A Better Way to Think About Education Policy Debates

What's really driving our debates about schools

More times than I can count, I’ve found myself in a room full of people who genuinely love children, who have dedicated careers to improving their lives, who agree that the current system is failing too many kids — and who cannot agree on a single thing to do about it. The issue might be whether to allow a charter school operator to manage a persistently low-performing, neighborhood school; or whether to spend federal dollars to revamp English-Language Arts instruction to focus on phonics.

The rooms usually have a range of participants. I’ve been next to parents fighting for their child’s survival in a school that isn’t working, while in the same room researchers present reams of data showing that the district’s literacy rates or other metrics have been making steady, albeit slow, progress. And I’ve testified before legislators who go home to face constituents and run for reelection in six months. These are scenes familiar to anyone who’s spent time in America’s K-12 education system — all of us, in those rooms, wanted the same thing: for kids to thrive.

And yet.

The disagreements are real, and they are fierce, and they do not resolve themselves simply because everyone in the room is well-intentioned. For a long time, I chalked this up to pure politics, and to be sure, there are plenty of times when students take a back seat to special interests. But the longer I’ve done this work, the more I’ve come to believe that the explanation is more complicated and, ultimately, more hopeful.

We disagree about education because we are not, in fact, starting from the same place in terms of values or timing. We just think we are.

The first layer: what we actually value

James O’Toole, a leadership scholar, developed a framework he called the Executive’s Compass. O’Toole argues that every major political conflict in democratic societies maps onto four values: Liberty, Equality, Efficiency, and Community. These are not left and right. They are all genuinely good, and they are genuinely in tension with each other.

Liberty asks: Do individuals have the freedom to choose what is right for them? Equality asks: Is the playing field level, and are the most vulnerable among us protected? Efficiency asks: Are we getting the best possible outcome for the resources we’re expending? Community asks: Does this bind us together, even across our differences?

The important thing O’Toole observes is that most of us hold all four values simultaneously, but we hold them in different proportions. When these values conflict, how we rank them, and how others rank them, is crucial for reaching consensus on a solution. A policy or initiative that only speaks to a single value is unlikely to endure. The education solutions that actually gain traction are the ones with a tent big enough to make room for all four.

Where values converge

School choice is the clearest proof of this I’ve seen. As recently as the 1980s, publicly funded private school choice was a radical idea confined mostly to academic circles and Ayn Rand book clubs. Today, 74 publicly funded choice programs operate across 32 states, and a new federal tax credit aims to provide K-12 scholarships for millions of students nationwide. That did not happen by accident. It happened because the school choice movement learned to speak to all four of O’Toole’s values at once.

Start with liberty. The original gravitational pull of school choice was individual freedom: the idea that a parent, not a zip code assignment, should determine where a child is educated. This argument is best summarized by the US Supreme Court, which held that “children are not mere creatures of the state.” In doing so the Court affirmed the right of parents to direct their children’s education.

But the idea really gained momentum by embracing the value of equality. Civil rights advocates like Rep. Polly Williams (D) and Dr. Howard Fuller, who spent years fighting for quality Black education within public school systems, looked at failing district schools serving low-income children and determined that parental choice was not a conservative abstraction — it was a lifeline. Fuller himself framed it plainly: if you’re drowning and a hand is extended to you, you don’t stop to ask which party it belongs to. To be clear, proponents of conventional public schools also claim the mantle of equality, and have committed to providing equal access to education in those schools in seminal moments from Brown v. Board of Education to the eventual passage of the Individual with Disabilities Education Act. But critically, school choice advocates didn’t grant them a monopoly on that value.

Efficiency followed. Because public schools have clear economies of scale and more centralized decision-making, academic improvement can happen among large numbers of students efficiently. The recent Mississippi miracle is one such bright spot. Nevertheless, research shows that school choice yields some of the best dollar-for-dollar return on investment. For instance, in Florida, the tax credit scholarship program — which incentivizes individuals and businesses to contribute to nonprofits that provide private school scholarships — has led to academic gains and is 11 times more cost-effective than simply adding money to district budgets. Additional research on school choice shows that competitive pressure improved outcomes not just for students who left district schools but also for students who stayed.

Community is probably the least appreciated value when it comes to school choice because participating students typically opt out of their zoned neighborhood school. What many find, however, is a more welcoming school environment. This is often the case for students with special needs, prior victims of bullying, and students seeking a faith-based experience.

