The 2026 NCAA women’s tournament, combining a mix of expected winners and up-and-coming programs, has provided an exciting month of basketball for millions of fans across the nation. In the last few years, thanks to the athleticism and on and off the court charisma of powerhouse stars in both pro and college teams, women’s basketball is now front and center and more thrilling than ever. 

Witness, for instance, the Vanderbilt Commodores’ Mikayla Blakes, the nation’s leading scorer, perform a near triple-double with 25 points against Illinois. Or the outstanding performance of UCLA’s Lauren Betts and Gabriela Jaquez as the Bruins stomped the Gamecocks of South Carolina to win the school’s first NCAA national title. The list that highlighted the Madness this March could go on, but the point is clear: Women’s basketball is a treat to watch.

But how well do these competitive schools, whose ability on the court has been rewarded with bids to the Big Dance, do when it comes to helping their students reach financial security? 

To find out, I have applied a methodology detailed in my recent analysis of the men’s tournament. 

The formula used ranks each college on an Economic Mobility Index (EMI), based on how many years graduates need to pay down the total net cost of their degree; how much more than a high school graduate the college’s bachelor’s degree recipients earn after 10 years; and how broadly the school’s effort applies to its low- and moderate-income students, using the percentage of students eligible for Pell grants as a proxy for low family income. 

Consequently, the EMI ranks 1,320 bachelor’s degree-granting institutions by how well each provides economic mobility for its most disadvantaged students. 

One way to grasp the value of the EMI is by comparing the two colleges that made it to the NCAA Tournament’s championship game. Although both schools are mighty on the court, there are wide differences in the statistics they provide for the tournament and for the index. To get to the championship game, the No. 1 seeded Bruins of University of California-Los Angeles had to overcome 23 turnovers and survive a late surge from the Texas Longhorns to manage a 51-44 win against the only team that beat them this season. Meanwhile, the South Carolina Gamecocks made it by breezing past the Horned Frogs of Texas Christian University. 

More significantly, in the Social Mobility Tournament, the University of South Carolina got only as far as the second round because the school’s total price tag is $43,300, but the earning premium for its graduates — compared with someone with only a high school diploma — averages just $28,600. Therefore, it takes 1.5 years on average to pay down the cost of its degrees. Compare this to UCLA, where a degree costs $34,500 and the earning premium is a whopping $45,000, making it possible to pay back the amount spent on a degree in less than one year. 

What’s more, South Carolina’s student body is made up of only 19.9% Pell-eligible students, compared with 31.9% for UCLA. The result: South Carolina ranks 501 in our index with a 17.6 EMI score, whereas UCLA, which went on to play in the championship game in both our bracket and the NCAA tournament, is ranked 115 with an EMI score of 30.4. 

Given the challenges colleges face today, as more and more people question whether they are worth the cost, the EMI calculations provide an important service. Not only do they help to identify which colleges are associated with the highest return on the educational investment made, but also which ones are doing so for the greatest numbers of underresourced students.

From a wider perspective, the 2026 NCAA teams in the Sweet Sixteen were a formidable lot. The No. 1 seeded University of Connecticut Huskies crushed the Syracuse Orange. The No. 1 seeded Gamecocks of South Carolina did the same to the embattled Trojans of USC. Meanwhile, the Louisiana State University Tigers, on their way to a fourth consecutive Sweet Sixteen appearance, battered the unfortunate Lady Raiders of Texas Tech by a punishing 101-47 score. 

Still, not every game leading to the Sweet Sixteen was lopsided. In one of the most thrilling games of the tournament, the Gophers of Minnesota sneaked by the Ole Miss Rebels by a mere 2 points, and it took two overtime periods for the University of Virginia Cavaliers to best the Hawkeyes of Iowa. 

But no matter which team you rooted for, this is exhilarating basketball right through to the Final Four matches between four No. 1 seeds. Still, as I have noted in the past, what should be no less thrilling is observing how well some of the tournament’s schools succeed in putting their students on the path to economic security.

After all, with college costs a major concern for most parents and students, an examination of the total net price to earn a degree at the participating schools is worth undertaking. For example, on average, an undergraduate degree at the Sweet Sixteen colleges in our Social Mobility Tournament costs approximately $40,900 but provides an earning premium beyond a high school graduate of about $32,200. It is data like these that make possible an earning premium that permits a graduate to pay down the cost of their degree in less than two years. This type of information is important for anyone considering a college education.

Also important is knowing how wide the door is open at any institution. For instance, when it comes to access, the colleges in our Sweet Sixteen differ greatly from their counterparts in the NCAA tournament. The Social Mobility Sweet Sixteen enroll nearly twice as many Pell-eligible students — 138,000 out of 461,600 — than those in the NCAA Sweet Sixteen, where only 74,200 out of 342,000 students qualify for Pell grants. 

While the winners in the NCAA tournament receive much praise, and their schools enjoy both bragging rights and potential increases in applications and donations, there is much reason to also celebrate this year’s Social Mobility Tournament champion, the University of California at San Diego. 

Not only did the Tritons win the Big West Tournament, but they also enjoy a 34.8 EMI score, putting them in 68th place out of 1,320 schools in the index. This means their approximately 11,100 lower-income graduates can pay back the cost of their education in less than one year and go on to earn on average more than $43,600 than a high school graduate in California.

I look forward to seeing powerhouse teams like the NCAA’s Final Four win games, but more than that, I am pleased that policymakers on both sides of the aisle in Congress and in state legislatures are now paying close attention to which schools are putting their students on the road to financial well-being. These are the schools most worthy of our praise and most deserving of the admiration that comes with success, whatever their fate on the court.

The scale of the disparity has fueled intense debate. Some policymakers argue the gap is primarily the result of systemic racism or unequal school resources. But does the data back up this notion?  Recently, I to try and determine what factors are truly driving this gap in the Badger State. 

This new analysis of Wisconsin’s statewide Forward Exam indicates that a significant share of the gap is driven not by racism, but by factors strongly correlated with race: especially poverty, disability status and family stability. This may sound like a distinction without a difference, but in reality it is key for figuring out how best to address the problem.  

Common policy solutions often focus on skin color as the driver of disparities. For instance, when he was state superintendent, now Gov. Tony Evers that one cause of the racial achievement gap is that too many people who work in schools “look like me.” Current Superintendent Jill Underly that “culturally responsive teaching” and diversification of the education workforce are among the keys to addressing the achievement gap.  

But it’s not clear those steps are the right approach. Using data from the 2022-23 edition of the state’s Forward Exam, I conducted what is known as a mediation analysis. Mediation analysis attempts to figure out how or why something causes an effect by identifying the middle step —the “go-between” factor — that explains the relationship. The results of one such mediation analysis with poverty as the go-between is shown below. 

The direct pathway shows that as the percentage of African American students in a school goes from 0 to 100 percent, the proficiency rate on the Forward Exam would be expected to decline by about 39%. However, there is the “behind the scenes” path to consider as well. A school with 100% African American students would be expected to have poverty rates 69% higher than a school with no African American students, and high poverty is in turn correlated with about a 41% reduction in proficiency rates. The analysis shows schools with higher percentages of African American students also tend to have far higher poverty rates, which then play a major role in academic outcomes.

Decades of research show that economic disadvantage strongly affects academic performance. Students growing up in poverty often face barriers that can hinder learning, from unstable housing and food insecurity to limited access to books, educational materials and early learning opportunities. In Wisconsin, poverty rates among African American families are particularly high. More than in the state live below the poverty line, placing Wisconsin among the highest in the nation on that measure.

Another factor influencing achievement gaps is disability identification. African American students are identified for special education services at higher rates than their white peers in both as a whole, particularly in categories that rely heavily on subjective judgment, such as emotional disturbance or intellectual disability. Students receiving special education services on average score lower on standardized tests and have lower graduation rates than students without disabilities.

 The Forward Exam analysis found that disability status explains a smaller but still measurable portion of the achievement gap. About 3.6% of the relationship between race and proficiency was mediated by differences in disability rates.

Some influences on student outcomes cannot be directly measured in the school-level data that we have access to. One of the most significant is family structure. Research that children raised in two-parent households tend to experience stronger academic outcomes and fewer behavioral challenges. Two parents simply have more time and resources to devote to a child’s development, from supervising homework to reading together at home.

In Wisconsin, however, the rate of married African American adults is the lowest in the country—, well below the national average of 31% for African Americans nationwide. Although the precise impact cannot be quantified in school testing data, decades of social science research suggest family stability plays a meaningful role in shaping educational outcomes.

Survey data from the in 2020 — the most recent year for which there was a large enough sample size for each group in Wisconsin — shows that African American families in Wisconsin are less likely to read regularly to young children than white or Hispanic families. About 55% of Black families report reading to young children fewer than four days per week, compared with 33% of white families. It is important to note that this factor is likely also correlated with poverty, but teasing out any independent effect between the two is not possible with existing data. 

Those early literacy experiences matter. Foundational reading skills built before kindergarten strongly influence later academic success across subjects.

Wisconsin’s disparities are real and deeply concerning. But the research indicates that race itself is not the primary driver of the state’s academic divide. Poverty, disability status, and family stability  together explain a large share of the gap.

Strategies focused narrowly on racial identity — such as diversity training or race-based programs — may miss the deeper issues shaping student outcomes. Other approaches, such as  focusing aggressively on early literacy, have shown progress in other states. Mississippi, as has been well-documented in The74, dramatically improved reading outcomes through policies aligned with the “science of reading,” which emphasize systematic instruction in phonics, vocabulary and comprehension.  A significant achievement gap still exists in Mississippi, but at 25 points it is significantly smaller than Wisconsin’s, even as proficiency levels rise in the state across the board. 

Closing the gap will likely require policies that address the broader social and economic realities affecting students’ lives: reducing poverty, strengthening families, improving early literacy and targeting support to disadvantaged students regardless of race. Reduction will also require a focus on what can work in large urban districts like Milwaukee, where about 44% of the state’s African American students attend school. This district has been plagued by decades of and across the racial spectrum.

If Wisconsin hopes to move up from the bottom of the nation’s achievement-gap rankings, solutions will need to look beyond race, and stop accepting the soft bigotry of low expectations. 

Pensions are sort of like New Year’s resolutions. Policymakers always promise, to themselves and to their constituents, that this will be the year they’ll finally get their financial house in order and bolster their pensions. But inevitably, something shiny comes along and distracts them.  

Oklahoma is grappling with this dilemma right now. After years of dutifully funneling millions of extra dollars into its beleaguered teacher pension plan, state policymakers are now considering scaling back. Instead, they would like to use that money to fund : pay raises for active teachers, more money for its school choice tax credit program, plus new investments in reading and math.

It’s likely to be a popular list. But it threatens to derail the state’s progress on pension funding. 

Oklahoma has actually done better on the pension front than most other states. Thanks to a combination of benefit cuts, plus a surge of new contributions, it has dramatically improved the health of its teacher pension plan. 

For example, the system’s unfunded liability, essentially the difference between how much it had promised and how much it had saved toward those promises, from $10.4 billion in 2010 down to $6.1 billion last year. Its funded ratio — a comparison between its assets and its liabilities — has improved from in 2010 all the way 80% as of last June. 

Oklahoma’s teacher plan is still not quite as well-funded as the median state and local plan — which was funded last year — but the state’s policymakers deserve kudos for making progress. Current and retired Oklahoma teachers should be thankful that their retirement plan is in much better shape than it was 16 years ago.

So how did they do it? First, legislators raised the retirement age from 62 to 65 and extended the amount of time that a teacher would need to work to qualify for a benefit from five to seven years. (This is called the vesting period, and these tend to be longer for teachers than for workers in the private sector. For example, according to a survey of Vanguard 401(k) plans, of employees are immediately vested in their employer’s retirement contributions.) These policy changes meant that any Oklahoma teacher who started after Oct. 31, 2011, had to wait just a bit longer to qualify for retirement benefits than those who came before them.  

A rising stock market certainly helped the pension plan as well, but the biggest change was on the funding side. From 2001 to 2011, Oklahoma was contributing less each year than what its actuaries said it needed to. Instead of paying off their metaphorical credit card in full, they made only minimum payments, which led to a large financial hole.

But every year since 2012, Oklahoma has put in more than what its actuaries said it needed to. As of , individuals were required to contribute 7% of their salaries. Employers like school districts paid 9.5% of each employee’s salary. And the state contributed a percentage of its revenues from sales taxes, cigarette taxes, corporate income taxes, individual income taxes and lottery proceeds. This extra state contribution came out to $456 million last year, and this is the portion that state legislators now want to cut back.

Oklahoma’s teacher pension plan is in much better shape today than it was. But it’s instructive to compare it with the plan Oklahoma offers to other state employees, which is in even better shape than the teacher plan.

That largely comes down to how far legislators went in designing reforms for each plan. In the case of the teachers, Oklahoma’s legislators were more hands-off. Teachers continue to be placed in the same defined benefit pension plan, for example. On average, their benefits are worth 10.67% of their salary, according to the plan’s latest . But remember that teachers themselves are paying about two-thirds of that cost, which means that most of the contributions made by the state and its school districts are paying for the plan’s unfunded liabilities, not for benefits for today’s workers. Moreover, the benefit structure is so heavily that someone would have to teach in Oklahoma for decades just to earn more than what they personally contributed.

Meanwhile, state employees have been enrolled in a portable defined contribution 401(k)-style plan since 2015. Members are required to contribute 4.5% of their salary, their employer contributes 6% and employees qualify for a growing share of those contributions over five years. A in the state legislature would raise those contribution rates and drop the vesting requirement altogether. Oklahoma’s higher education employees get an deal.

Putting the benefit situation aside, Oklahoma deserves credit for making substantial progress funding its teacher pension plan. According to the latest financial projections, the state’s actuaries expect that the plan could be fully funded by 2034. However, that assumption depends on its investments earning a 7% return every year. They also cautioned that one risk to its projection is that “actual contributions from the state may not be made in accordance with the current arrangement.” 

If Oklahoma legislators go forward with their plans to divert some of the money toward new expenses, they’d be putting all their hard-earned funding progress at risk.  

That, more or less, is the key to translating the science of reading into classroom practice, according to a new book by Doug Lemov, Colleen Driggs and Erica Woolway called . The authors work together at , an organization built on Lemov’s bestselling by the same name.

The new volume is meant to be a practical guide for classroom teachers. It offers concrete tips and embedded QR codes that take readers to videos of teachers putting those strategies into practice.

The authors are attempting to tackle a big problem: how to boost students’ knowledge. They cite suggesting that books — even children’s books — use more uncommon words than come up in most adults’ conversations.  In practice, that means, “most of the words a student learns in their lifetime will be learned via encountering them in their reading.” The more kids read, and the wider variety of books they are exposed to, the better off they’ll be.  

