If your house crumbles in a storm, your first instinct probably goes something like this: Rebuild your house exactly as it was. Get a roof over your head and return to your normal life as soon as possible. Never mind that the foundation was cracking, the roof was riddled with holes, and the air conditioner was broken.

After the devastation of a crisis, the drive to return to the “normalcy” of the time right before the crisis is a powerful (and understandable) desire. But like the house that was deeply broken before the storm ever hit, American education right before the COVID-19 pandemic and before the second Trump Administration’s dismantling of the Department of Education was badly in need of transformation. The system we had normalized by 2019 was already failing too many of our nation’s students, and the pandemic in many ways heightened existing achievement and opportunity gaps and deepened inequities that had been growing for years.

That’s why, as secretary of education under President Biden, I often urged my colleagues not to let a crisis go to waste by rebuilding education exactly as it was in 2019. Now, though the immediate crisis of the pandemic has passed, we face a new crisis—and a new opportunity. Public education is under attack. The Department of Education is being gutted. But when we rebuild after this crisis, we can (and must) also reimagine.

I see an opening for three big national movements. These are areas where, if we step up at both the national and state levels, work across party lines, and focus our efforts, we can deliver truly transformative and lasting change.

Three National Movements in Education

A Movement to Lift the Teaching Profession

One thing that’s been conspicuously absent from many education transformation proposals over the years is a recognition of the central role teachers play in education. At the end of the day, success in education comes down to quality core instruction: the relationship between the teacher, the student, and the content. It doesn’t matter if the curriculum is fantastic or the class has the coolest new technology if you don’t also have the expertise and dedication of the teacher at the front of the classroom. There are no great outcomes in education without great teachers, period.

Unfortunately, in recent years, we’ve seen significant teacher shortages in our country. But when we talk about the teacher shortage issue, what we’re really talking about is a teacher respect issue. Too often, the conditions teachers work under do not reflect respect for a profession that is expected to change lives and set young people up for lasting success.

We can address this through state and national efforts that target what I call the ABCs of teaching: Agency, Better Working Conditions, and Competitive Salaries. Agency means treating educators like the professionals they are and empowering them to make decisions based on their expertise and experience. Better working conditions encompass everything from refusing to normalize long hours of teaching in 95-degree classrooms to ensuring enough planning time and professional development opportunities.

Competitive salaries are critical. Currently, 70 percent of states and 65 percent of school districts offer average starting salaries for teachers below $50,000. The average salary for a public-school teacher nationwide is $74,495. These salaries cannot compete with those in other professions requiring a college degree. Teachers are taking second and third jobs just to survive. Educators do not do what they do for the money, but we cannot normalize martyrdom as a prerequisite for serving students. Legislative action to raise teachers’ pay, backed by state efforts and smart approaches like registered teaching apprenticeships, can help drive the movement to respect and support educators.

As part of this work, especially when it comes to increasing the agency of educators, we must also revisit how we approach educational assessments. To be clear, this does not mean that we should not have high standards and expectations for our students, or that we should never have assessments. Well-designed assessments play a crucial role in identifying gaps, underlying potential, and progress in learning. High-quality formative assessments that connect to high standards taught by great educators have the power to drive instruction and curricular decisions that better serve students.

The reality many teachers face across America, though, is an avalanche of assessments that eat into instructional time, incentivize teaching to the test, and limit educators’ agency to apply their knowledge of good pedagogy in their classrooms. Countless students have missed out on proven practices like project-based learning or hands-on, experiential learning because teaching was reduced to test prep.

At their best, assessments are like headlights, showing us where to drive instruction and support. But at their worst, and particularly as used in the top-down federal education initiatives of the past, they have instead functioned as hammers to slam down on certain teachers or schools.

I experienced that myself as an elementary school principal during the No Child Left Behind era. Our Connecticut school served a large population of immigrants and English learners receiving bilingual education. These students, guided by their tireless bilingual teachers, were needing to learn twice as fast as anyone else as they worked hard to adapt to a new language and culture. But in that era, these incredible bilingual students and teachers saw their worth reduced to their level of mastery on a standardized test in a language the students didn’t even know.

The next administration should drive a high-level initiative to encourage all states to pioneer innovative assessment systems that demonstrate clear value to educators and students. This process must include eliminating unnecessary assessments. Where necessary, Congress and state legislatures should enact legislation that provides political cover and reduces bureaucratic obstacles for these actions.

A Movement for Transformative and Sustainable Investment

I have often said that investing in education is no different from investing in national defense: Both protect our tomorrow. But to date, we have not funded education in this country at a level that can deliver the lasting transformation our young people deserve.

What would happen if we made a significant nationwide effort to invest in education at a whole new level? The impact on education of the American Rescue Plan (ARP), the 2021 stimulus bill to address the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, shows us what might be possible.

The $123 billion investment that went to states and school districts as part of the ARP helped us swiftly and safely reopen schools. But more than that, we saw what schools and districts could achieve when they were empowered to invest in their specific needs and focus on what works in education rather than on implementing mandates and standards from Washington. Some schools hired counselors and social workers who helped address the national youth mental health crisis. Others expanded tutoring, built up afterschool programs, or recruited and retained educators to address the much-needed recovery after the pandemic disruption. These targeted investments fueled visible academic growth, especially in large urban school systems, demonstrating that students rise when we seriously invest in public education.

But data from the Education Recovery Scorecard, a project of Harvard University’s Center for Education Policy Research, shows that two distinct groups of districts recovered best after the pandemic: the highest-income districts, which already had significant resources, and the lowest-income districts, which received more targeted support. The districts in the middle struggled the most to recover, remaining well below their 2019 achievement levels. This suggests that, though a federal funding boost can accelerate learning, when that boost is temporary and targeted, there are limits to who can benefit and how sustainable those benefits are.

