Dear colleagues,
It has been a tempestuous year in American education, with Washington dominating the headlines. Disappointing results on national assessments of reading and math prompted demands for school improvement. Neither Republican nor Democratic national leaders rose to the challenge. The Trump administration sought to hand the mantle of education reform to the states and set about disassembling the U.S. Department of Education, while championing a new law making all but the wealthiest American families eligible to use federal tax monies to pay for private schooling. In higher education, it leveraged the power of the federal purse to promote conservative policy priorities at leading universities.
FutureEd has sought to help educators and education policymakers navigate the maelstrom by providing nonpartisan, evidence-based analysis of emerging developments in the education sector and strategies for strengthening opportunities and outcomes for the nation’s students.
Over the course of the year, we examined:
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We produced extensive work on several key K–12 issues, including:
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We worked with the Keystone Policy Center to identify the features of elementary and secondary schools that produce the greatest student success in school and beyond. We then studied the best way to measures those features. The result was a practical framework for policymakers to rethink accountability systems and drive school improvement.
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We also:
- Authored commentaries in The 74 and Education Week on the value of building school-measurement systems based on what research shows to be the most powerful drivers of student success
- Hosted webinars on the future of school measurement with leading researchers, practitioners, and policymakers, including Colorado Governor Jared Polis and former U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings
- Joined the Education Gadfly Show podcast to discuss the implications of the Quality Check report for federal and state policymakers
- Published an Education Next essay by FutureEd Director Thomas Toch and Senior Fellow Lynn Olson making the case for a new model of statewide standardized testing
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FutureEd Senior Policy Analyst Bella DiMarco studied emerging universal private school choice programs in 10 states, revealing who’s participating in the programs, the cost to taxpayers, early achievement results, and implications for public schools—offering valuable insights into the potential consequences of the federal universal choice program when it debuts in 2027.
We also:
- Hosted a webinar on the impact of the new federal private school choice program on students, families, and schools
- Published a commentary in The 74 on what states’ experiences with universal choice programs can teach policymakers implementing the federal program
- Released a report on the lessons from the transformation of the New Orleans school district into a charter school system in the wake of Hurricane Katrina two decades ago
- Published an article in Governing magazine on the New Orleans experience
- Tracked states’ legislative activity on private school choice
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FutureEd launched an initiative in 2025 to help elected officials, philanthropists, and civic leaders nationwide explore comprehensive strategies to catalyze greater social mobility for students and their families.
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The initiative’s first report, authored by Senior Fellow Josh Anderson, explains in striking detail how policy barriers across education, health care, housing, and other social sectors combine to limit upward mobility and compound disadvantage over time.
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Attendance rates plummeted after students returned to classrooms in the wake of the pandemic, devastating schools’ efforts to help students to catch up after the Covid school closings. And strikingly high rates of chronic absenteeism continue to undermine schools’ productivity. We sought in 2025 to help policymakers understand the depth, breadth, and sources of the post-pandemic absenteeism crisis.
Our work included:
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The spread of high-quality tutoring in the wake of the pandemic was a rare educational silver lining to the Covid crisis. The need to catch students up academically and an abundance of federal funding brought into public schools an effective teaching tool that affluent families had long purchased privately. Our work in 2025 focused on helping policymakers perpetuate strong public-school tutoring programs.
It included:
- Writing in the Washington Monthly about why both Democrats and Republicans should support tutoring
- Outlining in a commentary in The 74 why Congress should maintain funding for U.S. Department of Education programs that support tutoring in public schools
- Tracking state legislative efforts to fund tutoring in public schools
- Publishing a commentary in Education Next and hosting a webinar on the potential of schools of education to enhance the supply of tutors
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In all, we produced 85 publications in 2025, including 5 major reports and more than 25 commentaries and analyses. We hosted 4 webinars, made 15 presentations, and published more than 30 podcasts.
We also continued to track leadership changes across the K-12 education sector, compile a comprehensive calendar of education events and conferences, highlight the latest, most important education research through our Research Notes series, and elevate important conversations in higher education through the FutureU podcast.
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We welcomed several new team members this year, including Associate Director Maureen Tracey-Mooney, who has worked in both traditional and charter public school systems and most recently led K-12 policy development at the White House Domestic Policy Council in the Biden administration and served as a senior advisor at the U.S. Department of Education.
Policy Analyst Tara Moon joined us from Teach for America. And Research Associate Giana Loretta taught in Bulgaria as a Fulbright Scholar.
And we were pleased to welcome three new members of our network in 2025. Frances Messano, the chief executive of NewSchools Venture Fund and a former Teach for America executive, is a new FutureEd senior fellow. As is Christina Grant, executive director of the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard, a member of the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, and a former District of Columbia state superintendent of education.
Anna Egalite, a professor of educational evaluation and policy analysis at North Carolina State University and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, joined our research advisor board. She is an expert on school choice and the teaching profession.
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The Year Ahead
We’ll continue to provide the education sector with non-partisan, solution-oriented policy analysis in 2026. Among other work, we plan to release a comprehensive analysis of the unprecedented, $189 billion federal investment in pandemic recovery in the nation’s schools and continue analyzing the fast-expanding private-school-choice landscape, including the new federal tax-credit scholarship program. And we will be launching new work under our social mobility initiative to support policymakers seeking to expand opportunity and promote upward mobility for children nationwide.
Please share your thoughts on the work we have done and work that you think we should do. We’re eager to get your insights.
Best wishes for the holidays and a productive 2026 from the FutureEd team.
Tom
Thomas Toch
Director, FutureEd
McCourt School of Public Policy
Georgetown University
[email protected]
@thomas_toch
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