Center on Reinventing Public Education

States and AI: An Early Look at How Early Adopters Are Approaching AI in Education

CRPE Admin — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 10:00:33 +0000

As AI use expands in schools, states are beginning to define their role—often without clear federal direction. What actions are they taking, and how are they approaching AI integration in K–12 education?

CRPE’s new State AI Early Adopter Database compiles publicly available information on AI-related actions across 20 early adopter states in 2024 and 2025, including guidance, legislation, professional learning initiatives, pilot programs, and partnerships.

This brief offers an initial, non-evaluative scan of the landscape, documenting how Early Adopter states are navigating AI amid uncertainty, limited capacity, and a rapidly evolving policy environment.

key findings

Across states, a consistent pattern emerges: cautious exploration over sweeping mandates.

Flexibility over directives. Most states are issuing non-binding guidance and updating it frequently—signaling priorities while preserving local control.
Professional learning comes first. Nearly all early adopter states are investing in AI literacy and educator capacity-building.
Pilots before scale. About half of the states are testing AI tools through pilots rather than mandating adoption.
Partnerships drive progress. States are leaning heavily on universities, nonprofits, and industry groups to expand expertise and implementation capacity.
Politics is not the main divider. Early AI strategies look similar across red, blue, and divided states.
The state role is still evolving. As AI adoption accelerates, states face growing pressure to clarify expectations, strengthen guardrails, and address infrastructure gaps.

As states move beyond early experimentation, they may consider:

Clarifying expectations for responsible AI use
Establishing procurement and data privacy guardrails
Investing in infrastructure and access to prevent widening gaps
Supporting evidence-building through pilots and shared evaluation frameworks
Securing sustained cross-sector capacity and funding

Read the full brief and explore the database to see how individual states are approaching AI—and what it may mean for the future of K–12 policy. CRPE is currently conducting surveys and interviews with state leaders in 2026 and will share deeper analyses later this year.

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Special Education Identification: What We Learned from the Unlocking Potential Data Sprint

CRPE Admin — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 11:00:42 +0000

Fifty years ago, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) promised to bridge the gap between what students with disabilities need and what the public education system was designed to provide. Today, that bridge is at risk of collapse as ever-larger shares of students are identified with disabilities, only to languish without access to the support they need.

While explanations of increasing rates of childhood disability abound, none help us understand perhaps the most confounding feature of today’s epidemic: trends around students identified as having a disability vary dramatically across states. We launched the Unlocking Potential Data Center in October 2025 to make those contours more visible than ever. Unlocking Potential is the nation’s first digital record documenting the share of students identified for special education since 1976 across all 50 states.

We then invited educators, researchers, and advocates to dig into the data, uncover new patterns, and propose ideas for a better system. Today, the winning contributors to the Data Sprint offer several preliminary explanations for those underlying trends.

Does money talk? Maybe, but not in the ways you might predict. In two separate entries, Krista Kaput from Bellwether Education and Sana Fatima from Afton Partners both wanted to understand whether states induce increased identification rates through their special education funding formulas. Their results suggest the relationship between money and identification rates is far from simple.

Using longitudinal data on special education revenue from the Census Bureau, Kaput shows that high-spending states do not reliably identify more students for special education compared to low-spending states.

Fatima explores this facet of special education finance further, constructing an index-based rating of state financial formulas based on whether they reward higher identification rates with more dollars. Like Kaput, she does not find evidence that financial incentives are responsible for increased identification rates overall. Her analysis, however, suggests that changes in those financial formulas–such as changes to “intensity tiers” that provide districts more money based on the number of services students receive–can result in increased identification rates compared to those in other states.

Does your child have a special education need? It may depend on how their regular classroom is staffed. Special education eligibility criteria are based in part on whether a child needs special education to succeed in school. But what if instead those needs were a feature of the regular classroom? Fatima found that states with lower pupil-to-teacher ratios (i.e., more staff for fewer students) consistently demonstrated lower rates of special education identification.

Response-to-intervention: Much ado about nothing? Response-to-intervention and its cousin, multi-tiered systems of support, were originally introduced to stem the growth of special education identification rates. The idea behind them was simple: if schools provide support for students outside of special education, fewer students will be found to have a disability. While a handful of studies have examined these programs’ effects in specific states, Zhiling Shea’s analysis provides the first national assessment. They find that RTI adoption reduced the share of students identified with a learning disability. But there’s a catch: more students were identified for special education overall. This pattern suggests an offsetting effect, whereby RTI implementation changes the disability categories that students are identified under, while doing little to reduce the share of students identified overall.

