It turns out, of course, that I am far from alone. 

Participation in tutoring grew by five percentage points (from 19% to 24%) between 2024 and 2025, according to the newly released 2nd Edition of The State of Educational Opportunity in America: A Survey of 23,000 Parents, from 50CAN and Edge Research. In the notoriously slow-moving U.S. education system, this is a sea-change. In urban areas, the rates are still higher, with nearly one-third of parents reporting that their child attends tutoring. 

Tutoring has long been the primary academic response of wealthy families across the United States when their children need additional support. Yet, the survey found that this too is shifting. While tutoring among high-income families increased one point from 28% to 29%, among low-income families there was a  five-point increase, cutting the access gap between low- and high-income families substantially. Indeed, at this point, you’d be hard pressed to go into any school, public or private, and not find children who attend academic tutoring outside of school. Tutoring is becoming the go-to tool for parents at all income levels and across all demographic groups. 

What would it take to make tutoring truly universal? The main barrier is expense, with 30% of parents whose children are not in tutoring saying that it’s too expensive. Cost is likely also the reason that students in private school participate in tutoring at much higher rates than their peers in public schools. A second barrier to tutoring is access. For the students getting the worst grades, 26%of parents also said that tutoring is not available in their community. 

My daughter is fortunate: I have the means to pay for tutoring, and I live in a suburban community with numerous tutoring centers. Like me, D.C. Public Schools principal Katreena Shelby had turned to private math tutoring when her daughter needed help. After seeing how quickly her daughter got back on track, she started wondering if she could get this same kind of help for her public middle school students. “I had the means to pay for my daughter to get tutoring,” Shelby told me. “Yet I wasn’t prioritizing the budget I had control over to get my students this same kind of support.” Shelby is one of thousands of principals who, in the wake of the pandemic, embraced tutoring. 

Spending two years researching the emergence of this new wave of high-impact tutoring for my book The Future of Tutoring, I’ve seen firsthand how students, teachers, school leaders and parents alike get excited when they are able to provide personalized support to struggling students. Tutoring is endlessly flexible; successful tutoring has taken place for early literacy in kindergarten, fourth-grade math skills, middle grades reading, ninth-grade Algebra I, required high school exit exams and more. Public schools have found ways to provide the very service that so many parents seek outside of school — a trusted adult who regularly meets with a small group of children, understands the progress they need to make and builds a relationship with them to not only help them learn but help them want to learn. 

While the initial groundswell of high-impact tutoring fueled by federal COVID dollars has dissipated, there are states and districts continuing to provide publicly-funded tutoring. Cities like Nashville and the District of Columbia are staying the course with tutoring programs that launched in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic, while other cities like Philadelphia are trying to get new tutoring efforts off the ground now. 

Louisiana has led the way for states, with state budget investments of $30 million annually to support tutoring for students below grade-level that is now required by legislation. Massachusetts is in the first year of implementing for struggling students in grades K-3, funded by a $25 million annual state budget allocation. Ohio’s state Senate passed at the end of 2025, which, if enacted, will require high-impact tutoring for students performing below grade-level in math. 

The good news from the State of Educational Opportunity survey is that a majority of parents strongly favor public funding that provides access to free tutoring for K-12 students who fall below grade level. In fact, of the nine policy proposals that parents were asked about in the survey, public funding for tutoring ranked first with 86% of parents supporting the idea. 

Tutoring is equally popular on both sides of the aisle, the survey reveals, and that popularity holds in every single state across the country. From a low of 79% support in Vermont to a high of 92% support in D.C., it’s clear that parents across the country want every child who needs help to receive that help, paid for by public dollars. 

In a country that seems increasingly pitted against itself, tutoring is one of the last remaining policies that has a chance to pull us back together. Parents in rural, urban, red, blue, east and west America know their child’s future rests on a quality education. What we learn from this new survey is that more than three-quarters of parents in every state want this for every child, not only their own. It is time that policymakers take up this charge from their voters and make 2026 the year that tutoring becomes a permanent part of the American educational experience. 

