By My cousin teaches fourth grade in Tennessee. Her friend from college teaches the same grade in Massachusetts. They text each other sometimes about their weeks — and increasingly, it sounds like they’re teaching in different countries.
That’s not an exaggeration for effect. The gap between what’s happening in public school classrooms across different states has grown wide enough that “American public education” is starting to feel like a fiction. There’s not one system anymore. There are fifty-ish experiments running simultaneously, with kids as the subjects.
The Curriculum Wars, Minus the Hype
The loudest version of this story involves curriculum restrictions — the laws passed in more than a dozen states that limit how teachers can discuss race, history, gender, and related topics. These laws get a lot of coverage, usually framed according to whoever’s doing the framing.
What’s harder to see in the coverage is the on-the-ground reality for teachers. A law that’s vague
— and many of them are intentionally vague — doesn’t just restrict specific content. It creates a climate of uncertainty where teachers stop knowing what’s safe to say. And when teachers don’t know what’s safe, they pull back. They self-censor on things the law doesn’t even require them to avoid. The chilling effect is often wider than the law itself.
This isn’t speculation — it’s what teachers in affected states describe when you ask them directly. The result is classrooms where perfectly legitimate historical content gets quietly dropped, not because anyone was told to drop it, but because nobody could guarantee it was okay to keep it.
Reading Instruction: The Less Dramatic but More Important Story
Beneath the culture war fights, there’s a quieter divergence happening around how kids learn to read — and this one might actually matter more for long-term outcomes.
The “science of reading” movement — phonics-based, research-supported, endorsed by basically every literacy researcher who’s looked at the evidence — has been adopted aggressively in some states and slowly or not at all in others. Mississippi, which was one of the earliest states to overhaul its reading instruction, went from having the worst reading scores in the country to showing some of the most significant improvement. That’s not an accident.
States that haven’t made the shift are still producing fourth graders who can’t read at grade level at alarming rates. Post-pandemic, those gaps got harder to ignore. But the policy responses have been uneven, and kids in some states are still being taught to read using methods the evidence stopped supporting decades ago.
The Teacher Shortage Nobody Wants to Talk About Honestly
Here’s the uncomfortable part of the state education story: the states that have been most aggressive about restricting curriculum and expanding school choice programs are, in many cases, also the states facing the most severe teacher shortages.
That’s not entirely a coincidence. When teachers feel like they’re working in an environment of surveillance and uncertainty, some of them leave — for other states, or for other careers. Teacher pay is part of it too, obviously. But the working conditions piece of the equation tends to get
underdiscussed because it’s politically inconvenient for the people pushing the policies that affect those conditions.
The irony is stark. You can pass all the education reform legislation you want, but if you can’t staff the classrooms, the legislation doesn’t mean much.