On a Wednesday morning in April, two students from Bryan Station High School stood beside a presentation poster as city council members, philanthropy leaders, educators, and community members stopped to listen. The room looked like a science fair: students naming problems, explaining research, sharing findings. But this was Civics Day in Lexington, Kentucky, and the students were not presenting an experiment. They were making a case about public priorities in their own city.

Over several months, the students had collaborated with teams from two other high schools and with adults from the community to study the quality of open space at every Fayette County public school, examining safety, the tree canopy, accessibility, and neighborhood walkability to determine which school grounds most deserved investment. Just over a week later, they brought their recommendations to school district leaders and municipal officials, seeking support to move their recommendations into design and planning.

This was not a civics lesson. It was civic life: young people doing real public work, on a real issue, engaging adults with real authority to act. It was also the exception. Few American students learn civic life by participating in it, a fact that shows how far public education has drifted from one of its essential purposes.

That purpose extends beyond teaching about civics, although that is something public education must do. It includes giving young people repeated experience belonging to a community, working on shared problems, encountering difference, exercising agency and accepting limits, and learning from adults who model care, reciprocity, and commitment to the common good. In a diverse, self-governing society, forming citizens is a civic responsibility that cannot be relegated only to families or private settings. It requires institutions where young people practice it together, across the differences that otherwise separate them. Public schools remain the only institution with the reach and democratic warrant to do this work for nearly every child.

Democracy rests on the premise that every person belongs equally in the civic community. Public education is the most ambitious institution Americans have built to make that premise tangible in childhood: young people from different families, neighborhoods, traditions, and circumstances learning that they belong, and that others belong equally too. Democratic life requires some common commitments to make shared life possible, such as fair rules that apply to everyone, public institutions that serve the whole community, and access to honest information and accountable government. Democratic life also requires learning to live alongside genuine difference. In a society as diverse as America, making room for people who live differently than you is not optional. It is the condition under which you get to live the way you want to live. Public schools are where young people can develop both: the common commitments that make shared institutions worth having, and the habits of living well alongside people different from themselves.

Because public education is such vital connective tissue in American life, I wanted to understand how leaders outside K-12 think about its condition and their stake in its renewal. So I talked to leaders in democracy and civic renewal, workforce development, and adolescent mental health.

What I found was clarifying, and sobering.

A Crisis Beyond Test Scores

Nearly every person I spoke with understands that, at some level, public education is not working. Democracy leaders see too little practice in deliberation, debate, or democratic decision-making. Employers need adaptability, problem-solving, and the capacity to work across difference—and characterize graduates as less prepared than a generation ago. Mental health professionals know that clinical treatment alone cannot meet adolescent distress at its current scale. Civic renewal leaders know democratic habits are built locally, through repeated experience with shared problems and shared institutions. Yet many leaders in these fields have written off schools as too insular or politically fraught to serve as serious partners.

The brokenness extends beyond academic achievement into belonging, purpose, agency, and young people’s confidence that school is preparing them for lives they want to lead.

We have become far too accustomed to harrowing levels of youth disaffection. Forty-five percent of high schoolers report not feeling connected to people at school; one in five has seriously considered suicide, and nearly one in 10 has attempted suicide. Schools aren’t solely responsible for these conditions and cannot solve them on their own. But treating these issues primarily as pathologies belonging to individual students, rather than as signs that the institutions surrounding young people need rethinking, reveals how thoroughly we have stopped expecting schools to be places where young people thrive. Most leaders I speak with see K-12 schooling as deeply broken; the harder recognition is that the brokenness extends beyond academic achievement into belonging, purpose, agency, and young people’s confidence that school is preparing them for lives they want to lead.

Even leaders who recognize the problem often step back when the conversation turns from diagnosis to responsibility. Their avoidance has two sources. The first is institutional: schools that once functioned more naturally as community institutions have become increasingly “upwardly responsive”—focusing on policy compliance, accountability pressure, and risk management—and less responsive outward, to the communities around them. Outside leaders with ideas, relationships, and resources encounter unclear authority to collaborate and routines that treat potential partners as vendors, program providers, or distractions from tested priorities. Even field trips, once a basic way schools connected students to museums, civic institutions, workplaces, and public life, have been squeezed by testing pressure, cost, and risk aversion. 

The second is political: leaders see the culture wars over public education and conclude, reasonably, that engaging with K-12 means being pulled into those battles. They see no lane for people who want to realign schooling with life outside school and little reason to believe their engagement would be productive.

