Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter

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. 

In western Pennsylvania, home to more than a dozen league districts, schools are remaking learning. For those unfamiliar with the area, Pittsburgh’s legacy as a steel town might overshadow its evolution as a hub of educational innovation. But the region boasts the league’s largest local cluster of innovative school districts in the country. To tour western Pennsylvania schools is to find K-12 students 3D printing violins to make an orchestra, growing produce in repurposed shipping containers, learning to read with help from baby lambs using computational thinking — a problem-solving approach that involves analyzing, organizing and modeling data — to make and test predictions in a fast-changing world.

This is the future of public education — and the kind of story that needs to be told. That’s why, this week, we brought more than 350 of America’s most forward-thinking superintendents, administrators, researchers and others to western Pennsylvania for the League of Innovative Schools’ Spring Convening. Featuring two full days of classroom visits to all 13 host districts, the convening shone a national spotlight on a region that’s proving what public education can do: where students learn math by taking off in flight simulators, become licensed drone pilots and work with robotics and biotech startups in a once-abandoned hospital.

It wasn’t the first time the Steel City offered a beacon of hope. In 1968, another tumultuous time, a young Pittsburgher named Fred Rogers debuted his television program, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. For more than 30 years, the show demonstrated what a neighborhood, at its best, could be. It wasn’t perfect: There was conflict and grief alongside wonder and joy. Actress Mary Rawson, who appeared often on the show, wrote in the book Mister Rogers Neighborhood: Children, Television and Fred Rogers that in Fred Rogers’ television world, “violence and war, hatred and intolerance [were] not painted out of the picture, but neither [were] they allowed to destroy the canvas.

He gave America hope that despite so much bad news, the canvas was worth defending.

The same can be said for public education. That’s why, taking a page from Mister Rogers’ playbook, the Pittsburgh-based Grable Foundation and the League of Innovative Schools are launching “Learning Neighbor Grants” designed to expand and enhance the field’s beacons of hope. Our organizations have granted each league member district in western Pennsylvania $10,143 (echoing Rogers’s use of the numbers 1-4-3 to say “I love you”) to develop innovations that prepare students for college, career and real life.

Working with other league members from around the country, as well as museums, libraries and other partner organizations, they will create a broadcasting program for young children; develop new workforce pathways (and combat the national shortage of bus drivers) by training high schoolers to earn a commercial driver’s license; and establish a competitive robotics team for neurodiverse students; and more. Each team will share its innovation at next year’s convening.

The goal is to seed beacons of hope in every community — and to keep telling the positive stories that deserve to be told.

“Good, more communicated, more abundant grows,” wrote the poet John Milton. Those of us who work in public education know goodness is abundant already. So, it’s time to change the narrative and seek out, amplify and invest in the schools and educators that are proving what’s possible. The future of education isn’t just something to debate — it’s something to build. And the work begins with the stories about what public education can do.

Get stories like these delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter