American schools continue to face challenges involving reading and math achievement, attendance, teacher workload, discipline, and student readiness. These 10 practical education reforms could strengthen accountability while giving students and educators better support.

Editorial Note

This article is intended for general educational and informational purposes. Education policy varies significantly across states, school districts, and individual communities, and no single reform can address every educational challenge.

The discussion below combines publicly available national data with educator-focused analysis. References to struggling schools or declining academic performance should not be interpreted to mean that every American school, teacher, district, or student is performing poorly. Many schools continue to produce strong results under difficult circumstances. The purpose of this article is to examine weaknesses in the broader system and consider practical reforms that deserve serious discussion.

America Does Not Need Another Education Slogan

American schools collect enormous amounts of information about students. Teachers administer assessments, districts track attendance and academic progress, states publish accountability reports, and the federal government collects national education data.

In many cases, we know when students are falling behind. The harder question is what happens afterward.

A child can be identified as struggling in reading, receive additional assessments, remain behind, move into the next grade, and repeat much of the same cycle. Teachers may recognize that a student needs more intensive intervention while staffing, scheduling, funding, or administrative limitations make that intervention difficult to provide.

Schools can experience something similar. A school may be identified as low-performing, complete an improvement plan, purchase a new program, replace administrators, attend additional training, and still struggle years later.

That points to one of the most important problems in American education: the system can sometimes be better at identifying problems than responding effectively to them.

National data provide reasons to take that concern seriously. The 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress showed that average fourth- and eighth-grade reading scores remained below their 2019 levels. Mathematics presented a more complicated picture: fourth-grade performance improved compared with 2022, but national results still showed that academic recovery was incomplete.

The National Center for Education Statistics also reported that public-school leaders estimated that 31 percent of students remained behind grade level in at least one academic subject at the end of the 2024–25 school year.

Those numbers do not prove that American public education has failed. They do suggest that returning to business as usual is not enough.

For decades, the United States has debated school funding, standardized testing, curriculum, teacher evaluation, school choice, federal authority, state control, discipline, technology, accountability, and countless other education issues. Those debates matter, but they can distract from a much more fundamental question.

Are students actually learning what they need to know, and what does the education system do when they are not?

A serious effort to improve American education should begin there.

What NCLB and ESSA Can Teach Us

Modern education reform does not need to begin from scratch. The United States has already experimented with very different approaches to educational accountability.

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 was signed into law on January 8, 2002, as a major reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. NCLB significantly expanded the federal government's influence over school accountability by requiring states to test students, establish academic expectations, report results across student populations, and intervene when schools repeatedly failed to meet accountability requirements.

One of NCLB's most important contributions was transparency. A school could no longer rely solely on an impressive overall average while particular groups of students consistently experienced much weaker outcomes.

At the same time, NCLB developed serious weaknesses. Its accountability system became highly prescriptive, and states were expected to move toward 100 percent proficiency in reading and mathematics by the 2013–14 school year. By the early 2010s, the federal government was allowing states to request flexibility from significant NCLB requirements.

Congress eventually passed the Every Student Succeeds Act. President Barack Obama signed ESSA on December 10, 2015, replacing NCLB as the current reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

ESSA retained important federal requirements involving assessment, transparency, disadvantaged students, and struggling schools while returning considerably more control over accountability systems to states.

There are useful lessons in both approaches.

NCLB was right that achievement gaps should remain visible and that schools receiving public funding should be accountable for student outcomes. ESSA was right to recognize that Washington should not dictate every detail of school improvement across thousands of communities with very different circumstances.

A better education system should preserve both principles: transparent outcomes and meaningful local flexibility.

An Educator’s Perspective: Data Should Change What We Do

From an educator's perspective, assessment data have limited value when they do not change instruction.

A test score should not merely create another spreadsheet, meeting, report, or label for a child. It should help educators determine what a student understands, what the student has not yet mastered, what type of support is appropriate, and whether that support is actually producing progress.

The same principle applies to schools and districts. Accountability should not exist simply to identify successful and unsuccessful schools. When evidence shows that a classroom, program, intervention, or school is not producing adequate results, the system should have a structured way to respond.

Education does not necessarily need more accountability paperwork. It needs better follow-through after a problem has been identified.