I knew them both as education reformers and my board members as I began my career in education policy. I learned as much from what they said as from what they left unsaid. And I knew it was their and other board members’ curiosity and willingness to work with strange bedfellows to reach shared goals, that powered what many remember as the state’s golden age of reform. Those were efforts, and times, to be proud of.

I thought of the bishop, the Congressman and their political collaboration to improve education when I reviewed the results of the 2nd Edition of the Educational Opportunity in America Survey from 50CAN and Edge Research, where we asked over 23,000 American families a range of questions not just about their educational preferences, but about their experiences navigating our education system. In the era of increased partisanship and “enragement is engagement” algorithms, several of the results were fascinating not just for what they expose about family preferences, but for the complicated coalitions they reveal, which could be necessary to drive the next phase of education policy change.

In advocacy, lukewarm support for a policy doesn’t get you very far. The parents who show up are the ones who say they “strongly favor” — not just “favor” — an idea. Using that high bar, let’s look at what the survey reveals. There is strong support on the issue of whether or not states should provide free tutoring to students, with 54% of Republican parents (the lowest) strongly supporting the issue and 73% of parents identifying as members of the DSA/Green party (the highest) strongly supporting it, as well. 

Free summer camp, similarly, features strong support with 47% of Republicans, 50% of Libertarians and Independents, 63% of Democrats, and 78% of DSA/Green party respondents strongly favoring the idea. Open enrollment also enjoys fairly uniform support across the survey with between 44% of Independents and 53% of Libertarians strongly favoring letting students attend the public school of their choice. 

One might argue that tutoring, summer camp, and open enrollment are relatively anodyne and should enjoy an easy path to victory. Certainly their cross partisan endorsement creates a good base for policy change. But it’s worth noting that — in this age when no political party has close to majority support from parents — even for these popular issues to get a majority of parental support we need to reach across the aisle. 

According to Gallup, in their most just 27% of American adults consider themselves Democrats, and the same percentage consider themselves Republicans. So that 63% of Democrats who support free summer camp is only about 17% of all parents. Only by bringing in Republicans and Independents do you get back to a majority of all parents strongly in favor of the idea. 

For other issues, the logic of strange bedfellows is even stronger. When asked about the hot-button topic du jour of education savings accounts, the highest support was found among DSA/Green respondents, with 57% strongly favoring, with Libertarians and Independents bringing up the rear at 43% jointly. Charter schools, conversely, get their strongest support, at 44%, from Libertarians with all other groups between 34% ofIndependents and 38% of Republicans. Supporters of these issues can’t afford to turn anyone away. 

So what can be gleaned from this data that might help in pursuing future policy change?

First, strange bedfellows will be the norm as building a diverse constituency, when no single party can guarantee success, will require new alliances with different political alignments. Second, it will require focus and issue discipline that allows groups to support the same policy for completely different reasons. And lastly, it will necessitate a dealmaking pragmatism that allows for the packaging of issues in unexpected ways. If you care about the future of ESAs, for instance, you might want to pair it with free tutoring or free summer camp to build a broader base of support. Politics is, after all, about addition.

The good thing is that we have some striking examples of this pragmatic approach to politics in action. They include Louisiana with its Steve Carter Education Program — part of the state’s larger tutoring initiative passed alongside its GATOR ESA — Massachusetts for early literacy efforts and New Jersey with its state funded Tutoring Corps; these programs ensure more students who need tutoring receive it. Arizona used its COVID relief funds during a Republican administration to run its sweeping AZ on Track Summer camp program. And Arkansas, Idaho, Nevada, West Virginia, Oklahoma and Kansas under Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly have all recently enacted open enrollment laws. 

ESA-like policies, which by some reports half of the nation’s children are now eligible to participate in, have been the shark allowing other policies to come along for the ride like a remora. Utah and Arkansas, for instance, added significant funds to raise teacher salaries when passing their ESA laws; Arizona did so separately. Texas — because everything is larger there -– increased public school funding by $8.5 billion,$4 billion of which was for teacher salary increases, when it passed its $1 billion ESA last year. 

