A LOOK AT CommonWealth Beacon opinion pieces for 2025 means taking the pulse of the body politic and seeing the issues that drew attention and drove passions. They ranged from the most local debates over zoning or health care services in a particular community to the oxygen-sucking moves by a president whose first year back in office commanded nearly nonstop headlines as he broke with one norm after another.

Here are five topics that stood out.

A call for civil debate

Beyond showdowns on specific issues, what has loomed large in politics in recent years has been the way we debate contentious topics, or, more to the point, the way we don’t actually engage in meaningful debate. Disagreement over issues today often devolves into something more akin to grade-school name-calling. This degradation of discourse starts at the top. But Donald Trump’s unhesitating use of juvenile taunts and unchecked invective, not reasoned argument, is both a cause of the coarsening of public debate and a consequence of the turn away from more civil exchange of ideas that was already underway when he launched his first campaign.

Offering a desperately needed antidote to that, Jim Peyser, who served as education secretary under Charlie Baker, gave our readers a civics class in how to talk about thorny topics. Through a series of more than a dozen essays, Peyser set out to frame how to think about and weigh competing arguments on issues where, he says, things are often a lot more gray than black or white. “The goal is not to confuse or paralyze,” he wrote, “but to acknowledge and clarify the inescapable trade-offs in public policy (i.e., second-best and less-worse options) and to encourage humility, civility, and even empathy in our public discourse and decision-making.”

We took note of Peyser’s essays in our rundown of notable 2024 op-eds, but he continued his essay-writing with more pieces in 2025, and we thought his plea to steer away from the toxic vitriol that animates so many debates was something we can’t hear too often. His concluding essay in the series, published in October, includes links to all the essays. You can also hear Peyser talk about these issues on a recent episode of The Codcast.

We also heard calls for grace and civility in our public discourse in essays this year by communications professional Colette Phillips, who sits on CommonWealth Beacon’s advisory board. Meanwhile, Lane Glenn, the president of Northern Essex Community College and a MassINC board member, eloquently made the case for freewheeling debate and civil discourse in this September essay. “We are at a moment when extremists on both the left and the right use strategies ranging from public shaming and cancelling, to censoring and intimidating not just to disagree with the opposition, but to silence them — sometimes permanently,” he wrote following the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

The precarious state of health care

From the soaring cost of health care to the dire shortage of primary care providers, the state’s vaunted health care system is showing lots of signs of strain, and federal cuts to research and Medicaid are only adding to the troubles.

Paul Hattis, who co-hosts the Health or Consequences episodes of The Codcast, and Eileen McAnneney started the year by calling on Gov. Maura Healey to go big on tackling health care costs.

Dr. Eric Dickson, CEO of UMass Memorial Health, said the system is drowning in unnecessary administrative costs for both providers and insurers, while we pay too little for primary care, a reimbursement structure that inevitably leads our country’s health care system to be dominated by high-cost specialists. Blue Cross Blue Shield CEO Sarah Iselin pointed to the cost of drugs and medical care as culprits. Alan Sager, a professor at the Boston University School of Public Health, pushed back on Iselin’s prescription and said incremental, piecemeal reforms won’t do the trick. He said we’re spending more than enough right now to provide quality care to all, but we need to radically reshape how it’s spent.

As the year wound down, in an essay that served to bookend the call he and Eileen McAnneney made at the start of 2025, Hattis said it was hard to feel optimistic that state leaders are ready to make the hard choices needed to get the health care system onto firmer footing. “There was no coherent roadmap, no shared strategy, and certainly nothing resembling a statewide plan,” he wrote about a November meeting of the state Health Policy Commission.

The uncertain road ahead for K-12 education

In the world of K-12 education policy, voters had their say last year, approving by a wide margin a ballot question that did away with the requirement that students pass the 10th grade MCAS exam in math, science, and English to graduate from high school. That decision has, in many ways, only underscored the sense of drift that some saw in the state’s schools, where achievement gains have been flat or falling and there is considerable fatigue with the education reform measures that promised to close a yawning achievement gap.

