Is U.S. Schooling in a Liberal Politics Education Crisis?
Are deep-red Republican states the new educational innovators and deep-blue Democratic states stuck in educational decline and rising inequality? So suggest politically conservative analysts writing in Education Next and at the Fordham Institute (Hartney and Peterson, 2025; Petrilli, 2025), and so argue journalists David Brooks (NYT, October 9, 2025), Nicholas Kristof (February 9, 2026), and, most recently, Sarah Mervosh, the New York Times education reporter in The Daily podcast (April 10, 2026), these last three focusing mainly on test score gains since 2013 in Mississippi and Louisiana. If the claims are correct and educational gains are indeed explained by something related to political party ideological structures (Democrats’ close ties to teachers’ unions, for example), this would have major implications for the politics of improving American education and for equalizing achievement gains between less and more advantaged groups.
