, and economic differences in student achievement remain large, school quality continues to differ according to the wealth of each respective community, and racial segregation persists.
- Teachers are the key resource for learning at school. Yet policies governing their training, recruitment, retention, and compensation are inefficient and not aligned with the practical needs of schools. Teacher shortages in high-poverty schools and in math, science, and special education are the most severe.
- Publicly provided early childhood education is rapidly expanding. Small-scale experiments show promising results, but large-scale interventions have less consistently positive results. Expanding early childhood education will not be a panacea for all that ails K–12 schooling.