Is special education the nation’s de facto trauma response system? This provocative question provides a backdrop for Seth Saeugling’s exploration of the causes and consequences of increased identification rates in rural North Carolina. Saeugling invites us to consider the relationship between childhood trauma, disability, and special education. Drawing upon data collected by the Rural Opportunity Institute, his analysis points to how special education eligibility criteria can prevent resources and support from getting to children in need, regardless of whether they are found to have a disability.

Does special education provide equal opportunity for all? Parent voice is a defining feature of special education law: whether students are found eligible and what services they are provided depend entirely on negotiations with parents. While this design was intended to empower families, exercising that power may depend on having resources that some families lack. Patrick Denice considers these differential effects in his intriguing analysis of the relationship between parental demand for resources and identification rates. He finds that identification rates are higher in states with higher median incomes and with higher rates of enrollment in schools of choice, raising questions about how current eligibility criteria shape resource allocation and access to support in school.

These findings make clear that there are many factors—beyond simply whether a student needs support—that drive eligibility for special education. Could a different system better connect resources to students in need of help? That’s a topic we’ll return to in future phases of Unlocking Potential.

The winning white paper submissions have not been peer reviewed. The findings presented reflect the views of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of CRPE or CRPE’s funders.

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Special Education Is Broken. Our New Database Can Help Spark Way to Fix It

CRPE Admin — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 11:00:20 +0000

Advocates who have fought hard battles to preserve the right of children with disabilities to attend public schools have never faced a fight like this one. Last month’s cuts to the Office for Special Education Programs, which all but eliminated the agency charged with enforcing schools’ civil rights obligations, fly in the face of decades of bipartisan support. It appears that no one—not even children with disabilities—will be spared in the current federal downsizing.

Yet these cuts are only the latest symptom of a deeper problem: The special education system is failing. Fifty years ago, the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) was a revolutionary step forward that mandated a free, appropriate public education for students with disabilities, tailored to their individual needs. It has since hardened into a compliance-driven exercise that leaves most of the students it serves without the educational support they need to succeed in school or life.

We understand these failures better than most, having watched our own children’s struggles compound due to their schools’ failures to provide the “basics,” such as a high-quality curriculum, evidence-based instruction, orderly classrooms, and a little extra academic support. These are the same things millions of students without identified disabilities also need—but that neither the general nor special education system reliably delivers.

The result is a crisis that long predates the current funding fight, because special education was never designed to help students achieve grade-level expectations. It is a system that prioritizes sorting children into diagnostic categories over improving student learning. Every year, more students are labeled, more money is invested, and yet the results remain the same: Millions of children are unable to read, write, or calculate proficiently. The problem isn’t too little special education; it’s that special education, as we know it, does not work.

That’s why the Center on Reinventing Public Education has launched a new project, Unlocking Potential, that aims to generate conversation and solutions around meeting the needs of students who struggle in school—one grounded in evidence, transparency, and a willingness to question the faulty assumptions that have shaped special education for a half-century.

Part of this initiative is the Special Education Data Center, the first-ever 50-state digital record of rates of students identified as needing services since 1976. The data document America’s increased reliance on special education to address learning and behavioral differences that are more common than those that originally inspired Congress to pass IDEA. But giving more students access hasn’t solved the core problem: Eligibility is based on subjective determinations of disability (something that can’t be measured) rather than demonstration of student need (something that can). As a result, students’ access to special education depends on the local policies and practices used in their schools, creating a huge disparity in services depending on where they happen to live.

While these findings illuminate longstanding inequities, they also open up new opportunities to act. To encourage deeper exploration, CRPE invited educators, researchers, and advocates to dig into the data, uncover new patterns, and propose ideas for a better system. The winning participants received financial support to develop deeper analyses that can help policymakers and practitioners design a new generation of interventions.

These new insights and fresh approaches could help reimagine the current system from the ground up. Instead of sorting students into rigid categories, schools could respond flexibly to their needs. Instead of disconnected experiences across general and special education, there could be a continuum of evidence-based supports. Instead of investing in gatekeeping, legislators could use analyses of this new dataset to justify allocating resources directly to the instruction and tools students need to succeed.

None of this can happen so long as advocates hunker down in defense of a program that is failing the students it was designed to serve. Instead, Unlocking Potential is an attempt to give advocates, families, and educators the tools to see the system as it truly is and imagine what it could become. Invention can offer hope in the face of despair, abundance in place of scarcity, and power to the powerless. Those are the resources disability advocates brought to Congress 50 years ago. They can be tapped again to advance the interests of children with disabilities in today’s challenging political climate.

This op-ed was originally published in The 74.

About Phoenix Rising: This series brings together different perspectives to examine what could and should come next in the wake of the pandemic and the federal interventions of the Trump administration. This series is a forum to challenge assumptions, spark debate, and generate ideas for preparing today’s and tomorrow’s students for a rapidly changing, uncertain future.

