Nobody Knows What's Going to Happen in Education This Year
The forecasts filling your inbox are doomed to be wrong
Making predictions for the new year is a fun, time-honored tradition.
It is also pointless. In addition to pablum like “change is on the horizon,” we get mainly stabs in the dark and personal wish lists.
It’s true that some years turn out to be more consequential than others. But we rarely see them coming.
If you’ll indulge me, I’ll attempt to convince you by looking back at three of the most significant years in modern education history. They surprised us with ramifications we scarcely could have imagined.
1991 - The advent of mayoral control
Perhaps the most exciting thing to come out of Boston in 1991 was Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch, fronted by future underwear model and family comedy stalwart Mark Wahlberg. Good Vibrations.
A close second place: mayoral control of schools. Boston Mayor Ray Flynn successfully converted the nation’s oldest elected school board to a seven-member panel appointed by himself. The proposal won approval from the city council and state legislature.
Few understood at the time that a new era for schools was dawning - one characterized by more assertive intervention. The New York Times reported that sentiment for Flynn’s campaign was driven by public belief that “the committee has failed to address the low reading scores and high dropout rates.” It was becoming politically unacceptable for city leaders to wash their hands of failing schools by pointing fingers at their school board members. A Massachusetts legislator put it this way: “Now the Mayor will have no excuse not to improve our schools.”
Chicago followed Boston’s lead in 1995. It was then joined by Baltimore, Cleveland, Philadelphia, New York, and Washington, DC, among others.
Early advocates were far from certain that mayoral control would be successful. By 1993, Ray Flynn reversed his position and began calling for a return to an elected board. He conceded that communities of color had been disenfranchised by concentrating power in the hands of the mayor.1
In Chicago, one of Mayor Richard M. Daley’s supporters was quoted as saying “I think in my gut it's going to work out, but it's going to be a bit of a white-knuckle ride." Such an exciting endorsement!
Nonetheless, a number of mayoral control cities saw increased stability and improved performance - at least in the near term. Boston had just two superintendents between 1991 and 2006. Chicago had two between 1995 and 2009. Achievement went up. Dropout rates declined.2
As mayors felt pressure to deliver better results, they paid closer attention to a lever that had been - to be generous - an afterthought in the 70s and 80s: labor negotiations. Thick, complex contracts with teachers unions dictated how educators were hired and assigned, making it nearly impossible to restaff struggling schools with well-trained, invested teams.
Mayors like Michael Bloomberg in New York and Adrian Fenty in Washington, DC lent their full political backing to superintendents (Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee, respectively) who refused to settle contracts until the byzantine provisions were removed. It worked. And tension between administrators and labor organizations became one of the essential stories in education nationally.
The interventionist trend spread. States took over districts and districts reconstituted schools.
Who could have foreseen the extent of this back in 1991? Nobody.
2008 - Education reform’s big moment seeds its decline
Heading into 2008, conventional wisdom was that Hillary Clinton would become the Democratic presidential nominee, beating back a spirited challenge from an inspiring-but-inexperienced junior Senator from Illinois. That’s certainly what the American Federation of Teachers believed in October 2007 when it went all-in for Clinton. They were confident that Clinton would, when elected, gut the No Child Left Behind Act the union had come to detest.
Instead, Obama won the nomination narrowly and the presidency resoundingly. He chose Arne Duncan, the reform-minded superintendent of the aforementioned Chicago district, as his Secretary of Education. Obama wanted more urgency for schools to improve results - not less.
Even before Obama was elected, however, the September 2008 financial crash put education policy on a different path that would unexpectedly come to define the next 15 years.
In the short term, federal bailout packages accelerated sweeping initiatives to turn around failing schools, expand the charter sector, and hold teachers accountable for student performance by offering grants to states with ambitious plans. That part got unlimited news coverage. Folks know all about it.3
But it wasn’t what really mattered. In the longer term, the Great Recession led to painful budget cuts for schools. According to leading economists, national spending dropped by about seven percent and took several years to recover. The funding shortages hurt student learning.
Against the backdrop of a terrible economy, demanding more from schools became politically infeasible - particularly given that NCLB had been ruffling feathers for years with its robust accountability measures.
Obama was soon squeezed by rising backlash. From the right, the Tea Party burst onto the scene in 2009. Eventually, it made opposition to Common Core a top priority. On the left, Occupy Wall Street arrived in 2011. Both signaled a shift toward populist skepticism of established institutions that would emerge as a transformative political current. Their momentum ensured that the days of centrist, nationalized education policy were numbered.