When people hear the “science of reading,” they might (mistakenly) equate it with phonics, but the authors spend little time on those core foundational skills. In fact, they take systematic phonics instruction in grades K-3 as the assumed starting point for literacy instruction and note that their book is about “the science of reading beyond phonics (emphasis theirs).”

This is an important shift. In , students have made impressive gains on early reading skills, thanks in part to widespread changes in state policy pushing for new curriculum and early screening  assessments. Meanwhile, fourth and eighth grade reading scores continue to decline, and 12th grade reading comprehension recently fell to all-time lows.  

Lemov, Driggs and Woolway suggest this is partly an assessment problem. If students can’t answer a question about a reading passage, that may be due to many potential problems. It might be because they didn’t understand the question … or they lacked key background knowledge embedded in the text … or they didn’t understand the vocabulary words … or the passage used an unfamiliar syntax that the student couldn’t follow.

While daunting, this multitude of potential reading challenges also helps provide a roadmap for improvements.

Lemov, Driggs and Woolway start with a critical foundation: attention. They note that, “You can only learn about what you are paying attention to. Attention is always a prerequisite to learning.” But reading and books are losing the war for kids’ time and attention. That’s partly why the authors support a “high text, low tech” approach to limiting distractions in schools, and why Lemov was of school cellphone bans.

So how can teachers get kids immersed in reading? It’s not as simple as putting good books in front of students, because if they can’t read the words on the page quickly and easily, they will struggle to comprehend and make meaning out of the text. The authors cite that found, “reading fluency predicted all school marks in all literacy-based subjects, with reading rapidity being the most important predictor.”

In response, the authors suggest that, “The best way by far to improve fluency is to provide students opportunities to hear, read and reread text aloud.” They cite the strong research evidence behind the practice of , which has positive impacts even for high school students.

Lemov, Driggs and Woolway devote a full chapter to how educators can put this research into practice, including teacher and student read-alouds, along with carefully constructed and monitored independent student reading time. For instance, a teacher helping children learn how to pronounce a new word during a read-aloud might say: “That word is pejorative. Try that: pejorative. Good. Pejorative means expressing disapproval.” This type of repetition can help students store the new word in long-term memory. In scientific terms, this process is called “orthographic mapping” and it’s a key component of how readers train their brains to connect words with their meaning.

Writing can also help students develop into strong readers, particularly when it’s tied to what they are already learning. But not just any writing; students need to be explicitly taught how to structure sentences, use precise vocabulary and write with style and panache. Drawing on concepts from , the authors suggest that teachers deploy “” exercises to help students extend their initial responses to explain why something is happening, any complicating factors and the final outcome.

Recently, there’s been a lot of in the literacy world about whether students should be taught to read using whole books or if it’s fine to mix books and excerpts or other short passages. On one side, researcher Tim Shanahan there’s no evidence that whole books are superior to excerpts at building reading ability or do more to build student reading stamina. He also notes that excerpts allow for greater breadth than a single book that may offer more in depth.

Lemov, Driggs and Woolway are unapologetic advocates for Team Book. They approvingly cite dyslexia researcher about how digital technologies are reshaping our brains, and how deep reading can counter those effects. They point out that stories help readers remember things better than just a series of disjointed facts and figures. And, channeling , they value the collective culture capital that students can access when they have read Shakespeare’s plays or George Orwell’s dystopian novels.

Regardless of which side of this argument you find more persuasive, Lemov, Driggs and Woolway have done teachers a service by providing numerous tips and examples of how to put the science of reading into practice in their classrooms. 

Statewide averages, while useful for tracking overall trends, often mask these disparities. Students who experienced the largest pandemic-era increases — Black and Hispanic children and those from low-income families — are generally the furthest from their pre-pandemic attendance levels. In many states, the gaps between these students and their peers have widened rather than narrowed.

Because chronic absenteeism — defined as missing 10% or more of the school year — is closely linked to academic achievement, engagement and long-term outcomes, these disparities carry significant equity implications. Without recovery, gaps in learning and opportunity are likely to persist.

This analysis examines trends in chronic absenteeism in 26 states and the District of Columbia, using data from the 2018-19 through the 2024-25 school years, broken down by income, English learner status and race. Together, the 27 jurisdictions educate just under half of the nation’s students.

Income

Low-income students had higher absenteeism rates in every state before COVID and experienced greater attendance disruptions than students overall during the height of the pandemic. Between 2018-19 and 2021-22, the average state saw chronic absenteeism among low-income students increase by more than 17 percentage points, versus 13 points statewide. In all but one state, Nevada, increases among low-income students exceeded the state average.

In some states, the divergence was especially pronounced. In Nebraska, 26% of low-income students were chronically absent in 2018-19; by 2021-22, that number had jumped to 43%. Over the same period, the state’s overall absenteeism rate rose by about 9 points — roughly half as much.

Since the peak, chronic absenteeism rates have declined for all students, with 21 of 27 states seeing larger reductions among low-income students. Those have varied widely, with decreases ranging from just 1 percentage point in Oklahoma to nearly 20 points in Rhode Island.

Despite these somewhat larger decreases, low-income students remain further from pre-pandemic attendance levels in almost every state. On average, chronic absenteeism in this population in 2024-25 remains more than 9 percentage points above 2018-19 levels, compared with about 7.5 points statewide. In Tennessee, absenteeism among low-income students remains roughly 10 points higher than before COVID, while the state overall is about 5 points above its baseline. In Rhode Island, West Virginia, Nevada and Ohio, low-income student attendance is closer to pre-pandemic levels than the state average.

As a result of these trends, attendance gaps between low-income students and their wealthier peers have widened in 23 of the 27 states analyzed. The average difference increased from about 7 to 9 percentage points in 2024-25. In Oregon, the gap widened from roughly 5 points to more than 13.

Where data are available for wealthier students as well, the divide is often stark. In Ohio, roughly 33% of low-income students were chronically absent in 2024-25, compared with 11% of more affluent kids. Similar gaps persist in Rhode Island (30% versus 12%) and Washington state (35% versus 19%).

English Learners

English learners followed a similar, and in some ways more striking, pattern. Between 2018-19 and 2021-22, the average state saw their chronic absenteeism rise by 16.5 percentage points — 3 more than the statewide average increase. In Iowa, English learner absenteeism rose by more than 21 points, from nearly 15% to more than 36%, compared with a nearly 14-point statewide jump. 

Post-peak declines among these students have been roughly comparable to statewide averages, around 6 percentage points. But because they experienced sharper increases initially, they remain further from their pre-pandemic baseline. On average across the states analyzed, English learner absenteeism rates in 2024-25 are about 11 points higher than in 2018-19, compared with 7.5 statewide. Except in Rhode Island and South Dakota, English learners are further from recovery than their peers overall — and in Rhode Island they have not only recovered, but now post lower absenteeism rates than before the pandemic.

In several states, English learner absenteeism remains especially elevated: in Alaska, Hawaii, Missouri, New Mexico, Oregon and Utah, more than 15 points above pre-pandemic levels. In Utah, it is 17 points higher than in 2018-19, compared with a 9.5-point gap statewide. 

Perhaps most notable is how these students’ relative position has shifted. Before the pandemic, English learners were not consistently absent more than their peers, as were low-income students. In 14 of the 27 states, English learner absenteeism was below the statewide average or within 1 percentage point of it in 2018-19. By 2024-25, that was true for only six states, and in every state, the gap has widened. In Missouri, for example, chronic absenteeism among English learners rose from 12% in 2018-19, about 1 percentage point below the statewide rate, to 27% in 2024-25, more than 5 percentage points above the state average  of 21.5%.

Race and Ethnicity

Pandemic-era increases also varied sharply by race. White students experienced smaller hikes than the average in nearly every state, rising by about 10 percentage points between 2018-19 and 2021-22, compared with 13 points statewide.

Black and Hispanic students saw substantially larger increases. Across states, absenteeism among Black students rose by about 16 points on average, and among Hispanics by about 16.5 points. In every state analyzed, except Washington, D.C., the increase among Hispanic students exceeded the statewide average, and in 14 of the 27 states, Hispanic students saw the largest spikes of the three racial groups.

Recovery since 2021-22 has been somewhat stronger for Black and Hispanic students than for white kids. Across states, Black and Hispanic students have each seen average declines in chronic absenteeism of roughly 7 percentage points, compared with about 5 points for white students. But because absenteeism rose more sharply for Black and Hispanic students during the pandemic, these improvements have not fully offset the larger initial increases.

White students’ attendance remains closest to pre-pandemic levels, averaging about 5.5 points above baseline. Black students remain nearly 9 points above pre-pandemic levels, Hispanic students, nearly 10 points. In 17 of the 27 states analyzed, Hispanic students are the furthest from their 2018-19 attendance rates. Rhode Island again stands out as an exception; there, they now post lower absenteeism rates than before the pandemic. 

At the same time, Black students continue to show some of the highest absenteeism rates, leading in 14 states in 2024-25. In some cases, gaps are extreme: in the District of Columbia, absenteeism among white students is about 9%, compared with nearly 49% among Black peers; in Nebraska, the figures are roughly 15% and 43%, respectively.

Attendance has improved nationally since the pandemic, but underserved student groups remain further from their pre-pandemic attendance levels than others, and the gaps are wider than they once were. Rhode Island has bucked this trend, offering a promising example of what can achieve. Through a commitment to collecting and disseminating detailed, daily school-level data, and bringing together mayors, hospitals, business leaders and other community partners under the leadership of the governor’s office, the state has helped several student groups not only recover, but surpass their pre-pandemic attendance levels.

The persistent disparities in many states and Rhode Island’s progress in addressing them underscore the importance of timely, disaggregated attendance data. Without it, policymakers and educators risk overlooking which students are missing school and why, making it harder to direct supports where they are most needed.

FutureEd Policy Analyst Tara Moon and Research Associate Giana Loretta contributed to this analysis.

School choice was a central point of disagreement, with Republican governors more likely to advocate for increased use of public funds for private schooling. A subset of Republican governors also focused on restricting transgender participation in women’s sports. Some Democratic governors fervently criticized Immigration and Customs Enforcement for conducting raids in and around schools.

But governors from both parties prioritized improving student achievement — especially in literacy — and increasing funding for public education and teacher pay. School nutrition emerged as a newly prominent area of shared focus. 

School Choice

Thirteen governors — all Republicans except for Arizona’s Katie Hobbs — referenced school choice in their speeches, with the vast majority promoting the use of public dollars for private education. 

Several governors advocated for expansion of their state’s private school choice programs, either by increasing funding or by broadening eligibility for participation. Missouri’s governor, Mike Kehoe, for example, proposed investing an additional $10 million in the MO Scholars Program. By contrast, South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster focused on eligibility, calling for universal access to the state’s education scholarship trust fund, which is currently limited to low-income families. 

Three governors announced that they will opt in to the new federal tax credit scholarship program. South Dakota’s Larry Rhoden praised the program and said the state will work with private school, public school and homeschool leaders to prepare for implementation in January 2027.

Other governors highlighted the need for more guardrails in private school choice programs. Hobbs continued to call for increased oversight of Arizona’s universal ESA program, arguing that a program originally designed to support students with disabilities and military families

has become vulnerable to waste, fraud and abuse, while Idaho’s Brad Little called for greater accountability in his state’s choice program.

Meanwhile, Kehoe and Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy, who are both Republicans, urged state lawmakers to support more choices for students within public education. Kehoe set aside $7.5 million for open school district enrollment, and Iowa’s Kim Reynolds proposed that per-pupil funding follow students to charter schools. 

Higher Education

Twenty-two governors discussed higher education priorities, largely centered on financial aid and affordability. Colorado’s Jared Polis continued his commitment to making the first two years at the state’s public colleges free for low-income high school graduates, and Indiana’s Mike Braun announced a freeze on tuition and mandatory fees at every public university for the next two years.

Others proposed targeted scholarships. Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen promised that every in-state student who scores a 33 or better on the ACT will receive a full scholarship, including housing, to the University of Nebraska. Georgia’s Brian Kemp proposed a $325 million investment in the state university’s needs-based DREAMS Scholarships.

Five governors proposed health sector-related higher education initiatives. New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham announced the construction and endowment of a new medical school. Idaho’s Little committed $1 million to support graduate medical education, while Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear proposed $25 million for nursing student loan forgiveness. 

Workforce Development

Looking beyond traditional post-secondary pathways, 15 governors highlighted workforce development initiatives and the importance of aligning career and technical education with the demands of a dynamic job market. 

Both Republican and Democratic governors proposed expanding K-12 and postsecondary programs that connect students to apprenticeships in skilled trades, health care, education and technology. Hawaii Gov. Josh Green, who proposed construction apprenticeships directly tied to affordable housing initiatives and partnerships between schools and nonprofits to train the next generation of climate stewards — key priorities for the state.

Kehoe announced support for a specific trade: pet grooming. His budget includes funding for expanding a Kansas City nonprofit called Pawsperity, which he said has helped 200 low-income students achieve financial stability through a stable career.

The governors of Colorado and South Dakota called for stronger state-level coordination, proposing new agencies to track workforce readiness and expand access to CTE.

Early Learning/Child Care

In line with initiatives to strengthen the workforce, 20 governors — Democrats and Republicans — proposed expanding early care and learning to increase access and affordability for working parents. 

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul pledged to fully fund New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s universal child care program for 2-year-olds for its first two years, while Grisham called for universal child care statewide in New Mexico. 

Seven governors — six Democrats and South Carolina’s McMaster — highlighted continued or new commitments to universal pre-K, while others suggested incremental expansions to early learning. Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson, for example, proposed using private investment to add 10,000 new seats in free early learning programs statewide, and Indiana’s Mike Braun suggested requiring businesses to have “skin in the game” to help reduce child care costs and expand access. 

Student Health

In last year’s addresses, several governors — predominantly Republicans — announced plans to ban cellphones in schools, with many framing the policies as necessary to protect students’ mental and behavioral health. 

This year, six Democrats and three Republicans proposed similar restrictions, though many emphasized improving student learning as the primary rationale. Kansas’s Laura Kelly, for example, proposed a school cellphone ban because the devices “are making it much harder for our children to learn and for our teachers to teach.” 

Still, student mental health was a concern, particularly regarding online safety. Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis warned parents about artificial intelligence chatbots, citing concerns about their connection to teen suicides. Democratic governors in New York, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts proposed restrictions on social media use for children — Hochul’s plan includes disabling AI chatbots, blocking location sharing and restricting access to online sports gambling.

Notably, only two governors, Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro and Wisconsin’s Tony Evers, proposed new investments in K-12 mental health services.

School Nutrition

Nutrition and school meals emerged as a new priority in this year’s addresses, with many governors referencing the Trump administration’s campaign to improve food quality and wellness nationwide. Ten governors, both Democratic and Republican, introduced initiatives aimed at improving student nutrition. 

