Education's Big Winner & Loser in 2025
Also: my plans for 2026.
1997
In 1997, education historian David Labaree observed that we love to fight about education and that our fights about pedagogy and policy really mask a fight about purpose. He identified several purposes for education, two of which have been locked in combat for the last several decades. From my perspective, we can confidently declare a winner and loser in 2025. Here’s Labaree:
From the democratic equality approach to schooling, one argues that a democratic society cannot persist unless it prepares all of its young with equal care to take on the full responsibilities of citizenship in a competent manner.
The social mobility approach to schooling argues that education is a commodity, the only purpose of which is to provide individual students with a competitive advantage in the struggle for desirable social position.
2025
The dominant education trends of 2025—including AI, personalized learning, increasing student absenteeism, education savings accounts, school choice, microschools, the kidsmaxxing of Alpha School and its partners on X—all indicate an American public that is giving up on democratic equality and is trying, instead, to maximize the social mobility of their children however they can.
Traditional public schools are one of the few remaining places where we gather very different people together in the same room to learn and be nice to one another. If you’re interested in fostering democratic equality, that work is extremely important and it isn’t cheap. Teaching students to learn math and learn to be nice to one another across their widening social, academic, and financial differences represents a huge challenge for teachers. Additionally, learning math and learning to be nice often takes more time than learning math alone, because learning more stuff generally takes more time than learning less stuff.
In 2025, we watched more and more parents say, “We really care a lot about the learning math part, but the costs of fostering democratic equality seem quite high.” Consequently, we watched more and more parents opt out of the relative heterogeneity of public schools and enroll their students into more homogeneous learning environments.
Not every parent group, though. Abigail Francis and Joshua Goodman studied enrollment rates in Massachusetts last year and found that enrollment declines in public schools were largely driven by wealthy parents. “The highest income 20% of districts have lost more public school students than the other 80% combined,” they found, “with these lower income districts having largely recovered.”
I think this is a dismal turn for our democracy, one that has been decades in the making, one that seems likely to continue in 2026. As the project of democratic equality provides fewer and fewer material benefits to people outside of schools—e.g. basic goods are very expensive; wealth inequality has only grown over the last 30 years; jobs are hard to find even for people who did all the things grown-ups told them to do like go to college and learn to code—people have, I think quite expectedly, prioritized that project less and less inside of schools.
Democratic equality has not lifted all the boats as promised. The ship of state is taking on water. People with the means to secure a lifeboat for their kids are doing exactly that.
2026
For 2026, as a citizen, I am most interested in projects that are committed to social democracy, committed to the truth that we have enough resources for everyone to have a lifeboat and more besides to fix the damage so none of them are necessary.
For 2026, as an educator and technologist, I am most interested in supporting democracy in schools, in working with teachers towards classrooms where every student feels valued, where every student feels like their ideas are needed, where every student feels like this class and its learning would have been less had they been absent today. I have several projects planned for 2026 and each of them will try to make it much easier than it is now for teachers and students to learn together.
Love this article! But there's been an exodus from US public schools because the "No Child Left Behind" approach and "teach to the test" incentives have been disastrous.
Kids that fail should receive intervention, not get passed through the system. US public schools teach the bare minimum to the lowest common denominator, and are even failing at that, so the standards bar keeps getting lower.
For inspiration, we should look to Finland and similar countries with successful social democracies, in which kids from all socio-economic backgrounds are enrolled in public schools because they're the superior option and private schools can't be privately funded by law.
Here's what ChatGPT says:
Finland is often brought up in exactly this context because its school system is almost a mirror image of the incentives and assumptions baked into U.S. education policy over the last 30–40 years.
Here are the big, structural differences that matter most.
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1. Almost no high-stakes standardized testing
This is the headline difference.
• Finland does not have an equivalent to No Child Left Behind.
• There are no annual nationwide standardized tests used to rank schools, punish teachers, or close campuses.
• Students take one major standardized exam at the end of upper secondary school (the matriculation exam), primarily for university entry.