In February, as the state began to consider new graduation requirements in place of MCAS, Kevin Cormier and Chris Marino of Teach Plus Massachusetts urged leaders to adopt new requirements focused on student outcomes, not simply inputs like a set of course requirements. Kerry Donahue, director of Teach for America Massachusetts, said the state must set a high bar for graduation and stick with it.

Earlier this month, after the state panel developing new graduation requirements issued an interim report this month, Mary Tamer, of the education nonprofit MassPotential, said the end-of-course assessments the report proposed would be crucial to maintaining uniform state standards and accountability for student performance.

In a sign of the vigorous debate that’s likely to unfold in 2026, Lisa Guisbond of Citizens for Public Schools wrote that the proposed use of end-of-course assessments would move in exactly the wrong direction. She said voters called for a turn away from state-administered standardized tests.

Beacon Hill’s closed-door ways

One storyline that seems to endure year after year is calls for greater transparency on Beacon Hill, where legislative leaders maintain a tight grip on which bills see the light of day and seem to agree only grudgingly to changes aimed at opening up the lawmaking process. Aaron Singer, a Walpole filmmaker working on a documentary on the issue titled “Shadows on the Hill,” cast some light on the Legislature’s top-down ways.

At a time of political polarization, frustration with the way the Legislature operates seems to be one thing that unites those on the left and right.

In March, a trio of progressive activists, Jonathan Cohn of Progressive Massachusetts, Peter Enrich of Progressive Democrats, and Scotia Hille of Act on Mass, pointed to at least one glimmer of hope for improvement: new reform-minded rules adopted for the Legislature’s 2025-26 session. In August, Jennifer Nassour, a former chair of the Massachusetts Republican Party, member of the bipartisan Coalition to Reform Our Legislature, and current MassINC board vice chair, decried the lack of transparency on Beacon Hill while spotlighting the same hopeful move on the internal rules governing how bills are handled. She cautioned, however, that the Legislature still “has a long way to go.”

Earlier this month, Jonathan Cohn and Scotia Hille pointed out just how far, writing that for roughly half of the nearly 9,000 bills analyzed by the new Beacon Hill Tracker website, lawmakers had broken at least one of the new rules put in place to promote greater transparency. “[I]f legislators are looking for a New Year’s resolution for 2026,” they concluded, “here’s a good one: follow your own rules.”

Putting a human face on health insurance bureaucracy

Politicians are fond of invoking the maxim that “policy is people.” It’s often used to describe how a law or some government or business policy ultimately affects real people in their lives, either for good or ill. Perhaps nowhere does that play out with more at stake than in health insurance, where lives are on the line and costs that are not covered could quickly bankrupt many families.

In September, Kendra Winner, a Winchester mother of two, made this poignantly clear in an essay about her son Aidan, who, two years ago at age 18, suffered a traumatic brain injury that has left him unable to speak or walk.

“[A]s if that agony weren’t enough,” she wrote of Aidan’s injury, “I’ve also been forced to wage another relentless battle — this one against a cold, indifferent private health insurance industry that treats my son like a number instead of a life worth fighting for.” She described the roadblocks she has faced, the bureaucratic hoops she has been forced to jump through, and the coverage denials and appeals she filed, all in a parent’s quest to secure the right medical care for her child.

Knowing too well from her family’s painful odyssey how policy is people, Winner outlines changes state lawmakers could enact — reforms already in place in other states — to help all those dealing with catastrophic brain injuries. “Today, I fight for him to live a life beyond survival,” she wrote about Aidan. “He deserves that chance. All brain injury survivors do.”

Michael Jonas works with Laura in overseeing CommonWealth Beacon coverage and editing the work of reporters. His own reporting has a particular focus on politics, education, and criminal justice reform.