Kansas’ Kelly proposed making school meals free for all students now eligible for reduced pricing, and Hawaii’s Green extended free school meals to families at 300% of the federal poverty level.

Regarding the food itself, Little proposed a bill to remove artificial dye from school lunches, while California Gov. Gavin Newsom encouraged the continuation of efforts to remove highly processed foods from school cafeterias. Despite tightening restrictions, no alternatives or funding for healthier food were proposed. 

Three Republican governors, citing health concerns such as obesity, proposed removing candy, soda, energy drinks and other unhealthy foods from programs that provide federal subsidies for students when school is not in session: Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Summer Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT).      

This report was produced through a partnership between and The 74. Senior Producer Meghan Gallagher of The 74 developed the interactive maps. 

This would be a mistake.

Students and families cannot afford to wait. Scores on the 2025 National Assessment of Educational Progress, and, attendance and engagement are all at historic lows, confirming what educators and many families already knew: Student performance and well-being continue to decline. Those learning losses will continue to have profound impacts both on the students themselves and on the nation’s broader economic prosperity. Meanwhile, decades of top-down reform efforts have yielded disappointingly little improvement, despite massive investments and constant policy churn.

State policymakers have a better path forward, one that doesn’t depend on federal direction: creating the conditions for bottom-up innovation to emerge, spread and scale within their own education systems.

As the Hoover Institution’s has documented, the current education infrastructure actively prevents innovation from emerging, spreading and generating measurable improvements in learner outcomes. Years of investment in top-down innovation and reform have yielded many lessons but little actual progress.

A new white paper from the Hoover Institution reveals why this approach matters. “,” synthesizes decades of evidence on education innovation, as well as organizational, network and diffusion theory. By dividing the growth of innovation into three clear phases — start, spread, and sustain — the paper’s framework illustrates clear actions and decision points in which policymakers and education leaders can either help or hinder innovation.  

We know that the most scalable and sustainable improvements emerge from the needs and problems that practitioners define and from the solutions they help develop. Yet, as a finds, it remains “very rare for an innovation to get diffused within a school and it is much rarer that it gets diffused between schools.”

The framework identifies obstacles that prevent good ideas. At the earliest stages where bottom-up ideas might start, rigid bureaucracies foster risk-averse cultures among educators. Decades of emphasis on standardized test scores have conditioned teachers to avoid failure, making new initiatives seem high-risk, low-reward. Many principals preemptively block innovation due to perceived regulatory barriers even though research shows these barriers are often negotiable or misunderstood.

When innovations do emerge, they struggle to spread. Teachers attempting to implement new practices face unfamiliar partnerships with district administrators, intermediaries and policymakers; they receive little preparation or support for managing these relationships. Schools, already overwhelmed with mandates and regulations, lack the basic administrative infrastructure and tools to disseminate ideas effectively. 

Perhaps most critically, the education sector lacks a robust knowledge ecosystem to capture what works, determine when replication is more sensible than adaptation and analyze whether and how an innovation fits in different local contexts.

At the scale phase, accountability systems emphasizing narrow metrics actively discourage ambitious teaching. Policymakers tend to be “failure-avoidant, linear thinkers” while innovations need trial-and-error cycles. The bias toward quick wins denies innovations time to demonstrate impact.

The result? A system where constant informal change happens in classrooms daily, but meaningful and potentially impactful innovations rarely spread beyond individual teachers or schools, and students’ outcomes continue to stagnate or decline.

The good news is state legislatures don’t need permission from Washington to address these barriers. The framework identifies specific policy levers that state lawmakers control:

• Invest in knowledge ecosystems. Bottom-up innovations often fail to expand, not because they don’t work, but because there’s no infrastructure to capture what works, why it works and how to adapt it to new contexts. States should fund networks connecting innovative practitioners, support rapid-cycle evaluation and incentivize “fail-forward” learning. Most knowledge sharing networks are led by intermediaries, such as NASBE and KnowledgeWorks’s,�� , in Michigan and NHLI’s. One state example comes from Nevada, where the Department of Education and the Center for the Future of Learning jointly lead the to support pilots, create tools for community engagement, and develop case studies to inform practice.

• Genuinely engage educators in policymaking. Innovations spread when they align with teachers’ values and address immediate classroom needs. Yet teachers are routinely shut out of policy development. States should remove procedural barriers and invest in the time and capacity needed for front-line educators to shape policy, not token teacher advisory councils, but an authentic partnership. Examples such as Georgia’s brings 21 classroom teachers annually into direct engagement with state and federal policymakers; and North Carolina’s has graduated over 800 fellows who continue to influence education policy statewide. 

• Support flexible implementation. Innovations that require strict fidelity struggle to spread; those that offer clear principles with room for local adaptation thrive. State policy should embrace “tight-but-loose” frameworks that maintain core commitments while allowing schools to adapt. Part of this flexibility entails states offering stronger scaffolds for novice teachers while giving more seasoned practitioners greater latitude to exercise professional judgment. Since 2016, has taken this approach for supporting personalized, competency-based change.

• Provide adequate, sustained resources. Unlike businesses, which can attract investment capital, educators must develop their own infrastructure before scaling. Federal funding historically has been scarce and short-term as in the case of the grants. School-level innovators often come to rely  on local or regional education foundations to provide seed funding for new models. In 2015, for example, the Nellie Mae Education Foundation to support innovation efforts across five New England school districts. For over a decade, North Carolina has offered smaller innovation grants as part of its ongoing and New York State offers that develop, implement, and share innovative programs. Generous and sustained support can rarely be counted on, but states can fill this gap by ensuring innovations have the financial runway needed to develop tools, train educators and demonstrate impact over time.

Do we want to spend another session waiting for Washington to solve problems it hasn’t solved in decades? Or are we ready to build infrastructure that enables teachers and school leaders — the people closest to students — to innovate, learn and improve?

The evidence is clear. Bottom-up innovation, when properly supported, can transform education. States have the authority and the tools to create supportive conditions. What they need now is political will. 

Our students can’t wait for federal certainty. State policymakers should give them something better: a system designed to foster, capture and spread the innovations that will actually improve their learning. The framework exists. The session is starting. It’s time for states to lead.

“I felt loved while I was on campus by my professors,” Johnson said. “I felt affirmed. I saw people who looked like me aspiring to complete higher education, and telling me, ‘I want to be a doctor, I want to be an educator or a lawyer.’ ”

Johnson is now looking to make that experience possible for a new generation of students of color, as the founding principal of the first early college high school in New York City inspired by historically Black colleges and universities. HBCU Early College Prep High School, which opened in Queens, New York, in fall 2025, is part of a broader effort to create innovative, community-driven and accelerated high schools designed in the style of HBCUs like Delaware State.

Students will graduate with not only a high school diploma, but also an associate’s degree and a guaranteed spot at Delaware State, founded in 1891 and ranked 10th overall among all HBCUs today. Just as important, they will experience a unique school culture modeled after Delaware State and other HBCUs. In fact, by their junior year students will be taught directly — but remotely — by Delaware State professors for certain courses.

Although New York City is home to more than 100 higher education institutions, it has no HBCUs. In fact, there are none in all of New York state.

“Young people of color just are not being exposed to HBCUs at all,” Johnson said. “We’re not even talking about HBCUs,” whose distinguished list of graduates include former Vice President Kamala Harris, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., former Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and actor and producer Samuel L. Jackson, to name a few. “And if we are, we’re either discrediting them, or we’re telling students that they can’t afford it, or they don’t give scholarships — none of which is true.” 

That concern is echoed in UNCF’s recent , which finds that many K–12 students — especially students of color — still lack meaningful exposure to HBCUs. The report underscores the urgent need for clearer, intentional pathways connecting young people to these historically Black institutions.

The new school, and the broader effort to develop HBCU-inspired high schools, is made possible with support from a partnership between UNCF (formerly the United Negro College Fund), the XQ Institute and Transcend, a national nonprofit that helps to design and support innovative schools. This coalition of organizations is also in the early stages of transforming an existing New Orleans public school into an HBCU-inspired, early college high school, with other communities also being explored for such efforts.

“This work only happens because of the strength of the partnership,” said Sarah Navarro, the chief of schools and systems for the XQ Institute. “UNCF brings deep expertise in what makes HBCUs so powerful for student success. Transcend supports and facilitates the design process with communities. XQ ensures the model is built to transform high school — not just launch a single school. 

“Together, we’re not just opening a new campus. We’re building a scalable model for how high schools across the country can connect students to college, culture and opportunity in a lasting way.”

Key hallmarks of HBCU Early College Prep include accelerated coursework, youth voice and choice, real-world learning and a deep connection to the local community.

Students are taking college courses beginning in ninth grade, with teachers receiving training by faculty at Delaware State, said Shawn Rux, a senior executive director in the Office of New School Development & Design at the NYC Department of Education, a key partner of the coalition. Eventually, those students will take virtual classes with Delaware State professors.

“The ‘intentionality around the school design” is key to this enterprise,” said Sekou Biddle, vice president for advocacy at UNCF. As part of the effort, the team asked, “What is it that we know about the HBCU experience that is so catalytic for students? And what if we were intentional about bringing those elements into high school?”

“It’s around [school] culture, it’s around instruction, but then it’s around bringing those principles to life,” Biddle said.

Channeling the ‘HBCU Magic’

To Rux and others, it’s not just the academic challenge; it’s the combination of that rigor with a strong, positive school culture that nurtures students and provides them a thoughtfully designed support system.

“I call it the HBCU magic,” said Rux, a Delaware State alumnus himself.

A valuable resource and reference point for the design of the new school came from a 2020 UNCF report, Biddle said.

“HBCUs are often overlooked as sources of effective methods for producing high-achieving Black students, although their existence is based on this very premise,” the Imparting Wisdom report notes. “HBCUs have been engines for ingenuity, academic excellence and social justice for decades, and the strategies and practices they implement can inform educational practices and systems.”

The report identifies a series of recommendations based on three “best practices” among HBCUs including: cultivating nurturing support systems with a high level of student and faculty interaction; leveraging African American culture and identity; and setting high academic expectations and an intentional college-going culture.

Competition to attend the new public high school was fierce, with some 1,000 applicants for about 100 seats. The school will grow each year, as it progresses from having ninth graders only to eventually a full slate of students in grades 9 through 12.

To apply, students are required to not only submit their academic credentials (including test scores), but also write a short essay about the Amanda Gorman poem, “The Hill We Climb,” and submit a video statement about themselves. While many students in the new class attended other New York City public schools previously, some came from private and parochial schools, according to Johnson.

“Our school is actually bringing students back into the public school system,” she said.

Designed for Belonging

Among those to earn a spot at the new Queens public school are ninth graders Mya Williams and Chance Thomas.

Mya, an aspiring veterinarian, was attracted to the school after hearing about it at a school assembly. Principal Johnson had been visiting middle schools to drum up interest.

“She talked about how we would get an associate’s degree at the end of our four years, and we would get college credits,” Mya said. “And that really caught my attention.”

Both students describe their new school as academically demanding, but also supportive.

According to Chance, the school is cultivating students’ work ethic and valuable skills like time management. “They definitely push us with the workload and the expectations, because a lot of our peers [at other schools] don’t have that,” she said. “Expectations are really high, but our professors [how teachers are referred to] are really supportive.” 

“I think it’s good that we’re challenged,” Mya said. “It’s preparing us for college.”

The two students also highlighted the “house” system, akin in some respects to sororities and fraternities, or to the student houses featured in the Harry Potter books and films, an analogy offered up by Principal Johnson. In fact, HBCU Early College Prep uses a point system like Hogwarts School, with rewards for those that amass the most. But in this case, the houses are named after well-known HBCUs like Spelman College and Howard University.

The experience “builds a sisterhood and brotherhood within those houses,” Chance said.

“Listen to how these students talk about their school. They’re describing rigor and community in the same breath,” said Aylon Samouha, co-founder and CEO of Transcend. “That’s not an accident. That’s the result of intentional design.”

“When students feel like they belong to something meaningful,” Samouha said, “when the adults around them have high expectations and real support structures, engagement stops being something you have to manufacture. It becomes the natural byproduct of a school that was designed with students’ full humanity in mind.”

Coming “home”

It didn’t take long for ninth graders at the new school to experience Delaware State firsthand. In November of last year, HBCU Early College Prep organized a field trip for students over homecoming weekend.

During the visit, the ninth graders toured campus and participated in a pinning ceremony with the college president. Over time, students will have the chance to attend career fairs and other activities at Delaware State, said Kareem McLemore, the university’s vice president for strategic enrollment management and international affairs. And, they will be earning college credits from the institution each year.

The high schoolers also had a chance to meet with upperclass students at an existing early college high school located on the Delaware State campus to better understand the accelerated model.

As part of the model, each student also is paired with a “success coach,” an upperclassman from Delaware State who can provide remote support, including tutoring and personalized academic advising.

As a brand new school with only ninth graders right now, HBCU Early College Prep is still early in its journey. But Principal Johnson, Rux from the city education department and their coalition partners are aiming high:

“We just want to make sure,” Rux said, “that when students walk out that door at the end of their four years, they’re fully prepared to really take on the world.”

Disclosure: is a financial supporter of The 74.

My own state, Arkansas, is preparing to implement a key piece of its 2024 , which is modeled after legislation in Mississippi. This summer will be the first in Arkansas when third-graders will be retained if they are not reading proficiently. As expected, parents and educators are on edge and questions abound. The prospect of thousands of students being held back is generating lots of attention and anxiety. 

But as Arkansas moves to implement its version of the Mississippi law and other states look to emulate it, policymakers would be wise to consider what the research says about retention. In short, like everything else in education, there is no panacea for increasing student learning. Retention in and of itself is not going to singlehandedly raise literacy rates. The key to success in Mississippi was the supports the state provided before and after students were retained. 

�Ѿ���������������辱’s , passed in 2013, was a comprehensive K-3 reform law designed to ensure that all third graders read on grade level. Core elements included intensive professional development aligned with the science of reading, early identification of struggling readers, targeted intervention beginning well before grade three, deployment of state-funded literacy coaches and the retention of a small share of third graders who did not meet the reading benchmark.

As science of reading reforms expand nationwide and districts work to address pandemic-related learning losses, third-grade retention policies have become more common. As of 2024, have laws requiring promotion based on reading proficiency, and 13 additional states allow districts to retain students for this reason. Importantly, these laws typically are more generous in allowing exemptions than previous versions.

But while exemptions are often well-intentioned, suggests that, when broadly used, they can undermine policy effectiveness. Exemptions tend to reduce participation among the students who may benefit most from intensive intervention, including English learners who could benefit from extra help. The primary benefit of promotion-linked literacy policies is early detection paired with substantial supports, such as additional instruction, tutoring and coaching, before students reach third grade. So when exemptions are granted, they must be coupled with the same level of structured intervention Mississippi requires through individualized reading plans and intensive instruction.