The lesson is not that school choice is the cure for every educational ailment. Rather, its recent momentum comes from shedding its niche status. Advocates learned to speak to a broad coalition with diverse values. Speaking to the values of those from other parts of the ideological landscape is the first step in building a constructive coalition.

Consider a counter example: year-round schooling. This is a valuable idea that has yet to resonate with people’s values. There’s an equality case to be made as more instructional time could close academic achievement gaps among students whose summertime lives are devoid of learning opportunities. But so far, the tent isn’t big enough for the other values. Liberty-first families hear coercion in the loss of freely enjoyed summer vacations. Efficiency-minded legislators see higher costs without proportionate returns, and community-oriented stakeholders feel the potential disruption to the longstanding, traditional school year schedule more than the benefit. The idea continues to pop up, but only in spurts before being quickly retracted because proponents haven’t yet hit upon a message that speaks at least somewhat to all four values, not just one.

One of O’Toole’s key insights is appreciating that reasonable people, ordering their values differently, will arrive at different conclusions. Understanding this fact and looking for points of intersection is far more productive than shaming one another over genuinely held beliefs.

The second layer: the time horizon gap

But values alone don’t explain all the conflict. I’ve watched people with identical value systems look at the same education policy and reach completely different conclusions about how it should be structured. When I started paying attention to why, the answer turned out to be simple and underappreciated.

It was about time.

More specifically, it was about the time horizon each person was operating on.

Take a father whose third grader is struggling to read. This parent is not thinking about implementing a statewide tutoring program over multiple years. He is thinking about next week. He is thinking about his daughter coming home in tears. His time horizon is immediate, because the consequences of inaction are immediate. When you tell this parent to wait for a systemic solution, you are asking him to sacrifice his child on the altar of a future that will arrive too late to help her.

Now take a state legislator. She cares about kids but her clock runs differently. She operates on a two- or four-year election cycle, which means she needs to show constituents meaningful progress within that window — progress visible enough to survive a campaign ad while navigating an annual budget process. Her time horizon is shaped, in part, by the structural rhythms of democratic governance. Voting to increase the state’s budget for supplemental reading material may be the solution that satisfies her constituents and can be implemented and defended before she has to ask them to vote for her again.

Finally, consider the academic researcher. She has spent her career studying what moves the needle on student outcomes. She has watched too many promising reading interventions (like three-cueing, which could be called “guessing”) get scaled prematurely before anyone understood why they work. She wants longitudinal data on outcomes across student demographic groups. Her time horizon is the longest of the three, and being skeptical of quick fixes, she prefers taking a more measured approach when rolling out a new program.

Parent. Legislator. Researcher. All operate rationally based on their perspective. Put them in a room together and they’ll talk right past each other, giving us the impression of a debate driven by bad faith — when it may just be a failure to name the different clocks everyone is running on.

I want to be careful here not to project a false sense of comfort. Understanding why people disagree is not the same as resolving the disagreement. There are genuine policy conflicts in American education — places where values truly pull in opposite directions, where there is no elegant synthesis, where someone’s priority must yield. Things like the debate over busing to achieve socioeconomic balance versus assigning students to zoned community schools, or whether to offer specialized gifted programming versus single-track pathways do not lend themselves to obvious solutions that will satisfy everyone’s differently-weighted values and timeline concerns.

But amidst these tensions, we must resist the temptation to turn every person with a different perspective into an enemy combatant.

Ask a different question, then actively listen

I started this piece with a room full of people who agree that the system is broken and cannot agree on how to fix it. I have been in that room as a frustrated participant. I have also, over time, learned to be in that room differently.

Now, before attempting to convince anyone of anything I ask: What are you most afraid of losing? The question helps me assess a person’s values and perspective.

The parent is afraid of losing her child’s chance at a decent life. The legislator is afraid of losing public trust in democratic institutions. The researcher is afraid of losing the real answer. The community advocate is afraid of losing the neighborhood. Every one of those fears is grounded in something real and worth protecting.

Upon assessing people’s frustrations and goals we can seek to gain consensus across different sets of values and time constraints. Learning and addressing each of the four poles of O’Toole’s compass helps all members of the community walk away feeling that their values are recognized. Meanwhile, the time horizon gap can be addressed by sequencing policy solutions so that short-, mid-, and long-term issues are acknowledged even if not fully solved.

These days, the brightest spots in education (e.g. microschools, high-dose tutoring, the science of reading, educational choice) are places where people coalesce despite divergent value structures. You won’t see it on social media, but rather, in real-life conversations where we respect one another enough to urgently ask questions and patiently listen.