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The “Big Blur”: A Renewed Call to Merge High School, College, and Career

CRPE Admin — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 11:00:26 +0000

Imagine a world where every high school junior has walked a factory floor, sat in a boardroom, taken college courses, and earned credentials valued by employers before graduation. Even before they’re legal adults, these students will have cracked open the door to a career by blurring the lines between school and work. While this might seem like a provocative thought experiment, it’s already happening in innovative school districts across the U.S. Jobs for the Future (JFF) first called for this “Big Blur” in 2021, arguing for the erasure of outdated boundaries between school, college, and career so that every young person has access to meaningful work experience and further education. This isn’t just good for high school students—it’s also good for the economy.

The labor market is changing faster and more unpredictably than governments, school districts, and higher education can handle. AI is rewriting the rules overnight. Credentials and degrees are necessary but increasingly insufficient to employers looking for proof of skills and agility, including prior work experience. States that manage to blur the sharp separation between K12 schooling, higher education, and workforce training will flip the script. Instead of students stumbling blindly into the job market when they graduate, they’ll hit the ground running with qualifications, work experience, and a clear path to a fair wage and quality jobs.

We already have policy precedents for how to “blur” effectively. Lawmakers in Colorado launched a Postsecondary and Work-Based Learning Integration Task Force to expand access to work-based learning, early college credit earning, and industry-recognized credentials. Texas created the Tri-Agency Workforce Initiative to foster cooperation among its K–12, higher ed, and workforce agencies. Tennessee launched the SySTEM grant to support the design and spread of work-based dual enrollment courses for high school students. Reducing bureaucracy can go a long way toward advancing the Big Blur, even in the absence of funding. Mandating that dual-enrollment credits are accepted at state colleges and universities, for example, doesn’t mean new spending. It just means shifting state policy to favor flexibility.

Conditions have never been more conducive to reform. Parents and students are increasingly skeptical of traditional college pathways. Employers are impatient for skilled talent. Taxpayers are reluctant to continue backing postsecondary institutions with dubious outcomes, as the debate over student debt and the demand for institutional accountability make clear. Meanwhile, the population of high school students is expected to reach a demographic peak and then begin a sharp and sustained decline over the next fifteen years. We simply can’t afford to waste human talent and expect to maintain our country’s growth and prosperity.

So, what should state governments do to accelerate the Big Blur and connect learning with real life?

1. Revamp state funding to treat grades 11–14 as a continuum.
States should pilot and implement funding models that follow high school students and provide strong incentives for definable college and career outcomes. Instead of bluntly funding enrollment, states should tie school dollars directly to student performance in areas like credential attainment, completion of work-based learning experiences, and successful transitions to further education or fair-wage jobs; the latter is possible in states that have longitudinal data systems linking education and employment data. This is not far-fetched: As of 2019, Texas rewards school districts with an “outcomes bonus” of up to $5,000 per student who earns markers of college and career success, including approved industry-recognized credentials. Schools should get credit for moving students along to the next phase of their lives and careers, not just keeping them enrolled through graduation.

Idaho’s Advanced Opportunities program gives scholarship funding directly to students (starting in seventh grade) to pay for AP and IB exams, professional certifications, career and technical courses, and apprenticeships. Texas adopted an outcomes-based funding model for community colleges that rewards institutions for producing graduates with credentials of value and incentivizes them to use dual enrollment toward this end. And in Colorado, the Path4Ward program awarded extra funding for college, apprenticeships, or internships to students who finish high school early. Without financial realignment, districts and colleges will continue to optimize for institutional survival, not student success.

2. Align governance and accountability toward shared outcomes.
States must build governance arrangements that allow K–12 districts, community colleges, and workforce agencies to own outcomes for young adults. Metrics should transcend a single institution, and states must share data systems across their K–12, higher education, and labor or workforce divisions. State authorizing bodies should be empowered to sign off on new models that blur the lines between high school, college, and workforce training and experience.

Tennessee created a Ready Graduate Indicator that emphasizes early postsecondary opportunities, like dual enrollment and Advanced Placement, alongside industry certifications and WorkKeys Career Readiness Certificates. Michigan’s Department of Lifelong Education, Advancement, and Potential comprises agencies and non-government organizations to help more people from birth through postsecondary earn a skill certificate or degree to help them get a good, paying job.

3. Scale up promising models of work-based learning.

States should set quality standards for youth apprenticeships, paid internships, and employer partnerships, provide seed funding for nonprofits and local government agencies that broker partnerships, and remove regulatory barriers that make employers reluctant to take on young trainees. The District of Columbia’s Ward 8 Advanced Technical Center gives high schoolers opportunities to earn dual credit and industry credentials, participate in paid internships, and gain clinical experience in fields like nursing, medical assisting, and emergency medical response, preparing them for employment with the DC Health Care Employment and Apprenticeship Link (DC HEAL) program after they graduate.