Because funding, teacher jobs, and school survival aren’t tied to test scores:
• Teachers don’t “teach to the test.”
• Schools aren’t incentivized to push struggling students through just to keep metrics looking good.
• Learning depth matters more than coverage speed.
Contrast that with the U.S., where testing became an accountability weapon rather than a diagnostic tool.
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2. Teachers are elite professionals, not managed labor
Finland treats teaching more like medicine than retail work.
• Teaching is a high-status profession.
• All teachers must have a master’s degree (fully funded by the state).
• Teacher training is research-heavy and competitive; many applicants are rejected.
• Teachers design their own curricula within national guidelines.
This creates a system built on trust:
• Teachers are trusted to assess students.
• Teachers are trusted to decide when a child needs more time.
• Teachers are trusted to adapt instruction rather than follow scripts.
In the U.S., by contrast:
• Teachers are often micromanaged.
• Curricula are standardized from above.
• Evaluation is frequently tied to test scores they don’t control.
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3. Holding students back is rare—but not because standards are lower
This surprises Americans.
Finland does not rely heavily on grade retention, but it’s not because failure is ignored. It’s because failure is addressed early and intensively.
• Struggling students get immediate intervention, often in small groups or one-on-one.
• Special education is integrated into normal classrooms, not stigmatized.
• Extra help is routine and normalized.
So instead of:
“You failed, but we’ll pass you anyway so the numbers look good”
The logic is:
“You’re falling behind, so we’ll slow down and support you until you catch up.”
By the time students reach adolescence, gaps are much smaller—making mass retention unnecessary.
In the U.S., interventions are often:
• Underfunded
• Delayed
• Conditional on diagnoses
• Overwhelmed by class sizes
Which leads to social promotion by default.
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4. Public schools are genuinely the best option
This is a huge cultural difference.
In Finland:
• Wealthy families send their kids to public schools.
• Private schools are rare and cannot charge tuition.
• There’s little school shopping or district gaming.
Why?
• Schools are well-funded and relatively equal.
• Teacher quality doesn’t vary wildly by neighborhood.
• There’s no market incentive to stratify schools.
In the U.S.:
• School quality is tied to property taxes.
• Affluent families exit the system (private schools, charters, suburbs).
• Public schools are left serving the highest-need students with the least political power.
That creates the “lowest common denominator” effect you’re describing.
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5. Fewer hours, less homework, more learning
Another counterintuitive point.
• Finnish students spend less time in school and do less homework than U.S. students.
• Classes emphasize understanding, discussion, and application.
• Play and recess are taken seriously, especially in early grades.
This works because:
• Teachers aren’t racing to cover testable material.
• Curriculum isn’t bloated with compliance requirements.
• Students aren’t burned out by constant evaluation.
The U.S. model often mistakes quantity for quality.
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6. Education is part of a broader social system
This is the part Americans often want to skip, but it matters.
Finland’s schools benefit from:
• Universal healthcare
• Low child poverty
• Strong social safety nets
• Free school meals and materials
• Stable housing
Schools aren’t expected to compensate for every social failure alone.
In the U.S., schools are asked to:
• Educate
• Feed
• Counsel
• Diagnose
• Discipline
• Raise test scores
• Compete in a pseudo-market
All while being punished when outcomes reflect broader inequality.
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The core philosophical difference
At bottom, the systems answer different questions:
U.S. (post–NCLB):
“How do we force schools to perform under threat?”
Finland:
“How do we design a system where failure is unlikely in the first place?”
Your instinct is right: when incentives reward appearance of success rather than actual mastery, standards erode. Finland avoids that by removing perverse incentives, professionalizing teaching, and making public education universally trusted.
It’s not that Finnish kids are inherently better or more compliant. The system simply isn’t built to lie to itself.
If you haven't read it already, Neil Postman's "The End of Education" examines several purported "ends" of education that go beyond Labaree's three. (It's been a couple decades since I read it; I mainly remember really enjoying it.)