Arkansas also adopted the science of reading and eliminated its charter cap in the process. Indeed, there are many good examples already that show an education strategy that aligns interests of seemingly disparate groups and with popular or unexpected issues is an effective one. When it comes to the politics of education reform, more may indeed be more. 

With all of this offered, the question left for us may be: In this age of stark differences can we really focus on the areas of agreement with people we may otherwise oppose? I suspect Bishop Jackson and Congressman Zimmer asked themselves these same questions before stepping forward to lead their state’s ed reform coalition of the time. Those differences never stopped them. And they shouldn’t stop us either.

And while just 19 states now offer taxpayer-supported , which allow families to spend public funds on the school or program of their choice, the policy has a growing constituency: Nearly half of parents strongly support it. 

Meanwhile, the constituency for annual testing is withering, with just 29% of parents saying they strongly support it.

The new revelations come from the second edition of , conducted by the policy group 50CAN, which operates chapters in 12 states. It surveyed parents in 50 states and Washington, D.C., and found small but significant improvements across five key educational areas, including satisfaction with school quality and student mental health support. 

The findings paint a slightly different picture than the one we’re accustomed to seeing in accounts of crowding into school board meetings: 47% of parents now say they’re very satisfied with their child’s school, up from 45% in 2024. Satisfaction by low-income parents jumped five points, from 41% to 46%. 

Likewise, 41% are very satisfied with the kind of emotional and mental health support their children get at school, up four points from last year, with significant gains in critical transition grades such as sixth and ninth grade, both up about five percentage points. 

“Overall, my takeaway is we shouldn’t get distracted by all the headlines, all the crazy stuff going on in the world,” said Marc Porter Magee, 50CAN’s founder. “We have a very reasonable shot at making education better in ways that will meaningfully improve kids’ lives. We’re generally heading in the right direction.”

Among the findings: 

• Participation in tutoring rose from 19% to 24%, with the income gap nearly cut in half, from nine percentage points to five, but low-income families still struggle to get their kids tutoring, largely because of cost and transportation;
• 86% of parents now favor free tutoring, while 80% support free summer camps; 77% back open enrollment and universal ESAs;
• 49% of parents want their children to get a four-year degree, but only 38% believe it’ll happen, with college affordability a huge sticking point; 
• While more high-income children participated in summer camp, overall participation dropped two percentage points; among low-income kids, it dropped three points; kids from high-income families are now twice as likely to attend, 61% vs 27%.

On the summer camp statistics, Porter Magee said, “My takeaway from that is there’s still a need, and high-income families are really leaning into that. But low-income families are getting hit with affordability.”

Responding to the findings, Keri Rodrigues, president of the , said, “Parents are fighting for a school that works for their kid, but when higher-income families can buy tutoring and summer learning while everyone else gets waitlists and paperwork, that’s not choice, it’s rationing.”

She noted that the union’s polling shows that just 48% of public school parents say their child is “definitely academically prepared for next year”; 31% say schools didn’t even tell them what skills their child needs.

As for satisfaction with mental health support, a 2024 found that 65% give schools an “A” or “B,” but that 31% give schools a “C” or worse. 

She said her group’s findings on parents’ priorities are clear: “Make tutoring, mental health supports, and quality learning time universal and easy to access, especially for low-income families. If we’re serious about outcomes, we have to be serious about access.”

ESA support rising across political lines

Among the most significant findings, parents across the political spectrum are now increasingly interested in ESAs — 46% of Republicans, 49% of Democrats and 43% of Libertarians and Independents say they “strongly support” the idea, and among self-described members of the Green Party or , support climbs higher, to 57%. In most state-level debates on ESAs, political conservatives are their biggest supporters.

ESAs, as well as open-enrollment policies, which allows students to attend the public school of their choice, now command more support than charter schools, and by a wide margin: 46% to 36%.

Porter Magee said ESAs merit attention as an “anti-majoritarian” school choice policy that appeals to many different kinds of parents, for different reasons.