I have sympathy for both concerns. Schools can be hard to work with from the outside, and the politics of public education have become punishing. But staying on the sidelines is becoming a form of abdication. 

Public education cannot remain on its current trajectory and play the role our society needs it to play. Too many students experience school as abstracted academics and compliance, disconnected from meaning, agency, or purpose. In a survey of more than 70,000 students by Transcend, most students “say that school feels irrelevant, is boring, and offers them few opportunities to take charge of their learning.” As a middle schooler in Utah put it to me, “School is mostly about getting ready for more school.”

The larger risk is not cheating or distraction. It is that technology will shape young people’s habits, attention, judgment, and identity more powerfully than schools do.

AI is accelerating the consequences of this misalignment. When schooling lacks meaning, it becomes rational for students to offload academic work to AI. Many schools are trying to prevent students from using AI to evade assignments rather than asking what kinds of learning are worthy of young people’s effort in a world where machines can increasingly produce competent academic work on command. The larger risk is not cheating or distraction. It is that technology will shape young people’s habits, attention, judgment, and identity more powerfully than schools do.

Families are already responding. While public schools still educate the vast majority of American children, their position as the default institution is no longer secure. Since the pandemic, public schools have lost market share as private schooling and homeschooling have gained. Meanwhile, states are encouraging exiting the public education system by rapidly expanding vouchers, education savings accounts, and tax credit scholarships, increasingly with no income eligibility requirements. A new federal scholarship tax credit is scheduled to begin in 2027, adding a national incentive for private and alternative schooling that will likely provide billions of dollars to expand private options.

Public education must win back broad public confidence. Otherwise, it will become a last resort for families with no other options rather than a shared civic project sustained by broad public commitment. It is not just the institution that will hollow out, but also the democratic commitment public education represents: forming citizens capable of governing themselves, working alongside others, and living well. This is not a dystopian projection. It is the direction we are already moving.

But decline is not inevitable. The Lexington students I described were not anomalies of talent or privilege. They were students whose district decided to take civic formation seriously—and to focus on local government and local budget decisions, the terrain where citizens are most likely to develop genuine agency but that most civics curricula barely touch. Working with CivicLex, a community partner, students learned how their city works, identified a need they experienced and cared about, and brought their findings to people with power to act. The underlying approach is available to every school, in every community: meaningful work on real issues in the places where young people are growing up. And this approach can be embedded across the curriculum, not only in civics class. Making it the norm rather than the exception is the work of this moment, and it cannot be accomplished by educators alone.

What Will It Take?

What would it take to get there? Three things, more connected than they might first appear. Each addresses something essential: expanding what counts as learning and development, rooting schools in the communities and cultures they serve, and taking seriously the civic formation a pluralistic democracy requires.

Value what students can do as much as what they know. 

For a generation, education reform organized schools around a human capital agenda: develop academic knowledge that translates into credentials that sort students into higher education and the knowledge economy. However aligned this agenda was with the economic assumptions of the 1980s and 1990s, it was always too narrow for public education. Today, its limits are impossible to ignore: it narrowed achievement to what schools could most easily measure, while pushing harder-to-measure capacities like judgment, collaboration, contribution, and character to the margins.

A system that awards status almost entirely through academic credentials leaves many young people without meaningful ways to demonstrate what they can do, how they contribute, or who they are becoming.

Populace’s Purpose of Education Index found that Americans rank practical skills, critical thinking, and good character at the top of their priorities for K-12 education. This is not anti-intellectualism. It is parents and the broader public articulating something education policy has long ignored: that capable, thoughtful, morally serious people are the goal, and that test scores and transcripts are at best partial evidence of whether schools are producing them. There is an equity dimension here too. A system that awards status almost entirely through academic credentials leaves many young people without meaningful ways to demonstrate what they can do, how they contribute, or who they are becoming. Expanding the definition of achievement is not just educationally sound; it is also a democratic imperative.

Reconnect schools to the communities they serve. 

Schools became insulated in part to guard against patronage, parochialism, and local abuses of power. But guardrails too often hardened into bureaucracy and disconnection, making schools less open to community life and leaving many families feeling that school is indifferent to their values and unresponsive to their concerns. Reconnection to community is not only a matter of governance or building trust; it is also an educational good. Students should learn about the places where they are growing up—the histories, cultures, conflicts, and assets—through the people and institutions around them. Young people who understand their community as something they belong to and can help shape are already practicing common good pluralism.