The Manufacturers Association of Central New York partners with community colleges across Upstate New York to provide a free 12-week course for women interested in advanced manufacturing, giving them on-site experience with local employers and the chance to earn industry certifications alongside their academic credit. Successful programs like these are closely tailored to local workforce needs and opportunities for further education.

4. Encourage teachers and faculty to experiment with new forms of learning.

Integrating college, career, and high school learning requires new approaches to teaching and learning. A wealth of research shows that making real-world connections across curricula helps drive student motivation and deepen learning, but that few instructors have the experience or the authority to make curricular changes on their own.

In Hawaii, industry experts can become certified teachers through an accelerated community college program. Tennessee supports a special category of teacher licensure for occupational experts, making it easier for industry-experienced professionals to transition into the classroom.

Life doesn’t happen in discrete, neatly packaged chapters, and we’re already living in a blurrier time. The Big Blur is a bold, actionable agenda that befits this reality. For students, it promises earlier, stronger access to meaningful careers; for employers, a more diverse and skilled pipeline; and for states, a better return on investments in education and training. The political and economic moment to blur has come. Will state policymakers act, or will they stand by and watch the opportunity slip away?

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The Debate over AI in Education Is Stuck. Let’s Move It Forward in Responsible Ways That Truly Serve Students

CRPE Admin — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 17:08:20 +0000

Artificial intelligence is already reshaping how we work, communicate, and create. In education, however, the conversation is stuck.

Sensational headlines make it seem like AI will either save public education (“AI will magically give teachers back hours in their day!”) or destroy it completely (“Students only use AI to cheat!” “AI will replace teachers!”).

These dueling narratives dominate public debate as state and district leaders scramble to write policies, field vendor pitches, and decide whether to ban or embrace tools that often feel disconnected from what teachers and students actually experience in classrooms.

What gets lost is the fundamental question of what learning should look like in a world in which AI is everywhere. And that is why, last year, rather than debate whether AI belongs in schools, approximately 40 policymakers and sector leaders took stock of the roadblocks in an education system designed for a different era and wrestled with what it would take to move forward responsibly.

The group included educators, researchers, funders, parent advocates, and technology experts and was convened by the Center on Reinventing Public Education. What emerged from the three-day forum was a clearer picture of where the field is stuck and a shared recognition of how common assumptions are holding leaders back and of what a more coherent, human-centered approach to AI could look like.

We agreed that there are several persistent myths derailing conversations about AI in education, and came up with shifts for combating them.

Myth #1: AI’s biggest value is saving time for teachers

Teachers are overburdened, and many AI tools promise relief through faster lesson planning, automated grading or instant feedback. These uses matter, but forum participants were clear that efficiency alone will not transform education.

Focusing too narrowly on time savings risks locking schools more tightly into systems that were never designed to prepare students for the world they are graduating into.

The deeper issue isn’t how to use AI to save time. It’s how to create a shared vision for what high-quality, future-ready learning should actually look like. Without that clarity, even the best tools quietly reinforce the same factory-model structures educators are already struggling against.

The shift: Stop asking what AI can automate. Start asking what kinds of learning experiences students deserve, and how AI might help make those possible.

Myth #2: The main challenge is getting the right AI tools into classrooms

The education technology market is already crowded, and AI has only added to the noise. Teachers are often left stitching together core curricula, supplemental programs, tutoring services, and now AI tools with little guidance.

Forum participants pushed back on the idea that better tools alone will solve this problem. The real challenge, they argued, is to align how learning is designed and experienced in schools — and the policies meant to support that work — with the skills students need to thrive in an AI-shaped world. An app is not a learning model. A collection of tools does not add up to a strategy.

Yet this is not only a supply-side problem. Educators, policymakers, and funders have struggled to clearly articulate what they need amid a rapidly advancing technology environment.

The shift: Define coherent learning models first. Evaluate AI tools based on whether they reinforce shared goals and integrate with one another to support consistent teaching and learning practices, not whether they are novel or efficient on their own.

Myth #3: Leaders must choose between fixing today’s schools and inventing new models

One of the tensions dominating the discussions was whether scarce state, local, and philanthropic resources should be used to improve existing schools or to build entirely new models of learning.

Some participants worried that using AI to personalize lessons or improve tutoring simply props up systems that no longer work. Others emphasized the moral urgency of improving conditions for students in classrooms right now.

Rather than resolving this debate, participants rejected the false choice. They argued for an “ambidextrous” approach: improving teaching and learning in the present while intentionally laying the groundwork for fundamentally different models in the future.

