Preparing Students for the Future
We need to reform education in this country, and we need smart, qualified people in Washington working on it—not dismantling the institutions that support it. The federal government's role should be guiding states, funding innovation, and ensuring no community gets left behind.
This is especially critical right now. Artificial intelligence is going to fundamentally reshape the workforce in ways we're only beginning to understand. The skills students need today are not the same skills they needed ten years ago. AI literacy, critical thinking, adaptability, and the ability to work alongside intelligent systems—these aren't optional future skills, they're survival skills for the modern economy.
Instead of fighting culture wars over textbooks, we should be investing in preparing the next generation to thrive in a world where AI is a collaborator, not a threat. States need federal guidance and resources to modernize curricula, retrain teachers, and ensure every student—in every zip code—has access to the education the 21st century demands.
This is one of those issues where both parties are failing the American people in different ways. Republicans look at a struggling public school system and conclude it's broken beyond repair—their answer is vouchers, school choice, and effectively defunding public education. Democrats look at the same system and rush to defend it as-is, resisting the structural changes that everyone knows are needed.
Here's the truth: the system does need reform. Serious reform. But the answer isn't to abandon public education—it's to fix it. Voucher programs may help some individual families in the short term, but they drain resources from the public schools that the vast majority of American kids depend on. You don't fix a leaking roof by moving to a new house and leaving everyone else behind. You fix the roof.
At the same time, Democrats can't keep pretending that defending the status quo is the same as defending teachers and students. It's not. When American students are falling behind their peers in other developed nations on math, science, and reading, something is fundamentally wrong and needs to change. Refusing to acknowledge that doesn't protect anyone—it just guarantees the next generation is less prepared than it needs to be.
We understand the families who choose private and parochial schools—many of them are paying twice: once in taxes for the public schools their kids don’t attend, and once in tuition. They’re not abandoning public education; they’re making the best decision they can for their children right now. Their perspective matters in this conversation, and any serious reform has to grapple with why millions of parents feel the public system isn’t serving their kids. The answer isn’t to defund public schools so everyone can afford private ones—it’s to make public schools good enough that private school is a choice, not an escape hatch.
The United States consistently ranks behind dozens of countries in math, science, and reading on international assessments. The most recent PISA 2022 results (Programme for International Student Assessment, administered by the OECD) tell the story clearly: the United States ranked 26th in mathematics, with a score of 465—below the OECD average of 472. Meanwhile, Singapore scored 575, Japan scored 536, and South Korea scored 527. In Singapore, 41% of students performed at the highest levels in math. In the United States, that figure is roughly 7%.
We perform better in reading (6th) and science (10th), but "better than average" is not the standard a country that wants to lead the global economy should be aiming for. These aren't just numbers on a chart—they represent the future workforce, the future innovators, and the future economy.
If we want to remain the most competitive economy in the world, education is where that fight is won or lost. Better education is the single most powerful lever we have for increasing incomes, reducing poverty, and lowering crime. The data is overwhelming on this. Countries and communities that invest in education see returns across every measurable dimension of quality of life. The ones that don't fall behind—and they don't recover easily.
We cannot afford to be complacent about this. China, India, and a dozen other countries are investing heavily in their education systems right now, with a specific focus on STEM, AI, and the industries that will define the next century. If we're not keeping pace, we're not standing still—we're falling behind.
One thing that almost nobody in American politics wants to talk about is the school calendar itself. The American school year is built on an agrarian schedule that made sense when kids needed to be home to help with the harvest. That was 150 years ago. The world has changed. Our school calendar hasn't.
Many of the countries that outperform us have longer school years, longer school days, or both. We should be having an honest conversation about extending the time students spend in school—not to warehouse kids, but to give them more time to learn, more time for enrichment, more time for the hands-on, project-based learning that actually sticks. More instructional time also means more opportunity for tutoring, mentorship, and catching students who are falling behind before the gap becomes permanent.
This is a conversation that will require trade-offs and difficult negotiations. But if we're serious about competing globally, we have to be willing to look at structural changes to how we deliver education—not just what we teach, but how much time we have to teach it.
Teachers are the backbone of the education system. Full stop. The job is harder than most people realize, the pay is too low for what we ask of them, and the best teachers are worth their weight in gold. We support teachers. But supporting teachers and supporting the way teachers unions currently operate are two different things.
Teachers unions have an important role to play in protecting their members, but they also need to be honest partners in reform. There are concessions and trade-offs that need to happen if we're going to build a system that works better for students and teachers. Unions can't block every meaningful change and then wonder why the public is losing faith in the system they're defending.
Here's what we believe needs to change:
Great teachers should be able to earn more. In virtually every other profession in America, the best performers have the opportunity to earn significantly more than the average. That's how you attract and retain top talent. Teaching shouldn't be any different. A teacher who consistently produces exceptional results, who inspires students, who goes above and beyond—that person should have a clear path to earning well above the standard pay scale. Trapping the best teachers in rigid salary schedules that reward seniority over performance doesn't serve students or the profession.
Teachers in harder environments should earn more. A teacher working in a high-poverty, high-crime school district is doing fundamentally harder work than a teacher in an affluent suburb. The challenges are greater, the resources are fewer, and the emotional toll is heavier. Compensation should reflect that reality. We need meaningful pay differentials that incentivize talented teachers to work in the communities that need them most, rather than watching the best educators migrate to the easiest assignments.