Too often, the prevailing logic of education policy has equated opportunity with exit. In communities where opportunity has been imagined as existing somewhere else, success was defined as earning the credentials to leave. For some students, leaving is liberating and what they want or need. But many young people do not want education as escape; they want the power to make where they are from better. Public education should honor that aspiration, not treat rootedness as a failure of ambition.

Schools that lower barriers to engagement, treat outside relationships as assets rather than complications, and model reciprocity discover something the bureaucratic model obscures: most families, even frustrated ones, want their public schools to succeed. The demand for exit options can be a demand for voice that has not found another outlet. When I wrote about the Supreme Court’s Mahmoud v. Taylor decision—involving a Maryland district’s refusal to accommodate religious families seeking opt-outs from early-grade LGBTQ-inclusive lessons—I tried to make this point directly. More than 1,000 parents signed a petition requesting the right to opt out, but only 43 families in a district of over 160,000 students actually exercised the opt-out once it was granted. What families wanted most was respect for their agency.

Make civic formation explicit.

For decades, public education has tried to sidestep the values question by retreating to the neutral language of college and career readiness. It has not worked. “College for all” was not values neutral; it encoded a hierarchy of merit that awarded status largely through academic credentials and quietly devalued other ways of contributing to community, culture, economy, and democratic life. This is not an argument against strong foundational skills; literacy and numeracy are democratic obligations schools still too often fail to meet. It is an argument against confusing those foundations with a single academic pathway. That confusion helped sharpen the elite/non-elite fault lines that now run through our politics. Healing this fissure requires schools to say something more honest: there are many ways to demonstrate merit, many ways to contribute, and every child deserves preparation for full participation in common life.

The exhausted majority of parents who want something more straightforward has been sidelined, and schools have lost the moral authority that comes from being honest about what they are for.

The values vacuum created by this avoidance has been filled, predictably, by ideological actors from both flanks—book bans and curriculum restrictions on one side, compelled social progressivism on the other. The exhausted majority of parents who want something more straightforward has been sidelined, and schools have lost the moral authority that comes from being honest about what they are for.

The alternative to this abdication is not a national curriculum of civic virtues. Civic formation in schools requires local legitimacy because schools are irreducibly place-based institutions. Civic values cannot be cultivated in the abstract, handed down from anywhere, and expected to take root.

Values that communities deliberate about and claim for themselves are more likely to take hold than values imposed from outside. The evidence that communities are capable of this is quietly encouraging. Portraits of a Graduate, community-developed statements of what young people should know and be able to do, have now been adopted in many states and hundreds of districts. They show remarkable convergence around critical thinking, civic engagement, responsibility, and empathy. The education reform instinct is to turn such convergence into scalable frameworks and standardized measures. The wiser reading is permission to decentralize with confidence.

Kentucky is testing this proposition through United We Learn, an effort to redesign accountability so the state supports and calibrates local measures of student success rather than defining everything from above. The state’s Portrait of a Learner puts engaged citizen first, defined as someone who shows respect across difference, participates in democratic processes, and makes a positive impact on their community. More than 140 districts have developed community-rooted versions of their own.

We also need to be honest about risk. Local governance without constitutional floors has a history in this country of failing the very children it is most obligated to protect, and that history is still with us. But neither can we pretend centralized policy can deliver equity on its own. We need legal guardrails to set a real floor—universal access, adequacy guarantees, civil rights enforcement—combined with genuine community authority. Durable progress has always required legal protection and the harder work of winning the politics by changing hearts and minds.

Pluralism means accepting that different communities will reach different conclusions about contested questions, and that local deliberation, within constitutional limits, is usually better than having those differences decided from far away. Beaufort, South Carolina, shows what it looks like when that works.

Genuine community voice does not guarantee perfect outcomes, but it can lower the temperature, build legitimacy, and prevent organized extremes from standing in for the public.

When the school board faced a petition to ban nearly 100 books, the superintendent devised a community review process built on transparent deliberation and local accountability, with veterans and residents with no direct connection to the schools serving on every review committee. After deliberation, only five books were deemed inappropriate while the rest were returned to the shelves. Genuine community voice does not guarantee perfect outcomes, but it can lower the temperature, build legitimacy, and prevent organized extremes from standing in for the public.