Evidence from Mississippi helps clarify why retention alone is not the driver of literacy gains. In the first year of implementation, roughly 15% of the state’s third graders who scored below the promotion cutoff in the 2014-15 school year were retained, and among students just below the threshold, were held back. Yet fourth-grade scores began improving almost immediately, from 2013 to 2024, making Mississippi those children for reading and math gains during that time — well before retention could plausibly affect outcomes at scale. This timing strongly suggests that the gains were driven primarily by early identification, targeted intervention and intensive instructional support rather than by retention itself.

Importantly, Mississippi paired promotion decisions — whether retention or exemption — with structured, mandatory resources. Even students promoted via exemptions were required to have individualized reading plans, summer literacy programs and ongoing intervention. Survey and administrative evidence suggest that these promoted-but-still-supported students made meaningful reading gains, underscoring that the policy’s effectiveness hinged on the , not simply on whether students were retained.

Evidence from other states reinforces this point. In Florida, where third-grade retention has been studied extensively, outperformed exempted peers who did not two years later. This suggests that exemptions, when not paired with intensive intervention, can dilute policy effectiveness by allowing struggling readers to advance.

Survey evidence suggests that in part by the supplemental assistance provided to low-achieving students who were promoted via exemptions. By contrast, evidence from Florida shows that in reading two years later, indicating that exemptions were not consistently granted to those who would benefit most from promotion.

As Arkansas moves toward implementation, it would do well to consider not just �Ѿ���������������辱’s experience, but also Indiana’s, which saw the rubber meet on the road on retention more recently. students are repeating third grade after failing the state test or qualifying for an exemption. State leaders had expected to retain more, but passing rates on the reading assessment jumped nearly 5 points last school year, to just over 87%. Officials said the progress stemmed in part from the expansion of a statewide program, the Indiana Literacy Cadre, that focuses educators’ attention on research-based instructional methods. Participation increased from 41 schools in 2022 to more than 550 in 2025, and schools in the Literacy Cadre saw a 7-point increase in passing rates, compared with gains of 3.6 points at other schools. 

Arkansas can hope for similar outcomes of this year’s state tests. There is cause for optimism – when it comes to not just retention but the resources that come before these critical decisions, is more expansive and students have access to more assistance both at school and home (through a $1,500 grant to families for literacy tutoring). Secretary Jacob Oliva, who leads the state Department of Education released in January to ensure families are aware of their students’ standing and students are receiving ample supports both before and after the testing window. 

Across studies, the evidence is consistent: retention mandates alone do not drive literacy gains in isolation. only when retention is part of a that intervenes early and intensively. �Ѿ���������������辱’s experience demonstrates that it is the comprehensive series of interventions—  — that produces lasting improvement.

High-quality tutoring has emerged as an important post-pandemic for helping struggling students in public schools. finds that tutoring often results in substantial additional learning gains when delivered during the school day, in small groups with the same tutors and multiple times a week for at least 10 weeks. 

But this often comes with a substantial price tag — depending on the model and staffing approach, can range from $1,200 to $2,500 per student per year. During the pandemic, many districts relied on federal Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funds to launch or expand tutoring programs, but these have largely expired.

Fortunately, states and school districts have access to other funding streams, which can be combined through “blending” and “braiding” to cover the costs of tutoring when a single source is insufficient.

Federal Funding 

Though federal funding faced significant uncertainty during the Fiscal Year 2026 budget process, Congress passed a spending package that sustains many of these funding streams, at least for the coming year. 

School districts may use Elementary and Secondary Education Act funds — federal aid intended to close achievement gaps for low-income students — for schoolwide or targeted tutoring programs, depending on a school’s poverty level. ESEA funds, which support the recruitment, training and retention of effective educators, can be used to train staff as tutors and provide stipends to those who take on this additional responsibility. ESEA fund student support, academic enrichment and afterschool programs, which includes tutoring. 

Other federal funds may be used for tutoring programs that aid certain student groups. ESEA funds can be used to train and pay tutors of English learners and Native American and Alaska Native students, respectively. And the can cover the cost of tutoring, instructional materials and tutor professional development when these services are tied to a student’s Individualized Education Program.

Beyond direct funding, districts can leverage federally supported service and employment programs. AmeriCorps, a national service initiative funded primarily through federal appropriations, has long supplied tutors to low-income districts and schools through full-time programs like City Year. And the federal work-study program helps pay part-time salaries for college undergraduates and graduate students, including those who tutor in K-12 schools. 

Finally, the U.S. Department of Education has �����ٲ���, a regulatory framework for discretionary grant competitions. This emphasis aligns with the department’s Fiscal Year 2025 literacy grants, which include roughly $89 million recently awarded to seven state education agencies to scale tutoring programs.

State and Local Funding

are playing a pivotal role in sustaining and scaling tutoring programs launched with federal ESSER funds by using funding formulas, policy mandates and infrastructure supports to keep post-pandemic initiatives going. 

Many states have relied on short-term appropriations. Louisiana, for example, paired a K-5 tutoring for low-performing students with an initial appropriation in the 2024-25 school year and another $30 million in 2025-26, though future funding will depend on annual legislative approval. 

And while most state tutoring investments have been one-time commitments, stands out for embedding tutoring in its K-12 funding formula by providing an additional $500 per fourth-grader each year for literacy tutoring.  

Some states have enacted tutoring mandates without funding them. , for example, requires that students in grades 3 to 8 who failed the state assessment the previous year receive tutoring, but districts must use a combination of state, federal and local funds to pay for it. Twenty-four states offer , such as vendor lists or other procurement assistance.

A smaller number of states have statewide programs that recruit, train and place members of their tutors corps in schools. In , this operates through a nonprofit model backed by and philanthropy. The is embedded within the state education department and relies on a combination of expiring federal relief funds and funds from local foundations, nonprofits and city governments.

Districts, cities and counties sometimes offer competitive grants that can fund tutoring, and superintendents can reallocate existing dollars for tutoring through their districts’ annual budget process. In cities with strong mayoral involvement in education, tutoring dollars can be allocated directly through the city budget, as the leaders of ., and have done. 

Higher Education Partnerships

Colleges and universities represent a large, often underused source of potential low-cost tutors. In a 2023 , then-Secretary of Education Miguel A. Cardona encouraged cross-sector partnerships to scale tutoring and highlighted federal work-study as a key resource. The letter noted that when eligible college students tutored school-aged children, the government could cover up to 100% of their wages through federal work-study. That guidance remains in effect, and there have been no subsequent regulatory changes to the program.

Teacher-preparation programs are also well positioned to expand tutoring capacity. At for example, undergraduate education majors are required to serve as tutors in local elementary schools as part of their coursework. Although the tutors are unpaid, their work counts toward their field-placement hours for graduation, giving them more than required by the state. There is no cost for participating public schools. The model enables districts to sustain tutoring at little to no cost, while future teachers gain valuable classroom experience. 

Leveraging Philanthropic and Nonprofit Support 

School districts can also partner with philanthropic and nonprofit organizations. The , launched as a public-private partnership during the Biden administration and now operating independently, offers free and connects districts with vetted providers of staffing, training and financial assistance for tutors, helping to reduce hiring, training and program startup costs.

The upshot is that there are more sources of support for intensive tutoring in public schools than one might think. Tapping them may require education policymakers and practitioners to move money from other programs. But with a large body of research showing increased and meaningful learning gains from high-quality tutoring done during the school day, that shouldn’t be a difficult decision to make.

In December, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis made waves by his intention to opt his state into the program, becoming the first Democrat to do so and setting the stage for his Democratic peers. Three other Democratic governors — Tina Kotek of Oregon, Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico and Tony Evers of Wisconsin — have that they won’t opt in. 

So the question remains: Will most Democrats stay the course and reject federal support for school choice? Or will they follow Polis’s example, bucking the traditional party line? How they proceed may have profound impacts on Democrats’ electoral chances this year.

As approved by Congress last summer, the program allows donors to receive a $1,700 federal tax credit for money given to organizations providing scholarships for private school tuition, tutoring and other education costs for families whose annual income is at or below 300 percent of their area’s median income. The Internal Revenue Service is currently drafting guidance for administering the tax credit, and states are evaluating whether to participate.

In addition to Polis, have either opted in or declared their plans to do so. One Democrat, North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein, vetoed an opt-in bill but said he expects to sign up after he reviews the IRS rules.

Jorge Elorza, CEO of Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) and former mayor of Providence, has been pushing Democratic governors to opt into the program. This is part of a marked change in DFER’s positioning on private school choice, which Elorza casts as a turn in the right direction for a party that has, according to DFER’s , lost its lead with voters on education. For Democrats concerned about being out of touch with the majority of voters on school choice, this decision represents a “lifeline,” he told me. “It is a convenient off ramp so that we can not only talk about K–12 education policy in a new way, but also take an important step in the direction of choice.”

The main argument he uses to get them on board, he said, is that “if a state does not opt in, then by default, the first $1,700 in every single federal taxpayer’s taxes is going to leave your state.” Because it’s a federal tax credit, Californians are every bit as eligible to donate as Floridians. But because states have to opt in, California’s children aren’t eligible to receive scholarships unless Gov. Gavin Newsom or the state legislature decides to participate. Elorza believes the decision for Democrats is a “no brainer.”

John Schilling, a school choice advocate, offered another argument: “it’s all additive.” Because it’s a tax credit, “it is adding K-12 resources, which are going directly to parents and students. It does not affect what the federal government or what state governments provide for K–12 education.” And since the law allows public school students to benefit from the scholarships, tutoring or afterschool activities, Schilling sees little reason why Democratic governors wouldn’t opt in. He too called it a “no-brainer.”

Not everyone agrees. Thomas Toch, the director of the Georgetown University think tank FutureEd, argues the decision to opt in could be “very problematic” for governors, especially if they can’t target scholarships to students from low-income families or provide much oversight of private schools. Because there are so many unanswered questions, Toch hopes governors will “wait until they understand in detail what the parameters of the program will be” before they opt in or out, which won’t be until the IRS releases its rules later this year.

Another concern is a perennial one for school choice opponents: that private schools can discriminate against students, including LGBTQ kids. Jon Valant, director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, said the tax credit is effectively a “backdoor voucher program” that states “actually have very little control over.” Democrats might be wary of opting into a program “where, for example, they can do very little to protect against some discriminatory behaviors.”

Such concerns are why Robert Enlow, president and CEO of the school choice research and advocacy organization EdChoice, believes governors in states on “the harder sort of left” — he mentioned California, Massachusetts and Connecticut — may choose not to opt in. Toch added: “In some states, especially where teacher unions are influential, there’s going to be a lot of pressure to just say no for no’s sake.”

Advocates argue that school choice, and particularly the scholarship tax credit, is popular. In September, DFER released showing that 64% of voters wanted their governor to opt into the program, including 61% of Democrats and 59% of Independents, with even stronger showings among Hispanic and Black voters. Enlow also pointed to done by EdChoice and Morning Consult showing that 65% of adults and 75% of school parents support tax-credit scholarship programs. With numbers like these, “opting in is not just popular, it is overwhelmingly popular,” DFER’s Elorza said.

Yet in 2024, voters in three states — Colorado, Kansas, and Nebraska — pro-school choice ballot measures. Elorza chalks these defeats up to “coordinated campaigns that raise a parade of horribles that will materialize” if these measures are adopted. Coordinated campaigns or no, those ballot measure defeats are surely going to give fodder to opponents of the tax credit scholarship program.

For now, most Democratic governors seem for the IRS rules. As a spokesperson for Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro put it in an email: “The Shapiro Administration is awaiting federal guidance to address key questions about how this program would work, including which students will be eligible, how this federal initiative will interact with existing programs, and more. We look forward to reviewing that guidance.” The offices of the governors of Illinois, Michigan, California and Michigan did not respond to requests for comment.

Toch applauds the wait-and-see approach: “My argument is that the devil is in the details, and the political leaders in both parties should scrutinize the details carefully and not commit to a program unless it serves valuable public policy ends.”

The question for Democratic governors facing re-election is simple: After a decade of declining student achievement, will voters want a massive change in how education is delivered? Or will they prefer a more cautious approach that maintains stricter oversight?

Amid these developments — some amazing research and resources have emerged for the field. As the year comes to a close, zero2eight asked early care and education experts to share what they consider to be the sector’s must-read research of 2025. What emerged from their responses were a collection of reports, studies and data tools relevant to a number of urgent themes. These include the sector’s ability to respond to current events, new ways of thinking about preschool gains and economic analysis of some of the ongoing challenges facing the early care and education workforce. 

Here are some of the themes, studies and resources identified by the field’s insiders as essential to moving the sector forward.

1. Timely Research and Resources for Challenging Times

Steeply rising costs, and have all contributed to a challenging, fast-changing landscape for families and early educators, and reliant on public benefits. The following new research and tools offer timely insights into how such pressures are reshaping families’ lives and the early care and education sector, with some offering inspiration for how to respond. 

Working Paper: 

Authors: Thomas S. Dee, economist and the Barnett Family Professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education

Key Takeaway: Immigration raids coincided with a 22% increase in daily student absences, with especially large increases among the youngest students. 

This study highlights the field’s “ability to innovate and be nimble to understand impacts of policy and policy enforcement,” said nominator Cristi Carman, director of the RAPID Survey Project at Stanford Center on Early Childhood who studies family well-being. It examines the collateral damage of unexpected immigration raids in California’s Central Valley, documenting a clear pattern in children’s school attendance, said second nominator Philip Fisher, director of the Stanford Center on Early Childhood, adding that “ICE raids are associated with increased school absenteeism.” According to the working paper, young children are expected to be the most likely to miss school, with students in kindergarten through fifth grade estimated to be far more likely to miss school as a result of immigration raids than high school students. 

Report:

Authors: Children’s Funding Project staff, including Bruno Showers, state policy manager; Lisa Christensen Gee, director of tax policy; Olivia Allen, vice president of strategy and advocacy; Josh Weinstock, policy analyst (former); and Marina Mendoza, senior manager of early childhood impact

Key Takeaway: Facing dwindling federal funds, several states have innovated ways to provide dedicated funding for early care and education and youth programs.

With pandemic-era relief funds running out, states are in desperate need of models for how to continue supporting early care and education, said Erica Phillips, executive director of the National Association for Family Child Care (NAFCC), who nominated this recent report. The report — from Children’s Funding Project, a nonprofit that helps secure sustainable public funding for children’s services — offers exactly that by providing a crucial, “very comprehensive overview” of how some states are building long-term, dedicated revenue streams for child care, early education and youth programs as federal money runs dry. As the report’s authors explain, stable, dedicated funding is critical to thriving programs, letting states and providers to “budget more than one year at a time, allowing them to make longer-term investments in quality improvement, facilities, staff education, and other key elements of evidence-based programs and services.” 

