Recently, opinion pieces in mainstream media outlets have begun speculating that education policy will be an important factor in the 2026 midterm elections, and that Republicans are owning the Democrats on the issue.
In October, The New York Times pundit David Brooks urged Democrats to reprise bipartisan policy ideas from the Clinton-Bush-Obama years of governing schools based on how their students scored on standardized tests. Drawing from recent assessments that show test score gains in a few Southern states, Brooks concluded, “the party that dominates the rural areas [i.e., Republicans] has a proven educational agenda while the party that dominates the urban areas [Democrats] doesn’t.” Similarly, in The Hill, Ben Austin, a former campaign staffer for Kamala Harris, lamented that Democrats “have lost their way” on education, because “it is politically untenable for Democrats to oppose all forms of school choice when Republicans are offering a free market smorgasbord of choice.”
What these commentators ignore are the results of a quiet revolution in blue states—and a few red states—that are implementing a school improvement plan commonly called the community school approach. A community school uses an evidenced-based strategy to improve student outcomes by drawing from the resources and voices of the surrounding community to support the full range of needs and interests of students and families. This approach, in which policies and programs are developed based on community input and multifaceted student outcomes rather than just test scores, is the antithesis of what has driven bipartisan education policies for the past thirty years. Up until now, education policy has emphasized top-down, heavy-handed governance and privatization schemes such as charter schools.
In 2021, California launched a $4.1 billion grant program to spur a two-year expansion of community school implementations across the state. The grants of up to $500,000 per school annually are used to help sustain or expand existing community school initiatives.
The same year, Maryland enacted its Blueprint for Maryland’s Future that included, among other measures, implementations of the community school strategy in schools across the state that have the highest concentrations of low-income students. In New York City, more than one in every four public schools is a community school.
The early results of efforts to measure the impact of community school initiatives have been impressive so far.
A 2025 research study, conducted by the Learning Policy Institute (LPI), of the first cohort of California’s grant-funded community school initiatives found positive impacts on a range of student outcomes, including reduced chronic absentee rates, reduced suspension rates, and increased academic achievement scores. The academic gains were largest among historically underserved students, such as Black students, English learners, and socioeconomically disadvantaged students.
In its study, LPI compared changes in student outcomes between schools that received the grants to implement the community school approach and a matched group of similar schools that did not. The analyses found that the community schools demonstrated a 30 percent reduction in chronic absences, on average, greater than their matched comparison schools. These improvements in regular attendance equated to more than 5,000 more students attending school regularly.
Schools using the community school approach also experienced a 15 percent reduction in average suspension rates. The reductions were especially significant among Black students, English learners, and socioeconomically disadvantaged students, whose suspension rates are typically the highest.
And schools implementing the community school approach experienced small but statistically significant gains in math and English language arts test scores. These increases are equivalent to what would have come from an additional forty-three and thirty-six additional learning days, respectively, compared to their matched schools where achievement in both subjects declined during the same time.
In Los Angeles, where teachers have made community schools expansion a key demand in contract negotiations, measures of student performance are showing “year-over-year growth [that] is outpacing that of the state, and students are now performing at higher levels than they did pre-pandemic,” LAist reported in 2025, although there are multiple factors driving improvement. The progress in Los Angeles is occurring while national standardized test scores, according to Education Week, are “stuck at historic lows” in reading and have barely “crept up” in math.
According to a 2020 analysis conducted by the nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization RAND, schools in New York City using the community school strategy experienced similar positive results. Compared to similarly matched non-community schools, community schools saw higher graduation rates; decreased chronic absenteeism, especially among Black students and high school students in temporary housing; fewer disciplinary incidents among elementary and middle school students; and significantly improved measures of student achievement—such as math scores, credit accumulation, and on-time grade progression.
Although the community school approach has shown promise, Republicans at the national level want to cut federal support for it. When Secretary of Education Linda McMahon presented the Trump Administration’s 2026 budget for education, funding for the federal government’s modest Full Service Community Schools (FSCS) program was zeroed-out.
The Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives fell in line with the Trump Administration and eliminated the FSCS program, while the Senate, also controlled by Republicans but requiring sixty votes to pass budget bills, voted to retain the program, but at a reduced funding level.
What are Republicans calling for instead?
Months after McMahon presented the 2026 budget that eliminated funds for community schools—as well as funding for homeless students, teacher preparation, rural schools, after-school programs, and instruction in literacy, civics, and the arts—the Education Department announced a record $500 million in funding for privately operated charter schools.
For years, the federal government has spent billions on expanding the number of charter schools in the country, and the results have been wasteful of education funding. A 2025 analysis by the Network for Public Education found that “more than one in four charter schools close by the five-year mark. By year ten, the failure rate jumps to nearly four in ten; five years later, almost 50 percent have closed.”
The study concluded, “Over the years, charter closures have broken their promises
to more than one million children whose parents believed they had enrolled their children in a better, stable alternative to their local public school. In the marketplace model of schooling, when it comes to charter schools, it is buyer-beware.”
Another school choice idea launched by Republicans at the national level in their “One Big Beautiful Bill” is the Educational Choice for Children Act, which creates a federal school voucher program through a tax shelter for wealthy people.
Republican lawmakers in mostly red states have enacted similar voucher programs that divert public funding for education to private schools. The results of these school voucher efforts have been disastrous for children and communities.
According to Michigan State University professor Josh Cowen, voucher programs tend to be used by wealthier families to help pay private school tuition for students who were never in public school. These programs have caused some of the largest academic declines on record in education research—on par with the impact that Hurricane Katrina had on students in New Orleans. Voucher programs also reduce available funding for public schools, according to the Economic Policy Institute, and they pillage public school revenues as students are drained away from district enrollments.
So it’s clear Republicans don’t have a plan to improve public education. They have a plan to privatize it and throw families into a chaotic marketplace that increases their risks of being poorly served.
Where Brooks, Austin, and their like-minded colleagues do have a point is that Democrats have failed to counter the Republican messaging about accountability and choice with a strong stand for community schools. Were they to do that, it could turn the quiet revolution of community schools into a resounding, nationwide movement for change.