The shift: Leaders must ensure they do not lose sight of today’s students or of tomorrow’s possibilities. Wherever possible, near-term pilot programs should help build knowledge about broader redesign.

Myth #4: AI strategy is mainly a technical or regulatory challenge

Many states and districts have focused AI efforts on acceptable-use policies. Creating guardrails certainly matters, but when compliance eclipses learning and redesign, it creates a chilling effect, and educators don’t feel safe to experiment.

The shift: Policy should build in flexibility for learning and iteration in service of new models, not just act as a brake pedal to combat bad behavior.

Myth #5: AI threatens the human core of education

Perhaps the most powerful reframing the group came up with: The real risk isn’t that AI will replace human relationships in schools. It’s that education will fail to define and protect what is most human.

Participants consistently emphasized belonging, purpose, creativity, critical thinking, and connection as essential outcomes in an AI-shaped world.

But they will be fostered only if human-centered design is intentional, not assumed.

The shift: If AI use doesn’t support students’ connections between their learning, their lives, and their futures, it won’t be transformative, no matter how advanced the technology.

The group’s participants did not produce a single blueprint for the future of education, but they came away with a shared recognition that efficiency won’t be enough, tools alone won’t save us, and fear won’t guide the field.

The question is no longer whether AI will shape education. It is whether educators, communities, and policymakers will look past the headlines and seize this moment to shape AI’s role in ways that truly serve students now and in the future.

This op-ed was originally published in The Hechinger Report.

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Think Forward: Building a Coherent Approach to AI in Education

CRPE Admin — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 09:00:58 +0000

In November 2025, the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) convened a diverse group of policymakers, system leaders, educators, researchers, funders, and technology experts for the Think Forward: Learning with AI Forum in New Mexico. At a moment when rapid advances in artificial intelligence are colliding with longstanding inequities and structural challenges in K–12 education, participants came together to grapple with a shared question: how can education lead, rather than react to, AI-driven change? Through candid discussions and working sessions, the group examined where current AI efforts are falling short and what it would take to build a more coherent, human-centered approach to teaching and learning in an uncertain future. This white paper is the result of those discussions.

Participants identified an “efficiency paradox,” warning that unguided AI adoption risks making outdated school models faster and cheaper without making them more responsive to students’ needs. Instead, participants call for a coherent, human-centered approach that improves current practice while intentionally building toward new models of schooling.

Key findings include:

Vision must lead tools. Without clear guidance from educators and policymakers, AI development has prioritized point solutions over integrated school design.
Coherence matters more than novelty. Sustainable impact requires aligned policies, infrastructure, pedagogy, and technology—not disconnected apps.
Human relationships are central. AI should operate in the background to expand capacity, not replace educators or reduce learning to efficiency gains.
Policy and investment are critical enablers. Innovation zones, redesigned assessment and workforce models, and sustained learning agendas are necessary to move beyond pilot projects toward system-level change.
Education must address two time horizons at once. Leaders need an “ambidextrous” approach that supports today’s students while redesigning systems for an AI-shaped future.

Ultimately, this white paper calls on policymakers, funders, educators, and technology developers to move from fragmented experimentation to coherent action—building future-ready schools grounded in equity, learning science, and what makes education irreducibly human.

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Smartphones and Absenteeism are Noisy Problems, but the Quiet Crisis in Math Is Instruction

CRPE Admin — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 11:00:37 +0000

Everyone needs foundational math skills. Numeracy predicts higher earnings, better health, and increased access to fast-growing jobs. Algebra is the gateway to advanced math and to many college and workforce programs. Yet America has a math problem—and it didn’t start with Covid.

After two decades of gains, national math performance peaked around 2013 and has continued sliding ever since, with the steepest losses among our lowest-performing students. On the 2024 Nation’s Report Card, nearly four in ten eighth graders scored Below Basic, and achievement gaps are at historic highs.

How did we get here? Our research points to no single cause, but people point the finger in many directions. Smartphones, social media, and chronic absenteeism clearly matter, and ignoring their effects would be foolish. But elevating them as the main drivers of math decline is a costly mistake. The quiet and painful truth is that students aren’t learning math because they aren’t getting effective math instruction.

In CRPE’s 2025 State of the American Student report, we reviewed national assessments, state report cards, high-quality research, and bright spot examples of schools where math scores are rising. We identified four systemic issues undermining math instruction that leaders must confront.

First, the supply of qualified math teachers has eroded. The number of teacher-prep graduates prepared to teach math fell 36% from 2012 to 2020; over half of middle-school math teachers lack a math or math education degree. Vacancies and “out-of-field” assignments hit high-poverty schools hardest. “We basically teach ourselves,” one student told the Math Narrative Project.

