Mike Petrilli, the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, recently launched a new Substack, SCHOOLED, that he hopes might help foster common ground on issues like accountability, charter schooling, gifted education, and school discipline. He explains that his not-so-secret agenda is to help reenergize the bipartisan “school reform” coalition. A one-time official in the Bush Department of Education and a co-founder of the Policy Innovators in Education Network, Mike has seen the ups and downs of “school reform” up close. Given that, I thought it’d be interesting to hear about this new endeavor and how he sees the broader choice landscape. Here’s what he had to say.
– Rick
Rick: Mike, earlier this fall, you started a new Substack called “SCHOOLED.” Care to share a bit about it?
Mike: Hey, Rick, that’s right. SCHOOLED is a newsletter that I publish every Tuesday and Friday morning. Most Tuesdays, I tee up a timely debate happening in education policy and solicit reactions, which I then print on Fridays. And on both days, I aggregate the best education opinion writing from around the internet, accompanied by a dash of my own commentary.
Rick: Why now?
Mike: There are two reasons. The prosaic reason is that I noticed a need that was going unfilled. While there are a bunch of education-focused newsletters, I didn’t see anyone aggregating opinion pieces in education policy, especially from across the left, right, and center. At a time when a growing number of writers are moving from traditional media to Substack and similar platforms, I suspected that, rather than having to keep up with every website, newsletter, and blog themselves, many people would value a one-stop shop for education opinion writing.
The more aspirational reason is that I’m hoping to restart the education reform conversation. I miss the early days of Twitter and blogging, when we had robust debates about policy, tactics, and direction. I’m hoping to bring some of that back.
Rick: What kinds of topics will you be tackling?
Mike: With a twice-weekly newsletter, I suspect I’ll tackle all the topics! We’ve already covered the educational choice tax credit in President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill; the evergreen debate over how to measure school quality; whether phone bans should happen at the state, local, or school level; and how to make gifted education more palatable to the left. I suspect that in the coming weeks we’ll address debates over charter schools, school discipline, the federal role in education, and more.
Rick: When you say you’re hoping to restart the old, bipartisan school reform conversation, what do you have in mind?
Mike: I miss the days when we used to hash out big disagreements on Twitter, in blog posts, and in person at the major ed. reform conferences. Unfortunately, as social media became a cesspool and the reform movement fractured along ideological lines, those conversations became full of vitriol and then largely went silent. But I sense there’s an appetite to kick start them again. That’s partly because of widespread concern over declining NAEP scores, but also because some of the culture wars related to “peak woke” have started to lose their punch, making conversation more achievable. Or so I hope!
Rick: Why do you think that the old reform movement faded?
Mike: That’s such a great question. More than anything, I think there was reform fatigue. As many analysts have written, public opinion in America tends to be thermostatic. Just like a thermostat turns on the air conditioning when a house gets too warm, or the heat when a house gets too cold, public opinion also tends to react to changes in public policy by pushing for a return to the middle. For example, we say we want health care reform, but once politicians offer a version, we decide we’re against it. You can also see this in public opinion on immigration. Americans say they want a more restrictive policy, but once they get one, they say they want a more welcoming one.
I think this applies to education reform as well. For two, arguably three decades, policymakers pushed hard on it and put a ton of new policies in place. Eventually, the public grew tired, and the opponents of reform became more motivated than we, its defenders.
Politics writ large also shifted. It turns out that populism is not conducive to ed. reform, which is in many ways a centrist, technocratic project. Relatedly, some reformers grew more interested in fighting culture wars than in improving student achievement. We also made some mistakes, especially the ham-handed push for teacher-evaluation reform.
Rick: As you know, some observers have argued that Bush-Obama school reform died for good reasons—that it was simplistic and self-righteous. What do you say?
Mike: They are correct that it was too self-righteous, and I was part of that at times. There’s a role for forceful rhetoric, especially when trying to get a big piece of legislation like No Child Left Behind enacted. But we should have shifted to acknowledging and addressing its flaws much earlier. And I cringe when some reformers return to that self-righteous language, especially versions of “We know what works, we just need the political will to do it.” It’s a lot more complicated than that.
That said, we got some big things right. The American education system, with its 14,000 districts, elected school boards, and entrenched teachers’ unions, is not going to improve without external pressure. That can come from top-down accountability or bottom-up market competition. Figuring out how to best apply that pressure—and combine it with added help and capacity—is hard, and the details matter. But the answer is not to give up on applying the pressure, as many reform opponents want us to do.
And here’s the most important thing: Both student achievement and attainment increased dramatically during the reform era of the 1990s and 2000s. I don’t think reform gets all the credit—more spending does, too, along with positive trends in the lives of kids, families, and communities. But we made huge progress as a country in the ‘90s and 2000s. We need to do so again.
Rick: Some progressive critics insist that the reform movement’s emphasis on assessments, test-based accountability, and school choice was misguided. Looking back where do you think they might have a point—and where do you think they get it wrong?
Mike: Not all progressives were critics. Groups on the ideological left, including Education Trust and other civil rights organizations, were key parts of the ed. reform coalition in its heyday. And they saw high expectations for kids of color as a natural extension of the civil rights agenda. But yes, the teachers’ unions and their compatriots never liked testing, and especially accountability. And they were right that the NCLB-era tests were low quality and encouraged “kill and drill” instruction. They were also right that the law’s accountability framework did not give enough credit to high-poverty schools that were making real progress for their students. But they were wrong that American schools were doing the best they could with “what they had,” both in terms of their students and in terms of funding. It turned out that many schools could—and did—do a lot better!
Rick: Today, there’s a lot of enthusiasm among Republicans for vouchers and education savings accounts, seemingly less for testing and accountability. How do you see the landscape on the right?
Mike: As I’ve argued repeatedly, I think it’s a mistake to say that Republicans have moved away from the comprehensive ed. reform agenda. Charter schools continue to thrive in most red states, for example, with policymakers working hard to increase funding for these schools, break barriers like transportation, and otherwise support the movement. So, too, with accountability. The states that still have A-F or five-star school rating systems are almost all Republican ones. As David Brooks wrote recently, Republicans at the state level are kicking the Democrats’ butts in education! That’s true for not just the “Southern Surge” states, but others as well. And yes, private school choice and education savings accounts are new additions to the agenda, and they are getting lots of attention from the right. But they have not yet pushed the rest of the reform agenda aside. Still, we’ll cover those topics in the newsletter, too!
Rick: What do you think a new reform coalition would look like in today’s climate?
Mike: I think it depends on whether we’re near the end of the populist moment in American politics, or if this phase is going to stick around. If the former—if we return to a politics in which both parties fight over the center again—the old coalition might reappear, with business groups and civil rights organizations playing key roles. But if populism is the name of the game for the foreseeable future, I think parents’ groups are going to have to play a bigger role, plus perhaps teacher organizations that splinter off from the teachers’ unions, like the one Ryan Walters now runs.
Rick: You’ve been at this a long time. If you had one piece of advice for educators and education leaders, what would it be?
Mike: For the people in the trenches, I’d encourage them to remember that student learning depends on student effort. And whenever they face a big decision related to curriculum, instruction, discipline policy, grading, AI policy, or anything else bearing on the day-to-day realities of schools, they should ask themselves: Is this going to make it easier or harder for my teachers to motivate their students to work hard and thus to learn?