1. Make Reading, Writing, and Mathematics the Foundation

Modern schools are expected to accomplish an extraordinary range of objectives. Students need opportunities to learn science, history, technology, citizenship, health, physical education, the arts, career skills, financial literacy, and many other important subjects.

Those areas matter, but none eliminates the importance of foundational literacy and numeracy.

A student who reaches middle school unable to independently comprehend increasingly complex text will likely face difficulties far beyond English class. Science textbooks, historical documents, mathematical word problems, job applications, technical manuals, college coursework, and many everyday adult responsibilities depend on literacy.

Mathematics presents a similar challenge. Weak number sense, incomplete understanding of basic operations, and major gaps in foundational concepts can make increasingly advanced mathematics considerably more difficult.

Schools should therefore treat early literacy and mathematics intervention as urgent rather than optional. Students should be screened early, teachers should receive useful diagnostic information, and intervention should begin when a meaningful problem first emerges rather than several years after the learning gap has widened.

That does not mean subjecting young children to endless high-stakes examinations. Effective assessment should answer practical instructional questions. Can this student decode unfamiliar words? Is the student reading fluently enough to comprehend a passage? Does the student understand fractions conceptually? Can the student explain mathematical reasoning rather than simply select an answer?

Assessment becomes useful when educators can use the results to decide what should happen next.

2. Build an Intervention System That Intensifies When Students Fall Behind

Simply retaining every struggling student is not the answer. Repeating a grade does not automatically provide better instruction, and making a student repeat essentially the same educational experience may not address the underlying skill deficiency.

Automatically promoting students while serious learning gaps remain unresolved is not an effective solution either.

Schools need a structured system in which support becomes more intensive when students fail to make sufficient progress. A student experiencing an early difficulty might begin with targeted small-group instruction. If that support is insufficient, the school may need to add more frequent intervention, tutoring, specialized instruction, additional instructional periods, summer programming, diagnostic evaluation, or other services based on the student's needs.

The important principle is that the response should change when the evidence shows that the current response is not working.

That can be difficult in practice. Schools operate within staffing limitations, schedules, budgets, transportation systems, special-education requirements, and competing priorities. A classroom teacher may correctly identify that a student needs considerably more instruction but have little authority to create additional time in the student's schedule.

That is why intervention cannot depend entirely on individual teachers improvising solutions. Schools and districts need systems that make additional academic support possible.

Students should not quietly progress from elementary school into middle school and eventually high school while teachers, administrators, families, and the students themselves all know that major foundational gaps remain unresolved.

3. Make High-Quality Tutoring a Serious Academic Intervention

Tutoring became especially prominent as schools responded to pandemic-era learning disruption, but the value of high-quality tutoring extends far beyond COVID-19 recovery.

Research summarized by the Institute of Education Sciences indicates that effective tutoring is generally structured, connected to student learning, and delivered with sufficient frequency. IES has reported that tutoring can be effective when offered once or twice per week but tends to have stronger effects when conducted three to five times weekly. Small-group tutoring can also provide an effective balance between individualized instruction and cost.

That approach is very different from simply announcing that optional homework help is available after school.

When a student is substantially behind, tutoring should be treated as an intentional academic intervention. Educators should be able to explain what skill is being targeted, how frequently tutoring occurs, where the student started, what improvement is expected, and how progress will be measured.

Consistency matters as well. Students can benefit from developing an educational relationship with someone who understands their strengths, misconceptions, habits, previous lessons, and academic progress. Constantly moving a student among different tutors may provide coverage, but it can reduce the instructional continuity that makes personalized education valuable.

Tutoring does not necessarily have to occur outside school. Depending on the student and the school, additional instruction could occur during intervention periods, before or after school, during the school day, over the summer, or through a combination of approaches.

The broader issue is instructional time. If one seventh grader is reading comfortably at the expected level while another is several years behind, giving both students exactly the same amount of literacy instruction and expecting the gap to disappear is a difficult proposition.

Students with larger academic gaps often need more instructional support, not simply more assessments documenting that the gap still exists.

4. Restore Order While Keeping Discipline Focused on Learning

Excellent teaching requires a classroom environment in which teaching can actually take place.

