Photo by Roger Starnes Sr
The Trump administration and Republican governors have a plan for the nation’s public education system. They call it school choice, but their real goal is to privatize the entire system, restrict access among marginalized communities, and dictate what’s taught, especially to low-income students of color.
The Democratic Party’s vision, however, of what this system should look like in the future is unclear. According to polling data, historically, Democrats have been viewed as the “education party.” That’s no longer true. A 2023 poll released by Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) found that among voters in battleground districts, Republicans outpolled
“Democrats for decades were viewed as the party more trusted on education, only to see Covid quickly undermine their position. … Two years later, polling showed Democrats either trailing or essentially tied with Republicans among voters in four battleground states when it came to which party would ensure public schools prepare students for life after graduation,” pointed out an April 2025 Politico article.
Getting education right is important. Although the issue rarely determines election results, voters rate education as more important than climate change, the wars in the Middle East, and abortion, according to a 2024 Gallup poll.
Yet, “On K-12 education, Democrats remain in a mostly defensive posture,” a 2024 analysis by Brookings found. “[T]hey offer a more ‘conservative’ agenda that protects against the GOP’s increasingly radical efforts.”
Some prominent Democrats who are aware of this situation want to return to a regime of top-down, heavy-handed reforms where students are constantly run through a battery of tests and their schooling is determined by distant bureaucrats. This is wildly unpopular. Others want education to focus more on job training. But job training for whom and what jobs? Do we know what kind of jobs will exist in the future?
In schools that are using the community schools approach, we’re seeing that the idea of returning schools to the community, asking families what they want, and giving students, parents, and teachers a voice in determining school programs and policies is showing great promise. Here are some examples of schools that have adopted this approach, resulting in positive outcomes:
1. In 2017, Lakewood Elementary School in Durham, North Carolina, was being threatened by a state takeover. The school was chronically underperforming according to test scores and given an F rating by the state. But families and community members from the neighborhood protested the takeover, and the state eventually relented but mandated that the school adopt an improvement plan. Rather than relying on the state to develop the plan or bringing in a consultant, parents and teachers in the school worked with the local school board to implement the community schools approach.
Following input from students and families, school leaders found partners in the surrounding community to help incorporate family services into the school. By 2019, Lakewood had progressed from an F rating to a grade C, a rate of progress that rarely happens. Although Lakewood experienced some setbacks during the pandemic, like most other schools, it is no longer an F-rated school and is one of the most popular elementary schools in the district, according to district sources I interviewed.
2. Milwaukee has been the nation’s longest-running experiment with school choice, starting 30 years ago when it became the first city in the nation to introduce school vouchers. Also in the 1990s, the city adopted charter schools. Yet, despite all of these choices, Milwaukee students have been consistently behind their peers in other urban communities. According to the 2017 results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, among the 27 nationwide urban districts included in the exams, Milwaukee had the second-lowest scores for math and reading.
Faced with the failures of school choice, the Milwaukee school board started looking at the community schools approach in 2013, and by 2020, 20 schools had adopted the model, including Hopkins Loyd Elementary. Over three years, Hopkins Loyd went from a state rating of “Fails to Meet Expectations” in 2016-2017 to a rating of just a few points short of “Meets Expectations” in 2018-2019. While the school also had some setbacks since the pandemic, its scores for academic growth are not far below state levels despite having a student population that is 95 percent economically disadvantaged, based on the 2023-2024 district figures.
3. In rural New Mexico, educators have used the community schools approach to provide students and families in a rural community a wide range of new resources and supports, including healthy snacks and warm clothes for students, an on-campus dental clinic, mental health services, food bank, summer programs, horticulture classes, service learning projects, parent education programs on money management and nutrition, and a garden and cooking club. As a result of these efforts, the school cut its absentee rate nearly in half and improved its state report card grade from an F to a D from 2016 to 2017.
There’s an abundance of similar anecdotes, but there’s research evidence as well. A 2017 review by the Learning Policy Institute found that well-implemented community schools led to:
- Improvements in attendance rates and declines in chronic absenteeism.
- A dip in dropout rates and a rise in graduation rates, which were often followed by improvements in grades and test scores.
- Improvements in school climate, including positive relationships, improved school safety and engagement with school, and a decline in disciplinary incidents and suspension rates.
In California, which invested $4.1 billion in community schools as part of its Community Schools Partnership Program in 2021, initial results show that schools have reduced chronic absence rates, improved attendance, lowered suspension rates, and raised achievement scores among the first schools implementing the approach.
In New York City, a 2020 RAND study comparing the city’s 420 community schools to non-community schools showed “reduced chronic absence and disciplinary rates and improved on-time grade progression and high school graduation. A follow-up study confirmed community schools’ impacts on reducing chronic absences and, after three years of implementation, improving math and language arts test scores,” stated a 2025 article by the Learning Policy Institute.
Of course, education is not just about numbers. It’s about what kind of country we want. And what kind of future do we want? Under the Trump administration, the conditions in our communities and schools are only going to get worse. More communities will be bereft of the resources and supports they need. More families will have to struggle harder to provide for their daily well-being, much less their future aspirations. More children and young people will face traumatized lives due to their circumstances.
Democrats have not yet put forward a grand vision that promises to change the education system for the better. But by getting behind the community schools movement, they will at least align their party with a proven way to ensure positive differences for one child, one family, one school, and one community at a time. And that could make Democrats the education party again.
(This is a transcript, with minor modifications, of a presentation made by the author at Netroots Nation 2025.)
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