September 2025
Dear Partners and Friends of the Progressive Education Network:
It’s hard to believe that nearly a year has passed since we gathered in Columbus, Ohio, for our biannual conference, and that it will be barely a year until we convene again. In the space between, so very much has happened to illustrate both the urgency and the precarity of our collective work as progressive educators in these times.
That is why, on the occasion of the initial launch of our new website, we invite you to partner with PEN to double down on the core commitments of our practice. We’re proud to introduce our new mission, vision, and principles of progressive education, intended to reflect back to our network what we’ve learned and proudly built with you over time. Our new mission statement, for example, not only foregrounds as explicitly as possible the pillars of PEN’s institutional identity, but also frames our collective call to action:
We support a network of educators to advance the practice of progressive education and to cultivate equity and justice in public and private schools.
Soon we’ll invite broader dialogue in the network about PEN’s mission, vision, and principles as they apply to your and our work moving forward. You’ll also receive further information about:
NIPEN: The 2025-2026 cohort of our National Institute of the Progressive Education Network [NIPEN] will convene at City Neighbors Charter School (Baltimore, MD) in January, then at Crossroads School (Santa Monica, CA) in April/May.
NewPEN: We will host a series of online engagements for partners who may be new to progressive education, as well as for partners who may wish to dive more deeply into practices aligned with our mission, vision, and principles.
Forum/Listserv: We will launch a new, asynchronous forum for our collective engagement and mutual support regarding pressing questions, strategic priorities, and concrete practices for progressive educators.
For more than a century, progressive education has promised to empower children with the agency and skills to thrive in and to steward our democracy. In this moment, our own agency as progressive educators to enact this mission may itself seem threatened, as we navigate sudden and restrictive changes to education policy, curriculum, funding, law, politics, and other contexts of ongoing campaigns against DEI and democratic institutions. It may have been for you, as it has been for us, uniquely challenging at the start of this school year to center the welfare of the children in your care—especially the most vulnerable children—while at the same time navigating fundamental concerns about and challenges to your professional capacity and legal authority to do so.
We are reminded in these times of three facts:
First, this is not the first time the tenets of progressive education have felt or have been under threat.
Second, in other significant periods of ideological backlash against the principles and practices we hold dear, it has been essential for progressive educators of all stripes to engage in solidarity across regions, sectors, and identities to sustain each other, and to build our capacity together.
Third, this approach works: despite all the threats and the fears over time, we are still here.
This is the story of the Progressive Education Association in the early 20th century. This is the story of the Network of Progressive Educators in the mid-20th century. And this is the story of the Progressive Education Network that we will write together with you in the months and years to come.
You’ll hear more from us before long,
In solidarity,
PEN’s Board of Directors