Schools should recognize that student behavior can be influenced by disability, trauma, mental-health concerns, family instability, academic frustration, and many other circumstances. Understanding those factors is an important part of educating children responsibly.

Understanding the causes of behavior, however, does not require schools to accept unlimited disruption.

When one student's repeated behavior consistently prevents an entire classroom from learning, the school has responsibilities to both the student exhibiting the behavior and the students whose instruction is being disrupted.

Schools need understandable behavioral expectations, predictable consequences, documentation, effective communication with families, and administrators willing to support reasonable classroom expectations. Serious or persistent cases may require counseling, specialized behavioral services, special-education evaluation when appropriate, alternative educational environments, or individualized intervention plans.

The purpose should not be punishment for its own sake. Effective discipline should restore conditions in which learning can occur while giving students a credible path toward improving their behavior.

Students should understand what is expected. Teachers should know that reasonable expectations will be supported. Families should receive clear information, and administrators should have meaningful options beyond repeatedly returning a severely disruptive student to an unchanged situation.

5. Treat Teachers Like Professionals—and Expect Professional Performance

Education debates sometimes describe teachers in extremes. They are portrayed either as victims of a broken system who should be protected from virtually all criticism or as the primary cause of disappointing educational outcomes.

Neither position captures the complexity of teaching.

Teaching is skilled professional work requiring content knowledge, instructional ability, communication skills, classroom management, planning, judgment, adaptability, and an ability to analyze student performance.

School systems should treat the profession accordingly.

RAND's 2024 State of the American Teacher Survey found that teachers reported working an average of 53 hours per week, compared with 44 hours among comparable working adults. Teachers also reported substantially higher levels of frequent job-related stress and burnout.

Reducing unnecessary administrative burdens should therefore be part of education reform. Districts should examine how much teacher time is consumed by duplicated documentation, inefficient meetings, constantly changing initiatives, poorly implemented technology, ineffective professional development, and reporting requirements that have little connection to instruction.

Professional respect should also include professional expectations.

Teachers who struggle should receive meaningful coaching and a realistic opportunity to improve. Strong teachers should have opportunities to mentor colleagues and exercise instructional leadership without necessarily having to leave the classroom.

When an educator remains persistently ineffective after appropriate support and due process, schools should also have a workable mechanism for addressing that performance.

The objective is not to make teaching easy. The objective is to make excellent teaching sustainable while maintaining meaningful professional standards.

6. Put Instructional Leadership Back at the Center of the Principalship

The modern principalship has become extraordinarily complicated. School leaders manage staffing, discipline, budgets, special education, parent concerns, school safety, testing, evaluations, facilities, transportation, legal requirements, community relations, and numerous other responsibilities.

Every one of those responsibilities can consume significant time. Yet the central purpose of a school remains education, meaning instructional leadership cannot become secondary.

A strong principal should understand where students are succeeding and struggling. School leaders should know whether interventions are working, where attendance problems are concentrated, which teachers require additional support, what strong teachers are doing successfully, and whether resources align with the school's academic priorities.

Principal accountability should therefore involve more than a single standardized test score. Student academic growth, overall achievement, attendance, school climate, teacher retention, progress among previously struggling students, and postsecondary outcomes can all provide valuable information.

The most important leadership question is whether the school becomes more effective over time.

Principals do not need to personally solve every classroom problem. They do need to create conditions in which excellent instruction is expected, supported, measured, and improved.

7. Keep Standardized Testing, but Use It More Intelligently

Standardized testing remains one of the most controversial subjects in American education, but eliminating objective measurement entirely would create problems of its own.

Without comparable information, schools, districts, and states could make broad claims about improvement without an independent way to determine whether students were actually learning more. Large achievement gaps could also become easier to overlook.

That is one reason NCLB's emphasis on transparency remains important.

Problems arise when standardized testing changes from being one measurement tool into the central purpose around which a school operates. Education is broader than a reading or mathematics score, and accountability should reflect that reality.

Strong accountability systems should consider multiple indicators. Academic proficiency matters, but year-to-year growth can matter too. Attendance, graduation, successful completion of advanced or career coursework, school climate, and appropriate postsecondary outcomes can add important context.

