Teacher Pay

Source: Economic Policy Institute

Date: 9/24/25

The teacher pay penalty reached a record high in 2024

Over the past three decades, stagnant weekly wages of public school teachers have fallen further and further behind those of college graduates who chose other careers, resulting in an ever increasing teacher pay gap that hit a record high in 2024.

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.

Teacher Employment and Retention; Teacher Recruitment

Source: Annenberg EdExchange

Date: September 2025

Who Wants to Be a Teacher in America?

"Long-standing compositional disparities and more recent concerns about the health of the teaching profession highlight the need to increase our understanding of the pipeline into K-12 teaching. Leveraging data from 11.5 million college applicants from 2014-2025, we provide the most detailed description to date of who is interested in teaching in the United States. We document substantially lower interest among men, students of color, and high-achieving students. Comparing teaching to similar career paths, such as nursing or social work, we find that racial/ethnic disparities are far greater for teaching, but gender and academic achievement gaps are comparable or less severe. We also find evidence that students interested in teaching submit fewer applications, are less likely to apply to selective colleges, and tend to apply to colleges close to their home. Controlling for application behavior greatly attenuates the relationship between teaching interest and academic achievement, suggesting that ambition or a desire for prestige is a more salient predictor of who becomes a teacher than achievement. We find corroborating evidence from applicants' teacher-recommenders, who rate students interested in teaching as having lower intellectual promise and self-confidence, but greater concern for others. Finally, career interest in teaching and other lower-wage helping careers has declined by roughly 20% over the past decade, while nursing interest has exploded."

School Enrollment; School Finance and Funding

Source: Annenberg EdExchange

Date: August 2025

The Fiscal and Resource Effects of Enrollment Increases and Decreases on American Public School Districts

"Public school enrollment has decreased over the past few years and is forecast to continue decreasing for the foreseeable future. Experts and educators are concerned about the fiscal and resource effects of these enrollment declines. Using data on all public school districts from 1998 to 2019, we estimate the effects of enrollment changes on revenues and expenditures per pupil and a variety of resources for students. Our preferred empirical approach operationalizes all explanatory variables as spline variables, which allows for different covariates for growing and declining districts. This flexible approach allows for the possibility that school funding systems, and therefore fiscal and resource changes, differ between districts with growing and declining student enrollment. We find generally that districts with declining student enrollment have experienced larger per pupil increases in funding and resources, as compared to districts with growing enrollments. The one counterexample is total compensation (salary and benefits) per employee in the long run. While the estimates in our preferred models suggest a modest compensation advantage for growing districts over longer time periods, this result is not robust to alternative specifications, which tend to find null effects. All other fiscal and resource measures find an advantage for declining enrollment districts. This fiscal and resource advantage for declining districts was due to local and federal school finance systems not requiring declining districts to suffer revenue declines proportional to enrollment declines."

Legal Issues

Source: Manhattan Institute

Date: 9/23/25

Privately Provided Equitable Services: Root Out Unconstitutional "Secular, Neutral, and Nonideological" Restrictions from Education Law

On April 9, 2025, President Trump directed the heads of all federal agencies to identify and cease enforcing any regulations that run afoul of 10 recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions, including Carson v. Makin. In the spirit of this order, the Department of Education should take immediate action to clarify that the "secular, neutral, and nonideological" restriction on the services provided by private third-party providers under ESEA and IDEA is unconstitutional and will not be enforced. It should further undertake a comprehensive audit of all federal education laws and regulations to identify other rules that disfavor religion in contravention of Carson v. Makin and make clear that these requirements also will not be enforced. Congress should take immediate steps to remove them from federal law. This paper includes an appendix with model federal legislation language to accomplish this end.

School Choice

Source: Brookings

Date: 9/23/25

Universal school choice programs mostly benefit the wealthy unless policymakers act to prevent it

...We showed that funds were disproportionately flowing to the very wealthiest parts of the state, with correspondingly less take-up in the poorest areas. For those of us concerned about inequitable access to schools, these patterns were troubling

 

In this piece, we extend that analysis to five other states (Indiana, Iowa, North Carolina, Ohio, and West Virginia) with universal or near-universal private school choice programs, and we also update the data on Arizona.1 These six states are only a small subset of the rapidly growing number of states with large-scale private school choice programs. Unfortunately, we can't run this analysis for all states that have these programs, partly because many of them don't publish the data needed for this type of analysis.

 

We look, program-by-program, at whether funds tend to flow to poorer or wealthier areas. In looking at these programs, a clear picture emerges: these universal or near-universal programs are disproportionately used by families in wealthy areas-except where state policies have provisions to prevent that from happening.

