Education Belongs at the Center of the Abundance Agenda

The Abundance movement has helped shift the focus of public policy from ideology to outcomes. It has exposed how our institutions, across sectors, are often structured in ways that prevent them from delivering the very goods and services they were created to provide. Housing is the clearest example. Despite broad consensus that we need more of it, entrenched processes, procedural veto points, and overregulation have made it harder to build. As a result, we have a shortage of one of the most basic necessities for a thriving society.

The same is true in K–12 education.

For all the movement’s clarity and momentum, education has remained oddly peripheral to the Abundance conversation. But if we apply the same lens, the dysfunction is obvious. Too many children are failing to meet even the most fundamental standards in reading, writing, and reasoning. According to the Nation’s Report Card, nearly 40 percent of fourth graders scored below basic in reading, marking the worst results in more than three decades. The system is failing to deliver on its most essential promise, and it is doing so at scale.

What’s driving that failure is not a lack of public investment or concern. It’s a governance model that privileges process over purpose, compliance over outcomes, and powerful special interests over student needs. The education system has become tangled in bureaucracy, captured by narrow interest groups, and resistant to change. Too often, the loudest voices in policymaking are those representing institutions, not children.

This mirrors the critiques that have been raised in housing, transportation, and climate policy. In each of those areas, Abundance thinkers have made the case that we must redesign systems not just to operate more efficiently, but to produce more of what people actually need. Education deserves the same treatment. And it requires the same courage to rethink old assumptions.

First and foremost, we must move with clarity of purpose. The goal is not to protect any particular institution, it is to ensure that every child receives a high-quality education. “Public education” should be understood as a public commitment to universal learning, not as shorthand for a particular delivery system. Whether a child is educated in a traditional district school, a charter school, a private school, or a faith-based setting, the test of legitimacy should be the same: is the student learning?

This mindset demands openness to new approaches, inside and outside of the traditional school system. That doesn’t mean abandoning public oversight or accountability. But it does mean moving past a rigid, one-size-fits-all system that assumes the same approach will work for every child in every community. Education policy should reflect the same values the Abundance movement champions elsewhere: flexibility in delivery, responsiveness to local needs, transparency in outcomes, and a willingness to follow the evidence, even when it challenges legacy institutions or interests.

Too often, however, debates in education default to ideological loyalty rather than empirical results. The left, in particular, has struggled to reconcile its historic commitment to public education with the reality that many public schools are underperforming. Rather than defending the status quo, progressives should be the ones most committed to deep, structural change.

This is not just a moral imperative. It is also a political one. Voters are increasingly skeptical of institutions that seem more focused on maintaining their own power than on serving the public good. Education reform offers an opportunity to restore trust; not by doubling down on existing structures, but by showing that we are willing to change what’s not working.

The Abundance movement has already begun to reshape how we talk about housing, energy, and infrastructure. It has challenged us to reorient governance around results, not rituals. Education belongs in that conversation. It is foundational to opportunity, central to mobility, and critical to any vision of shared prosperity.

If we are serious about building a society that delivers on its promises, we cannot leave education on the margins. We need an abundance of options, an abundance of opportunity, and a commitment to outcomes that match our values. That starts by putting education at the center of the agenda.