Results should also continue to be examined across student populations. A school with a strong overall average should not automatically receive an unquestioned success label if students with disabilities, English learners, economically disadvantaged students, or other groups repeatedly experience substantially weaker outcomes.

Transparency should not be confused with punishment. Good data make problems visible, while good leadership determines what should be done about them.

8. Make High School Lead to a Real Next Step

A high-school diploma should represent more than accumulating enough credits to leave school.

For decades, American education has sometimes treated enrollment at a four-year university as the clearest measure of postsecondary success. Universities remain enormously valuable, and college preparation should continue to be an important part of secondary education.

It should not be the only respected pathway.

Students should have credible opportunities to prepare for universities, community colleges, technical certifications, registered apprenticeships, skilled employment, military service, entrepreneurship, and other structured postsecondary options.

Those pathways should become visible well before senior year.

Career and technical education should also maintain rigorous expectations. It should not become a destination where schools simply send students who struggle academically. Skilled trades and technical careers frequently require mathematics, technology skills, communication, problem-solving, reliability, and substantial specialized knowledge.

College-bound students need practical preparation too. Financial literacy, professional communication, research skills, digital literacy, time management, and an understanding of student loans and career outcomes can all help prepare students for adulthood.

Schools should therefore ask more than whether a senior accumulated the required credits.

They should also be able to answer a more important question: What is this graduate prepared to do next?

9. Make Families Genuine Partners in Academic Accountability

Schools cannot control every condition affecting a child's education. Students spend considerably more time outside school than inside it, and attendance, sleep, technology use, health, homework habits, transportation, home stability, and family expectations can all influence academic performance.

Recognizing that reality does not mean blaming families when students struggle. It means communicating academic information in ways families can actually use.

Parents and guardians should receive understandable information explaining where their child is performing, what skills are expected, where significant difficulties exist, what the school is doing to address those difficulties, what can reasonably be reinforced outside school, and when progress will be measured again.

Attendance deserves similar attention. NCES reported an average daily attendance rate of approximately 91 percent among public schools during the 2024–25 school year.

A national average cannot explain the circumstances of an individual child, but persistent absence creates an obvious instructional challenge. Even excellent teachers and interventions become less effective when students repeatedly miss instruction.

Schools should identify serious attendance problems early and determine what is driving them. Transportation, health concerns, housing instability, bullying, family responsibilities, disengagement, and other barriers may require very different solutions.

Partnership should not mean blame. It should mean that schools and families understand the challenge, understand their respective responsibilities, and know what they are trying to accomplish together.

10. Give Schools Flexibility, but Demand Transparent Results

Education reform often becomes a debate about who should control schools: the federal government, states, local districts, principals, teachers, or families.

In reality, no single level of government or organization can effectively make every educational decision.

States and local communities should maintain meaningful authority over standards, curricula, graduation requirements, school-improvement strategies, and other decisions that depend heavily on local circumstances. A rural district, a major urban system, a military-connected community, and a rapidly growing suburb may face very different challenges.

Flexibility, however, cannot become an excuse for weak accountability.

States and districts should publish understandable information about academic achievement, growth, graduation, attendance, subgroup performance, and other meaningful outcomes. When public money funds an educational initiative, the public should have a reasonable way to determine whether that initiative is producing results.

The federal government does not need to tell every principal how to run a school. Federal policy can still play important roles involving civil rights, funding, educational research, transparency, and protections for student populations whose needs might otherwise disappear inside statewide averages.

The same accountability principle should apply when schools purchase programs.

Districts should stop cycling through major initiatives before they have been properly implemented and evaluated. Before purchasing a curriculum, intervention platform, technology product, or school-improvement program, leaders should identify the problem it is intended to solve, examine the evidence supporting it, determine what successful implementation requires, train employees appropriately, and establish measurable outcomes.

Programs should not survive indefinitely because administrators are emotionally invested in them. They also should not disappear simply because a newer product has better marketing.

Education reform should be driven by evidence of what students need and whether the response is working.

What New To Education Can Contribute

Large-scale education reform takes place through legislatures, state agencies, school boards, districts, schools, educators, families, and communities. Individual students, however, cannot necessarily wait years for every structural problem to be resolved.

That is one reason personalized educational support can be valuable.

