Was 2025 a good year for education reform?

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‘Tis the season—for “best of” lists and 2026 predictions, and for those of us in the SCHOOLED community to ponder the pros and cons of the year that was.

What do you think? Did the good outweigh the bad? What were the highlights and lowlights from your perspective?

Offer your take in the comments or by replying to this email.

Here’s what I’d say: While 2025 will be remembered for a lot of bad—no, terrible—news outside of education, inside our little sandbox of ed-reform, there’s plenty to be grateful for.

Let’s start with the nice before getting to the naughty:

Pros

• It’s the year that opinion elites woke up to America’s educational malaise, blamed it on more than the Covid pandemic, and pointed to counterexamples from Mississippi and the rest of the surging South as proof that we can do better. Here’s a sample of what I’m referring to:

  • David Brooks, “America’s New Segregation,” New York Times, August 14

  • Matthew Yglesias, “American students are getting dumber. It started before Covid, and it keeps getting worse,” Slow Boring, September 22

  • Kelsey Piper, “Illiteracy is a policy choice. Why aren’t we gathering behind Mississippi’s banner?” The Argument, September 25

  • David Brooks, “Why Are the Democrats Increasing Inequality?” New York Times, October 9

  • Idrees Kahloon, “America Is Sliding Toward Illiteracy,” The Atlantic, October 14

  • Andrew Rice, “The Big Fail: Public Education Is Crumbling,” New York Magazine, November 20

  • Megan McArdle, “The signs of educational decline are now impossible to ignore,” Washington Post, November 23

  • Jonathan Chait, “Why the Left Stopped Talking About Achievement Gaps,” The Atlantic, December 8

  This matters, I believe, because it’s the first step in getting policymakers to care about education again. And if a presidential candidate makes education reform a key issue in 2028, these opinion-makers will deserve much of the credit.

• The backlash to grade inflation, cheating, and phones in school is here (and was itself reflected in the many opinion pieces mentioned above). We learned, for example, that an overwhelming majority of teachers oppose “no zeros” policies and other grading “reforms” that result in lower expectations.

• The science of reading continued its march through the state legislatures, with even California enacting a decent law, and practitioners embracing the importance of implementation. If we can get this one right, and help millions of students learn to read effectively, everything else we’re trying to do will be a whole lot easier.

• Houston keeps crushing it under state-appointed superintendent Mike Miles, and now the Texas Education Administration is preparing to work its magic with Fort Worth’s schools, too.

• The reform movement dodged a bullet on religious charter schools. A victory for St. Isidore could have splintered the charter sector, but we were rescued by Amy Coney Barrett’s recusal. (Unfortunately, we might not be so lucky next time.)

• Both Texas and Alabama enacted historic school funding reforms, with the Lone Star State in particular demonstrating a creative path forward on teacher compensation reform via its expanded Teacher Incentive Allotment.

• Indiana made strides towards a huge breakthrough for charter schools, with plans underway for facilities and transportation in Indianapolis to be managed independently of the school district, putting charters on equal footing with traditional public schools. As Jed Wallace argues, this is an excellent “North Star” for charter advocates everywhere.

• Some large districts finally got serious about closing underenrolled schools, which is never a happy process but is essential if our system is going to focus its resources on serving students best. (Of course, plenty of other districts still have their heads in the sand.)

• The teacher shortage all but evaporated, thanks to rising unemployment for college graduates. This is the one silver lining of a weak job market, given that teachers hired during downturns like this tend to be more effective than their peers.

• The U.S. Scholarship Tax Credit in the One Big Beautiful Bill could open the door to better schools for millions of students. This one is definitely TBD, as a lot depends on implementation, which is just now getting underway. And the initiative’s lack of accountability for results is a big miss. (Same goes for Texas’s big new program.) But if lots of low-income kids in cities like New York, Denver, Los Angeles, and Chicago gain access to Catholic schools and other high-quality options, it will be beautiful indeed.

Cons

• President Trump’s immigration raids scared families and children, and contributed to our ongoing chronic absenteeism crisis.

• Illinois and Kansas lowered their thresholds for what it means for a student to be “proficient” in reading and/or math this year, adding to the growing list of states that are returning to the soft bigotry of low expectations and widening the “honesty gap.”

• DOGE bulldozed the Institute for Education Sciences, putting at risk our sector’s R & D infrastructure, as well as the Nation’s Report Card. Stay tuned, we hope, for our colleague Amber Northern’s recommendations on how to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

• Too many schools embraced dubious instructional uses of AI—at the very time we’re seeing the disastrous results of incorporating phones and other devices into our classrooms.

• Socialists are now in charge in NYC and Chicago. Maybe Zohran Mamdani will surprise us reformers and embrace charter schools and other smart policies, but if Chicago is any indicator, the Big Apple is in for a rough four years.

It’s close, but to my eye, that adds up to more light than darkness for 2025. But what do you think? Offer your take in the comments or by replying to this email.

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• Marc Porter Magee is looking ahead to 2026, which he hopes reformers will make 1) “The Year of the Next Step in Implementation of Literacy Reforms”; 2) “The Year of Math”; and 3) “The Year of Making Education Relevant to the Political Conversation.”

• James Pethokoukis is on Team Optimist when it comes to AI in schools—if used properly. “The real fix isn’t banning chatbots—it’s redesigning classrooms so AI adds cognitive friction rather than removes it.” Well said!

• Here are some concrete ideas for improving math achievement in California—or really any state—from Chad Aldeman. He also notes that math proficiency rates tend to decline as kids get older. But is that real or just a sign that states are being too lax about what it means to be proficient in the early grades?

• Robert VerBruggen weighs in on Pam Bondi’s move to rescind longstanding Department of Justice “disparate impact” regulations and what that means—and doesn’t mean—for schools. Most importantly, “intentional discrimination remains illegal within programs receiving federal funds,” Robert writes, “including when it’s achieved through policies with a disparate impact. In other words, you can’t choose a policy because it will disproportionately exclude certain racial groups—and rightly so.”

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“At every level in the American education system over the last decade, left wing forces have pushed—often successfully—to evaluate less and rank less. They have fought for less standardized testing in K–12 schools, less tracking, less advanced math made available to the smartest students, and college admissions that are less tied to aptitude... if you make education less effective and make its effectiveness harder to measure, what about it is worth paying for, with public and private dollars?” —Josh Barro, Very Serious

“She was shot at 15 in a school shooting. Brown was another close call.” —Daniel Wu, The Washington Post

“In American high schools, the age of the book may be fading,” writes Dana Goldstein (echoing Fordham’s Meredith Coffey from last summer). Comments from an informal New York Times reader survey describe curriculum products based on excerpts, often read on digital devices. —The New York Times

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See ya Friday!

Mike

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