Hello Kind and Curious Leader,

The backpacks are back in the stores, and so is the good kind of dread. New shoes, a class list, the smell of a pencil that has never been sharpened. Somewhere this month a child will walk into a school their family did not get to pick, and how good that school turns out to be will have an enormous amount to do with where their parents could afford to live.

I know this because my own start was the lucky version of that story.

When my parents went looking for a house, they were not really shopping for a house. They were shopping for a school. They sat down with what little they had and chose the neighborhood, the mortgage, and the longer commute based on which public school would give their kids the best shot. They could not have told you a test score. They asked around, they trusted their gut, they stretched. It worked, because I am who I am in no small part because of teachers in a free public school in Toledo, Ohio, who saw something in a kid and refused to let him waste it.

That is a warm story. It is also, if I am honest with you, the whole problem in one small picture.

The promise of American public education is four words long: free, and for all. The reality my parents navigated is that "good" and "free" have never been evenly handed out. They are sorted by zip code, by property tax base, by which families have the means to move toward the better building and which families are simply assigned to whatever is nearest. My parents had just enough room to choose. Most families do not. We built a system that is free to enter and wildly unequal once you are inside, and we have mostly agreed not to talk about it.

Let me say a fair word about private schools before I go further, because they earn it.

Private schools are good at what they do. Smaller classes, focused missions, communities that pull hard for their kids. I have friends and colleagues whose children flourished in them, and I will not pretend otherwise to make a point. The part we have to hold at the same time, though, is this: roughly nine in ten American children, about 49.5 million of them, are in public schools, according to federal data. Private schools serve just under ten percent. The national average private school tuition for this coming year runs close to fifteen thousand dollars, with private high schools higher still. For most working families, that is not a choice. It is a number that ends the conversation. So when we talk about "school choice," we should be precise about who actually has one.

Now the people we ask to keep the whole promise standing: teachers.

We hand them our children for roughly seven hours a day and then pay them as if we do not quite mean it. The National Education Association puts the average public school teacher salary at about $74,495 for last year. Adjusted for inflation, the average teacher earns roughly five percent less than a teacher did a decade ago. A new teacher starts near $46,500. The Economic Policy Institute measures what it calls the teacher pay penalty, the gap between teachers and similarly educated professionals, at about twenty-seven percent. Read that again. We have decided, collectively, that the person teaching your child to read should earn about seventy-three cents on the dollar compared to their own college classmates who went into almost anything else. Underpaid, underappreciated, and, as any teacher will tell you in August, already overwhelmed before the first bell. They do it anyway. We should be a little embarrassed that "they do it anyway" became the business model.

Which brings me to the thing that should have your attention this fall.

A clarification first, because the slogan and the substance are not the same. The U.S. Department of Education does not run your child's school. It never has. It does not hire the teachers, write the lessons, or pick the books. That has always been local and state work. What the Department actually does is narrower and, it turns out, more load-bearing than the slogan suggests. It administers federal student aid, it enforces civil rights law in schools, and it funds programs for low-income children (Title I) and children with disabilities (IDEA).

Over the past year, that Department has been taken apart in pieces. An executive order in March 2025 directed the Secretary to begin shutting down what the administration called nonessential functions. The workforce has fallen from more than 4,100 employees to roughly 2,800. Full elimination requires an act of Congress, which has not happened, and Congress in fact rejected the deepest proposed cuts. So the work has been moved instead, through a series of interagency agreements, to other departments. The most consequential came on June 16 of this year, when the administration moved civil rights enforcement in education to the Justice Department and oversight of special education to Health and Human Services.

I am going to be fair here, because you deserve the real argument and not a cartoon of it. The administration's case is that the federal bureaucracy is bloated, that decisions belong closer to families, and that other agencies are better positioned to carry this work. That is a real position held by serious people, and "Washington should run less of this" has a long bipartisan pedigree. The counter-case, made by former department staff and a number of senators, is that the agencies inheriting the work do not have the capacity for it, that costs are climbing, and that the children most likely to fall through the cracks are exactly the ones these offices were built to protect: kids with disabilities, kids who face discrimination, kids from low-income homes.

You can hold a sincere opinion on either side of that. What you cannot do is look away while it happens, because the question is no longer abstract. If the enforcement of a child's right to a fair education now runs through the Justice Department, and the support for a child with a learning disability now runs through Health and Human Services, then the answer to "who is responsible for my kid" is being rewritten in real time, with very little of the public watching.

So watch. More than watch: vote in the elections that actually decide your child's school.

As Washington steps back, more of this lands on your state and, closer still, on your local school board and your superintendent. These are the people setting the budget, choosing the curriculum, and hiring the leadership for the building your kid walks into. There are more than 82,000 school board members in this country. Turnout for the elections that put them there is, by the National School Boards Association's own count, often somewhere between five and ten percent. A Ballotpedia review of more than 5,400 school board races in 2023 found that about fifty-three percent of the seats were uncontested. Not lost. Uncontested. Nobody ran. In Newark, odd-year school board turnout has run as low as three to four percent. We will wait in line for hours every four years for a presidential ballot and skip the one race that decides what happens to our own children eight hours a day.

I told you I would be balanced, so let me end where I actually believe the agreement is, and not pretend it is bigger than it is.

We do not agree on the role of the federal government. That is a genuine disagreement, and no amount of good manners is going to dissolve it. What I think we do agree on, left, right, and exhausted middle, is this. A child's school should not be a lottery decided by a mortgage. A teacher should be able to afford to keep teaching. The people making decisions about our kids should have to win a real election that real neighbors showed up for. None of those three sentences belongs to a party. All three are within our reach, and all three start the same place: ordinary people paying attention to the least glamorous ballot they will ever cast.

My parents could not give me much. They gave me a school, and they gave me a line I have carried my whole life. Leave your corner of the world better than you found it. A free, strong, public school open to every child is one of the few places a whole country gets to do that at once. It was built by people who showed up. It will be kept, or lost, by whether we do.

The backpacks are out. The teachers are already in their rooms, setting up, spending their own money on supplies. The least we can do is learn the names of the people on our school board, and then go decide who they are.