Second, math teaching strategies backed by evidence aren’t consistently reaching classrooms, especially explicit instruction that builds procedural fluency and conceptual understanding. Much like how schools once underemphasized phonics in reading, they are now getting misleading guidance about the role of explicit instruction in math.

Third, schools aren’t built to catch up students who miss key skills. Math learning is cumulative: miss a precursor skill in third grade, and algebra becomes a wall. Today, one-fifth of students are below grade level by grade five, and roughly one-third by grade eight. These gaps are preventable, but only by generating real-time data on learning progress, enabling quick intervention, and tailoring support for each student.

And fourth, at the same time as standards and accountability have weakened, grade inflation and opaque reporting make it hard for families to see where kids truly stand. Only eight states provide clear, accessible report cards that let parents compare schools on math performance and opportunity. Over 40% of grades are inflated, meaning parents are not getting the truth about what students know and don’t know.

None of this means phones, disengagement, or absenteeism are red herrings. Chronic absenteeism roughly doubled from pre-pandemic levels at its peak, and 40% of high schoolers reported persistent sadness or hopelessness in 2023. But directing too much attention to these external problems risks distracting schools from fixing what they can control: consistent access to effective instruction, delivered by prepared teachers, within a system that identifies gaps quickly and closes them.

The good news: we know what works. Ector County, TX, solved for teacher vacancies and tied tutoring payments to student growth. Their third- through eighth-grade math performance has rebounded to 2013 levels—and that was before the district banned student cell phone use starting this year. Alabama has posted the nation’s strongest fourth-grade math growth since 2019 by combining high-quality materials, coaching, and focused training. These strategies complement statewide efforts to improve school attendance, which are also paying off.

These aren’t miracles. They’re systems. Improving math outcomes means focusing on what works. Teach what the science says students need: explicit instruction, plenty of practice, and engaging lessons that build fluency alongside conceptual understanding. Math teachers’ professional associations are not doing this well, and states can step up (and even band together) to reduce confusion for districts. Make evidence-based practices non-negotiable in struggling schools. Tell the truth with clear data on growth, subgroup results, Algebra readiness, and course access, backed by accountability that pairs high expectations with real support. Staff creatively by paying more for shortage roles, prioritizing high-need schools, growing math specialists and master teachers, and piloting team-teaching. And fix the leaky pipeline with early diagnostics, in-day tutoring tied to core instruction, and multiple on-ramps to higher-level math—so a missed week never turns into a lost year.

But to engage in this work meaningfully, states must first set a bold goal for the future, like preparing all students for Algebra I by eighth grade by 2030, and track progress towards it. Getting eighth graders ready for Algebra I doesn’t have to be every state’s goal, but they should pick something equally measurable and concrete. Without a clear end in mind, states won’t have a defined path towards accelerating improvement. Whichever goal states choose, they should also guarantee help for the students who’ve fallen furthest behind and prioritize improving their foundational skills with proven interventions.

Phones and absenteeism are noisy problems. Instruction is a quiet but obvious one. If we aim the system only at the loudest noises, we’ll miss the fix. Aim for high-quality teaching and learning for all, and America’s students will climb again.

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2026: A Year for Leadership

CRPE Admin — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 11:00:10 +0000

The start of a new year is always a moment for reflection, but 2026 leaves little room for pause. This is not a year for incrementalism or hoping someone else will lead. It is a year that demands decisive action.

In education, responsibility for student success has shifted: the federal government has abandoned many of its traditional oversight roles and mandates, and states are now in the driver’s seat. That shift creates real risk. Federal coherence and guardrails matter. But it also removes a familiar excuse for states that have eschewed leadership for compliance. States now have both the authority and the responsibility to act. The NAEP scores released in 2025 should have been a wake-up call, but I fear they were not.

The question in 2026 is not whether states can lead, but whether they will.

States that want to raise achievement and prepare young people for a far more uncertain future will need to think beyond small fixes. Leadership now means setting clear goals for student learning, aligning policy and incentives to those goals, and being willing to change course when evidence says something is not working. It also means acknowledging that avoiding hard choices is itself a choice, and one students usually pay for.

This year must mark a turning point for education leaders: generative AI is no longer an emerging technology—it is a foundational force reshaping society and the future students will inherit. The pace of change is only accelerating. In the here and now, AI cannot be an afterthought for education leaders. Instead, it must be front and center in legislative agendas and policy decisions.

The central challenge is not whether schools will use AI, but whether states will govern its use to strengthen learning rather than fragment it. 2026 will require nuanced policy that puts sensible guardrails in place while also helping schools adapt to a world where jobs, skill demands, and pathways are far less predictable than they once were.