“If you’re on the far left, you probably don’t feel like your traditional public school and school district represents you and your values perfectly,” he said. “And it’s the same when you’re on the far right. A lot of times, the people who are most attached to traditional school districts are moderates — wealthy, suburban moderates. So it kind of does make sense.” 

Porter Magee said he knows of no other parent polls that break out political beliefs like this, suggesting that conservative policymakers who favor ESAs and other school choice proposals should consider “a strange-bedfellow strategy” that invites Green and DSA-aligned parents. “Maybe they are better allies on some of these issues than we think.”

More broadly, he said, “We should not be writing off the left or the right when we’re trying to figure out the coalition that would actually pass these things.”

Kids who are ‘just not doing a lot’

The survey also broke out responses by about 1,000 parents who are K-12 teachers. It found that they’re significantly more likely to be very satisfied with their children’s school, and that their kids participate in summer programs, sports, community service, dual enrollment, and Advanced Placement/International Baccalaureate courses at higher rates. “They’re just more engaged,” Porter Magee said. “They’re getting more out of their time as students.”

Asked about their children’s grades, parents with kids who get mostly A’s reported that their children were more likely to do 30 minutes or more of homework, spend time with friends in person and read for fun — “all the things we want them to do,” Porter Magee said. D and F students were more likely to play video games, scroll on their phones and access social media, their parents say. 

They also drop out of sports at higher rates, he said. “They’re just not doing a lot.” 

The difference between how “A” and “D” students spend their time isn’t generally addressed in public policy, he said, “partially because we haven’t had the data, partially because we don’t know what to do about it. But I do think it’s an issue, and I think parents see it as an issue.” 

Overall, Porter Magee said, the main finding from the survey is one of slow, incremental progress for kids, whose parents now feel that they have greater access to different kinds of opportunities. But the fact that much of that progress is largely enjoyed by high- and middle-income parents, he said, is problematic.

“How would you create the public systems to make a more equal world, where all of those opportunities are available to everyone?” he said. “That’s what we’re trying to do, and [what] the survey is helping us track.”

As is typical, adults demonstrate far more positive attitudes toward the local schools in their own backyards, with over 40% grading them highly. 

Even so, the results may help explain rising support among parents for private school choice. With 12 states now offering universal education savings accounts or tax credits that can be used for tuition or homeschooling, nearly 60% of parents say they would choose a private or religious school for their child if they were offered public funds. That’s up from 56% in 2020. 

The poll figures offer further evidence of a post-pandemic shift toward alternatives to traditional public schools. In Florida, a majority of K-12 students now use , from district magnet programs to homeschooling with state funds. 

“COVID was a key factor in making people more open to choice,” said Douglas Harris, an economics professor at Tulane University and the director of the National Center for Research on Education Access and Choice. He noted that frequent disparagement from Republicans, led by President Donald Trump, have contributed to the public’s souring mood.

“It wasn’t until COVID that he started to really attack public schools, and saw the power of pulling that into his larger culture war,“ Harris said. “Is the message sinking in? No doubt. When politicians relentlessly bash any institution, support for that institution goes down.”

He cautioned against reading too much into the low percentage of Americans giving public schools high marks. Many of the 1,000 poll respondents may not have kids in school. While the average voter might be influenced by politics, public school parents answer questions based on their experiences, he said.

The poll from PDK International, a professional organization for educators, comes as the Trump administration pushes to dramatically reduce the federal government’s role in schools while also pressuring them to drop equity-focused programs. Responses show that Americans agree with the president in some areas, but reject other pieces of his agenda.

Closing the Education Department

Two-thirds of U.S. adults oppose eliminating the Education Department and say such a move would negatively affect students. Support for keeping the agency intact is highest among Democrats, but at least a third of Republicans agree it should stay open. Closing the department is far more popular among men (34% in favor) than women (9%). 

Marc Porter Magee, CEO of 50CAN, a national education advocacy group, said that Americans “just aren’t super inclined” to get rid of programs.

