A progressive vision for education in the 21st century

Introduction and summary

The American education system is home to countless schools, child care centers, and colleges and universities. They are attended by millions of students and led by teachers, principals, presidents, professors, and other individuals. All are working toward a common goal of fostering opportunity, supporting families, and strengthening local communities and the country as a whole. This system spans early childhood education, K-12 education, higher education, and workforce development—each piece a load-bearing support for the American dream. And to preserve that dream, it is essential to expand educational opportunities across the country.

Education is our only political safety. Outside of this ark, all is deluge.

– Horace Mann, Thoughts Selected From the Writings of Horace Mann (Boston: H. B. Fuller and Company, 1867).

More than 100 years ago, education in the United States was limited. Americans sent their children to elementary school to learn the basics of reading and writing, and then were often taken out of school to work in factories, on farms, or any other job they could find to support their families.¹ In 1900, only 51 percent of children went to school at all,² and only 5 percent went on to attend high school or college.³ This meant that the majority of Americans grew up receiving only an elementary education and the limited economic opportunities that came with it.

If the nation’s educational progress had ended in 1900, it is hard to imagine that the United States could have endured two world wars, won the space race, created the information highway, and met the other challenges of the 20th century. Luckily, over the course of that century, federal, state, and local actors; parents; community leaders; activists; and others helped expand access to education at all levels. This was accomplished through investments in free and public schools, including preschool programs such as Head Start, and through federal funding for more equitable public schools through Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Investments in higher education came courtesy of the GI Bill and financial aid programs such as the Pell Grant for low-income college students. Civil rights leaders and others expanded access to education for women and families of color, including those of Asian, Black, American Indian, and Latino descent.

As a result of this progress, access to education and the opportunities associated with it have been open to a far greater number of Americans. As of 2022, approximately 50 million children had access to public education.⁴ And as of the fall of 2021, 18.6 million students were enrolled in higher education.⁵ This expansion not only meant that more children were in school for longer periods of time, but it has also contributed to the growth of U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) and the American middle class.⁶

However, this journey of educational progress need not end with these achievements. Educational progress can still be made. A bold, progressive vision for education policy that looks at the next 100 years can help Americans meet the challenges of this century. At its foundation, the American education system should ensure that a quality education is affordable and accessible for every family, for every worker, and for everyone looking to grab hold of the American dream. And that system should create even greater economic and educational opportunity, strengthen the nation’s competitiveness and democracy, and be available to all Americans.

At its foundation, the American education system should ensure that a quality education is affordable and accessible for every family, for every worker, and for everyone looking to grab hold of the American dream.

These three overarching themes—opportunity, strengthening the nation, and inclusion and belonging—must be at the bedrock of any progressive vision for education. This introduction to the Center for American Progress report “A Progressive Vision for Education in the 21st Century” explores these themes in more depth and provides a summary of the recommendations included in the other chapters of this report.

Opportunity

As Americans attain higher levels of education, they also obtain higher wages on average.⁷ This is one of the major strengths of the U.S. education system. But education policies at the local, state, and federal levels should help Americans access those higher wages and opportunities through affordable means. Families should not have to bear heavy debt burdens or high out-of-pocket costs to pursue education at any level. Early childhood education, K-12 education, higher education, apprenticeships, and workforce development opportunities should have a free and public option for participants and families.

While K-12 education is already free for most families, it is important to continue to invest in that public option so that all families have access to quality public schools, regardless of whether they live in rural areas, the suburbs, or cities. Moreover, policymakers at all levels of government should continue to pursue investments that ensure that teachers are paid a fair and living wage, that students have access to free school meals, and that children are not learning how to meet the challenges of this century in spaces built during the last one.

As education is inextricably linked with opportunity, it is important for policymakers to recognize that not all educational opportunities are the same. Education policies should help prevent families from wasting their hard-earned resources on low-quality educational products. A focus on accountability at all levels of education is essential for enhancing opportunity across the entire system.

Strengthening the nation

A thriving education system is essential for the strength of the United States. Education supports the country’s national security, global competitiveness, and democracy. In 1957, when the former Soviet Union launched Sputnik I into orbit, President Dwight D. Eisenhower called for investing in education “to encourage improved teaching quality and student opportunities in the interests of national security” and worked with Congress to pass the National Defense Education Act.⁸ Today, education remains vital to the country’s national security, which is why the federal government continues to support university research and other key educational programs.⁹

Education also plays an important role in supporting the nation’s global competitiveness. In the same way that higher levels of education can lead to higher wages for individuals, an educated workforce also contributes to GDP growth.¹⁰ Higher levels of educational attainment also can lower unemployment,¹¹ free up federal resources spent on social services,¹² and improve overall health.¹³ For example, individuals with higher levels of education experienced less unemployment and disruption during the recent COVID-19 pandemic.¹⁴

Moreover, education strengthens American democracy. U.S. public schools were founded on the belief “that children from different backgrounds, the children of workers and the children of factory owners, would be educated together.”¹⁵ Today, thanks to its public schools, the United States has centers of learning that offer education to students no matter who they are, where they are from, what they look like, or how they worship. Public schools also offer—and must continue to offer—students the opportunity to learn about American freedoms. As such, public schools in the United States mirror and inform many of the ideals of democracy. Those ideals should be celebrated and safeguarded so that the country continues to thrive for generations to come.

Today, thanks to its public schools, the United States has centers of learning that offer education to students no matter who they are, where they are from, what they look like, or how they worship.

