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It鈥檚 a bleak time in education policy.

Student achievement started falling about a decade ago, slowly at first, and then all at once. Then COVID led to dramatic drops in enrollment and attendance and a decline in trust in public schools. This year, with the expiration of federal relief funds, schools will have a lot less money to spend on staff or new programs.

With all this in mind, with education floundering and in need of direction, I sketched out a list of 12 guiding principles. Some may seem like obvious truisms, but they haven鈥檛 always been reflected in policy or classroom practices in recent years. Others may be more controversial and fly in the face of prevailing trends. But America is overdue for a big national reckoning about the current and future state of its public schools, so here鈥檚 my attempt to start that conversation:聽

1. Education is good, but knowledge is better. More schooling leads to more learning, and people who know more stuff tend to lead more successful, productive lives. That’s good for individuals and good for society. But time in school is merely an input measure, and the outcome 鈥� achievement 鈥� is what will ultimately matter in a child鈥檚 life. That lesson can be multiplied over the broader society. As economist Rick Hanushek to me back in 2015, 鈥淚n the long run, the economic well-being of countries depends upon the quality of their workers.鈥�

2. Teachers are incredibly important. Educators are still in-school factor for student learning, and the best teachers also improve students’ . As a policy matter, schools should hold teachers to high standards and pay them like professionals.

3. Incentives matter. Students and educators are rational actors and will respond to incentives. When states and school districts 鈥� especially those in areas 鈥� retreat from school and student , that will have consequences in the form of reduced academic effort and lower achievement. Teachers as a group are well-intentioned and mission-oriented, but they naturally to toward with less challenging students. Deliberate policy nudges in the form of for working in schools and can help reverse these normal human tendencies.

4. Testing and high expectations are good. They give people targets to shoot for, hold them accountable for results and provide a tool for diagnosing what needs to improve.

5. Parents deserve honest, timely information about their child鈥檚 performance. The nonprofit group Learning Heroes has found that believe their child is on grade level, while the reality is about half that. This has fed into an urgency gap, where educators warn the public that kids are behind even as they struggle to enroll students in tutoring or summer school or convince students to take those programs seriously.

States have been mostly indifferent to this disconnect. They take months to process and distribute the results of their annual spring tests. Those exams are meant to present parents with the objective reality of their child鈥檚 performance, but that check on the system can鈥檛 happen given the current delays. In response, Ohio now requires school districts to with parents no later than June 30 of each year, and Virginia will soon give parents their child鈥檚 results after the testing window closes. More states should follow Ohio and Virginia鈥檚 lead.

6. All children should get a fair opportunity to be educated to the best of their ability. A noble pursuit for 鈥渆quity鈥� has sometimes meant that schools hold higher-achieving students back. That鈥檚 a mistake, and schools would be better off with a clear focus on developing all kids鈥� talent. , in which students qualify for accelerated courses based on their demonstrated performance, is one simple policy that鈥檚 starting to spread across the country. Similarly, more places could adopt individual learning plans, as Mississippi did in reading, or what some states do for gifted students.

7. Public education can take many forms. The current system of delivering public K-12 education through residential school districts is a weird artifact of history. It鈥檚 not how pre-K or higher ed work, it leads to economic segregation and it distorts the housing market. Plus, as Johns Hopkins researcher Ashley Rogers-Berner has pointed out, it makes the U.S. an outlier internationally.

8. Choice is good, but it doesn’t guarantee better results. Within education, choice makes people happier with their schools and helps students (and teachers) find the right fit. , , voluntary desegregation programs and can all boost outcomes for kids. There should be fewer and more options.

Still, choice is no guarantee of quality, and a well-functioning market requires oversight. As economist and others have noted, the logic of the free market doesn鈥檛 apply neatly in the K-12 context, given the lack of information parents have about their choices and the limited options they may have available depending on where they live. In other words, policymakers can鈥檛 just assume parents voting with their feet will automatically lead to systemwide improvements. 

9. Beginners need to be explicitly taught to master the basics. In basically every human endeavor, beginners need to follow carefully sequenced steps to learn the fundamentals and make progress. For example, kids won鈥檛 learn to read well unless they can decode letters into words. That requires teachers to patiently break down the 44 distinct phonemes used in the English language, and that can feel boring or unimportant to adults who don鈥檛 remember how they learned to read. Too many education fads suffer from this 鈥溾�� and assume that kids will just figure things out on their own. 

10. Knowledge is specific to particular domains. We all want kids to be creative, and to be able to read with comprehension. But these are not . Instead, they are tied up with what someone already knows and can do. For example, the most creative people in any field are those who have mastered the basics and can apply those in new ways. Similarly, people’s ability to read and understand something new depends on what they already know. People don鈥檛 knowledge they don鈥檛 continue to refresh, and there is very little across skills and subjects. Learning chess won鈥檛 make you smarter, and most adults have forgotten much of what they learned in school. As such, schools should seek to help students develop deep knowledge in specific content areas, rather than taking a skills-based approach.

11. Practice is good. Educators sometimes speak derogatorily about 鈥渞ote鈥� memorization or 鈥渄rill and kill.鈥� No one talks like that in sports or the arts, even though, in those fields, it鈥檚 obvious that leads to improvement. Within education, kids need to master their times tables before they can handle more advanced math, and they need to spend plenty of time immersed in books to build up their vocabulary and reading stamina. It doesn鈥檛 all need to happen during the school day, but kids need lots of time to practice academic skills.

12. Individual policies matter, but they are not a guaranteed recipe. Researchers have documented a number of variables associated with improvements in student outcomes. For example, it鈥檚 true that generally helps schools produce better results and that smaller classes are easier to work with than bigger ones. But sometimes, advocates take these lessons too far. They assume there are no trade-offs to these policies or lose sight of the ultimate goal of education. For example, states like California and Florida spent billions of dollars reducing class sizes , perhaps in part because it led to a decline in . Maine about twice as much per pupil as Mississippi does, yet students in Mississippi outperform those in Maine, once you factor in demographics.

Education is complicated, and policymakers need to focus on the end goal 鈥� or they can get lost chasing the wrong things. By remembering the principles I鈥檝e outlined here, they have a better chance of getting American education back on track and helping all students reach their full potential.

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