State and system leaders have a critical role to play. They need to help school leaders make sense of a crowded and confusing AI landscape, clarify which tools and uses are grounded in learning science, and send clearer signals to the market about what outcomes matter and what evidence will be expected. Realizing this potential will require discipline, design, and a willingness to rethink longstanding assumptions.

Students need sharp critical thinking skills, sound judgment, a strong foundation of knowledge in core subjects like history, math, and reading, and, perhaps most importantly, the ability to learn and adapt over time. Other countries are moving quickly to align education systems with the new reality AI presents. The United States cannot assume it will remain competitive by default.

The real opportunity goes well beyond tools. AI has the potential to support whole school models that individualize instruction with rigor and allow systems to deploy teacher talent in more effective and sustainable ways.

Leadership in this moment is not just about power. It is about capacity and courage. Many state education agencies were designed to manage compliance, not to shape markets, redesign systems, or drive continuous improvement at scale. If states are serious about leading, then they will modernize how they govern education by investing in talent, building new capabilities, and being much more direct about the results they expect. Some states are beginning to do this. Most are not. And students are paying the price for inaction.

This work will generate conflict. Structural reforms, from teacher preparation and pensions to responsible school choice, always do. Governing through that conflict, rather than around it, is what leadership looks like now.

After years of disruption, it is understandable that many leaders feel exhausted. But the costs of waiting are rising, and the risk of not taking action at all is now far more consequential than taking the wrong action.

Over the past year, CRPE has focused on helping leaders move from aspiration to action. Through our Phoenix Rising series, we laid out a set of ideas for a new reform agenda grounded in both the reality of today’s education systems and the demands of tomorrow. In 2026, we will continue to develop this work and spend more time with states and local leaders who are ready to implement it.

That means taking on issues that have lingered far too long. States that want to raise achievement at scale cannot avoid hard conversations about teacher preparation, the design and governance of school choice, pension obligations that crowd out investments in students, and accountability and funding systems that no longer match how schooling actually happens. These are not easy problems to address. They are also unignorable.

None of this will happen on its own. With greater authority comes greater responsibility. Leadership in 2026 will come from those willing to set priorities, make tradeoffs, and take ownership of results.

Those in official state leadership roles are critical, but leadership can come from advocates, educators, as well as students and their families. We at CRPE continue to be inspired and learn from forward-thinking educators, as well as from pioneering schools and districts making bold moves to transform what students’ experience and what opportunities they access. Ground-level innovators can push state leaders and give them cover to act. We remain optimistic because we see leaders who are ready to do this work. Our role is to surface hard truths, develop evidence-based ideas, and work alongside states and local leaders to turn ambition into action.

In 2026, CRPE will focus on student outcomes, advance bold reform agendas through Phoenix Rising and partnerships in the field, build a practical roadmap for responsible AI, and push states to lead strategically and coherently for meaningful gains in learning. We hope others will join us on this path and think forward, through 2026 and into the future.

The post 2026: A Year for Leadership appeared first on Center on Reinventing Public Education.

Reckoning with Reality: The Case for a New Union Strategy in K–12

CRPE Admin — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 11:00:13 +0000

Public school districts are facing an existential threat. Demographic shifts and school choice policies are exacerbating declining enrollment. A diminishing role for the federal Department of Education alongside broad economic uncertainty could further erode state and local revenues. These trends threaten student outcomes and teacher jobs, as well as district solvency. When we talk about improving public education under these conditions, it is disingenuous (and unproductive) to ignore the role of teachers’ unions.

Today, unions’ traditional and legitimate focus on “bringing home the bacon” for their members is in tension with their need to avoid destroying the enterprise that employs them. Right now, schools need flexibility to stem enrollment losses and attend to post-pandemic learning gaps. They must adopt (and train teachers to use) new, evidence-based curriculum to analyze and act on student assessment results, consider new approaches to team-based staffing models, use technologies like AI to help teachers individualize student academic support, and fill critical holes left by federal cuts to student counseling and social services. Public schools can’t meet these needs when their budgets are tied up in union wage demands backed up by strike threats.

If their militancy and aggressive demands continue, unions and districts could be entering a death spiral in which unaffordable labor settlements and work stoppages exacerbate district decline.

But this fate is not inevitable. Unions can protect their members’ interests while also considering the health of the industry in which they work. To do so, teachers’ unions must adapt to working within a threatened industry (like the United Auto Workers (UAW) did in the 1970s) by changing their strategy from a mostly adversarial relationship with employers to one that is demanding but tempered by realism.

