Public Education And The Future Of Democracy

By Frank F Islam & Ed Crego, September 10, 2026 (Image credits: Tom de Boor/JNCGPT56)

Public education has been a cornerstone of America’s democracy and economy, and at its best extends opportunity to all its participants.

That sentence is from the introduction to a series of essays on “Renewing Public Education’s Purpose,” published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review (SSIR). Those essays are important as references for consideration in shaping the future of public education, and reinforcing the contribution it can make to shaping the future of our democracy nationally.

There is only one problem. The state of public education in the United States today varies considerably from state to state.

In July of this year, the Network for Public Education (NPE) issued its 2026 Report Card, evaluating all 50 states and the District of Columbia’s performance in four categories: privatization of public education, protections for homeschooled students, school funding, and conditions for teaching and learning.

The Report Card showed that only two states — Nebraska and Vermont — received A’s. The two states receiving the lowest grades were Florida and Arizona — states which have “made active, sustained choices to abandon their public schools while directing public money toward private alternatives with documented records of fraud, discrimination, and academic failure.”

Key findings highlighted in the Executive Summary of the Report Card for each of the assessment categories include the following:

• Privatization: Thirty-four states and the District of Columbia now fund one or more private school voucher programs, and nineteen states operate Education Savings Account (ESA) programs — the most expansive and least accountable voucher — allowing families to spend public funds on a wide range of private educational expenses through a dedicated debit card. Across 26 states, more than a third of all charter schools that ever opened have since closed, leaving students and families to navigate the disruption.
• Protections for Homeschooled Students: In most states, the law provides near-absolute freedom to parents with virtually no checks on whether children are learning or safe.
• School Funding: Research firmly establishes that per-pupil spending is linked to student outcomes. Yet in state after state, the choice to fund privatization has come at the direct expense of public school investment. The gaps (in investment in public schools) between the top and bottom states are not marginal. They represent fundamentally different visions of what public education is for and who it is meant to serve
• Conditions for Teaching and Learning: The teacher shortage is real, but it is not uniform. It is worst in the states that have made teaching least attractive — through low pay, the erosion of collective bargaining rights, hostile political climates, and deteriorating working conditions. Student well-being is equally at stake. Nearly half of all states still permit corporal punishment in schools

The 2026 NPE Report Card concludes by observing that the “campaign to transform American education…at the federal level and in statehouses across the country” has the most negative impact on “children least able to seek alternatives: those in poverty, those with disabilities, those in rural communities, and those whose families lack the time or resources to navigate a fragmented marketplace of educational options.”

Given this complex context, shaping the future of public education will not, and should never, be a one size fits all approach. The ten experts who wrote the essays for the Renewing Public Education’s Purpose SSIR series understood that, and proposed a variety of solutions for renewing that purpose.

They agreed, however, on several points. Some of those key points, highlighted by Kent McGuire and Matt Wilka in their essay, “Building Public Schools Worth Defending,” in response to the ideas put forward by the other experts, include: purpose matters; the challenge confronting public schools “call for more than incremental fixes”; and “the window for rethinking school is wide open…which is why clarity of purpose matters more than ever.”

McGuire and Wilka stress that:

Clarifying education’s purpose allows us to move beyond the false tradeoffs that characterize our current debate on schools. Rather than pitting hard skills against soft, careers against civic preparation, or rigor against well-being, the future of education depends on seeing these as interconnected goals.

They add that “the authors in this series concurred that education also matters as a public good: the foundation for a dynamic economy, strong communities, and healthy democracy”.

And they provide two criteria and a design principle for educating toward a public purpose. Some of the thoughts put forward related to those concepts follow:

• Criteria 1: Learning to share power: Schools must be willing to co-create more of the learning experience with students, families, and the surrounding community.
• Criteria 2: Learning across difference: Co-creation and the practice of sharing power don’t happen in a vacuum. They unfold within an American democracy that demands certain capacities of its participants, including the ability to disagree productively across difference.
• Hub and spoke: A design principle for public purpose: We need both: spokes tailored to the individual, and hubs for learning and reflection across differences. The relationship between the two makes the system work.

McGuire and Wilka highlight that:

A hub and spoke model is one way to architect a future education system, but is hardly the only one. What matters is that community schools, apprenticeships, dual enrollment, civic projects, and new approaches to co-creation shift from being scattered reforms to coherent parts of the same public system. States and regions can pilot hub-like spaces for power sharing across difference, along with spoke-like infrastructure for flexible exploration.

As the data presented earlier in this piece demonstrates, this is a critical point to make, given the diverse structure and nature of public education and public schools from state to state across this country.

In summary, there is no single or simple answer for what to do to make our public schools central to the future of this nation again. Nevertheless, we must put approaches in place that can be customized to meet the needs of each state and school district in this country.

In closing, we leave you with this thought from Renewing Public Education’s Purpose:

What we cannot do is stand still, pretending that the system today is the one we need, or that our democracy can flourish absent a vibrant public education system in some form.

Our democracy will not flourish without a vibrant public education system. A vibrant public education system was vital to America’s past. During these politically and culturally divided times, it will be even more vital for its future.