Schools in the Media

Source: Bellwether

Date: 9/26/25

A Year in Review: How National News Media Covers K-12 Education

Across the country, news media plays a critical role in shaping public discourse about K-12 education. Which K-12 issues media outlets cover, and how they cover those issues, influences how the public understands one of the most important functions in society: providing young people with a high-quality public education. Media coverage also influences decision-makers within the sector - from parents' schooling choices to leaders' policy decisions to teachers' classroom practices.

 

Yet there is little information about how exactly the media uses its influence. This analysis begins to fill that gap by taking stock of trends in how news media outlets cover K-12 education. Guided by human design and oversight, and aided by artificial intelligence (AI) tools, more than 1,500 online articles published by 12 major print, broadcast, and radio outlets between June 1, 2024 and May 31, 2025 were categorized by primary theme (Appendix: Methodology, Limitations, and Sources).

 

The findings show that breaking political news drove a significant amount of education coverage over the last year - one that included a national election cycle and a new presidential administration with ambitions to remake the federal role in education.

School Segregation

Source: New America

Date: 9/25/25

Redrawing the Lines: How Purposeful School System Redistricting Can Increase Funding Fairness and Decrease Segregation

Students often attend school in segregated districts that are funded with very different amounts of property tax revenue. These conditions are the result of the fact that states place their school district borders along lines that entrench and worsen America's racial and economic divides.

 

States can, and should, redraw school district boundaries to encompass more equal property tax capacities and more diverse student populations. Just as legislative gerrymandering can shift the balance of political power in a state without changing anything about the voters who live there, purposeful school-system redistricting can ensure that all kids get a fairer share of the state's property tax base, regardless of race, class, or neighborhood-all without changing anything about property values or where families live.

 

In this new research report, New America's Education Funding Equity initiative draws on the machine-learning methods often used for legislative redistricting to simulate new school system boundaries. We present three potential redistricting approaches-a blank-slate model that draws entirely new school districts, one consisting of only county-based districts, and one that strategically merges existing districts-and measure their impact on tax-base fairness and segregation.

Review of Fiscal Factbook: 2025 Edition

Source: Fiscal Research and Education Center (FERC) of EdChoice

Reviewed by: Mark Weber, Rutgers University

As enrollment in school privatization programs grows, right-wing ideological think tanks such as EdChoice have continued to argue that school vouchers and education savings accounts (ESAs) strengthen public school finances. Its Fiscal Factbook purports to find that voucher programs do not harm public school finances. The data presented in the report, however, fail to support its assertion.

In his review of Fiscal Factbook: 2025 Edition, authored by the Fiscal Research and Education Center of EdChoice, Rutgers University lecturer Mark Weber highlights several ways the report falls short of providing credible support for its conclusions.

School choice doesn't need federal funding

By: Kevin Garcia-Galindo, The Carolina Journal

This op-ed in the Carolina Journal makes the conservative argument against the federal vouchers; basically, it will give the feds more control over state education.

Powering a Breakthrough for Public Education: Two Year Network Policy Agenda

By: Partnership for the Future of Learning

"This Two Year Network Policy Agenda lays out our network's vision for public education and the steps we believe are essential to achieve it. It is meant to inspire, inform, and guide actions by people and organizations across our network - and beyond - to uphold this public resource and, in doing so, support its transformation into the school that every child and family deserves."

U.S. Department of Education, AFPI, TPUSA, Hillsdale College, and Over 40 National and State Organizations Launch America 250 Civics Coalition

By: U.S. Department of Education

"Turning Point USA, which includes Turning Point Education, is more resolved than ever to advance God-centered, virtuous education for students flourishing across our nation," said Dr. Hutz H. Hertzberg, Chief Education Officer of Turning Point Education. "With that in mind, we are honored to partner with the distinguished organizations that comprise the America 250 Civics Education Coalition to restore, revive, and reclaim robust American civics education for all students throughout our country."

American satisfaction with K-12 hits record low - but parents tell a different story

By: Megan Brenan, Gallup

"Only 35% of Americans are satisfied with the K-12 education system - a record low since Gallup began polling on the subject 26 years ago....However, a reverse trend is seen when looking only at parents with children in the K-12 system. There, about 74% say they are at least somewhat satisfied with their eldest child's education, and only 23% say they are dissatisfied to some extent."

Momentum builds in schools for team-based staffing models

By: Anna Merod, K12Dive

"Teacher teams, where multiple educators instruct up to 100 students, are increasingly shaking up how K-12 leaders view classroom instruction."

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