Data Tools: and

Authors: The diaper need mapping tool was published as part of a research collaboration between the Urban Institute and the National Diaper Bank Network. The affordability tracker was published by the Urban Institute. 

Key takeaway: Families are facing mounting economic insecurity 

The Urban Institute recently released two innovative data tools for policymakers, advocates and researchers that illuminate the increasing economic precariousness facing too many families, said Carman of the RAPID Survey Project. The interactive, produced in partnership with the National Diaper Bank Initiative, shows how many diapers each county across the nation needs to address diaper shortages facing homes with young children that are below 300% of the federal poverty level. illustrates the rising cost pressures facing families across various indicators, including how the price of groceries has changed in counties and congressional districts in recent years. “Being able to see and understand scale and drivers of economic insecurity nationally is very powerful,” wrote Carman. 

2. New Research Reveals Preschool’s Overlooked Impacts

The body of early education research about how preschool affects children often measures child outcomes such as kindergarten readiness, standardized test scores or later graduation rates. While those are all important, Christina Weiland, professor at the Marsal School of Education at the University of Michigan and the Ford School of Public Policy, wrote in an email, “we’ve long suspected they aren’t the full picture of preschool’s effects.” Weiland nominated the following working paper as part of what she considers to be a new wave of research that explores a broader set of outcomes than the field has typically examined, such as parent earnings, and subsequent schooling environments. “Together, these studies suggest benefits of preschool programs that have been largely overlooked,” but that are key to fully understanding the potential benefits of early learning investments for children and families, noted Weiland.

Working Paper:

Authors: John Eric Humphries, faculty research fellow at Yale University’s Department of Economics; Christopher Neilson, research associate at Yale University; Xiaoyang Ye, Brown University; and Seth D. Zimmerman, research associate at Yale School of Management 

Key Takeaway: New Haven’s universal pre-K (UPK) program raised parents’ earnings by nearly 22% during pre-kindergarten, with gains persisting for at least six years.

Weiland said that this notable study, published in 2024 and updated in 2025, expands the preschool picture by looking at how UPK might impact parents’ earnings,” and uses that to estimate the program’s returns on investment. It found that New Haven’s UPK program raised parents’ earnings by nearly 22% during pre-kindergarten, with gains persisting for at least six years, concluding that the returns to UPK investment are “high.” As one of the first studies looking at “earnings data in modern-day pre-K studies,” noted Weiland, it offers more evidence that the field is “likely underestimating the return on investment early education programs have.” 

3. Spotlight on the Early Child Care Workforce

Back in the spring, child care economist Chris Herbst spoke with zero2eight about how the COVID pandemic demonstrated how the child care workforce is “like a leaf blowing in the wind” — “sensitive to all kinds of changes in the policy and economic environment because it is is inextricably linked to the larger labor market.” Because of this, a new surge of recent research by economists has focused on the workforce, with researchers seeking to understand how early care providers respond to policy and market changes. Nominators pointed toward two such studies. 

Working Paper:

Authors: Katharine C. Sadowski, assistant professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education

Key Takeaway: An increase in minimum wage changes who provides child care

Combining “rich data with sensible research designs,” this study examines how an increase in the minimum wage could impact child care quality and access, noted nominator Aaron Sojourner, senior economist at W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. 

Author Katharine C. Sadowski’s findings suggest that an increase to the minimum wage doesn’t lead to a decrease in the number of child care programs or the number of people working in the sector. However, minimum wage policies can influence who provides child care: larger enterprises, such as child care centers, are more likely to open and remain in operation, while smaller, self-employed providers, such as home-based child care programs, are less likely to open or remain in business. Among the smaller establishments that do stay open, the owners are less likely to have advanced degrees, the study found, potentially impacting the quality of child care provided, according to the author. “Unfortunately, minimum wage policy is binding and too important for a lot of child care employers and employees due to chronic underinvestment in the sector,” wrote Sojourner, adding that this is the first paper he’s seen to leverage “restricted-use data available through the U.S. Census Research Data Center system to generate insights on the sector.”

Study:

Authors: Chris M. Herbst, foundation professor in Arizona State University’s School of Public Affairs 

Key Takeaway: The education of the early education workforce has dropped over time, possibly due to the sector’s low wages 

This study found that the education levels and cognitive test scores of the early education workforce have been declining over time, suggesting lower teacher quality, which could have implications for children’s development. The study links this dip in teacher skills to the proliferation of early education programs which might divert future child care workers away from four-year colleges. It also looks at how low wages — which have remained low even as wages for other jobs for similarly-skilled workers have increased — might lead highly qualified individuals to choose other occupations. 

“This is analogous to what,” wrote Jessica Brown, assistant professor of economics at University of South Carolina, who nominated the study. It “underscores the importance of the discussion of compensation in early childhood education.” Brown notes that it’s a difficult topic for the field to discuss, because “no one wants to imply that the current workforce is not high quality. But the reality is that compensation challenges mean that child care is not a very attractive job, and that has implications for the quality of the workforce.”

Its most recent contains the blunt admission that, “L.A. Unified currently has a structural deficit whereby in-year expenditures exceed in-year revenues. As revenues continue to decrease due to enrollment decline and loss of one-time COVID funds, expenditures have not been reduced proportionately.”

How did a district with $18.8 billion in revenue this year get to the point where it is projecting a $1.6 billion deficit by 2027-28?

The problems start on the revenue side. Namely, the district keeps losing students. According to it reported to the federal government, Los Angeles Unified served 495,255 students in 2018-19, the last full school year pre-pandemic. By 2023-24, that number had fallen to 419,929. That’s a decline of 75,326 students, or 15.2%.

That 15% decline is key to understanding the next few data points because the district did not reduce the number of staffers at anywhere close to the rate at which its student population declined. During the same period that it lost 75,000 students, it cut its teaching ranks by just 251. That represents a decline of 1.1% on the teacher side, compared with the 15.2% loss in student enrollment. It had a similarly small decline in non-teaching staff.

Effectively, Los Angeles reduced its student/teacher ratio over this time period from 22.5 to 19.3 students per teacher. As The 74 reported earlier this year, about three-quarters of districts across the country have reduced their student/teacher ratios in similar ways over the last few years, but Los Angeles had one of the bigger drops.

As it served fewer students, the district also failed to adjust the number of schools it operates. In 2019, it had 785 district-run and charter schools. Five years later, despite the 15% decline in the number of students it served, it operated the exact same number of schools — 785.

In practice, by not responding to the enrollment declines, the district now operates a lot of partially vacant schools. Between 2019 and 2024, 224 Los Angeles schools lost 25% or more of their students. It is far from the only district with very small schools, but it does have a particularly large number of them. In 2024, 52 Los Angeles district schools served under 100 students and another 68 had less than 200 students.

The Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University has compiled across the country, and that data suggest that many small schools become very expensive to operate. For example, Marina del Rey Middle School in Los Angeles served 716 students in 2013-14. Ten years later, it taught only 369, at of $38,780. Similarly, Crescent Heights Elementary went from educating 384 students in 2013-14 to just 192 a decade later and now spends $37,967 per pupil.

So, how is the district proposing to get its back into balance? For now, it’s starting with accounting tactics like limiting the amount of money schools can carry over from one year to the next, closing unfilled school staff vacancies and cutting central office operations. It also hints that it will “consolidate” campuses and programs but doesn’t say exactly what that will mean. Elsewhere in the document, the district says it expects to save $130 million this year by cutting 1,291 teacher positions — a 7% reduction. 

These cuts are necessary in part because the district projects it will lose another 35,000 students, a further 9% drop, by 2027-28. The one-time federal relief funds allowed Los Angeles to temporarily ignore the imbalance between revenues and spending it had accrued thanks to a bloated payroll and an unwillingness to deal with the messy business of closing or consolidating schools.

But it now has to resolve that deficit, and district leaders will face some tough decisions in the years ahead as they attempt to bring their budget back into balance while continuing to build on their recent academic gains.

As if that weren’t enough to keep her busy, she worked with legislators to co-write three climate bills for the Indiana General Assembly, raised $87,000 to support student journalism programs as director of , and helped secure winning votes for Indianapolis Mayor Joe Hogsett in a critical municipal race.

It’s the kind of résumé you’d expect from someone twice her age. Yet when you ask how Maiga got here, she doesn’t talk about awards or titles—she credits her high school.

Maiga is a graduate of Indiana-based , designed in partnership with , a nonprofit working to modernize the high school experience. In 2016, only 12 graduates from Indianapolis Public Schools enrolled at Purdue University, the state’s flagship postsecondary institution. Determined to change course, the community came together to create PPHS, a project-based, STEM-focused high school serving students citywide.

In its first graduating cohort, the school single-handedly tripled the number of Indianapolis public high school graduates entering the university. The network of now three schools has become a statewide model helping to shape policy across Indiana. 

It’s that flexible, out-of-the-classroom thinking that defined Maiga’s four years at PPHS’s Englewood campus. The school gave her the opportunity to discover her passions with interest-driven classes and meaningful internships, shaping her skills and, ultimately, helping her chart her future.

One of those opportunities was the , a pitch competition that gives local high school students a chance to develop their entrepreneurial skills while learning from business leaders and investors. Magia, who had honed her professional skills at PPHS, was well prepared. She and her Compleyes.ai co-founder walked away with first place—and a $25,000 check.

“High school was so important to me,” she said. “I feel like if you talk to a traditional high school student, they probably don’t feel heard enough in educational decisions—that’s pretty different when you talk to students at my school.”

Instead of taking four years of English classes, Maiga interned with a legal organization where she practiced the same reading and writing skills—perhaps with even more rigor—while gaining immersive, practical experience and class credit.

“People think internships are in addition to what you do in the classroom, like joining a sports team or an extracurricular, but they’re not,” she said. “In my internship, I did essentially the same things I did in a lot of my English classes, but it was more technical and advanced.”

Work-based learning let Maiga imagine a career on her own terms—and redefine what success meant along the way. Growing up, she’d always loved the humanities, but her family—who immigrated from West Africa when she was in fifth grade—valued more conventional, financially secure paths. “These roles didn’t fit the traditional idea my family had of a successful career.” 

That perspective began to shift during Maiga’s time at Purdue Polytechnic. Through hands-on learning and exposure to a variety of industries, she began to see that success had many definitions, opening her eyes to the range of possibilities after graduation. “It was really important because it showed me there are different career paths where you can have a lot of impact.”

The experience didn’t just change Maiga’s mindset — it also helped bridge a gap between her and her family. “That was the one thing standing between us,” she said. By seeing the kinds of professional paths Maiga could pursue, her parents began to understand that her interests in the humanities could lead to real, fulfilling work. “My experience at PPHS helped us get closer.”

Maiga’s story is a testament to what’s possible when schools give students room to explore, fail, and redefine success for themselves. For her, work-based learning wasn’t just an academic exercise—it was an invitation to connect her passions to real-world change. 

Today, Maiga continues to lead the charge at as the company evolves and grows while also supporting Mayor Hogsett as an intern. And, of course, she is beginning her next chapter at Cornell.

As she looks ahead at her future and future generations, Maiga hopes more students get the same chance to learn on their own terms. She believes that when young people are empowered to explore their passions, they not only transform their own lives but also shape the communities around them. For Maiga, the journey is only beginning—and she’s determined to make sure others can start theirs, too.

Disclosure: is a financial supporter of The 74.

Ingersoll, of course, was wrong. 

The car radically reshaped transportation and, ultimately, modern civilization, albeit with physical, psychological and societal costs. Cars make many things easier but also created traffic, pollution, risk of death from accidents, the suburbs and more. 

Today, thinking that artificial intelligence won’t play a significant role in education is like thinking the automobile wouldn’t change transportation. What we must do now is begin to anticipate the costs we might accrue. One such cost is that the adoption and use of AI could look vastly different in schools and communities with high-poverty rates than in those set in more affluent places. Imagine one town with modern roads, accessible driver’s ed and an array of vehicles. Imagine another town where cars drive on a muddy road, making a mess of street and sidewalk alike so that everyone’s day gets a little more difficult. This is the “smart use divide.” 

The work to improve education outcomes for all American children is most often the work to improve education outcomes for those with the fewest opportunities and resources. If AI can in fact live up to its promise to supercharge education and maximize efficiency in operations, it’s reasonable to believe this will first, or even mostly, happen in the schools and communities that have the opportunities and resources to use AI in smart ways.

It’s not the same as asking whether schools in low-income communities are using AI. Right now those schools are likely using some form of educational technology, some teachers may be using ChatGPT or other tools to create lesson plans, and students are absolutely using AI to cheat (because all students, at all income levels, are doing this). 

The Smart Use Divide is especially problematic because it grows in both directions. Poor AI use will lead to less learning for the students we might worry most about — negative student use of AI such as cheating may become more pronounced or go more unchecked, and positive student uses of AI such as high-quality tutors or other personalized learning approaches are less likely to be correctly applied.

When it comes to educators, it is well established that the least-experienced teachers are more likely to end up at the most challenging schools. Those teachers are likely to have less experience or ability to incorporate AI in effective ways. High-poverty districts are also providing on AI. Only 39% of high-poverty districts reported providing teacher training on AI in the fall of 2024, compared to 67% of other districts. 

If this sounds harsh, it’s only because this is the lesson we have learned through previous rounds of technological innovation. High-poverty schools were the last to have good internet connections, then the last to move from broadband to wireless connectivity. In 2024, found that high-poverty schools are significantly more likely not to vet any of their ed tech products and their students are most likely to have “unsafe apps with digital ads…and behavioral ads.” 

Teachers in high-poverty schools already say that ed tech tools are for “supporting practices related to learning new content, and practicing and assessing new skills.” But their counterparts in more affluent schools say these tools are effective for “supporting student collaboration and research.” In other words, affluent students are using tools to augment learning while lower-income peers are using tools to learn the material in the first place. 

Students’ belief in their own abilities also reinforces and furthers this divide. Students with “are more inclined to rely on AI” while students with more confidence in their academic abilities “were more selective in AI reliance.” We should expect this pattern to repeat with AI-fueled technology. Sadly, relying on AI for learning may well result in less learning happening at all. 

Can we minimize the smart use divide? Here are three ideas that can be implemented now. First, all schools should draw a hard line at the use of generative AI in student schoolwork. At the high school level in particular, this may mean more in-class writing, or using for written exams as a number of colleges have done. The advent of new technology is not a sufficient excuse to allow students to abstain from acts of learning, including writing. 

Second, schools should support effective teacher use of AI. Teachers who use AI tools at least weekly are already saving almost six weeks of work time over the course of the year. But more than one-quarter of teachers are only using AI tools once a month or less. Teachers need training and support to discover the time-saving and quality-enhancing benefits of new AI tools, while ensuring that the very human act of providing feedback and delivering great lessons remain human endeavors. 