“There is a certain ‘more is better’ kind of a vibe,” he said. Even among parents who opt to put their children in private school, many recognize the federal government’s role in holding states accountable for serving students with the greatest needs. “Protecting kids with disabilities probably polls quite well.”

Along with downsizing the department, which has shrunk to roughly half the size it was when Trump took office, the administration has taken aggressive steps to get schools and universities to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion programs. Efforts to force schools to comply with anti-DEI orders are still tied up in court, but Trump recently claimed victory. 

“The beautiful thing is, as you know, we’ve gotten rid of the woke. Woke is gone,” last month. “I think pretty well buried. We’re gonna make sure it’s buried.” 

But that’s not necessarily what Americans want. Over 60% of PDK’s respondents say DEI is important, but there’s a partisan divide. Eighty-nine percent of Democrats support such initiatives, compared with 62% of independents and 22% of Republicans. 

Opponents of equity-related efforts, like , president of the conservative Defending Education group, say some schools have rebranded their DEI efforts to emphasize “belonging.” That term has nearly unanimous support from poll respondents. Ninety-eight percent consider initiatives that make students feel welcome at school to be important or very important — second only to keeping students and teachers safe, at 99%.

Over 90% of Americans say boosting teacher pay should be a high priority, and nearly two-thirds agreed that educators’ salaries are too low. It’s a more pressing issue for Democrats, like Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who last month that would set annual teacher pay at a minimum of $60,000. Among Republicans, more than a third, 39%, agreed that teachers don’t earn enough.

Support for AI in schools drops

While it ranks lower than other topics, educating students about artificial intelligence and responsible social media use is a top concern for 84% of adults. The Education Department recently issued brief on AI integration, saying that grant funds can be used for tools that personalize learning, supplement tutoring and help students make post-secondary plans. 

Teachers and students are inundated almost daily with AI tools, like ChatGPT’s new “study mode,” meant to help students solve problems “step by step,” rather than just giving them the answer. Khan Academy offers an AI tutor, and research shows some AI tutoring offers promising results.

But Americans’ enthusiasm about AI’s potential in education has dropped since last year. Less than half of respondents support or strongly support teachers using AI to create lesson plans, down from 62% in 2024. Thirty-eight percent of adults think it’s fine for students to use AI to complete their homework, a drop from 43% last year.

Kyla Johnson-Trammell, who recently stepped down after eight years leading the Oakland Unified School District in California, said she’s not surprised about Americans’ deepening skepticism.

“At the end of the day, learning happens when kids have a relationship with the teacher and when they’re engaged in human connection,” she said. But she also sees value in using AI tools to solve specific dilemmas. A teacher might grade 30 essays, but can then use AI to “look for trends across all those papers, like ‘a majority of your students need help being able to write a clear thesis,’ ” she said. “Technology can do that.”

Most educators who try AI don’t stick with a tool more than seven days during a three-month period, according to an by Stanford University’s Generative AI Education Hub. The report, based on data from 9,000 teachers, showed that the 40% who become regular users lean toward teacher-focused chatbots rather than AI assistance for students.

The of AI for educational purposes comes as more states enact policies to ban cellphone use during the school day. have restrictions in place, and while it focuses on college freshman, a finds increases in academic performance once a ban is enforced.

The public largely supports such policies, the poll found. Forty percent agreed with a full-day ban, while 46% said students should only be able to use their phones during lunch and class breaks. 

Some experts are frustrated by the apparent contradiction. 

“This is what I find so completely surreal about the current moment,” Benjamin Riley, who writes about learning and generative AI, last month. “We can’t even say smartphones are being ‘memory holed’ because the bans in schools are happening quite literally at the same time as various ed-tech hucksters are falling all over themselves to push AI into the classroom. Wake up!”

Porter Magee said he worries about the “downstream” effects of devices on student habits, including trouble focusing and a continued . 

“It feels like we’re swimming against a tough tide,” he said.

But new data suggests that’s changing. 

In a recent of 20,000 parents, respondents said they trust communication from their children’s teachers more than any other source of information to judge whether their kids are on track. That was the case regardless of whether parents thought their children performed on grade level. 