It’s time to move beyond temporary emergency programs and establish a bigger, better plan for education—one that invests in districts and schools across the country more broadly and sustainably. We must treat sustained federal investment not as a one-time crisis intervention, but as a bold and lasting strategy to protect public education and ensure every child can achieve their full potential.

The ARP served us well in recovering from the pandemic. Now, we need a new ARP: an American Reimagination Plan to transform education for the future.

Transforming federal investment in education, of course, won’t solve all the challenges we face in funding education. After all, the vast majority of education funding comes from the state and local levels. In many places, there are factors—such as the reliance on local property taxes to fund schools—that create inequities in resources between districts. Some states have worked to address these through funding models like the “guaranteed tax base” approach, which works to equalize the minimum amount of local tax dollars available for education across districts. A national effort to identify a “gold standard” education funding model and encourage states to make reforms that align with that model could go a long way toward making investment in education more sustainable and equitable for generations to come.

A Movement for Intentional Collaboration

If there is one factor that is decisive in whether education leaders succeed in overcoming a major challenge or achieving a lasting transformation, it is intentional collaboration. I saw that as Connecticut’s commissioner of education during the height of the pandemic. The districts that handled the pandemic best weren’t necessarily the most well-resourced districts; they were the districts that partnered most effectively with others. As commissioner, I worked closely with many key partners in Connecticut to get their “fingerprints on the plan” for school reopenings. Our plan was not going to please everyone, but because we collaborated intentionally, our imperfect plan achieved quick and lasting success on an issue where tensions could sometimes run high, and it became the model for our reopening work when I became U.S. secretary of education.

Some of our worthiest goals in education urgently require intentional collaboration. Take the effort to transform high schools—something my former Department of Education colleague James Kvaal writes about in depth in his piece in this symposium—so that students can have more pathways to upward mobility through hands-on, career-connected learning, internships with nearby employers, and dual enrollment with local colleges.

Similarly, the work I focus on today as an independent education adviser is about creating interdependent ecosystems that provide options for students when they graduate high school. By creating statewide systems that connect K-12 schools, colleges, industry partners, labor, community-based organizations, legislative and governmental agencies, and student groups, we build a shared movement that improves college and career pathways that lead to student success and upward economic mobility.

The next administration should do much more than restore the work the Biden-Harris Administration was doing on pathways. It should come in with a national plan for intentional collaboration to reimagine high schools, and the White House should use its convening power to hold an annual White House Education Pathways Summit that serves as a lever for collaboration inside and outside of government.

Another area where leadership from the highest levels of the next administration can encourage intentional collaboration is community schools. The community schools model reimagines schools as hubs for their local communities where families can get health and other services—a lifeline in many rural communities and areas with large immigrant populations. This transformative model, too, requires intentional collaboration with local partners, government agencies, health organizations, and others.

During the Biden-Harris Administration, we more than quintupled funding for full-service community schools and helped create 2,000 new community schools. A new administration should immediately establish a National Partnership for Community Schools that creates a mechanism for intentional collaboration among all the partners who could take the community schools movement even further.

When President Biden set a national goal to bring an additional 250,000 caring adults into schools as mentors and tutors to students, we set up the National Partnership for Student Success (NPSS). This was a public-private partnership between the Department of Education, AmeriCorps, and the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University that ultimately far exceeded the President’s 250,000-person goal. Perhaps most significantly, this partnership outlasted our Administration. With a new name, this partnership, now led by Johns Hopkins, continues to bring together a coalition of school districts, higher education institutions, and champion organizations.

In education, we’re used to federal initiatives with splashy names that garner big headlines, promising magic solutions imposed from the top down. Inevitably, these initiatives disappear after the administration that launched them leaves office. Initiatives structured around intentional collaboration may not get as much attention, but they have greater potential to drive lasting changes in education that don’t rely on who leads the federal government. The next administration should come in ready with intentional partnership initiatives in education like NPSS, with the incoming President’s education transition team already having done significant leg work with potential partners.

A focus on intentional collaboration must also apply to the next administration’s Department of Education. At a time when the department is being dismantled and undermined piece by piece, it’s tempting to focus on restoring it as it was in 2024 as quickly as possible. That would be a wasted opportunity. The department can, and should, be much faster, more collaborative, and more responsive to the needs and expertise of educators than it was before.

As secretary, I found that actions as seemingly straightforward as creating new recognition programs to highlight great schools (like the Blue Ribbon and Green Ribbon Schools programs) or issuing nonbinding policy guidance to states and districts got caught up in paperwork and endless cycles of review. Interagency collaboration was often even more daunting. Meanwhile, although President Biden appointed me as secretary because he believed a public-school teacher should lead the Department of Education, there were still insufficient opportunities for educators to lead and influence the policy process within the department.

To restore public trust and confidence in the department as soon as possible, the next administration, together with Congress, should reimagine it with more fast-track processes to get things done rapidly. Political appointments, new hiring authorities, and fellowship programs should all be on the table to bring more educators into the reimagined department. For example, national and state teachers of the year could be given the chance to serve as fellows within the department and go on temporary assignments to other agencies, building their teacher leadership and capacity for interagency collaboration.

Depoliticizing Education

To be clear, no part of this vision for transforming education is partisan. As secretary, I visited all 50 states and heard from students, parents, and educators in so-called blue and red states alike. Amid all the national noise around education, I found that there is far more common ground than the headlines suggest. At the end of the day, people across America want what’s best for students.

While there will always be disagreements, true education transformation cannot happen when we are politicizing schools and classrooms. We must work together. If we can do so, we have a chance to reimagine education for years to come. Let’s not waste the opportunity.