This is a long way from teachers’ unions’ current position. During and after the pandemic, they have pressed for hiring more teachers, dramatically raising salaries, and more support from nonprofits and social service agencies. In many cities (Chicago, Seattle, Oakland), this has led to crushing deficits. Unions have hounded out superintendents who, faced with insolvency, have proposed spending cuts and school closings. In some cities, it is clear the unions pay no attention to district budget limitations, insisting that the state government should pony up.

Unlike the UAW, which had to acknowledge the bedrock fact of declining auto sales, teacher unions tell their members that political mobilization can scare the state government into coming up with a lot more money. But union leaders who want to avoid killing the school systems that employ their members have other options. They can:

Stop threatening strikes for wage settlements that will throw their host districts into deep debt.
Allow differentiated pay, including higher levels to attract and keep quality math, science, and special ed teachers, and higher pay for hard-to-staff schools. These changes would improve schools, stabilize staffing, and address real equity problems. They don’t threaten membership numbers and would enable better STEM and special education instruction.
Stop fighting charters and other public alternatives to private choice; it’s a losing battle. Unions should help the public sector compete, and chartering is a necessary part of that strategy.
Concede on sustainable public pension reform and accept flexible benefit packages that let teachers with different needs set their own priorities (e.g., employer-paid health insurance coverage for those who need it, other benefits like child care support for those whose spouses’ jobs provide health insurance for the whole family).
Lead the charge to transform high schools to be more career-relevant and use out-of-school time for tutoring, career counseling, etc. This will mean allowing industry and higher education experts who are not regular district employees to serve as teachers of record.
Lead the charge for evidence-based instruction. This will mean a national campaign to end the math and literacy wars, give struggling students adequate targeted support, and get objective, solid evidence on good instruction to state and district leaders. It may also mean supporting and designing state accountability systems to sanction schools where students don’t learn due to the persistence of pseudoscience-based practices.
Give teachers in schools more say on how vacancies are filled. This includes eliminating seniority placement preferences, which force new teachers into the most troubled schools where they can face overwhelming problems and get little help.

At a time when federal regulation and funding are withering, states and localities face loss of financial support but have unprecedented freedom of action, as CRPE has previously documented.

States have a responsibility to act in the best interest of students and protect their districts against financial insolvency. Legislators could prevent disastrous collective bargaining agreements by limiting pay package increases to a few percentage points above inflation or by capping salary increases for districts that are losing students and whose teacher-to-pupil ratio is growing. States could also preserve school flexibility by limiting collective bargaining to teacher compensation and benefits, ruling out district concessions on issues like curriculum, teacher assignment, class size, and last-in, first-out reductions in force.

State officials can also press both unions and school boards to make realistic bargains by publishing definitive information about district incomes and expenses. If necessary, states should invalidate labor agreements that districts can’t afford, though the extent to which they can do so may depend on whether they’re right-to-work states, etc.

In their own interests, teacher unions need to change. The singular pursuit of maximizing teacher pay and benefits regardless of consequences will lead to disaster for the unions, as well as for the families that depend on local public schools. In the event that unions don’t deviate from the path of confrontation, state and local elected officials need to take action to protect district solvency and the quality of schooling.

The post Reckoning with Reality: The Case for a New Union Strategy in K–12 appeared first on Center on Reinventing Public Education.

Virtual 1:1 Literacy Tutoring in Oakland Unified School District: Implementation and Effectiveness of a Pilot at Scale

CRPE Admin — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 15:50:46 +0000

In 2024–25, Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) launched a districtwide pilot of virtual, high-dosage, 1:1 literacy tutoring in partnership with three providers: Hoot, Ignite Reading, and OpenLiteracy. This initiative aimed to address early reading gaps, particularly in phonics, for K–2 students who were below grade level.

Key Findings

High implementation fidelity: Over 80% of tutored students received at least 20 sessions, and nearly 60% received 900+ minutes of tutoring.
Targeted and equitable reach: Schools followed district guidelines in selecting students most in need of support.
Meaningful academic impact:
- On the i-Ready Phonics assessment, tutored students gained the equivalent of 1.3 additional months of learning, and those who received 15+ hours saw gains of 1.6 months.
- On the DIBELS Oral Reading Fluency-Accuracy assessment, students gained up to 9 months of additional learning, though this result is based on a smaller sample and should be interpreted with caution.
Mixed results elsewhere: Tutored students showed similar or slightly lower gains in overall literacy and fluency on other assessments.
Provider variation: Students with Ignite Reading outperformed others on the i-Ready Overall assessment, with gains equivalent to 1.5 extra months of learning.

Implications

Oakland’s pilot stands out as a rare, large-scale, real-world example of effective virtual tutoring. Even at modest doses, students showed measurable gains in foundational skills—suggesting that virtual 1:1 tutoring, when implemented strategically and equitably, can be a powerful tool for early literacy recovery.

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