School Choice, Charter Schools, Poverty, Race

Source: SAGE Journals

Date: July 2025

The Double Burden of School Choice

School choice policy shifts the responsibility of accessing high-quality schools from the state to parents, yet there is little research on how parents subjectively experience the burdens of choosing schools. In this case study, we conducted interviews and focus groups with 36 parents attending traditional public, charter, and private schools across six school districts in Colorado, Louisiana, and Michigan to examine bureaucratic hassles in choice policy. We outline the administrative burdens of choice policies and how local policy design influenced the costs parents experienced. Despite policy efforts to improve equity and access in school choice, families dealt with uncertainty and waiting periods and ultimately felt disempowered by the process. School choice, we argue, placed a double burden on low-income Black and Latinx families through the learning, compliance, and psychological costs of choosing as well as the burden of responsibility for their child's educational success.

Accountability and Testing

Source:AEI

Date: 7/29/25

A New Direction for the National Assessment of Educational Progress

Key Points The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is an important tool for education accountability, helping ensure that our national education system is on track. Targeted changes could make it even more useful for understanding student performance. We should establish a first-grade NAEP and bring the 12th-grade NAEP onto the same alternating-year schedule as the fourth- and eighth-grade assessments to provide a fuller picture of student performance from the beginning to the end of the K-12 career. We should also make sure that the types of content included in the NAEP 12th-grade assessments reflect what we believe successful graduates of the American K-12 system should know and be able to do, focusing on math and reading.

Digital Technologies and Artificial Intelligence in Education

Source: CRPE

Date: 7/29/25

What California Teachers Are Trying, Building, and Learning with AI

How are educators engaging with AI to support teaching and learning? In partnership with the Silicon Schools Fund, CRPE studied 18 California schools that piloted AI tools to address core instructional challenges, including learning gaps, low engagement, time constraints, and behavioral issues.

Over 80 teachers and administrators participated in more than 30 pilots using both off-the-shelf and custom-built tools. This brief documents their experiences and lessons learned.

Education Policy and Policymaking

Source: Bellwether

Date: 7/31/25

The Pandemic Learning Project: Lessons From Learning Loss Interventions and What Leaders Should Do Next

The unprecedented disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic forced state and district leaders to make rapid and sweeping changes to education policy and practice. From orchestrating systemwide shifts to virtual instruction to temporarily waiving licensure requirements to implementing academic recovery interventions on an unprecedented scale, leaders had to act decisively - often with limited time to prepare or review research.

 

While the urgency and magnitude of these policy changes presented real challenges - and subsequent consequences for students that are now well documented - they also created an exceptional opportunity to learn from the past. These unplanned policy shifts produced numerous natural experiments that allow researchers to explore what worked for students, teachers, and schools; what did not; and what lessons can be drawn to help leaders make more deliberate and effective policy decisions in the future.

 

Bellwether partnered with the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER) at the American Institutes for Research to examine how pandemic-era research can support state and local leaders in navigating K-12 policy challenges now and into the future.

ESAs

Source: EdChoice

Date: 7/31/25

Rethinking ESA Policy Design

As education savings accounts expand across the country, one of the biggest questions policymakers face is how to maintain financial accountability without undermining the flexibility that makes ESAs valuable.

 

This new report from EdChoice and the State Policy Network, "Rethinking ESA Policy Design," addresses that challenge head-on. Written by Katherine Bathgate, an EdChoice Advisor, the report outlines how states can make sure ESA programs have incentives to encourage responsible spending without creating unnecessary red tape for parents or administrators.

Literacy Education

Source: EdTrust

Date: 7/29/25

6 Principles to Advance Equity in State Literacy Policy

While state and local leaders have become more engaged in this policy area over the past several years, more must be done to advance policies and practices that ensure that students of color, students from low-income backgrounds, multilingual learners, and students with disabilities are afforded the same opportunities and resources as their peers to become skillful, engaged readers. At the same time, bad actors at the federal and state levels are actively attacking civil rights, banning books and censoring authentic stories, and undercutting access to high-quality education, to the detriment of students' literacy development.

 

Advocates must demand evidence-based, comprehensive, and sustainable changes to ensure that every student learns to read. In this report, EdTrust outlines six principles to guide advocates as they work toward this goal.

Review of Apples to Apples: The Definitive Look at School Test Scores in Milwaukee and Wisconsin for 2024

Source: Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty

Reviewed by: Benjamin Shear, University of Colorado Boulder

A recent report from the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) examines publicly available test score data from Spring 2024 in Wisconsin to investigate the relative effectiveness and cost of school choice programs.

The report claims to provide evidence that private schools participating in the state's voucher programs and charter schools yield better academic results as compared with traditional public schools, but Benjamin Shear of the University of Colorado Boulder identifies several critical limitations in the data and analyses behind those claims. NEPC today published Professor Shear's review of WILL's Apples to Apples: The Definitive Look at School Test Scores in Milwaukee and Wisconsin for 2024.

How the Trump administration wields the federal government's power over public education

By: Jeff Bryant, Nation of Change

With the help of the U.S. Supreme Court and congressional Republicans, Trump is turning public education into the great unequalizer.

Charter School Reckoning: Decline, Disillusionment and Cost

By: Network for Public Education

Decline, the first installment of a three-part report, Charter School Reckoning, presents sobering findings on the stagnation, retrenchment, and accelerating closures plaguing the charter school sector as it enters its fourth decade.

Education Department tells states to seek waivers from ESEA

By: By Naaz Modan, K12-Dive

In a move to hand over more authority to states for how they spend their federal education dollars, the U.S. Department of Education on Tuesday encouraged all states to seek waivers from the bedrock Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

Which schools and colleges are being investigated by the Trump administration?

By: Sarah Butrymowicz, The Hechinger Report

The Education Department and other agencies are looking into allegations of antisemitism and racial discrimination against white students at dozens of colleges. The agency also has begun investigating policies that protect transgender athletes and, in some cases, targeted entire state departments of education as part of that work. See a map of affected schools.

What borrowers should know about student loan changes in the One Big Beautiful Bill

By: Cory Turner, NPR

On July 4, when President Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act into law, he also greenlit a history-making overhaul of the federal student loan system - one that will affect the lives of many, if not most, of the United States' nearly 43 million student loan borrowers.

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