Introduction Illinois is the state that perfected educational inequity and then tried to dismantle it. For most of the twentieth century, Illinois ranked among the most inequitably funded school systems in the country, a state where the quality of a child's education was determined almost entirely by the property tax base of the ZIP code they were born into. Then, in 2017, Illinois passed the Evidence-Based Funding formula, one of the most ambitious school finance reforms in

Introduction Washington, DC is the only jurisdiction in the United States where the city itself, in its entirety, is the school district. There are no suburbs to draw away the most engaged families, no satellite counties to absorb the middle class, no geography to escape. Every student who attends a public school in Washington is a DC public school student, and every elected official, think tank researcher, nonprofit leader, and classroom practitioner in the city is, in some

Introduction The first five years of a child's life are the most consequential period of human development. Neuroscientists have established that the brain forms more than one million new neural connections every second during early childhood, and that the foundations of language, executive function, emotional regulation, and social competence are laid before a child ever walks through a kindergarten door. In the United States, the stakes of getting early childhood educatio

Introduction Vermont public schools are at an inflection point. Enrolment has fallen by roughly 20 percent over the past two decades, per-pupil costs have risen to among the highest in the United States, and a majority of students in the 2024-25 school year were not yet meeting grade-level academic standards, according to the Vermont State Report Card released in February 2026. The state that once ranked among the top performers nationally in science and mathematics is now re