Regional pay rates need a serious overhaul. Right now, teachers in some of the most comfortable, well-resourced schools in a metropolitan area are earning roughly the same as teachers in the toughest, most under-resourced schools across town. That makes no sense. We need smarter regional rate structures that create higher base pay for teachers in more challenging environments and adjust compensation to reflect the actual difficulty and cost of living in different areas. This isn't about paying anyone less for the sake of it—it's about directing resources where they're needed most and making the hardest teaching jobs the best-compensated ones.
These are tough conversations. Teachers unions won't love all of them. But the alternative—continuing to resist change while the system slowly erodes and politicians use that erosion to justify defunding public education entirely—is far worse. Unions need to come to the table as reform partners, not reform blockers, because the future of the profession they represent depends on getting this right.
Here's something that should make every American angry: we send kids through 13 years of public education and most of them graduate without understanding how a credit card works, what compound interest does to debt, how to file their taxes, what a 401(k) is, how mortgages work, or how to build a basic budget. These aren't niche skills for future accountants. These are survival skills for every single adult in a modern economy—and we simply don't teach them.
The consequences of this failure show up everywhere. Americans carry over $1 trillion in credit card debt. Millions of young adults sign student loan agreements they don't fully understand. People buy homes without grasping what an adjustable-rate mortgage can do to their payments. Families live paycheck to paycheck not always because they don't earn enough, but because nobody ever taught them how to manage what they earn. Financial illiteracy doesn't just hurt individuals—it destabilizes families, communities, and the broader economy.
This is not a partisan issue. This is a basic competence issue. Every student in America should graduate high school understanding personal budgeting, the mechanics of debt and interest, how credit scores work, the basics of investing and retirement planning, how taxes work, and how to evaluate financial decisions critically. These topics should be woven into the curriculum starting in middle school and reinforced through graduation—not offered as an optional elective that most students never take.
The ripple effects of getting this right are enormous. People who understand money make better decisions about debt. They save more. They're less likely to fall victim to predatory lending. They start building wealth earlier. They're more resilient during economic downturns. Financial education doesn't just help individuals—it reduces the strain on social safety nets, lowers bankruptcy rates, and builds a more economically stable country from the ground up.
This one is going to be uncomfortable for some people, but it needs to be said: we have stopped teaching young people what it means to work hard, show up, follow through, and take personal responsibility for their outcomes. And the results are showing up in every corner of American life—in the workforce, in relationships, in communities, and in the general sense that something fundamental has shifted in how the next generation approaches the world.
This isn't about nostalgia for some imagined golden age, and it's not about blaming kids. It's about recognizing that work ethic, discipline, reliability, and accountability are learned behaviors—and if we're not deliberately teaching them, we shouldn't be surprised when they're in short supply. Schools used to reinforce these values as a matter of course. Somewhere along the way, we decided that was someone else's job. The problem is, for a lot of kids, nobody else is doing it either.
The impact extends far beyond the workplace. People who develop a strong sense of personal accountability and follow-through are better partners, better parents, better neighbors, and better citizens. They're more resilient when things go wrong. They're more likely to finish what they start—whether that's a degree, a career, or a commitment to their community. Work ethic isn't just about making money. It's about building the kind of character that sustains a functioning society.
We need to bring these values back into the educational framework—not as a lecture about "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps," but as practical, lived experience. Project-based learning with real deadlines and real consequences. Mentorship programs that connect students with working professionals. Community service requirements that teach kids what it means to contribute to something bigger than themselves. Internships and apprenticeships that give young people a taste of what the real world expects. These aren't soft skills. They're foundational skills, and the fact that we've let them atrophy in our education system is one of the reasons so many young people feel lost when they step into adulthood.
Artificial intelligence is going to reshape the economy more fundamentally than the internet did. That's not speculation—it's already happening. The students sitting in classrooms right now will graduate into a workforce where AI is embedded in virtually every industry, every job function, and every career path.
If we don't prepare them for that world, someone else's students will be ready instead. AI literacy, computational thinking, data fluency, and the ability to work alongside intelligent systems need to be woven into the curriculum from an early age—not as elective add-ons, but as core competencies alongside reading, writing, and math.
But—and this is the part we have to get right—AI readiness does not mean letting AI do the work. Kids still have to learn to read closely, write clearly, do the math, and reason a problem all the way through on their own. You cannot skip the foundations. A student who hands the essay to a chatbot never learns to think, and it shows the moment the crutch is taken away. The goal is a mind that can do the work without the tool—and can then use the tool to go further.
At the same time, we have to stop pretending. This technology is not going away, and every honest teacher already knows students are using it. Banning it and looking the other way just guarantees kids learn to use it badly, in secret, with no one teaching them the difference. Using AI well is itself a real skill—knowing when to reach for it and when not to, how to prompt it, how to fact-check it, how to catch it when it's confidently wrong, and how to use it to sharpen your own thinking instead of outsourcing it. That skill should be taught deliberately, with real curriculum built around it, the same way we teach any other powerful tool: master the fundamentals first, then learn to wield the technology they'll be using for the rest of their lives.
This requires investment in teacher training, updated curricula, and the technology infrastructure to support it. States can't do this alone. The federal government needs to provide guidance, funding, and a national framework that ensures no state and no zip code gets left behind in the AI transition.