Education’s Next Chapter: Abundance, Pluralism, and Empowerment

Part Two of Education Rebuilt: A Vision for What Comes Next

Education Rebuilt is a four-part series of essays exploring how innovation, equity, and abundance can remake K–12 education for the 21st century.

As I argued in Part I, for more than a hundred years, American public education has operated on a single blueprint: one system, one curriculum, one way of doing school. This centralized, standardized model, built in an industrial age that prized efficiency and control, became the default operating system of American education.

For a while (and for some), the system delivered: graduation rates rose, achievement gaps narrowed, and public confidence remained high. But those gains have stalled or reversed. Today, American students lag behind international peers on key metrics. Teacher dissatisfaction is surging. And families across the country, especially in low-income and rural communities, are searching for something different.

That search is leading them to new opportunities, increasingly facilitated by new funding models and by alternatives to traditional neighborhood schools. Since the pandemic, there has been a dramatic rise in states embracing Education Savings Accounts (ESA), and with the passage of the federal Educational Choice for Children Act (ECCA), parental choice is expanding throughout the country. And over the past two decades, charter schools have cemented their place in the American education landscape, outperforming their traditional school counterparts and helping to transform even the most challenged districts like New Orleans, Los Angeles and Camden, NJ. These innovations don’t just support better access. They lay the groundwork for something far more transformative: a new educational operating system that shifts power away from legacy systems and toward families.

From Scarcity to Abundance

The core challenge in American education today isn’t a lack of effort, resources, or ideas; it’s that our system wasn’t built to adapt. In sector after sector, as Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson argue, America is struggling to build. We face housing shortages not because we lack materials, but because we’ve empowered incumbents to block new construction. We fall short on clean energy and infrastructure not for lack of innovation, but because legacy institutions and rigid regulations stand in the way.

K-12 education suffers from the same challenges. We have talented educators, committed parents, and a growing ecosystem of potential solutions, but they’re trapped in a model designed for a different era. A model that values incumbents over builders, uniformity over flexibility, and top-down mandates over bottom-up creativity.

That’s where the abundance mindset comes in.

At its core, abundance compels us to believe that progress accelerates when we empower more people to build. It’s about trusting families and educators, removing barriers to innovation, and creating systems that welcome new approaches rather than resisting them. An abundance approach doesn’t guarantee success, but it creates the conditions where success is more likely, by allowing good ideas to emerge, evolve, and scale.

During the pandemic, we saw what’s possible when that mindset takes hold. Learning pods grew into microschools. Homeschooling became hybrid. Communities built culturally rooted models and à la carte learning pathways. None of it was centrally planned. It was local, urgent, and grounded in trust.

What enabled these breakthroughs wasn’t just creativity, it was capital. Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) and tax-credit scholarships provide the flexible funding that allows new models to launch and grow. Too often, these tools are seen narrowly: as tuition subsidies for existing private schools. But that’s only part of the picture. When the money follows the child, we create platforms for innovation, allowing families, educators, and civic entrepreneurs to build new learning environments that reflect their values and respond to the diverse needs of every child.

In Arizona, families are blending STEM and Montessori in small-scale microschools. In Atlanta, culturally-affirming learning pods center Black literature and history. In New Hampshire, students are customizing their learning with public dollars, blending tutoring, online classes, and mentorship. And in New Orleans, now nearly two decades into the nation’s most extensive experiment in charter-based reform, research led by economist Douglas Harris has found substantial academic gains and increased equity, making it one of the clearest examples of how structural innovation can deliver lasting results.

These models work because they trust educators to lead. Many of the builders behind these new schools have been former public school teachers, talented professionals who left not out of disillusionment with students, but with systems that constrained them. In traditional environments, they felt like cogs. In these new ones, they’ve been creators, mentors, and community anchors.

That’s what abundance makes possible: not just more choices for families, but more freedom for educators. A dynamic, responsive system where trust replaces control and where the energy to build is met with the freedom to do it.

What’s emerging is a new educational operating system, one where the money follows the child and that is open, flexible and bottom-up. Families now have greater access to a diverse set of school types, from public charter to community-based micro to à la carte learning. They are experiencing broader content, with schools adopting different pedagogical models, cultural frameworks, and instructional approaches. And they are pursuing different purposes, with parents able to emphasize the outcomes they value most, from academic rigor to civic engagement to moral formation.

Critics often warn that expanding educational alternatives will drain resources from traditional public schools. But decades of research shows otherwise.¹ When choice expands, the performance of nearby public schools holds steady or even improves. The feared “death spiral” of public education simply hasn’t materialized. On the contrary, new entrants often spur traditional schools to innovate, respond to families, and strengthen their own offerings. For too long, the education debate has been framed as a zero-sum game: any gain for families who exercise choice is seen as a loss for those who remain. But that scarcity logic has no empirical basis. With an abundance mindset, the goal isn’t to protect a fixed pie, it’s to grow it.

That shift requires us to move past debates about public versus private, or one governance type versus another. “Public education” is not a specific set of institutions.² It’s a goal: an educated, empowered, and engaged public. An abundance mindset requires us to be hyper-focused on delivering on that goal. If a particular model helps us achieve it, then we should support it, period.

The real choice is not between sectors, but between the kinds of systems that help create a better-educated public. Instead of systems that are closed and rigid, we should embrace open and adaptive ones that treat pluralism as a strength, educators as builders, and families as trusted partners.

Skeptics might argue that a centralized, state-run approach to education is a feature, not a bug; that the current operating system is essential for equity or national unity. Yet the current system is hardly an academic or civics success story. It segregates by ZIP code, locks low-income families into underperforming districts, and generates culture wars over who controls the single “official” curriculum.

We don’t need to guess what a more pluralistic, abundance-oriented system could look like; we can learn from our international peers. Countries like the Netherlands, Sweden, and Canada have long embraced educational pluralism, funding a wide range of schools so long as they meet public standards.³ These nations demonstrate that it’s possible to combine equity with diversity, and public oversight with family choice. The result is a system that reflects the varied values of its people while consistently delivering academic and civic outcomes that surpass those produced by America’s more uniform, top-down (and expensive) approach.

Structures feel fixed and permanent, until they’re not. The schoolhouse of today was designed, which means it can be redesigned.

For conservatives, it’s about freedom from centralized control. For progressives, it’s about empowering families and communities. For both, it’s about meeting the diverse needs of every child.

Moments like this don’t come often. Let’s build a better operating system, before another generation is asked to sit quietly in a classroom arranged for someone else’s vision of the future.

1. See A Win‑Win Solution: The Empirical Evidence on School Choice, EdChoice (2016), which surveys over 30 studies finding that public school performance often holds steady or improves under expanded choice; The Impact of Public School Choice: Evidence from Los Angeles’ Zones of Choice (Campos & Kearns, 2023), which finds that competition through choice can raise achievement in public schools; and School Choice is Making Traditional Public Schools Better, Fordham Institute (2023).

2. Robin Lake from The Center for Reinventing Public Education has articulated this key insight.

3. See Ashley Berner, Pluralism and American Public Education: No One Way to School.