I can already the old battle lines being drawn in response to Nikole Hannah-Jones' NYT article, so I wanted to re-up my recent piece in @DemJournal arguing that we no longer have the luxury of a schools-vs.-family debate given the change of era we're in: we have to merge them.

Thrilled to have a piece in @demjournal along Joe Waters as part of their symposium on "The Schools Our Kids Deserve." The whole symposium is worth a read -- we're sharing space with folks like former Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona and AFT head Randi Weingarten -- and we argue that: "For 60 years, a debate has raged in education circles: Is educational achievement primarily the result of strong schools, or strong families? The pendulum on this question has swung back and forth over the years. But in an era of fading parental belief in public schools, widespread declines in enrollment, atomized teens struggling to make sense of their lives, and novel threats and opportunities emerging from the artificial intelligence revolution, we need a new synthesis that includes education as a key pillar of a comprehensive family policy. This will not only improve student achievement but help the nation prepare for a predictably unpredictable future. ...The educational reforms of our day must go far beyond improving the United States’ uneven performance in literacy and math, vitally important as those efforts are. Nor is this merely a matter of better civics education. The content and structure of our education system do not meet the moment. We’ve been treating academic achievement as an end in itself rather than as a critical part of developing the capabilities of the human being to flourish. We call this 'human formation': the cultivation of all dimensions of the person—intellectual, moral, spiritual, and relational—with enough self-aware grounding in well-defined principles to be able to navigate uncertain and unknown waters without losing one’s way. When you start talking about human formation, however, you must talk about the family too."