A teacher-led capacity and implementation institute focused on what public schools must build — if democratic life is going to hold.
Read Our FrameworkThree interconnected challenges showing up in classrooms every day. They are educational crises, but they are also threats to democratic life. Public schools are our best chance to address them together.
73% of students pass state reading tests. 31% score proficient when measured independently. That's not a gap — it's a system telling families everything is fine when it isn't. Literacy isn't just an academic benchmark — it's a democratic safeguard.
Starting, sustaining, finishing: all under siege. Working memory overwhelmed. Environments have become more hostile to attention, and schools can redesign for protection.
Students can't tell what's true. And they've stopped trying to find out. Democracy cannot survive if citizens lose the habit of asking what counts as evidence. But epistemic skills can be taught — and the evidence says they must be.
These forces don't cause the three-capacity crisis, but they accelerate it — and any serious response must account for them.
31% of students chronically absent nationally in 2021-22. Less time in school directly reduces the practice that builds every capacity — and the students absent most can least afford it.
Teachers are the delivery system for every intervention. Turnover, staffing shortages, and initiative churn degrade implementation regardless of how good the policy looks on paper.
The device environment is engineered to capture attention — the very resource executive function exists to manage. You cannot build sustained attention in an environment designed to destroy it.
What schools fail to build, democracy eventually loses.
Each brief addresses one face of the three-capacity crisis with specific, actionable recommendations for Virginia policymakers.
What Virginia's proficiency numbers actually mean — and what they hide. A closer look at the standards-and-signals gap and why honest measurement is the first step toward real improvement.
Read the briefVirginia has created a policy contradiction. EO-33 accepts that attention matters, but funding still treats screen access as presumptively beneficial. Something has to give.
Read the briefBuilding democratic reasoning in Virginia classrooms — because epistemic capacity is teachable, the evidence base is strong, and the democratic stakes are rising.
Read the briefWhy single-issue reforms consistently underperform — and what a linked-capacity approach looks like. Read our founding white paper.
Read the frameworkTeaching is intellectual work that requires constant judgment, not script-following. Policy should come from practice, not conference rooms.
Most "achievement gaps" are funding gaps. No amount of reform solves resource scarcity. Address the inputs before debating the pedagogy.
Screens aren't neutral. The burden of proof should be on ed-tech to demonstrate benefit, not on teachers to justify its absence.
The ability to say "I don't know yet" and keep investigating is fundamental to democratic citizenship. Schools should teach it.
Teacher-led means the people writing these briefs teach. Present tense. The perspective comes from lived experience, not site visits.
Read our full philosophy