Dear John,

For our staff, the CAN Summit is also an annual reminder of the depth of partnership needed to win big for kids in states across the country. To that end, we’d like to highlight two opportunities to dig in deeper with us that may interest you, a colleague or a friend:

The 50CAN FIRE Fellowship, now in its third cohort, is our national parent advocacy fellowship, developed in partnership with the National School Choice Awareness Foundation. The program brings together parents from all across the country to hone their advocacy skills and launch their own advocacy projects. Fellows take courses on a range of advocacy tactics and gain real world experience in honing their messaging. Applications close October 15.

Now in its eighth year, the 50CAN National Voices Fellowship has opened applications for the 2026 cohort. Grounded in collaborative bipartisanship, National Voices works to train the next generation of education policy messengers through the development of concrete communications and media skills alongside exposure to innovative education policies. Applications close October 22.

Last time in the New Reality Roundup, we looked at the history of education reform in New Orleans on the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and raised warnings over declining time spent reading by kids and adults. This week, we look at how quickly school choice is changing the American education landscape and explore how Southern states’ academic growth has outpaced the Northeast.

Best,


Marc Porter Magee, PhD
50CAN Founder and CEO

 @marcportermagee

As the regular readers of this newsletter no doubt know by now, the past few years have seen a flurry of wins by promoters of educational choice. But it would be easy to lose sight of what this means for families in states. 

When we dug into data, helpfully compiled and visualized by our friends at EdChoice, we were surprised by just how different the choice landscape is from before the pandemic. 

Take Indiana, for example. In the 2019-20 school year the most popular form of school choice was interdistrict public school choice (5.7% of all students), followed by charter schools (4.1%). By 2024-25 students enrolled through educational choice programs had jumped from third (4.0%) to first (7.4%) and homeschooling had leap-frogged over charter schools to take the third spot (nearly doubling from 2.6% to 5.0%). If your view of what school choice means in Indiana is a charter school, it's time to update that mental picture.

Another surprising trend is the transformation of the private school sector from one that sits outside of public funding systems to one now squarely inside these systems. For example, in Florida in the 2019-20 school year, 6.7% of students were enrolled in private schools paid for entirely with private money (yellow) and just 4.5% attended private schools through educational choice programs (purple). By 2024-25, the percentage of students enrolled in private schools entirely with private money had dropped to nearly zero (0.3%) while the percentage enrolled through publicly-funded educational choice programs had nearly tripled to 12.8%. Private schools in Florida aren’t as private as they used to be. 

Usually change in education happens very slowly but this is a sea change in what school choice means for families. At the same time, there is a lot we don’t know and the next few years will go a long way towards helping us understand if these trends will continue, plateau or reverse:

• These new choice programs are paid for almost entirely from state funds. How well will they hold up under fiscal pressure the next time the economy slips into a recession and state budgets slide into deficits? 
   
• Many of these choice programs were passed after hard-fought and contentious political debates. Will political support grow as more parents take part in them or will they be subject to shifting political winds in future elections? 
   
• Previous studies of smaller private school choice programs showed a wide range of results. What will the data show for these larger programs? 
   
• Traditionally, private schools have been slow to grow. Will school supply expand more quickly now to meet new demand? 

We look forward to exploring these questions and more in this newsletter in the months and years ahead. 

• The task this week is to dig into the data in your state and explore ways to better understand the shifting school choice landscape.

“Ten years ago, New England’s public schools were the envy of the country. On the Nation’s Report Card, Massachusetts students led the United States across ages, subjects, and most demographic groups, despite wide achievement gaps. Vermont and New Hampshire were near the top. Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Maine were in the middle of the pack,” writes journalist Christopher Huffaker in The Boston Globe. “On the other end of the spectrum, states in the Deep South, riven by poverty and the legacy of segregation and slavery, sat at the bottom … But gradually, and then suddenly, that traditional order has begun to reverse.”

Vermont has dropped from fourth in the country a decade ago to 37 today, with other northeastern states showing similar declines. At the same time, as readers of the New Reality Roundup know, states in the South that were once perennial strugglers have begun to climb. Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee and Alabama have all shown steady improvements on the Nation’s Report Card over the past decade, driven by the science of reading, new supports for students and a relentless focus on student achievement as measured by standardized tests.

Yet the divergence in results also provides a roadmap for a New England comeback. As Huffaker explains in his article, Southern governors and legislatures focused on literacy as an economic development imperative, marshaling resources and demanding growth in outcomes. In New England, by contrast, political leaders were headed in the opposite direction, weakening high bars for achievement, giving in to the demands of special interests and leaving most decisions to local school boards. 

“If New Englanders are to maintain that birthright for their children and those less fortunate,” Huffaker writes, they may have to “override the wishes of popular and powerful teachers unions, and, most of all, stop resting on their laurels.”

• The task this week is to take note of the changing map of educational excellence and learn from both the Southern Surge and the New England Slide.

50CAN’s Marc Porter Magee was quoted in The New York Times on the latest NAEP results, which showed just 37 percent of 12th graders proficient in reading, where he identified the policies that are working to turn results around: “There’s a road map out there from states like Louisiana and Tennessee, focused on high-dosage tutoring, high-quality curriculum and clear information for parents on where their kids stand. What’s missing now is the political will to bring it to every state.”

ConnCAN’s Steven Hernandez also weighed in on the Nation’s Report Card in the Connecticut Post, emphasizing that the decline in state scores is a call to action for policymakers to double down on proven supports like tutoring and literacy reforms.

50CAN VP of Policy Liz Cohen published a piece for the American Association of School Administrators urging district leaders to expand tutoring and treat it as a core part of academic recovery, rather than simply a short-term intervention.

City Journal published a new article by 50CAN William E. Simon Policy Fellow Danyela Souza Egorov, examining New York City’s sharp enrollment declines, persistent test score struggles, and rising homeschool numbers—arguing that the system’s inefficiency is driving families to seek alternatives.