Finally, even as automobiles were becoming increasingly prevalent, a solid wagon could still transport a farmer and his goods to market. America knows how to effectively educate students with rigorous, engaging coursework. We’ve done so for centuries. Excellent education has never been equitably distributed, however. 

State, district, and school leaders should pay attention to and engage with AI, but primarily focus on student outcomes. Look to high-poverty districts that are showing significant academic growth, like Somerset ISD near San Antonio, Texas. In spring 2025, 68% of Somerset students scored on or above grade level on the , compared to 47% of all Texas students. Find a school or district with similar demographics to yours that is outperforming you, and figure out what’s working for them. Maybe it’s about smart AI use — or maybe it’s a laser focus on instruction or an ongoing commitment to tutoring. At the same time, don’t abandon what works for the seductive appeal of emerging technology. 

Underlying the excitement about AI hovers a quiet implication that these are tools the education sector has been waiting for, that only with these tools will student learning finally reach long-desired heights. But nobody needs AI to make schools work. Indeed, if a school is failing without any AI tools, there’s no evidence to suggest the adoption of those tools will address the reasons causing the school to fail.

The smart use divide will grow if schools allow for poor AI practices to take hold and if schools allow for the thrill of new AI tools to distract from the core work of teaching and learning. Nobody wants to be the last one holding the buggy reins while everyone zooms along at 60 miles-per-hour, but neither will building stoplights without first paving the road get you to your destination any faster. 

But theory is not always reality. In the case of teachers, research the best way to get better is to actually practice teaching, especially with and mentors, not to sit in a classroom to earn an advanced degree. 

Unfortunately, a flawed theory of teacher development has been baked into a range of state- and district-level policies that encourage or even require teachers to get ever-higher levels of external training. And, instead of working to better understand how to help teachers improve on the job, policymakers continue to rely on credentials to do that work. 

That starts with state control of who gets into the profession, with some states demanding that teachers earn master’s degrees to get or stay in. In California, for example, educators can’t remain in the classroom beyond an initial five-year grace period unless they earn a master’s or become certified. 

Once prospective teachers are licensed by their respective states, most districts use educators’ academic credentials to decide how much money they will earn. Salary schedules typically offer higher pay to teachers with more academic credits, on the theory that extra training should make educators better. 

And, to help teachers pay for all those additional courses, many states, districts and even the federal government have stepped in. 

 As a result, more teachers have master’s degrees than ever before, even though the profession today has than it did in the 1980s and 1990s. As of 2020-21, of all public school teachers had a master’s degree or higher. That makes teachers overall than biochemists, zoologists, mathematicians and statisticians. 

But suggests that relying so heavily on teacher credentialing is misguided. Other than a few potential in high school math and science, teachers with master’s degrees are no better than those without them. A from the Institute of Education Sciences found there was “no statistically significant relationship between student test scores and the content of the teacher’s training, including the number of required hours of math pedagogy, reading/language arts pedagogy or fieldwork.” 

But teachers with a master’s are no worse, in general, than those without, either. So what’s the harm in pushing teachers to pursue more and more higher education credits? 

The most damage is done to teachers themselves. Despite all the government subsidies, the Learning Policy Institute found that 60% of teachers have to to pay for those advanced degrees. Among those who took out loans and completed a master’s in 2020, the average balance owed was $38,230.

In other words, teachers are taking out large loans to earn academic credentials that won’t help them do their jobs better. That’s not a good trade. 

The individual harm to prospective teachers should be enough for policymakers to pay attention. But paying for credentials also costs a lot of money, and those precious resources could be put to better use. According to from the National Council on Teacher Quality, 15 states require districts to offer additional pay for master’s degrees. Those states — Alabama, Delaware, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Ohio, Oklahoma and West Virginia — tend to be concentrated in the Bible Belt or upper Midwest. 

But the practice is widespread. NCTQ found that 135 of 148 large districts offered higher pay for master’s degrees. The average premium in 2025 for beginning teachers with a master’s was $3,581 a year. For teachers with 25 years of experience, it ran to $9,315. This adds up to millions of dollars that districts are investing to reward teachers with higher degrees. 

Seattle, for example, pays beginning teachers with a master’s degree almost $13,000 more than those with just a bachelor’s. In Miami, teachers with 10 years of experience make $20,446 more if they have a master’s degree. In Montgomery County, Maryland, a teacher with 25 years of experience makes almost $40,000 more with a master’s. 

As these examples suggest, master’s degrees do pay off handsomely for some individuals. But that’s not the norm for most teachers. Last year, an analysis for the found that master’s degrees in education have low to negative returns on investment, in contrast to master’s degrees in science, engineering and nursing, which offered much greater returns. 

There are better alternatives. States have been ramping up that don’t require much of a front-end investment on the parts of teacher candidates. And a Texas program shows that states can pay teachers more without making the higher salary contingent on a master’s degree. Team-based staffing models demonstrate how schools can reward effectiveness rather than resumes.

But in most parts of the country, state and district policies continue to rely on teacher credentials. That harms educators, who take on debt and never earn much of a return on their investment. And it’s a poor use of taxpayer resources, which go toward a credentialing system that ultimately doesn’t help teachers get better at working with students. 

Our conclusion: Targeting bonuses to educators in high-needs areas — beyond the additional pay for seniority and advanced degrees that most teachers enjoy — would help equalize access to high-quality educators, rectify per-pupil spending inequities between schools with high proportions of low-income students and their more advantaged peers, alleviate shortages in specialty areas such as STEM and special education, and reduce teacher turnover at high-poverty schools.

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Yet despite the and , bonus pay for teachers in specializations like STEM, special education and bilingual education, and for those working in high-poverty schools, is still shockingly uncommon. on 148 collective bargaining agreements in large districts shows that fewer than 1 in 6 (15%) offered any differentiated pay for teachers working in schools with large proportions of low-income students. Even where extra pay for other shortage areas (e.g., special education) ostensibly exists, the financial incentives are usually nominal and often require activation by school boards or other entities through processes that lack transparency and accountability to parents and taxpayers, which, in turn, renders them ineffective.

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So why isn’t more being done to build a better system that provides equal access to high-quality teachers and fairer per-pupil spending?

Unions are the most formidable barrier to bonus pay in high-need schools and specializations. In a 2022 piece for The New York Times, Thomas Toch of Future Ed : “For their part, teachers unions, influential voices on state and local staffing policy, tend to back expensive strategies that benefit every teacher rather than concentrate resources where there’s clear need. An American Federation of Teachers shortage task force in July recommended higher across-the-board pay, smaller classes and a reduction in the use of student achievement to measure school and teacher performance.”

Similarly, researchers at the Brookings Institution in 2017: “Both state policies and teachers unions have blocked differentiating teacher compensation for things like teaching in high-demand subjects or in high-need school settings, but this type of price discrimination would be an expedient way to address many of the persistent teacher vacancies districts increasingly face.”

Union leaders often opine that any from standard salary schedules and that bonus pay could be divisive among the teachers who receive it and those who do not. 

We don’t see anything necessarily nefarious or malicious in this stance. It may have some grounding in practical realities and could be an easy way to please most members without ruffling too many feathers. However, the stance of union leaders seems at odds with that of their rank-and-file teachers, 92% of whom, in a 2023 survey by E4E, said they for working in hard-to-staff schools. The popularity of this idea was sustained in , when teachers selected “Opportunities for higher pay for working in a hard-to-staff school or subject area” as one of the strategies most likely to attract talented and diverse candidates to the teaching profession — and teachers of color chose it as the No. 1 strategy.

That opposition also reveals a fascinating contrast with standard practices in nursing — a profession for which, like education, the American Federation of Teachers provides widespread representation in collective bargaining.

Though nursing shares similar demographics and educational requirements with teaching, the union’s approach to compensation in these two professions is worlds apart. Our of six matched AFT teacher and nursing contracts in Manchester, Connecticut; Cincinnati Ohio, and New Brunswick, New Jersey, shows that while bonus pay is rare, restricted and meager in teaching, it is widespread, accessible and far more generous in nursing.

When it came to hard-to-fill roles in nursing — such as weekend and overnight shifts —  the we examined provided substantial supplemental pay to attract nurses to these less popular time slots. Nurses in Manchester, for example, receive a shift premium of $5.25 per hour (18% above base rate) for evening shifts and $7 per hour (24% above base rate) for working nights and weekends.

In contrast, the teacher agreements we studied had no incentives whatsoever for teaching in high-poverty schools. Some were there, in theory, but upon closer inspection, they were reduced to zero in practice by the failure to actually implement them.

For example, while the Cincinnati Federation of Teachers contract gives the superintendent authority to declare shortage-based needs, the funding is restricted behind multiple layers of bureaucratic processes. When contacted, Cincinnati Public Schools officials informed us that the superintendent hasn’t authorized this policy since at least 2022.

The situation was somewhat better for teachers in specializations in which there are shortages, such as special education, bilingual education and STEM. However, where teachers might, if they are lucky, get a maximum differential of 5% of their base salary for one of these positions, nurses’ contracts commonly include bonuses of 15% or more for hard-to-staff assignments. Research shows that bonuses 7.5% above base salary are the to influence choice of assignments, with increasing efficacy above that level.

We don’t consider our study to be the final word. We examined only six contracts in three geographic areas. And in both professions, there are ways to provide bonus pay outside collective bargaining agreements.

Districts could offer differentiated pay as annual bonuses outside of contracts (though negotiation through a memorandum of understanding or the like might still be required) or by giving school leaders, such as principals, autonomy over hiring (instead of assignments based on bumping and seniority) and weighting funding based on student needs rather than teacher seniority in order for school administrators to set salaries and staffing assignments according to their school’s specific needs.

At the state level, funding could be offered to districts or schools through grants tailored to address shortages in high-poverty and rural schools and specializations, such as Illinois’ Teacher Vacancy Grant Pilot Program and Texas’ Teacher Incentive Allotment. 

More research is clearly needed.

Nonetheless, we think our findings weaken the argument that bonus pay is somehow inherently anti-union or unmanageably divisive. This is also a situation where we feel that the adults need to give a little to do what’s best for children, especially students in the highest-need classrooms that continue to suffer from shortages of experienced and qualified teachers that diminish young people’s opportunities. It is time to pay added bonuses to get the best teachers where children need them most.

Since last year, more districts have been publicly sharing information about their AI strategies, and these are increasingly sophisticated and varied. While only a few are using AI to fully rethink instruction or tackle longstanding challenges, the total number of districts in our database of early adopters has nearly doubled in a year, from 40 to 79, with the most growth happening in urban areas. Below are initial findings from the 2025-26 early adopter cohort.

More early adopters, including more urban districts, are piloting systemwide AI strategies

The number of districts offering teacher professional development is up to 86% this year from 63% last year. More districts are providing guidance about AI use (78% this year versus 65% last year), and more are giving AI-powered apps and tools to educators (77% this year versus 70% last year) and to students (63% versus 58%).

Several large, urban districts are shifting from isolated, piecemeal implementation to more transparent, complex and strategic approaches that go beyond tool testing or teacher literacy. 

For example, Denver Public Schools recently published a that includes a continuous-learning framework and guidance. The district’s vision moves beyond  simply providing instructions on using popular apps to highlighting AI’s potential to improve data-driven decision-making, real-time coaching and personalized learning. It also outlines ways AI can aid students with disabilities and multilingual learners. The district about AI preferences and usage to develop its handbook. 

Charlotte-Meckenberg Schools in North Carolina, which released its and in spring 2025, takes a different approach. The district will provide training on and access only to specific, targeted AI tools it approves and continue a districtwide ban on others, including ChatGPT. It has designated 30 “AI Champion Schools” to explore the technology and share what they have learned. 

Early adopters are also focusing more on students

As AI literacy efforts for teachers increase, more districts (63%) are also prioritizing student-centered resources and tools. 

Several are using tools created by, or customized for, their students. For example, at , students developed an AI assistant-powered platform in their Java Programming I course to answer questions on topics ranging from homework to current events. The skills students strengthened while working on this project, like collaboration and problem solving, are among those outlined in the district’s . Students also helped design a . 

While more districts are bringing AI to students, only a few are sharing information about shifts in learning standards, which helps build community buy-in and trust. is an exception, announcing it would implement a new curriculum on how to use artificial intelligence, with age-appropriate lessons required by the school board. The district also said it would offer electives on AI for seventh and eighth graders.

A very small number of districts are systematically engaging students in building AI strategy. One example is in California, which asked high schoolers to help shape policies. Selected teens serve as tech interns who facilitate dialogue among students, teachers and school leaders about AI and developed a chatbot that contributes to draft artificial intelligence policies for the district. 

Reimaginers continue to push the edge of what’s possible

Last year, we identified a small cohort of , districts that include AI strategies in broader plans for change. Even a year later, only a few districts qualify as reimaginers, but their progress is promising. They are diving deeper in 2025-26, piloting AI to transform schools or student learning. 

In fall 2025, ASU Prep opened a in collaboration with the . It uses a mastery-focused, project-based learning model that blends personalized learning with seminars modeled on the Socratic method, where teachers engage students in dialogue and encourage them to develop and defend a point of view. 

Bullitt County Public Schools is piloting a suite of custom-made, AI-enabled coaching tools to help teachers and school staff transition to competency-based learning. Developed in partnership with and built with , some provide 1:1 coaching for teachers, instructional coaches, school leaders and central office teams. Others help educators and leaders design learning experiences and reflect on whether their instructional practices and other initiatives are helping students. 

Districts must advance coherent AI strategies for teaching and learning

While it’s encouraging to see more districts embracing AI, adoption remains fragmented, and district leaders and teachers are still overwhelmed. Early adopters must keep their focus on systemic transformation, not isolated innovation. 

Strategies to do this include:

• running more short pilots, analyzing the results immediately and adopting what works, to keep up with emerging tools and technology shifts;
  
• testing ways to use AI to streamline administrative or operational tasks;
  
• aligning AI solutions to a broader vision of teaching and learning;
  
• committing to helping district leaders, educators and students understand the risks and potential benefits of using AI;
  
• including students in designing strategy and solutions. 

The emerging data on early adopters signals that more districts and schools are willing to embrace AI’s potential to transform education. At the same time, students have yet to recover from , reminding education leaders what is at stake. Without a coherent vision or systemic strategy for learning, districts risk adopting AI in fragmented ways that widen student achievement gaps and yield short-term gains rather than genuine transformation.

This low vote of confidence on current accountability systems comes at a time when schools and districts face profound challenges. Artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping the world of and . Basic literacy and math skills have been sliding for more than a decade. Families increasingly with the needs and aspirations of their children. Reimagining school to meet these demands means reimagining the systems of assessment and accountability that surround them.