Inclusion and belonging

In addition to supporting American democracy, education also strengthens the country’s sense of community. Public schools are the centers of their communities, meeting places for children and their families, houses of worship on weekends, and polling places on election day. When schools are open to everyone, they help to strengthen the social fabric of their communities. But when schools become places of exclusion, the common bonds of community become frayed.

When Congress established the U.S. Department of Education in 1979, it recognized that “there is a continuing need to ensure equal access for all Americans to educational opportunities of a high quality, and such educational opportunities should not be denied because of race, creed, color, national origin, or sex.”¹⁶ To provide equal access to education, the American education system should focus on equity. The system should be committed to equitable outcomes for all children—for those in impoverished rural communities, those in both affluent and struggling suburban communities, and those in urban communities across the nation.

Greater access to education is essential to creating a sense of belonging and ensuring equitable outcomes for all students. Policymakers should expand access to include the earlier years of life. But this expansion should not stop there. As more and more jobs require education beyond high school, policies should provide universal access to schooling beyond the secondary level.¹⁷ This would include universal access for Americans at any age to attend college or community college and to pursue apprenticeships or other workforce development opportunities. This would mean that an American of any age could gain access to educational opportunities and achieve the economic benefits that come with them.

Policy recommendations

Chapter 1: Early childhood

• Support the unionization of early care and education workers, which can boost their wages, reduce wage inequality, and ensure these workers have a valued voice in U.S. democracy. States should ensure that all early care and education workers, particularly home-based providers, can unionize and collectively bargain.
• Reauthorize the Preschool Development Grant Birth through Five (PDG B-5) program as the Early Childhood Innovation Fund and fold it into the existing Child Care and Development Block Grant program with increased funding to support states in building the capacity to deliver universal birth-through-5 systems in a variety of settings.
• Supply resources and support so that all providers of early care and education across various settings can meet certain health and safety standards. This would result in more choice for families and more providers feeling valued and supported by the early childhood system.
• Support the passage of bold child care legislation, such as the Child Care for Working Families Act, to establish consistent funding for early care and learning programs. This proposal would lower costs for families, increase the number of child care slots, and improve compensation and benefits for early care and education workers. Supply-building efforts such as those included in the Child Care for Working Families Act are a critical step toward establishing a federal universal birth-through-5 system.
• Establish an early childhood education interagency task force to create a coordinated continuum of services from birth through third grade, focused on such topics as the transition from the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act Part C to Part B and a targeted strategy around early literacy to boost test scores.

Chapter 2: K-12 education

• Support educator recruitment, development, and retention through various means, including by focusing on continued state efforts to increase teacher pay that involves multiple forms of compensation. In addition, policymakers should explore different staffing structures in schools to best support educators.
• Address crumbling school infrastructure, including by rehabilitating poorly ventilated buildings and thus curbing associated health risks for students amid the rise in extreme heat conditions.
• Establish federal policies to ensure equitable use of artificial intelligence (AI), including addressing digital equity and the creation of ethical principles for AI development. As part of this effort, the federal government should support rural education programs to ensure that rural communities have the resources and connectivity they need to access instruction and digital literacy skills.
• Address adequate and equitable funding by adopting and incentivizing student-weighted funding formulas so that all school districts in the country can provide equitable educational opportunities.
• Support whole child approaches to education, including student mental health and social and emotional learning.
• Strengthen and expand college and career pathways by focusing on career and technical education, work-based learning, and dual enrollment.

Chapter 3: Higher education

• Implement comprehensive measures that support academic freedom, institutional autonomy, and free inquiry while fostering safe learning environments in order to protect the right of students to learn the truth. Protecting academic freedom requires policies that shield it from political, special, and commercial interests and includes supporting tenure and faculty governance structures that enable faculty to teach, research, and express ideas without outside interference.
• Move away from debt-financed higher education and toward more direct funding from federal, state, and local governments, enabling colleges to lower fees charged directly to students.
• Increase grant aid to students and control rising college costs to make postsecondary education universally accessible.
• Rescind the U.S. Department of Education’s 2011 bundled services guidance that allows institutions of higher education to outsource core educational functions to third-party servicers without sufficient oversight. Collecting better information about third-party contractors for online programs is also essential.
• Implement measures that ensure equitable support for land-grant historically Black colleges and universities and Tribal colleges and universities to address long-standing funding inequities.

Chapter 4: Workforce development

• Establish a national workforce trust to sustainably fund training and education programs into the future. This would increase resources for training and employment by requiring employers of a certain size to pay into the trust. This proposed program would create a structure for cost sharing among the private sector and government for the training and education of workers, especially since employers have been reducing investments in training for their workers.
• Offer additional funding and options to students and workers interested in enrolling in training programs through the Individual Training Account (ITA) program of Title I of the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA). Policymakers could expand the ITA program through new WIOA investments and make them universal for all students and workers, who could flexibly use these funds for training throughout their careers.

Conclusion

Fruit trees are not planted for the fruit they yield tomorrow, but for the fruit that they can yield in the years to come. In the same way, a progressive vision for education is not one that will necessarily bear fruit overnight. It will take the hard work of progressive champions seizing every opportunity—whether in harvest or famine—to help make progress in education in the years and decades to come. This report outlines a progressive vision for American education across early childhood education, K-12 education, higher education, and workforce development.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Sophia Applegate, Beatrice Aronson, Carl Chancellor, Hailey Gibbs, Veronica Goodman, Erin Grant, Stephanie Hall, Weadé James, Ed Paisley, Lisette Partelow, Sara Partridge, Casey Peeks, Christian Rodriguez, Bianca Serbin, Shanée Simhoni, Lauren Vicary, Madison Weiss, and everyone who contributed to this report.