In the heady days of 2008, we had no clue what was coming.
2015 - The wheels fall off the school improvement bus
At the beginning of 2015, NPR did a nice roundup of education predictions from a diverse array of voices. They covered topics like blended learning, standards, student loans, and data platforms. Very few of them turned out to be accurate. Because that’s how these things work.
Instead, 2015 was pivotal in other ways.
The first “we’re not in Kansas anymore” moment came in February when philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad suspended their $1 million annual award for urban school systems. For more than a decade, the Broads had cultivated an Oscars-style atmosphere around the ceremony, filling venues like New York’s Museum of Modern Art with big education names from across the country. They invented the big district prize. Then, they shelved the whole thing. Why? The decision was “precipitated by sluggish academic results from the largest urban school districts in the country.” Translation: They didn’t think there were enough deserving winners to hold a contest. Whoa.
It was a signal that the era of splashy edu-philanthropy was coming to an end. There wouldn’t be any more Mark Zuckerbergs going on Oprah to pledge $100 million to Newark.4 Today, the retreat of funders is an open secret in the sector, much discussed behind the scenes though rarely in public, for fear of alienating the donors who remain.
Next, loads of parents stopped allowing their children to take the annual assessments mandated by NCLB in math and reading. They were frustrated by the outsized role they felt tests were playing, crowding out instruction and reducing teachers to drones. The trend was particularly notable in New York - and, more specifically, Long Island. About 20 percent of eligible students statewide did not test in 2015.
Political leaders got the message. Gov. Andrew Cuomo beat a hasty retreat on his policies to include student learning in teacher evaluations. By the end of 2015, Congress updated the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, moving away from imposing specific academic goals on states. The Obama emphasis on school turnarounds and teacher effectiveness? Nowhere to be found. The interventionist era that kicked off in 1991? This is where it ended.
At the time, it felt like a much-needed correction. Educators - and the organizations that represented them - were in revolt against what they saw as a wrong-headed consensus. States wanted a breather. There was a feeling that in the absence of federal bossiness, states would carry innovation forward in ways that suited their local needs.5
The states did not lead, though.
With the benefit of hindsight, ESSA is widely regarded as an over-correction. A good case can be made that the battle for COVID academic recovery was lost back in 2015, before anyone knew what a coronavirus was.
How so? When schools closed in spring 2020, we were almost five years into a hands-off era. No one was telling anyone what to do. And no one was intervening with schools that weren’t getting results. This led to a lot of shoe-gazing during the re-opening process followed by more shoe-gazing in 2022 and 2023 as learning loss erased decades of gains made since… well… 1991.
So, what does 2025 hold?
In the words of modern prophet Nate Bargatze, nobody knows.
It’s more sensible to take stock of the recent past than to predict the future. We will probably remember 2024 for all that didn’t take place.
President Biden did not declare a state of emergency around student learning.
Neither presidential campaign gave meaningful attention to education.
No member of Congress made a serious proposal to update the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.
No state successfully reduced student chronic absenteeism below its 2018 baseline. Very few have improved their ELA or math achievement to pre-pandemic levels.6
Something’s going to happen, eventually. Millions of educators are out there every day, busting their tails to get us moving forward. I’m optimistic that we will see progress. History tells us these inert periods don’t last forever. I just don’t know when this one will end - or what 2025 will hold.
Meet back here in December and we’ll review the year together.
All Boston mayors, to that point, had been white men. This would not change until Michelle Wu’s election in 2021.
Today, Boston’s mayor still appoints all board members, though Michelle Wu supported a hybrid board during her mayoral campaign and a 2021 non-binding referendum received 79 percent support in favor of an elected board. Chicago is in the midst of a tumultuous transition to a fully-elected, 21-member board that will be, so far as I know, the largest in the country.
If you aren’t already familiar with the teacher evaluation element, we did a series on it last year that you can find here.
Zuckerberg might be more likely to cast himself as Marky Mark in a Funky Bunch biopic. For real. I’d watch.
Not everyone shared this optimism about states. There were notable voices calling out the flaws that eventually led ESSA to be seen as a failure. They deserve credit for seeing through the hype. In 2015, that chorus included Chad Aldeman and Andy Rotherham. Anne Hyslop, who helped craft the law, began sharing her concerns soon after leaving the administration. I am sure there are others - apologies if I have missed them.
Big thanks to
and her team for maintaining this repository of state assessment results. It is super helpful.