For decades, a scarcity mindset has dominated American education.

Across the country, policymakers and education leaders have become accustomed to systems that don’t work well — and often treat those failures as inevitable. Chronic teacher shortages in math, science, and special education are framed as unfortunate but immutable realities. Students routinely miss out on advanced coursework because their schools can’t hire qualified teachers, can’t make the scheduling work, or simply choose not to offer accelerated pathways. Entire K-12 school systems shut down for snowstorms, heat waves, transportation problems, or public health emergencies, even as other sectors adapt and find ways to keep operating far more quickly. Teacher strikes bring learning to a halt, send parents scrambling for child care, and heighten local tensions. 

These chronic challenges frustrate families and erode confidence in the entire education system. So why do we accept them?

In other policy domains, such as housing, energy, and infrastructure, a growing “abundance agenda” is challenging exactly this kind of resignation. Rather than accepting scarcity, abundance-oriented leaders are exploring how to expand supply, unlock innovation, and design systems that actually work. They’re interrogating the rules, processes, and incentives that constrain supply and limit growth — and changing them. Think “YIMBY” activism in the housing arena, National Environmental Policy Act and other environmental review reforms in the energy sector, or the emergency public works procedures that allowed for the speedy reopening of a portion of I-95 in Philadelphia just 12 days after its collapse in 2023.

The education equivalent has largely been absent from this conversation. In 2022, Alex argued that Derek Thompson’s influential case for an “abundance agenda” was incomplete without K-12 education, even though the same dynamics of artificial scarcity that Thompson identified in housing and health care shape which children have access to quality schools. Four years later, though, that may be changing. 

In a new report from the UC Berkeley Possibility Lab, Carrie examines how the concept of abundance could apply to education in California. The report argues that many of the K-12 challenges we treat as inevitable are not the result of fixed constraints, but of policy choices that restrict the supply of quality options, limit flexibility, and underinvest in capacity. Using California as a case study, the findings raise questions with national implications: What would it look like to design public education systems to produce more of the things that students need and families demand — more engaging and rigorous learning opportunities, more effective educators, more functional districts — rather than continually rationing limited resources?

The Possibility Lab is not alone in exploring what abundance means for education. A small but growing number of leaders are grappling with it from different perspectives. Democrats for Education Reform released its own education abundance framework, naming innovation, accountability, and choice as its three pillars. Charter advocate Jed Wallace and policy expert and writer Chad Aldeman also invoked abundance to argue for expanding the supply of public-choice options such as charter schools. Others are using different language to champion similar goals related to innovation; in education, these proponents often focus on personalized and accelerated learning, arguing that the U.S. has lost its focus on trying to achieve excellence in education.

The diversity among these voices points to one of abundance’s greatest strengths: it’s a mindset, not an ideology. Its champions hail from across the political spectrum, united by a shared belief that scarcity is often artificial — a result of policy choices rather than inevitability — and that public leaders can act to reduce barriers, increase capacity, and broaden participation. That shared diagnosis matters because if many familiar education challenges are policy-made, they can be remade. Here’s how.

Educator Workforce Shortages

Most states face chronic understaffing in specific teaching fields, yet maintain preparation pathways that are lengthy and costly, and require licensing exams that are poorly aligned with classroom performance. Paraprofessionals, afterschool educators, early childhood teachers, military veterans, and career changers with deep subject-matter expertise routinely encounter burdensome requirements that discourage entry into the profession. An abundance approach would build more pathways into teaching while maintaining quality, rather than accepting shortages as inevitable. It would also make the profession more appealing by encouraging more flexible staffing models, boosting compensation, and restructuring benefits to better align with worker preferences.

Course Access Rationing

In thousands of schools nationwide, students cannot take advanced math courses because rigid grade-level progression policies require all students to move at a similar pace. In some cases, these policies were adopted to strengthen equitable access, but have had the effect of limiting acceleration for students ready for it. Many students also miss out on engaging electives, college preparatory courses, and career-connected learning opportunities — not because of a lack of demand, but because staffing rules, seat-time requirements, small or remote schools, and/or inflexible schedules make them impractical. These are all failures of system design. An abundance mindset would expand course offerings and options.

School Choice

From an abundance perspective, the goal is not for every school to offer everything, but to ensure families have access to a wide array of high-quality options. But in practice, access to those options is uneven. Affluent families already enjoy a form of abundance: They can purchase homes in areas with desirable schools, choose private schools, and layer on tutoring, arts programs, extracurricular activities, and other “extras.” Meanwhile, millions of students from lower- and middle-income families lack these same choices. Across the country, hundreds of “barrier borders,” invisible district lines separating concentrated-poverty communities from more affluent ones, function as engines of educational scarcity, sorting children into schools based on what their parents earn rather than what their children need. 

An abundance approach would substantially increase the supply of high-quality educational options, regardless of where students live, and encourage innovation in the delivery of learning. Policymakers and education leaders can develop regional, virtual, and shared-delivery models that broaden access without necessarily expanding costs, grow diverse school models such as early college high schools, themed or career-connected learning academies, hybrid programs, dual-language schools, and charters or other autonomous models. And they can ensure families can move between schools through open enrollment and streamlined transfer policies when a setting is not the right fit. 

Layers of K-12 Red Tape

State education codes often span thousands of pages, and districts must comply with dozens of rules related to reporting and the use of funds. These rules frequently have overlapping mandates and layers of governance. Administrators and staff often experience frustration when attempting to launch new programs, redesign schedules or transportation routes, partner with external providers, respond to unexpected emergencies, or repurpose empty school buildings. Parents become frustrated, too, when navigating individualized education program procedures, school transfer petitions, course schedule change requests, or when attempting to raise concerns related to bullying, teacher misconduct, or any number of other local issues. 

An abundance agenda would not eliminate important safeguards for equity or accountability. Instead, it would ask which rules protect students and which merely protect process. In the same way that streamlined building codes support more housing development while maintaining (or improving) safety, overhauling state education codes could adapt regulatory systems to deliver results rather than just regulate — making it easier for educators and communities to innovate and for families to engage.

Importantly, abundance is not a call to abandon traditional public schools. Even as debates over vouchers and education savings accounts continue, the reality is that the vast majority of students will continue to rely on public schools. For an education abundance agenda to be equitable, it must be forged within the public systems that serve everyone — while still leaving space for private partnerships and market forces to fuel innovation. 

This is where the Possibility Lab offers particular value. By grounding the abundance conversation in the realities of California’s large, diverse, and complex public education system, the report moves the abundance debate beyond slogans and toward practical questions of K-12 policy design: 

• How are fiscal resources generated and distributed? 
• Where do laws and regulations protect quality and equity, and where do they serve to constrain efficiency and innovation?
• How can governments build the capacity to deliver, not just regulate? 
• How can systems expand high-quality options without widening gaps between the haves and have-nots?

Other states might answer these questions differently than California. But the framework itself is more universal, offering a way out of the same circular debates that always leave underlying system constraints untouched. It invites policymakers, funders, and education leaders to ask a different set of questions: Which scarcities are truly unavoidable, and which are the result of choices we could revisit? Where might smarter system design unlock existing capacity, especially among educators and community partners? What would it take to build K-12 education systems that reliably deliver more of what students need and families demand?

Business as usual in public education will continue to ration opportunity and normalize underperformance. A K-12 abundance agenda challenges us to imagine something different — and to design public education systems capable of delivering it.