New To Education provides tutoring and educational services designed to give learners additional instructional time and individualized support beyond what may be possible within a traditional classroom schedule.

Tutoring should never be presented as a replacement for excellent classroom teachers, effective schools, special-education services, counseling, or other professional educational supports. It is another tool that can provide focused instruction when students need additional explanation, practice, instructional time, or individualized attention.

A consistent tutoring relationship can also provide something that large educational systems sometimes struggle to deliver: continuity. When an educator understands a student's strengths, misconceptions, academic history, goals, and previous progress, instruction can become considerably more targeted.

Families and students can explore New To Education to learn more about available educational services or view New To Education tutoring subscriptions for current tutoring options.

Key Takeaways

Improving American education does not require recreating No Child Left Behind, eliminating ESSA, abandoning standardized testing, or finding one national program that promises to fix every school.

The larger challenge is determining what happens after evidence shows that a student or school is struggling.

Foundational literacy and mathematics should trigger early intervention. Students who remain behind should receive increasingly intensive support rather than repeatedly receiving essentially the same intervention. High-quality tutoring should be used strategically when students need additional instructional time.

Teachers should receive stronger professional support alongside meaningful expectations. Principals should remain instructional leaders. Discipline systems should protect learning while responding appropriately to student needs, and high schools should prepare students for several credible pathways into adulthood.

Testing should remain part of the education system, but testing should inform improvement rather than define the entire purpose of education. Families need understandable academic information, states should retain meaningful flexibility, and taxpayers deserve transparency about whether educational programs are producing results.

Accountability matters most when it leads to action.

FAQ

Did No Child Left Behind end?

Yes. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 was signed into law on January 8, 2002. Congress later passed the Every Student Succeeds Act, which President Barack Obama signed on December 10, 2015. ESSA replaced NCLB as the current reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act while retaining several federal testing and accountability requirements.

Does ESSA still require standardized testing?

Yes. ESSA maintains statewide assessment requirements in specified grades and subjects. States have considerably more flexibility than they had under NCLB in determining how those assessments fit into broader accountability systems.

Are American students still struggling academically?

National evidence presents a mixed but concerning picture. Fourth-grade mathematics improved between 2022 and 2024, but national mathematics performance had not fully returned to 2019 levels. Reading performance remained particularly concerning, with both fourth- and eighth-grade national averages below 2019 performance. NCES also reported that school leaders estimated that 31 percent of public-school students remained behind grade level at the end of the 2024–25 school year.

Should students who are behind simply repeat a grade?

Not automatically. Retaining a student does not guarantee that the student will receive different or more effective instruction. Schools should identify specific skill deficiencies and consider targeted interventions, additional instructional time, tutoring, specialized support, and regular progress monitoring based on the individual student's needs.

Would increasing education funding solve these problems?

Resources matter because schools need qualified educators, instructional materials, intervention programs, facilities, transportation, technology, and student services. More spending by itself, however, does not guarantee stronger outcomes. Policymakers and school leaders also need to examine where resources go, how programs are implemented, whether educators have the capacity to use them successfully, and whether student outcomes actually improve.

Final Thoughts

American education reform does not require choosing one period of education history and attempting to recreate it.

The era before NCLB demonstrates the value of state and local flexibility. NCLB demonstrated why achievement gaps and subgroup outcomes need to remain visible. ESSA showed that accountability can coexist with greater state authority.

The next stage of reform should focus more deliberately on what happens after a problem has been identified.

When students struggle, schools should recognize the problem as early as reasonably possible. Families should receive understandable information, educators should have access to interventions that match the identified need, and students who require additional instruction should receive additional instruction.

Schools should then determine whether that support actually worked. When the evidence shows that an intervention is insufficient, the response should change rather than simply documenting the same problem again.

That is a more demanding form of accountability than issuing another report, assigning another label, or purchasing another educational program. It requires educators and policymakers to connect evidence with action and then examine whether that action resulted in meaningful improvement.

The United States does not lack educators who care about students. It does not lack assessment data, educational research, technology, programs, or policy ideas.

What the system too often lacks is a reliable connection between identifying a problem, providing an appropriate intervention, measuring the result, and changing course when necessary.

Building that connection would not solve every challenge facing American schools. It would, however, be a meaningful place to start.

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