Remember Rahm Emanuel?

Author

Timothy Wirth
April 02, 2025

Former Clinton Chief of Staff, Mayor of Chicago, Ambassador to Japan, and formerly a Democratic leader in the House, few Americans have such a list of high responsibilities. And few have such a reputation for brass knuckle politics and blunt speech. Now Emanuel has returned to the domestic political scene with a series of columns and speeches, and clear ambition for high office. He is almost the last person in the world I thought I would follow, but I now find him refreshing and thoughtful, and always worth reading. T

The Washington Post
Opinion

While we argue about stuff that doesn’t matter, our schools are failing

Too many kids can’t read. Here’s how to fix that.

March 25, 2025

Civilization, H.G. Wells once claimed, is a race between education and catastrophe. In the United States today, catastrophe has the upper hand. I remarked recently that for every student trying to figure out which pronouns might apply to them, there’s a whole class trying to figure out what pronouns actually are. That prompted some to suggest I was taking a swipe at woke culture. Well, yes and no.

My real point was that we’re facing a Sputnik moment in education, and almost no one among the nation’s purported adults seems to want to solve the problem. Democrats can’t be the party that believes in equity as a core principle while simultaneously being complacent about math scores still languishing below pre-pandemic levels and reading scores hitting their lowest in more than 30 years.

We need to shape up real fast.

On both sides of the aisle, we’re caught in wild and beside-the-point education debates: whether the Education Department should be closed, which students should change in which locker rooms or participate in which sports, and whether curriculums should be stripped of diversity, equity and inclusion. All those disagreements deserve a hearing. But they are shiny baubles distracting us from the real crisis — namely, our children’s failure to meet basic standards in reading, writing and arithmetic.

For decades, nearly everyone recognized that, at its core, education is the cornerstone of our future prosperity. The U.S. economy’s most profound periods of economic growth emerged after we’d made big new educational investments — in land-grant colleges, in universal high school and in the GI Bill. This was a shared, bipartisan priority: The Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations all had their own initiatives to drive improvements in reading and math. And though they worked to different ends — some more effectively than others — they all focused on the same thing: educational gains.

That’s no longer the case, and it’s not only because Republicans are working overtime to distract us from what really matters. Democrats need to be honest with parents, too: We shuttered schools for too long in response to the pandemic, and we need to stop looking at our shoes and hoping no one highlights our role in the devastating consequences. This is the long tail of the pandemic: Our country lost two decades of progress in a little more than two years.

And so, we have two challenges to meet today. The first is to make up for lost progress. The second is to build a system that prepares high-schoolers for the workforce they’re poised to enter.

On the first front, there’s little question about what needs to happen. We have, today, new and real insights into how to teach the basics. In recent years, Alabama has forged ahead with a back-to-basics approach to elementary school math — an effort that has been so successful that the state is the only place where fourth-grade math scores have risen since the pandemic began, a remarkable achievement. Mississippi’s early embrace of “the science of reading” — that is, the restoration of phonics in teaching literacy — has led to what some call a miracle: The state’s reading scores for fourth-graders rose from 49th nationally in 2013 to ninth in 2024. We ought to be bringing these approaches to scale with urgency.

Another reality: Children aren’t receiving sufficient instruction time, and they’re not getting the interventions they need when they begin to fall behind. When I was mayor of Chicago, I lengthened the school day, extended the school year, and added universal pre-K and kindergarten. The result was a cumulative four extra years of education for each student. We should augment new schedules with private tutoring, using tutors who can help students online and one-on-one.

To fix what covid-19 degraded, we need to throw the book at the scourge of absenteeism. Since the pandemic, too many students and parents have come to see attendance as optional. We need to be clear that any student who is absent more than 7 percent of the time will not advance or graduate. That’s a simple standard everyone could understand.

And we need to reinvent the way we prepare students for the future. Every day, on average, 7,000 children drop out of school, which is clearly unacceptable. We can do a better job of making post-high school education universal. Two things can be true simultaneously: Not everyone should go to college, but no one can afford to stop their schooling at 18 anymore. If we can make high school a relevant stepping stone to a life students can envision for themselves, they will respond.

I saw it work in Chicago. In 2017, we began requiring every high school student in the city to present a letter of acceptance from a college, community college, a branch of the armed services or a vocational school as a condition for a diploma. We made community college free to all students with at least a B average. Third, we gave college-bound graduates a head start by making it easier for them to earn college credits in high school, saving the 50 percent of graduates who took advantage of the program $18.2 million in college costs.

The collective results spoke for themselves: A little more than half of students were graduating when I entered office in 2011, but well more than 80 percent were graduating when I left. Even though nearly three-quarters of our students came from low-income households, nearly two-thirds enrolled in college, matching national figures.

This is where our efforts should be focused. Instead, adults in Washington (who sound a lot like kids) are scoring political points instead of solving problems. We all know how much President Donald Trump likes to govern by sowing chaos — and nothing would throw Washington off-balance more powerfully than if he actually tried to solve this problem. But if his administration remains deaf to the decline in educational standards, it falls to governors, mayors and other elected leaders to form a national task force that publishes goals and proven techniques for solving this problem. That’s what this generation’s Sputnik moment requires.

 

Rahm Emanuel, the U.S. ambassador to Japan from 2021 to 2025, has served in Congress, as White House chief of staff under President Barack Obama, and as mayor of Chicago.