Public education needs positive stories.
Those of us who work in the field are fortunate to hear these stories daily: about students developing meaningful, real-world skills, about educators preparing engaged, motivated citizens, about school districts equipping young people for life beyond the classroom. We see up close the acts of compassion and care, the innovations supporting students and families and — even in tumultuous times — the countless reasons to hope.
But hope doesn’t make headlines. Cognitive scientists have long known that people are drawn far more to the negative than to the positive. For most of our history as a species, this negativity bias led humans to avoid enemies and predators. In 2025, it leads people to click on catastrophic news stories and absorb the doom-and-gloom narratives with which we’re so frequently bombarded.
That’s not to say bad news is unjustified. There are plenty of problems, particularly in education, that demand urgent attention, from declining reading scores to the crisis of chronic absenteeism. But bad news alone has colored too much of the perception of public education. Despite the positive momentum found in so many school districts, more than half of adults say education is heading in the wrong direction, and satisfaction with K-12 schools has hit an all-time low.
Now more than ever, the nation’s school systems need beacons of hope — people and places whose work should be studied, replicated and celebrated amid the challenges facing the field. And those beacons can be fostered only when leaders who are willing to think and do things differently are at the helm.
Fortunately, they are all around. You’ll find them, for example, from coast to coast in more than 150 districts that comprise the League of Innovative Schools. A national network organized by Digital Promise, the league has member districts in 34 states that work to co-create solutions to public education’s challenges. Together, they’re collectively compiling guidance around the safe and ethical use of artificial intelligence in classrooms, reimagining the traditional high school experience to better prepare students for tomorrow’s workforce and collaboratively finding ways to address chronic absenteeism.