Here are some of the education stories to watch for in the coming year.
The School Voucher Debates Shift
After a period of explosive growth, school voucher advocates have found themselves facing new resistance, notably from rural Republicans. In November’s elections, states that went hard for Donald Trump also went hard against school vouchers. In Texas, after rural Republicans refused to fall in line with Governor Greg Abbott’s desire for school vouchers, Abbott and allies poured millions of dollars into races to get a voucher-friendly majority in the legislature.
School vouchers have never been approved by voters. That’s why voucher laws have all been created by legislatures, and why voucher advocates carefully avoid the term “voucher.”
Meanwhile, Congress is poised to created a federal school voucher program that would add to the federal deficit and force school vouchers on states that have so far rejected them.
School voucher rhetoric has shifted, deliberately, from talk about freedom and choice to the language of the culture wars, painting public schools as indoctrinating students in far left radicalism and gender ideology. Watch for voucher policy discussion to shift further away from ideas of real choice and more toward the “choice” of replacing secular public school with properly religious tax-payer funded private school.
The Oklahoma Catholic Charter Challenge
If the Supreme Court decides to hear the challenge to Oklahoma’s proposed Catholic charter school, the result could shake up both the world of public and private schools.
If states are required to fund religious charter schools, state legislatures will have to figure out which religions are entitled to taxpayer dollars to fund their schools (and if the answer is “all of them,” taxpayers will have to deal with that). At the same time, private religious schools will find themselves competing with tax-payer funded religious charter schools.
Trump Policy and Schrodinger’s Cat
Donald Trump has promised a menu of education policies, many of which are mutually exclusive. Is the Department of Education already dead, or is it alive and about to be used to enforce a raft of conservative policies? Many smart people are making predictions about this cat, but we won’t know until Trump opens the box.
AI In Education
It is hard to over-estimate how many companies are pitching their innovative artificial intelligence in education product, and educators across the country are scrambling to separate the smoke and mirrors and over-promising from the ideas of actual substance, all while trying to find ways to deal with the creative ways students are concocting to use AI.
Education Downsizing
The Baby Bust is underway and there are simply fewer and fewer K-12 students to educate. The public school system is left with excess capacity, even as school vouchers and charter schools add to the total K-12 capacity in the country.
Districts are going to face difficult decisions about closing schools, and these discussions will be contentious because every school is somebody’s school, and some school communities have more political clout than others.
Seattle is just one example of how this can play out. In September, they announced that twenty-one schools were on the chopping block in a pair of proposal aimed at creating “well-resourced” schools. By then end of October the district had backed off that plan and targeted only four schools. By the end of November, in the face of continued public protest, the district had given up entirely. But Seattle Public School enrollment has dropped from a 2019 high of 53,627 to 49,226, the lowest numbers in over a decade.
In large districts, schools can be targeted because of low enrollment, but the district also has the power to move students around and “pick” which schools are under-enrolled. Watch for heated debates in many districts over just whose facilities will be downsized and how that decision will be made.
School Surveillance
By 2020, surveillance products for schools were a growing industry, but the pandemic focused attention elsewhere. A recent New York Times piece by Ellen Barry serves as a reminder that student surveillance is still a busy business, fueled primarily by the push to protect students and the call to “harden the target” in response to school shootings.
As technology continues to extend its reach in education, so does its ability to collect data about students. Watch for people to start questioning that reach.