For the first time in decades state and federal leaders are showing unprecedented openness to rethinking assessment and accountability. This shift offers both promise and peril, especially for new models of learning: Choosing systems with outdated metrics can smother innovation before it takes root, while too little accountability can leave students without clear standards or comparability across schools. 

the answer is to double down — strengthen accountability and demand more tests. Others increasingly question whether holding schools accountable for test scores makes sense at all.  But the Canopy survey reveals that school leaders want neither extreme. Only 10% of Canopy leaders favored eliminating accountability altogether, but just 5% supported maintaining the status quo. 

Leaders are eager for reform, the Canopy survey revealed. But they also warn that one of the most popular reforms under discussion—through-year testing—may be moving in exactly the wrong direction.

Among these leaders’ critiques of existing systems is a familiar charge — that they rarely provide useful data for improvement. Fewer than one in three leaders said accountability data helps them adjust instruction in meaningful ways. Even fewer found it useful for supporting English learners or students with disabilities. In practice, the data often arrives too late, reflects too narrow a slice of student learning or simply confirms what educators already know from their own local measures.

To address these shortcomings, many states are betting on . Instead of a single end-of-year exam, these states administer multiple shorter assessments throughout the year, with the goal of producing timelier and more actionable data. Montana has rolled out a ; Texas passed legislation this fall to replace its annual testing with assessments ;  Missouri recently secured to pilot one under the Innovative Assessment Demonstration Authority; and several other states have either adopted similar plans or are in the process of considering them.

Yet Canopy leaders surveyed are skeptical. When asked to rank possible reforms, they overwhelmingly preferred less testing, not more — by nearly three to one. Their reasons are straightforward. While students may only be tested for several hours, the work required from adults for paperwork, preparation, and proctoring can be overwhelming. Several leaders also stressed that reducing state testing would free up space for richer, performance-based assessments — like public exhibitions, debates, or mock trials — that give students authentic opportunities to demonstrate mastery and teachers find much more instructionally useful.

The case for through-year testing rests on shaky assumptions: that state assessments are inherently more trustworthy than other measures, that they provide unique value beyond what teachers already collect, and that the logistical headaches are worth the benefits. The Canopy Project survey and interviews suggest otherwise. For many Canopy school leaders, through-year testing feels like a well-meaning but misguided boss who requires you to submit a new weekly report “to make your job easier.” Adding new state-mandated tests risks increasing the administrative burden on schools to generate additional data that educators do not want and will not use.

Despite their critiques, school leaders aren’t calling for accountability to disappear. On the contrary, only 10% of Canopy leaders favored eliminating accountability altogether. But even fewer support maintaining the status quo. They voiced strong support for systems that uphold equity and transparency while evolving in three key ways:

First, states should focus on right-sizing the assessment footprint. Don’t ditch testing, but be realistic that no single test can effectively serve multiple purposes. State-mandated tests should be designed to be useful for policymakers, researchers, and other state-level actors, not individual schools or teachers. Accordingly, states should explore that provide necessary information for state actors while minimizing the administrative burden on schools.

Second, states should differentiate accountability requirements — without lowering standards — for different kinds of schools. Leaders of specialized schools told us that accountability systems ignored progress on indicators that are core to their missions, like providing industry-accepted credentials or reengaging students after extended absences from formal schooling. In Washington, D.C., the Public Charter School Board has launched a new accountability framework that provides room for “school-specific indicators,” mutually agreed upon by schools and the authorizer; states could consider a similar approach.

Finally, states have the opportunity to incorporate a broader set of measures into accountability systems, such as those related to learning opportunities and student engagement. States like Illinois already in their accountability systems, and Canopy leaders are interested in scaling up their use while exploring ways to .

Accountability systems need reform, but simply doubling down on existing models by layering on through-year tests is not the answer. Instead, new learning models require new forms of accountability so that today’s guardrails don’t become tomorrow’s handcuffs.

This question has been at the heart of education policy debates for decades. Federal law requires states to not only look at a school’s overall results, but to make sure that no group of students is “left behind.” This policy is grounded in a long history of schools giving Black students, Hispanic students and children with disabilities an education that was inferior to that offered to white and non-disabled peers.

But subdividing students in this way hasn’t proven as transformative as federal policymakers might have wished. Over the last decade, for example, scores have been declining overall, but especially for low-performing students. Those trends cross all racial and ethnic groups and apply to differences across income levels, for students with and without disabilities, and for native and non-native English speakers. 

Unfortunately, publicly available data are not well suited to looking specifically at the performance of lower-performing students within schools, so I asked a related one: Are there schools that are doing an excellent job with one group of students while neglecting others? 

To unpack this question, I turned to data from the state of Louisiana. Not only have students there done quite well in recent years, Louisiana is also one of the few states that calculates A-F grades both for overall schools and for individual student groups within those schools.

I started by looking at family income. Could a Louisiana school could somehow earn a high overall rating if its low-income students were not doing well?

The answer is no.

Of course, a perfect apples-to-apples comparison would compare economically disadvantaged students with wealthier peers, not the overall student body. That wasn’t possible with the publicly available Louisiana data.

Next, I looked at gaps between Black and white kids. The story wasn’t quite as clear as the one around income, but there was only one school that got an F for Black students and an A for white students, and just six schools earned a D for Black students and an A for white students.

Sadly, there were no schools where low-income students earned a higher grade than their more affluent classmates, and only five schools where the Black student group earned a higher grade than their white peers. Statewide, Black students performed worse than white students and low-income students performed worse than wealthier students. But those aggregate totals may suggest different problems than individual schools ignoring some of their students.

Now, this is just one state and one year’s worth of data, but from the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research came to similar conclusions. It looked at whether districts contributed to academic mobility — essentially, did students in some districts improve faster than their peers in other districts. After looking at data for nearly 3 million students across seven states, the authors concluded that, “low-performing students experience the largest performance gains when attending districts where students generally excel.”

The lesson for state policymakers is not that they should just trust these generalities and stop collecting disaggregated data. That would be a mistake, since they would never know if within-school gaps did emerge.

Moreover, carefully constructed rules could flag the small subset of schools that do have gaps. For instance, a Louisiana school cannot receive an A grade overall if one of its subgroups is low-performing for two consecutive years. (That caught one school last year with a low-performing English learner subgroup.) Virginia passed an even stronger last year requiring that any school with a low-performing subgroup automatically will have its overall rating downgraded by one level. These are useful back-end checks.

More directly, a handful of states, including Louisiana, Florida and Mississippi, each have accountability systems that give schools points based on the academic growth of their lowest-performing students. Given the national trends where performance has fallen further among these children, more states should consider such measures.

While policymakers can take some heart in knowing that good schools tend to be consistently good across student groups, the flip side is also true: Bad schools tend to be bad for everyone, and state policymakers should focus more on district-level performance issues than within-school gaps.

Ultimately, for school leaders, the priority should be providing a consistently solid education.

Disclosure: Chad Aldeman worked as a consultant for the Virginia Department of Education on the accountability regulations mentioned in the piece. 

But I don’t want a hotel that excels in only one area. I want every hotel I stay at to have clean sheets and towels, hot water and a quiet environment.

What about schools? Are they more like restaurants or hotels? At the high school level, they might be more like restaurants in that they can offer varieties of experiences that allow students to start to develop specialties. But elementary schools should probably be more like hotels and provide consistently strong services — and outcomes — for all kids.

When it comes to the basics of reading and math, how much within-school specialization is there at the elementary levels? That is, are there schools and districts that do a great job of teaching kids to read but maybe aren’t so good at teaching math?

To find out, I started by looking back at our projects last year identifying districts that did an exceptional job of teaching kids to read by third grade and be proficient in math by eighth grade. Among those positive outliers, I found 140 districts that appeared on both of our lists. That is, these districts were producing outstanding results across subjects and grade levels.

In contrast, we identified 14 districts that were exceptional in one subject but significantly underperformed expectations in the other. Among those, 12 of the 14 were strong in math but weak in reading.

To look at school-level results, I pulled up the 2025 test scores in the state of . Mississippi has some of the best schools in the country, so I figured it would be a good test to see whether they specialized or were consistently strong.

First, I looked to see whether reading scores were correlated with performance in math and science. A correlation of 1.0 would mean the two trends were moving in perfect lockstep, while a correlation of 0.0 would suggest that the two variables were not associated with each other at all. As you can see in the table below, there were very strong correlations across academic subject areas. For example, the correlation across school-level reading and math scores was 0.87, which suggests a very strong relationship. 

These results suggest that schools with high test scores in one content area are very likely to also have high test scores in another subject. (And the opposite.) But that doesn’t necessarily reflect how much the school contributes to a student’s scores. It could just be that the school happens to enroll higher- or lower-performing kids.

So, next, I looked at growth rates. In Mississippi, the state using a model called a value table. Essentially, the state created eight performance levels, and schools receive points if they help students advance to higher tiers from one year to the next.

Do schools with high student growth rates tend to see improvement across multiple subject areas? The answer in Mississippi is yes. In the graph below, each dot represents a school that is graphed according to its reading and math growth rates. The closer the dot is to the diagonal line, the closer the relationship between the school’s growth rates in reading and in math.

Although there are a few outliers on both sides, a “good school” tends to be good across subject areas. That is, there are no schools at either the bottom right or top left corners of the graph, where they would be if they were extremely strong in one subject but not the other. For example, among the 50 Mississippi elementary and middle schools that made the greatest gains in reading last year, none of them were below the statewide average in math growth. 

The opposite was also true: Among the 50 schools with the lowest reading score gains, only two reached the statewide average in math.

Florida operates a similar as Mississippi. When I ran their numbers in the same way, I found similar correlations across subject areas.

Both Mississippi and Florida showed strong relationships between a school’s proficiency and student growth scores. However, that could be a function of the specific way those states have chosen to measure student growth, and it’s not always the case that a school with high proficiency scores will also have high growth. In fact, because proficiency rates are highly correlated with socioeconomic status, prefer growth measures that attempt to truly isolate a school’s impact on student learning.

While questions about how best to measure school performance can be thorny and technical, it does seem to be the case that schools that are strong in one subject tend to be strong in others as well. In an increasingly specialized world,  it’s fortunately rare to find a school that’s doing a great job in one subject area and letting kids down in the other.

Too often, high schools separate so-called academic students from those perceived unlikely to attend college, a process commonly known as tracking. Two high schools in Cranston, Rhode Island are showing that career and technical education programs can prepare students for both college and the workforce.

In fact, seniors who completed CTE paths in the past school year included those with the highest academic rankings at both Cranston High School West and Cranston High School East. Across Rhode Island, students who have completed at least two CTE-specific courses perform higher on national assessments and have a higher four-year graduation rate than other students.

“There used to be a division between postsecondary education and vocational education. At Cranston, we’ve been able to make these two things the same thing,” said Zachary Farrell, executive director of secondary programs for Cranston Public School District. 

High school students in Rhode Island’s second largest district can choose among coursework in Medical Pathways, Pre-Engineering/Robotics, Information Technology, Culinary Arts, Computer Science, Criminal Justice and more. Those who complete a CTE track graduate with real-world work experience and either industry credentials, college credits or both, in paths that the state has approved as aligned to a high-wage, high-demand career. Students do this alongside their existing general education coursework, so they can take AP classes or participate in extracurriculars with the rest of their classmates.

When Santomassimo, the valedictorian, entered the Medical Pathways program her freshman year of high school, she thought she wanted to do direct patient care. But the program’s work-based learning, including a placement at a nursing home, helped to change her mind: “I realized direct patient medicine isn’t for me because I don’t like blood…[Then] [s]chool helped me get set up with an internship at an engineering site…[so I’m] back on the science and research end, not direct patient care.” 

Santomassimo credits Medical Pathways with helping her carve out a specific vision for her future. “I really want to do research…to help inform public policy,” she said. At Brown, she plans to double major in physics and political science.

Students who complete that pathway, which is available at both high schools, leave with healthcare workplace safety training and a CPR and First Aid certification. They have the option of completing a certified nursing assistant or emergency medical technician certification. Even though she isn’t planning to become a healthcare practitioner, Santomassimo has no regrets about the hands-on classes she took. She completed 40 patient hours as a certified nursing assistant (CNA) in training and successfully passed her licensing test this summer after graduation: “It’s a really good certification to have and will never not be a needed job. I will have that certification as a backup if I ever need it.”

Cranston Superintendent Jeannine Nota-Masse has seen the benefits of exposing students to passions and careers: “At both our high schools, we have an educator training program. You’d be surprised at how many students [say] ‘I love little kids, little kids are so funny,’ and then go into it and don’t love it. They have that hands-on experience before their parents pay for college and they realize ‘Oh I really don’t want to be a teacher.’”

Graduating high school with college credits in hand is another way that the CTE tracks across Cranston help save students time and money. Mark Lizarda, part of East’s second-ever Medical Pathways cohort, graduated with college credits from three different institutions under his belt, not to mention a high score on the AP Calculus test, which converts into college credit.

In 2024, Lizarda won first place in the Medical Terminology exam at the SkillsUSA championship, a national CTE organization for students, and is attending University of Rhode Island this fall. “Those three years [were the] hardest classes I’ve ever taken, but that’s the reason I stayed. It was so captivating and rigorous. I wanted to prepare myself for college.”

The programs also benefit CTE participants who choose to go directly to the workforce. For example, culinary students graduate with food handling and food safety certifications, Information Technology students graduate with CompTIA certifications and all CTE programs include a financial literacy class. “If your child wants to get a job after high school and they have no skills whatsoever, it’s going to be difficult,” Nota-Masse said. “But if they even have entry-level skills, they are still more competitive in the job market than their peers who don’t.” 

Farrell sees the inherent value in a program that connects to student interests. “Forget credentials,” he said. “If students really enjoy the program that they’re in and are learning and having fun and it’s part of their identity, I think you can’t really put a price tag on that.” 

The aquaculture path at West, the only one of its kind in the state, is a model for making learning fun and practical. Rhode Island is known as the Ocean State, and its over 400 miles of coastline are crucial to the economy. Launched by longtime science educator Leonard Baker in 2000, the aquaculture path prepares students for careers in the state’s fish hatcheries and shellfish farms or for further study in the biological sciences. 

With access to an on-campus aquarium, laboratory, pond and greenhouse, students learn about water chemistry, aquatic plant science and how to breed fish. Baker sets every student up with their own aquarium to practice keeping plants and animals alive: “They say ‘I can’t stand chemistry,’ but they’re measuring water temperature and pH balance…They say ‘I can’t stand insects,’ but they’re feeding frogs. We’re making science meaningful, relevant and important to students.”

Every single senior who has completed Baker’s program has been accepted to a four-year institution. On top of that, many of the people running the state’s fisheries are graduates of his program, and one even started a fishery in another state. Some go on to careers in nursing or other healthcare professions because they’ve had exposure to complex refrigeration and filtration systems and extensive practice working in teams.

