Think Twice Weekly Report

Assessment

Source: Brookings Institute

Date: 3/18/25

5 years after COVID-19 hit: Test data converge on math gains, stalled reading recovery

Five years after COVID-19 disruptions, math scores have shown modest recovery, but reading scores continue to decline, with full recovery in math projected to take over seven years. Learning gaps have widened, with historically underserved students and lower-performing students recovering more slowly, while higher-performing students have made gains. The expiration of federal pandemic aid and declining school funding threaten recovery efforts, highlighting the need for sustained investment in evidence-based interventions.

Education Data Sharing

Source: Bellwether

Date: 3/20/25

Transforming Education Data Sharing for Nebraska's Court-Involved Students: Improving Academic Outcomes Through Cross-Agency Collaboration

"Court-involved" students - those who are incarcerated, on probation, in foster care, in residential treatment facilities, or have concurrent adjudications - retain their full educational rights under federal and state laws. They also face many educational challenges, as they are often highly mobile, have concentrated needs, and may have missed significant stretches of school. Providing high-quality experiences for these students requires schools and juvenile facilities to quickly transfer records like transcripts, attendance, assessments, and special education plans as students move between placements. In Nebraska - as in many states - systems for sharing these critical education records of court-involved students have been inefficient and ineffective for many years. But progress is possible. Transforming Education Data Sharing for Nebraska's Court-Involved Students: Improving Academic Outcomes Through Cross-Agency Collaboration details Bellwether's nine-month effort supporting a team of state leaders from Nebraska's youth-serving agencies in creating a recommendation and implementation plan to centralize and improve education data-sharing functions.

School Finance and Funding

Source: Bellwether

Date: 3/17/25

Block Grants: A Framework for States' Response to Potential Flexibility in Federal K-12 Education Funds

The Trump administration may push for a shift away from the current formula-driven federal K-12 education funding toward more flexible block grants - part of a broader effort to significantly scale back the U.S. Department of Education and direct more education policy decision-making to the states.1 If Congress authorizes this new flexibility, state leaders and policymakers must be prepared to use it wisely in service of students and schools. The concept of block granting could be straightforward from a federal accounting perspective but would present new challenges and opportunities for state policymakers. While it would not likely provide states with more overall federal funding, block granting could give states much more flexibility on how they spend their funding. The degree of that flexibility, however, is an open question. This memo anticipates key policy questions and options state policymakers will need to consider if Congress converts federal education funding to block grants - with a focus on ensuring that federal funds continue to target support to marginalized students (e.g., multilingual students, students with disabilities, students from low-income families). It is not an endorsement of this funding approach, nor does it try to predict exactly how Congress will implement it.

School Reform and Restructuring

Source: CRPE

Date: 3/19/2025

Running fast but not getting far: Five years of studying the pandemic's impact on education

This report distills five years of research to understand how the pandemic reshaped public education. Drawing from over 100 reports and articles, we examine the crisis response, recovery efforts, and ongoing challenges facing schools today.

Review of Fiscal Effects of School Choice: The Costs and Savings of Private School Choice Programs in America Through FY 2022

Source: EdChoice

Reviewed by: Mark Weber, Rutgers University

The expansion of voucher programs, which provide taxpayer-financed subsidies for families enrolling students in private schools, has prompted a debate about their fiscal impact. A recent EdChoice report argues that these programs do not negatively affect public school finances and actually save taxpayers substantial sums of money. Today's review explains how this argument rings hollow.

In his review of Fiscal Effects of School Choice: The Costs and Savings of Private School Choice Programs in America Through FY 2022, Mark Weber of Rutgers University and the New Jersey Policy Perspective walks readers though the report's simplistic and unvalidated methods, showing how they lead to the invalid conclusion that the programs result in taxpayer savings.

Chaos and confusion as the statistics arm of the Education Department is reduced to a skeletal staff of 3

By: Jill Barshay, The Hechinger Report

"President Donald Trump promises he'll make American schools great again. He has fired nearly everyone who might objectively measure whether he succeeds."

Education in Governors' 2025 State of the State Addresses

By: Bella Dimarco, FutureEd

"FutureEd analyzed speeches from 41 governors to identify states' education agendas for the coming year, highlighting common themes, bipartisan commitments and partisan divides. Across party lines, governors remained committed to investing in public education, with many proposing increased K-12 funding and efforts to modernize school finance formulas to better support high-need students. Alongside these general financial commitments, governors prioritized strengthening the teaching profession, addressing youth mental health, restricting cellphone use and expanding career pathways for high schoolers."

Shelter Skelter: How the Educational Choice for Children Act Would Use Tax Avoidance to Fuel School Privatization

By: Carl Davis, ITEP

"ITEP estimates that ECCA would spur $126 billion in contributions to private school voucher funds over the next 10 years but would cost the U.S. Treasury more than that-$134 billion-because the tax subsidies being paid out would exceed the contributions made to these funds. Most states would automatically provide additional tax breaks on top of those offered by the federal government, bringing the total loss to public budgets to over $136 billion. In effect, ECCA seeks to harness wealthy families' interest in tax avoidance and personal profit as a means of bolstering private schools at the expense of public budgets."

10 Trump changes education leaders need to know about

By: K-12 Dive

Here's a recap of Trump actions so far that affect K-12 professionals nationwide.

GreatLakesCenter.org