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.

At various times in both U.S. and global history, education systems have been called upon to adapt to changing contexts. World War II presents a stark example. In his book The Year of Our Lord 1943, scholar Alan Jacobs notes that many eminent humanists—ranging from writer C.S. Lewis to poet W.H. Auden to philosopher Simone Weil—as well as faculty at top American colleges and universities, like Harvard, obsessed over the education and formation of the postwar generation. While these individuals came to different conclusions about the shape of postwar education, Jacobs writes that “The unspoken question underlying all these explorations was the same: if the free societies of the West win this great world war, how might their young people be educated in a way that made them worthy of that victory—and that made another war on that scale at worst avoidable and at best unthinkable?”

We face a similar hinge point now as the world reckons with new technologies that pose fundamental questions as to the nature of humanity itself while also shaking the foundations of how we have traditionally consumed information and related to one another. Such a tectonic change demands a response from educational institutions. We sometimes forget the sheer power and potential energy contained within a mass public education system. Despite a pandemic-influenced spike in homeschooling and new school voucher laws, over 80 percent of American children—around 50 million kids—still attend public schools. The public school system has undergone major shifts to meet the demands of the times, from the advent of high schools in the first decades of the twentieth century to the shift toward science and math education amid the Space Race. Our own era calls for educational institutions that form students committed to democratic pluralism and the common good. As education expert Ross Wiener has written: “In a diverse, self-governing society, forming citizens is a civic responsibility…. Public schools remain the only institution with the reach and democratic warrant to do this work for nearly every child.”

The educational reforms of our day must go far beyond improving the United States’s 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.

Family Policy Matters

In the 1970s, renowned psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner articulated a new theory of child development. Rather than development marching stepwise through predetermined phases, he said it was guided by a complex interaction between the child and their environment. Bronfenbrenner, whose ideas were largely confirmed by later research, appropriately called this an “ecological” model.

In the ecology of childhood, few institutions loom larger than that of the family. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “The institution of the family is decisive in determining not only if a person has the capacity to love another individual but in the larger social sense whether he is capable of loving his fellow men collectively.” From pregnancy onward, the stability, predictability, and quality of family life indelibly shape how children grow and mediate their educational experiences both in early childhood and in later school years.

Hillary Clinton likes to tell the story of how the Maasai people of East Africa greet each other with a saying meaning, “And how are the children?” But the more apt question in our society might be, “And how are the parents?” The answer is: They’re not doing so well. As early childhood experts Phil Fisher and Joan Lombardi of the Stanford Center on Early Childhood wrote in 2025, Bronfenbrenner’s model must be updated to account for a modern-day “constellation of conditions” that are “impacting the ecosystems of young children in unprecedented ways and leading to new challenges for children and the adults in their lives.” These challenges include unaffordable and scarce child care, hazards exacerbated by climate disruption, and pressures in everyday life caused by the advent of new technologies. Fisher and Lombardi conclude that, all told, this new context is contributing to “emotional distress and mental health issues [that] are affecting large proportions of the adult population who have children.”

Our own work confirms this diagnosis. In Capita’s most recent quarterly survey of parents with minor children, half consistently reported feeling down, depressed, or hopeless over the past several weeks. To the list of challenges from Fisher and Lombardi, we would add an epidemic of depersonalization, or feelings of invisibility; fewer social connections; growing parental concerns about the impact of tech usage on children’s development and health; and uncertainty around what jobs might be available for today’s children in an AI-shaped future.

Yet most of the challenges facing today’s families are rooted in policy choices, not inevitabilities. As Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once wrote: “In the nature of modern industrial society, no government, however firm might be its wish otherwise, can avoid having policies that profoundly influence family relationships. This is not to be avoided. The only option is whether these will be purposeful, intended policies or whether they will be residual, derivative, in a sense concealed ones.” In the absence of purposeful, intended policies around summer child care, for instance, millions of parents are forced to pay thousands of dollars out of pocket and get up early on cold December mornings to refresh registration pages like they’re trying to score Taylor Swift tickets. A large survey of working parents released by Pew Research Center this June found that nearly half of working parents with 6- to 12-year-old children struggled to secure summer care. That stress is a policy choice.

Or consider the quality of parental job schedules, not traditionally part of the education conversation. Nearly a third of parents in Capita’s survey reported experiencing an unexpected shift change with less than 24 hours’ notice. This unpredictability in income and schedules not only makes it difficult to maintain public benefits or find child care, but also means parents must miss important events in their children’s lives, such as school performances and critically important education-related commitments like parent-teacher conferences. They certainly can’t expect to regularly participate in a parent-teacher association or attend school board meetings with such volatility in their schedules. That unavailability can create distance between parents and schools and prove highly distressing for both adults and children. It also deprives kids of a chance to see civic engagement in action.

When families—rather than children in isolation—are put at the center of the education conversation, the need for a different approach becomes clear. Much of what we call education policy today is, in fact, educational programming. The distinction matters. As Moynihan put it, “Programs relate to a single part of the system; policy seeks to respond to the system in its entirety.” Better teacher training, a stronger curriculum, and improved educator pay are important, but they are programmatic interventions masquerading as a policy agenda.