Stephen Osborn, who leads statewide opportunities for students at the Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE), credits the program for getting young people excited and ready for their future: “They can“get a job after graduation if they want, but [the program is] also preparing many of them to go onto college. Kids are doing incredibly complex things in their classrooms and they don’t realize it because they’re having fun.”

A between RIDE and, launched in 2018, helped unlock changes that enabled Cranston to give students more options. Cranston high schoolers previously had rotating daily schedules, like most high schools, but switched to a college-style schedule where students only take four classes a semester and are in them for almost 90 minutes instead of 50. This way, students get longer blocks of time for hands-on and work-based learning.

“It took a lot of professional development and a lot of community communication,” said Nota-Masse, reflecting on the process. “People kept saying ‘kids won’t be able to sit in a class for 84 minutes, they’ll go crazy.’ We’re not saying we do that perfectly, but if you’re in construction and you’re working on a project, 84 [minutes] is certainly better than 50 [minutes] to start and clean up.” These technical changes allowed Cranston to expand CTE programs, while keeping room in the schedule for AP courses, electives, special education services or services for English language learners. 

Cranston Public School District is a powerful leader in the state, but it’s not alone. is the new statewide initiative, with the goal that all of Rhode Island’s kids take at least one CTE course before they graduate. Coursework that’s rigorous and relevant is helping to unlock students’ freedom of choice. Says Osborn: “We don’t tell [students] whether to go to college or work. They have the skills and an open door to choose what they want to do after high school.”

Disclosure: is a financial supporter of The 74.

Having spoken with teachers, parents and students about the rippling effects of Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids, arrests, detentions and removals, we know that educators — second only to the immigrant families themselves — will bear the brunt. Teachers need to be ready.

Our two decades of research into the effects of immigration enforcement on those living far from the U.S.-Mexico border — in states such as Michigan, Ohio, Tennessee, Nebraska, New Jersey and New York — shows that educators are likely to encounter a number of challenges in the classroom. Family disruptions can profoundly affect   and students’ , and developmental well-being. Some young people become withdrawn, anxious, or depressed, while others exhibit aggressive, hyperactive or disruptive behaviors in school. Additionally, students may have to take on new responsibilities, assisting family members in interacting with lawyers, locating relatives and coping with the aftermath of enforcement actions.

Fear of arrest may stop students from showing up at school altogether. For example, after a large worksite raid in Bean Station, Tennessee, one county reported 530 absences, when on a typical day there are . When seven poultry plants were raided across Mississippi in 2019 on the second day of school, of Hispanic students in one district were absent. Fears of ICE cause students and families to isolate themselves, impactingl and,,.

Children and teens may be uncomfortable talking about immigration. For some, this is because it is a source of trauma in their families. Others view the word “immigrant” negatively, given sentiments in the news. Teasing and bullying may draw on harmful stereotypes about immigrants, with .

Educators occupy a unique position on the front lines. Teachers counsel students whose parents have been removed. Principals face the logistical demands of empty homes and hungry students. Educators at all levels must address achievement gaps among students worried about enforcement.

However, educators are also poised to connect students to vital resources and services. In New York, teachers and coaches were key to the of young adults whose parents were targeted by ICE. Adults connected students to important services, including counseling and mentoring programs; having an adult simply listen to young people’s stories helped them feel less alone or embarrassed about their circumstances, and more willing to seek assistance. In Tennessee, teachers and advocacy organizations developed a in the event students’ parents are taken in worksite raids. 

How can those working in K-12 schools prepare for this fall?

First, teachers can use triage methods to better direct students to services when they suspect they have experienced disruptions. Students suffer when enforcement actions strain households due to family separations and when they take on new responsibilities like housework, child care, interpreting or legal brokering. Teachers and counselors should look for changes in students’ housing, food insecurity or new roles in their families. They can connect students to school-based services to alleviate economic, health and social stressors related to these changes. 

Second, educators can address students’ fears by establishing networks with community organizations. In many places, rapid response teams are emerging to verify reports of ICE activity. Teachers and school administrators can connect to groups who may be able to patrol around schools, bus stops or after school programs to give students a sense of security and assuage their anxieties. 

Third, teachers can remind all students that migration is part of the human experience and underlies U.S. nation-building processes. Because some children and teens may feel uneasy about this topic,  teachers can plan lessons that highlight contributions of the foreign-born and their children. This not only offers role models for students who feel vulnerable, but also reminds others that migration — both past and present — is a shared part of American history.    

Finally, superintendents and principals must develop and communicate protocols in the event ICE agents show up at schools or in the neighborhoods in which their students live. They can institute guidelines that address the many logistical changes that may occur following arrests and detentions, such as how to handle bus drop-offs, ways to deliver meals to students who depend on the cafeteria for their food or policies for field trips that require crossing Border Patrol checkpoints. Guidelines like these can lessen the chaos and confusion in the immediate aftermath of detention.

This back-to-school season, educators will be the first line of defense for young people. They should be ready to take quick action to protect their students and help them navigate and connect with community resources that can ease the most harmful effects of ICE actions.

Between fall 2019 and fall 2023, public school enrollment fell from 50.8 million to 49.5 million, a loss of more than 1.2 million students, or 2.5%. The pandemic accelerated that decline, but enrollment was already falling in some grades and communities before COVID, and that trend is expected to continue: The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) projects overall enrollment will fall below 47 million by 2031.

Yet a FutureEd analysis based on data from NCES, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention and other sources, finds that enrollment trends vary widely by race, grade level, geography and schools. That variation offers important insight into how the education landscape is shifting, where the challenges are most acute and what it means for the future of the public school system.

When COVID struck and public schools switched to virtual learning, some families began educating their children at home; others opted for private schools, many of which resumed in-person learning sooner than public schools.

Though many families eventually returned, by fall 2022, an were homeschooled, compared with — and . Private school enrollment also grew, reaching roughly 7 million in 2021, an estimated over pre-pandemic levels. Newly expanded school choice policies are likely to accelerate that shift: Sixteen states offer or intend to offer public funding for private school tuition to any student in the state. While these programs haven’t yet triggered a , they are likely to reshape some family preferences and expand the supply of private alternatives.

Still, family choices aren’t the sole or even primary driver of the decline. The U.S. birthrate has fallen steadily for more than a decade and is now —at — the lowest in history. Between 2010 and 2020, the number of children under 5 nationwide, from 20.2 million to 18.4 million. That shrinking pipeline is now reaching classrooms.

Historically, immigration has helped offset declining birth rates, but to sustain enrollment. Recent immigration crackdowns could further reduce student numbers.

Domestic migration is also reshaping enrollment patterns. High housing costs and taxes are driving families from urban areas and high-cost states like California. As a result, some regions are experiencing much steeper enrollment losses than others, while others are growing. 

The sharpest declines are seen among the youngest students. Between fall 2019 and 2023, kindergarten enrollment fell by 215,000 students — nearly 6%. Elementary schools overall lost about 865,000 students (4%), while middle school enrollment (grades 6–8) declined by nearly 700,000 (6%). The largest drop, 7%, was seen in sixth grade. High school enrollment increased slightly, rising 2%, or roughly 345,000 students. 

The trends also vary by race and ethnicity. White students account for the largest share of the overall decline, a loss of nearly 2 million kids between fall 2019 and 2023 — an 8% drop. Black enrollment fell by about 250,000 students, or 3%. These decreases pre-dated the pandemic but accelerated afterward. As of fall 2023, white student enrollment is down 13% from its 2014 level.

Meanwhile, Hispanic and Asian enrollment — long drivers of public school growth — continued to grow, but more slowly. Public schools added roughly 540,000 Hispanic students between fall 2019 and 2023 (a 4% increase), and about 72,000 Asian students (3%). In the five years before the pandemic, both groups were growing at closer to 8% to 9%. These increases are no longer large enough to offset losses among white and Black students.

Enrollment declined in 41 states between fall 2019 and 2023, ranging from 0.3% in Louisiana to 6.5% in Hawaii. Thirteen states lost at least 5% of their students. California saw the largest decrease: 325,000 students (5%). In total, 29 states had fewer public school students in fall 2023 than they did in 2014 — and 23 states are projected to lose at least another 5% by 2030. West Virginia is expected to see the steepest proportional decline, at 18% (45,000 students), and California projected to lose the most students at 500,000 (8%).

At the same time, 10 states, mostly in the South and Midwest, with lower overall tax burdens, saw enrollment growth between fall 2019 and 2023.

Within states, urban districts, which had been growing before the pandemic, saw the steepest post-pandemic declines, losing some 675,000 students, or about 4%. Rural, suburban and town-based districts also lost students, though these decreases were more modest in comparison, around 1% to 2%.

In California, for example, urban districts accounted for much of the state’s overall decline, losing 180,000 students between fall 2019 and 2023. Los Angeles Unified School District lost the most students, 63,000 (13%), while Santa Ana Unified School District experienced a 17% decline (about 7,500).

Even within districts, the impact varies. In Los Angeles Unified, high-poverty schools lost an average of 15% of their enrollment, versus a 10% decline at schools with fewer low-income students. And nationwide, public charter school enrollment has grown from 2.7 million in fall 2014 to 3.4 million in fall 2019 and 3.7 million in fall 2022, the most recent .

So what are the consequences?

In most states, public school funding is directly tied to enrollment. When students leave, or never enroll, schools lose per-pupil state dollars, which typically account for around of their budgets. Federal COVID relief funds temporarily masked the strain, but with that money now expired, many schools are feeling the pressure. 

As budgets tighten, students often bear the consequences. Under-resourced schools may cut arts programs, electives and extracurriculars, or eliminate counselors, librarians and mental health professionals. With fewer students, schools also need fewer teachers, prompting layoffs that ripple through schools and local economies. And when enrollment drops sharply, course offerings inevitably shrink. Schools can’t sustain multiple Advanced Placement classes, foreign language courses or sports teams if buildings are only half full. 

Eventually, under-enrolled schools may be closed, which can disrupt students, displace staff and erode community life. Between 2019 and 2024, for example, West Virginia, where enrollment is down 12% from 2014, shut 53 of its more than 600 schools due to declining enrollment. In rural areas, closures can be particularly disruptive; shuttering a small town’s only school might mean the next nearest option is an hour’s bus ride away. In all cases, students must be reassigned, which brings its own challenges and added costs to the neighboring schools. And when a school closes, it’s not just students who are affected — teachers, janitors, cafeteria workers and other staff often lose their jobs, deepening the impact on the broader community.

Today’s enrollment declines don’t seem like a temporary disruption, and districts are going to have to deal with this new reality. That doesn’t always mean closing schools, but ignoring the inefficiencies of under-enrolled buildings isn’t sustainable. Georgetown University’s EdunomicsLab ways of keeping small schools open, such as sharing staff across buildings or leasing out unused space. 

There is no one-size-fits-all solution. But as enrollment patterns continue to change, school districts will need to respond by balancing fiscal responsibility with community needs, all while ensuring that fewer students doesn’t mean fewer opportunities.

Just for fun in 2023, compared with 37% 30 years earlier. Op-eds and analyses mourn that ; meanwhile, children ages 8 to 18 spend 7.5 hours per day, on average, on screens. If there’s one institution that can make teenagers read, it’s school. And if there’s one time of year when teens have ample time on their hands, it’s summer. Indeed, to read a 300-page book over nine weeks of summer vacation is to read five pages a day. So it would make sense for schools to ask students to read more books when class is out.

I looked at 32 high schools in Maryland, the District of Columbia and Virginia to understand the state of summer reading assignments in 2025. The results are disheartening.

Only 54% assign any summer reading for incoming ninth-graders. While 90% of private schools studied have such a requirement, only 38% of public schools do — and at three of those, the “summer reading assignment” doesn’t actually involve a book.

Maryland’s Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School asks incoming ninth-graders to read three New York Times articles and write a short paragraph about each. Catonsville High School in Baltimore County asks new high school students to read an article titled “.” The at Albert Einstein High School in Kensington, Maryland, requires completion of one of four tasks: watching a documentary, listening to a music album, or reading an article or a six-page short story. In Montgomery County, Maryland; Fairfax County, Virginia; and neighboring districts, splashy graphics on school websites tell students they should strongly consider reading a book over the summer — which won’t convince anyone who isn’t interested in reading to start or entice a student who is reading to tackle something new or challenging. 

Five schools actually ask students to read more than one book — all of them private schools. Holton-Arms, an all-girls school in Bethesda, leads the pack with a four-book requirement. A six-minute drive away, at public Whitman High School, students are told to read any book that is at least 150 pages and to take notes in the margins or on sticky notes. Whitman is in the same district as Einstein and Bethesda-Chevy Chase high schools, so it’s clear the central office plays no role in requiring student summer reading. The same is true in the District of Columbia Public Schools, which before COVID required students to read a book and complete a writing assignment over the summer — and posted an 80% compliance rate — but now has nothing.

Even when districts do attempt to set a reading bar, the results are uneven. 

For example, the Newark Board of Education declared that this summer, incoming ninth-graders in the district’s 18 high schools would be required to read S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders and complete three related activities. But on East Side High’s school website, the is to watch a TED talk and a movie. Central High prominently displays the assignment for The Outsiders, but most other Newark high schools don’t have anything listed on their websites at all about summer reading. 

Evidence from my survey suggests that public schools serving more affluent communities are more likely to mandate summer reading. Whitman is one of the most affluent neighborhood high schools in Montgomery County and the only one to require students to read a book. Similarly, Staples High School in Westport, Connecticut, where 2% of students are low-income, requires ninth-graders to read two books; Highland Park High School, outside Dallas (no low-income students), requires incoming ninth-graders to read Paulo Coehlo’s The Alchemist; and New Trier High School, just north of Chicago (3% low-income students), assigns specific books based on incoming students’ ninth-grade English placement. 

But affluence doesn’t guarantee a commitment to summer reading, either. Newton North High School, outside Boston, asks students to consider picking up a book, as does Harriton High School on Philly’s Main Line. Both districts have fewer than 18% low-income students. Georgetown Day School, the D.C. prep school where Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson sends her child, provides only a , as does New York City’s . 

The class that enters ninth grade this fall was in third grade when the pandemic hit. By the time these students began middle school, education was back to “normal,” and they’ve had years to be sold on the importance of academics, community and all that school has to offer. But a survey of middle schoolers in 2024 found that agree that “in school, people don’t give up when the work gets hard.” Less than half agree that “at my school, we use our thinking skills, rather than just memorizing things.” In their recent book “The Disengaged Teen,” authors Rebecca Winthrop and Jenny Anderson write that to address these sobering statistics, “what kids need now is to become better at learning.” adolescent language ability and brain development, among other benefits, suggesting that literacy itself might be a tool for helping young adults further develop their ability to learn. Demanding a few hours of reading over the course of the summer is a small but meaningful step that can only help.