- Education
- Reforming Education
This excerpt lists the key findings of The Unheard Voices Project: Community Conversations, a new report that continues the Hoover Institution’s decades-long work to collect research-based information about our nation’s schools.
The Unheard Voices Community Conversations project was launched in response to urgent and persistent concerns about the quality of public education in the United States. Despite high levels of education spending, American students continue to lag behind their international peers in academic performance. Traditional top-down interventions often impose recommendations for improvement through policy mandates or regulatory requirements without community input.
Community members rarely have a voice in decisions about their local schools, yet they are the ones who must live with the consequences of poor results.
In the Unheard Voices Community Conversations project, we aimed to give a voice to community members in areas with low-performing public schools. Our goal was to create space for them to share their experiences with local education systems, identify the challenges that prevent school improvement, and explore practical, community-driven strategies to better support student outcomes. We were particularly interested in learning the degree to which community members have the interest and bandwidth to actively pursue educational change in local schools, with a special focus on understanding what conditions or supports might strengthen engagement.
To understand community perspectives, we organized small discussions with community members in collaboration with local organizations. Participants included parents, educators, community leaders and activists, and business representatives, among others. We traveled across the United States to communities of all sizes—cities, towns, and rural areas—and spoke with people from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, educational levels, and experiences, including minorities and those historically underserved, to ensure a diversity of perspectives. The unifying characteristic was that the communities we visited had low-performing schools.
This report draws on nine focus groups and a companion survey conducted between June and November 2025. The results point to policy considerations for strengthening community-school partnerships. These are the key findings:
- Communities have limited information about school performance. More than half of survey respondents were unaware of state performance ratings for their local schools and could not identify their district’s rating. Further discussion revealed that performance information is not easily accessible or proactively communicated, limiting families’ ability to engage with accountability systems they may not know exist.
- Those who are familiar with performance ratings consistently rate schools as low-performing. More than half of survey respondents rated their schools as needing improvement or not meeting expectations, with district schools rated lowest of all school types. Challenges include teacher turnover, resource shortages, inadequate special-education services, low expectations, and unmet needs such as vocational education, financial literacy, mental health support, culturally responsive teaching, and language services.
- Even when improvement efforts demonstrate success, initiatives are often discontinued after funding cuts, leadership changes, or shifting priorities.
- While community members understand the consequences of poor schools, they believe that the value of education has declined for families and students, seeing structural barriers as factors eroding confidence in schooling as a pathway to opportunity.
- Participants believe that crucial decisions regarding educational services and programs are made without community input or representation, leading to solutions that do not address the community’s actual needs. Community members feel unheard, excluded, and ignored by school administrators, principals, teachers, and the school system as a whole.
- Communities want to be partners in addressing these problems, yet they feel shut out of decision-making. Among survey respondents, 52.1 percent want equal partnership with schools, yet only 24.3 percent believe districts want the same, and school boards are rated the least receptive to community involvement among all stakeholders (mean 2.97 out of 5).
- Despite this exclusion and other systemic barriers, extraordinary untapped civic capacity exists, with nearly 90 percent of participants willing to join community efforts to improve local schools and 54.1 percent wanting active participation, to the point of committing to twenty-plus hours over a six-month period.
- Community members value collective potential over individual influence. While participants are not particularly confident in their personal ability to drive meaningful change, they express much greater confidence in collective action. They see coordinated community efforts as a real source of power that schools and districts should recognize and support.
- Communities know what would enable their participation. They cite flexible meeting times accommodating work schedules, culturally responsive staff reflecting communities served, practical supports such as child care and stipends recognizing parents’ time, anti-retaliation protections, transparent decision-making, stable leadership, and, most fundamentally, beginning with community listening rather than predetermined solutions.
An overarching insight across the findings concerns community capacity for engagement. The study shows that community members are interested in getting involved in efforts to improve local schools. Yet many barriers limit participation, including limited knowledge and skills to navigate the system and advocate effectively.
While respondents recognize that education is important, the link between school performance measures and life outcomes often remains unclear.
The findings indicate that if community members are expected to help drive change, intentional capacity building is needed, focused on how schools operate and what is at stake when schools perform poorly.
Read this new report here.