This myopia speaks, in fact, to widespread confusion about what education—public or private, pre-K or higher ed—is for. For much of the past 40 years, there has been a technocratic consensus on the center-left and center-right that education is primarily about developing workers to ensure the smooth and efficient functioning of the economy. Hence, we have seen a broad retreat from the humanities and a rise in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) and career and technical education. While defensible in a narrow sense (we do not propose abandoning these efforts), the focus on programming rather than policy stems from a failure to understand education’s true power. Sociologist and early care and education advocate Susan Prentice calls this framework the “investable” child: the view that shaping children is worthwhile only because of the value that can be extracted from them once they are grown, like a maturing bond.

Needless to say, this is an impoverished vision of the human being, the dignity and purpose of work, and the role of a basic liberal education in preparing young Americans for participation in the deliberative activities of democratic citizenship. It views the family—the first place where the habits of deliberation, compromise, negotiation, shared decision-making, and managing differences are learned—as largely irrelevant to the educational enterprise, which is left instead to technical experts focused on the economy rather than the health of the body politic. It ignores the family, and families are growing tired of being ignored.

Toward a Renewed Partnership

The relationship between schools and families seems to be growing more adversarial. Coming off rancorous years of fighting over COVID-19 response measures, school board meetings now regularly devolve into tense debates over school consolidation and the use of technology.

It does not have to be this way. Elected leaders should commit to ensuring that the academic product in schools will be of high quality and, in the same breath, to creating the conditions for parents to be full partners in their children’s education. Those conditions must be anchored in the stability, predictability, and quality of family life. Exhausted, stressed-out parents are not set up for the partnership with educators that they and their kids deserve. They need robust paid leave; income support in the form of child benefits; control over job schedules; improved public transportation that shortens commutes between work, school, and home; a publicly funded system of formal and informal child-care options that incorporates both after-school and summer programs along with care for young children; and a goal of 100 percent of children having health insurance and none experiencing homelessness. When schooling is placed within the context of family stability and quality of life, these are the types of policies that become inseparable from any education agenda.

Certainly, some of these goals represent generational projects, but the potential for success will be considerably greater if the education sector—which receives nearly one trillion dollars in public money annually, boasts the nation’s largest labor union, and has as stakeholders tens of millions of parents who vote—starts flexing its muscle and building desperately needed connective tissue around the American family. Moreover, profound transformations may open windows that previously seemed sealed. Consider that the Great Depression and World War II gave us the modern welfare state, while the COVID-19 pandemic sparked social and medical innovations that continue to exert influence today.

At the same time, there are immediate steps education leaders can take to support families. For instance, they can create integrated systems and pathways between early care and education, K-12 schools, and after-school and summer care—such as school-community partnerships that would create joint parent outreach, unified applications, combined trainings, and more—to minimize parents’ stress and maximize the quality time they have with their children. Similarly, leaders can work with local businesses to flag upcoming school events or school holidays that will impact employees with children.

Proficiency in reading, writing, and math will always be indispensable. Deprioritizing student achievement in core subjects would be foolhardy. But we must acknowledge that the U.S. education system is not built for the late 2020s and ’30s, much less the decades that lie beyond. Most proposed solutions fail to even approach the level of ambition that healthy human formation requires amid changes of this scale. Schools and families need each other more than ever, and our children need leaders who can see that the only viable education policy agenda encompasses both.

The first task of a renewed family-school partnership is to come together for a sober conversation about the role of education in our changing era. Artificial intelligence, in particular, is generating many questions—not only about how to use AI tools or prevent cheating, but also about how to help students navigate an AI-inflected future. Beyond AI, today’s youth are faced with an era marked by political polarization and ever more sophisticated methods of propaganda, as well as increasingly difficult metaphysical questions about what the good life looks like in the middle part of the twenty-first century.

This partnership also calls for reimagining what educational pluralism means in a period when family needs and forms are especially diverse and dynamic. There is historical precedent to draw on: The 1976 Democratic platform affirmed the party’s “commitment to the support of a constitutionally acceptable method of providing tax aid for the education of all pupils in non-segregated schools in order to ensure parental freedom in choosing the best education for their children.” Former American Federation of Teachers president Albert Shanker was in fact an early proponent of public charter schools. While private and parochial school vouchers have certainly been politicized in ways that harm public schools, opposition to private and parochial schools has its own politicized past, often tied to nativism that treated Catholic schools as un-American. Neither history should bind us. It is possible to hold the line on strong public schools while also empowering families. This will likely involve some form of school choice alongside reforms to school funding formulas that allow public schools to thrive amid declining enrollment and harsh budget pressures. After all, balancing competing priorities and finding elegant syntheses is the work of statecraft, and pluralism done well can strengthen the common good.

Reclaiming the common good has rarely been more urgent. The United States, and indeed the Earth, is approaching a discontinuity: Driven by factors like an AI-dominated economy, emerging technologies that were once the dreams of science fiction, extreme weather, a rapidly aging and soon-to-be-shrinking population, and geopolitical disorder, what lies ahead will be markedly different from what came before. Our education system must face the facts. We are not simply in an era of change, but a change of era. These times demand that we reckon, above all else, with questions of human formation and what it means to exist, grow, and flourish—individually and as a society—in the Anthropocene. The first step is putting schools and the family in their proper place: together.