But it’s been a while. Times have changed. Those fevered efforts to promote standards, teacher evaluation, accountability, and school turnarounds faded. There was a tendency to declare victory and move on to the next new thing, and eventually it created a lot of frustration with the failure of reforms to deliver on their promise. Funders shifted to other priorities, and much of the K–12 advocacy community wound up enlisting in Ibram X. Kendi’s “anti-racist” crusade. For nearly a decade since, the K–12 debate has been dominated by culture clashes, the pandemic, and shiny new technologies.
Well, for better and worse, old-fashioned school reform shows signs of making a comeback. Fueled by dismal academic results, troubling levels of absenteeism and classroom misconduct, concerns about the doomscrolling mind virus, and a general sense of post-pandemic reckoning, one can see hints of revival everywhere. The science of reading has grown from a brushfire into a four-alarm movement. Proposals like state takeovers of failing schools are back on the radar. Advocates are pushing hard for civics, “high-quality” instructional materials, career pathways, and new high school models. Democrats for Education Reform has got its mojo back. School choice has exploded. There’s steady chatter about the prospects of resurrecting bipartisan school reform.
The decade-long hiatus from “reform” means that many of those enmeshed in today’s renaissance were in middle school back when Race to the Top was an object of national fascination. Coming at these challenges with fresh eyes can be a plus. It can also usher in a naivete that ends up reenacting all the mistakes of the last crowd.
As I noted a decade ago in Letters to a Young Education Reformer, there’s much to be learned from the Bush-Obama era. While the first two-thirds of that period saw a promising continuation of 1990s-era NAEP gains, a host of seemingly good ideas—from Reading First to teacher evaluation to school turnarounds—delivered a lot less than champions had hoped or promised (for examples of how disappointing things got, see here, here, and here). Taking a moment to understand what went wrong last time really should be table stakes for today’s would-be reformers.
Now, in noting this, humility is warranted. I don’t claim to have the authoritative set of lessons, much less any secret insight into how they would apply in 2026. After all, today’s politics and technology differ considerably from a decade ago. This makes it hard to know exactly how hard-earned lessons should apply. That said, here are five lessons that may prove useful in this new school reform landscape.
Don’t mistake initial wins for lasting victories. Every corner of the Bush-Obama reform era was stuffed with old, tattered “Mission Accomplished” banners that had been hung too soon. The celebrations that followed No Child Left Behind, the high fives in the Gates Foundation war room tracking Common Core adoption, or the chest-thumping “wins” on teacher evaluation reform all look pretty premature in retrospect. The battle for adoption or an initial appropriation is often a long, exhausting push. While it can be natural to breathe a sigh of relief, declare victory, and move on after passing legislation, the hardest part of reform is all the tedious, ongoing work that follows in state agencies, local systems, and classrooms. There’s recently been a lot of healthy talk about the importance of “implementation.” That’s good, as long as it’s accompanied by an understanding that in education, there’s no such thing as an “implementation problem.” The stuff that gets termed “implementation” is the actual work of reform. Legislative wins, no matter how tough, are just an opening act. Reformers used to give me buckets of grief when I said this, complaining that I was denying them the credit they’d earned. That doesn’t make it any less true. State voucher expansions or science of reading mandates draw national interest and allow advocates to tally up wins, but the long battles that follow are what determine whether the efforts pay off.
Resist drinking the Kool-Aid. Reformers tend to be committed to their cause. Even if the passion wasn’t there at the start, years of pursuing funds, wooing allies, taking fire, and battling as part of a team tend to turn reformers into true believers. That can be a problem when it comes to making sense of public pushback or absorbing criticism from observers outside the circle of trust. The Common Core diehards were famously dismissive of “white suburban moms,” for instance. This made it a helluva lot tougher to understand good-faith complaints about goofy math problems or the de-emphasis of fiction. What might that look like in 2026? Well, those who’ve imbibed too much innovation Kool-Aid might be prone to dismiss ed tech backlash as AI panic, rather than a legitimate response to screen-saturated classrooms and schools’ history of fumbling technology. In 2026, the prevalence of echo chambers and algorithm-driven social media feeds makes it that much harder—and more important—to resist the pull of the tribe.