CivicLex’s partnership with Fayette County Public Schools shows what it looks like when public education takes civic formation seriously. Every FCPS high school student receives instruction in local government and budgeting and participates in a Civic Expo where public agencies and major service providers spend a day in conversation with students. Teachers also engage with municipal officials so their instruction can reflect how the city actually works. Every student learns about civic life not as an academic abstraction, but through the people, institutions, decisions, and tradeoffs that shape their own community. Some students then go further, designing civic projects, researching community issues, and presenting findings to adults with power to act.

These three moves—valuing what students can do, reconnecting schools to community life, and making civic formation explicit—make school a more powerful engine of connection and belonging. And they respond to what young people, parents, and the broader public are already telling us. Gallup’s research on Gen Z finds that young people want more hands-on learning, practical skills, and real-world experiences. For K-12 students, those experiences are most accessible in the communities where they live: in local problems, local institutions, local work, and local relationships. 

A Shared Civic Project

The high school movement of the early twentieth century offers a hopeful precedent. High school enrollment in America grew from less than one-fifth of adolescents in 1910 to roughly three-quarters by 1940. This transformation was not driven by federal mandate but by communities that looked at what their children needed and built institutions to meet that need: schools with gymnasiums, auditoriums, laboratories, and civic spaces that became infrastructure for community life. The movement was messy, uneven, and exclusionary in ways we should not romanticize. But its underlying logic was sound: democratic communities build and govern the schools their children need.

We need something like that animating logic again: not nostalgia for the past, but a recovery of the conviction that public education is a shared civic project.

Recommitment will look different by sector, but the obligation is the same: recognize that public education is too important to work around. Employers should say plainly that the capacities they most need—judgment, communication, adaptability, problem-solving, and the ability to work across difference—must be developed while young people are still developing habits they will carry into adulthood, not left for remediation later. Civic leaders should insist that democratic participation be taught, practiced, and taken seriously through engagement with the institutions that govern students’ own communities. Pediatricians, child psychiatrists, and youth development leaders should say publicly that we cannot keep adding clinical supports around a school experience that too often reinforces disconnection, passivity, and purposelessness.

These sectors can also help make this work real. Employers can host internships, give employees time to mentor students, and help educators show how durable skills are applied in workplaces. Civic organizations and public agencies can engage students through applied projects, local problem-solving, and democratic deliberation. Health and youth development leaders can collaborate with schools to design routines and relationships that promote belonging, responsibility, and purpose. The point is not to pile more programs onto schools. It is to rebuild the connective tissue between school and the forms of adult life students are preparing to enter. 

The obligation extends beyond adjacent sectors to the broad public, especially to parents who have been crowded out or disengaged from decisions about what public education is for. More in Common’s research identifies an exhausted majority of Americans whose views are more moderate and pluralistic than public conflict suggests. Populace finds the same dynamic in education: Americans privately want schools to develop practical skills, critical thinking, and good character, but assume their neighbors still prioritize college preparation as the goal. The result is a majority that does not know it is a majority and therefore cedes the field to more ideological but better organized camps. Parents, whose children live the consequences of these decisions every day, are at the core of this majority. Their reengagement, alongside the sectors that depend on what schools help young people become, is the work this moment asks of us.

Reengaging this majority will require structures for community deliberation that keep organized extremes from standing in for the public. School board elections, with participation rates often below 10%, are too easily captured by groups whose views do not represent the broader community. Civic assemblies and other representative deliberative processes offer one path: ordinary community members, selected to reflect the public, given the structure and support to deliberate about what schools should be for and how success should be judged, and who deliver their recommendations back to the elected leaders who commissioned them.

 Young people are capable of doing real work, not just completing assignments.

The students in Lexington presenting their parks analysis to district officials and city leaders demonstrate something education policy too often forgets: young people are capable of doing real work, not just completing assignments. In civics, as in science, history, math, and career-connected learning, students should encounter problems, tasks, and expectations that connect to work valued outside school. Not every project will have city officials as its audience, but every subject can ask students to practice judgment, responsibility, craft, and collaboration in ways that matter beyond the classroom.

The question is whether the rest of us will build the conditions that make such work ordinary. Public education cannot renew itself alone, and it cannot be renewed by another round of reform imposed from above. It must be reclaimed as a shared civic project by families, communities, and the sectors whose own futures depend on whether young people come to see themselves as belonging to, contributing to, and responsible for a common future.

Ross Wiener is an independent consultant, and the former VP and Executive Director of Education & Society Program at The Aspen Institute.