The finding came as a surprise to Bibb Hubbard, president of Learning Heroes, a nonprofit that helps parents understand student achievement data. In , including surveys her own organization has conducted since , parents have listed grades as the primary indicator of student performance. 

“For the first time, grades are not the number one factor,” she said. “Teachers really are on the front lines in terms of communicating to families about where their kids are.”

As one who urges schools to level with families about student progress, Hubbard zeroed in on that point among the trove of data that 50CAN, a national education advocacy organization, released in October. 

One reason for the shift, she said, is the falling importance of grades as a dependable measure of learning. Long before COVID, and news reports pointed to examples of : While grade-point averages have steadily increased, objective measures of performance like remained flat. States and districts further relaxed grading standards during the pandemic, and parents took notice. The growth of online communication apps that allow teachers to update parents throughout the year on children’s progress have also lessened report cards’ influence, Hubbard said.

“Just putting the grade in the portal is not going to be sufficient for any parent right now,” she added. “They want that connection. They want that relationship.”

At Kickapoo High School in Springfield, Missouri, Algebra teacher Cicely Woodard said she tries to be as specific as possible when grading assignments by labeling tests with the skills students are learning — like exponents — so parents don’t have to guess. But she also leans on parents to understand why students might be struggling.

“I’ll say, ‘This is what I’m observing.’ Then I’ll be quiet and listen,” she said “I can learn so much from parents who know their children really well.”

Almost 30% of parents in the 50CAN survey said they rely on that type of communication from teachers more than any other source of information. Report card grades were second, with 20%. 

Parents who believe their children are performing below grade level value that interaction with teachers even more than those who think their kids are at or above grade level, the data shows — 36 to 28%. During the 2023-24 school year, parents who thought their children weren’t meeting expectations were more likely than others to communicate with teachers outside of parent-teacher conferences, talk to their school’s principal and consult with their child’s guidance counselor.

They also want their kids to get additional instruction. If they had the time or money, parents who think their children are below grade level would choose tutoring over organized sports and art, dance or music lessons, the survey showed. But a higher percentage of those parents also said tutoring was too expensive or wasn’t available in their community.

“They are engaged. They care about their kids, and they are not getting the support that they necessarily need,” Hubbard said.

Melony Watson, a mom of six in Fort Worth, Texas, said she’s barely looked at report cards in two years. She felt misled when one of her daughters kept making the honor roll even though she couldn’t read. 

“I’m a proud parent, sitting there clapping and jumping up and down because my baby’s walking across the stage, getting certificate after certificate,” Watson said. But by third grade, she told her daughter’s teacher that she saw signs of a learning disability. Her daughter wrote letters and numbers backwards and out of order. “They’re like, ‘No, no, she’s just a COVID baby. She’s going to be a little behind.’ ”

Watson ultimately quit her job as a substitute teacher and homeschooled her daughter for a year before enrolling her in a different school. Now, with her children in third through 12th grade, she is in frequent contact with their teachers, especially in eighth grade algebra and ninth grade social studies. 

“I get weekly updates to know what test my child has failed,” she said. “I have made myself known. If those teachers think that you don’t care, they’re not going to go the extra mile.”

‘Tipping point’

Parents aren’t the only ones who think grades provide a less-reliable predictor of success than standardized tests. Several universities, mostly Ivy league institutions, have reinstated for admissions after dropping them during the pandemic. 

“I do think that it is possible that we are nearing a tipping point with regard to grade inflation,” said Adam Tyner, who wrote about the issue in a for the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute, where he is national research director. “Maybe parents are also starting to see teacher-assigned grades as a less valuable signal.”

To Hubbard, the results suggest that teachers need better training on discussing test scores with parents. Surveys of teachers conducted by show educators often fear either that parents won’t believe their children are behind or that administrators will overrule their grading decisions.

“It needs to be an expectation for teachers to have ongoing communications with families — which takes time, training and support,” she said. “Otherwise, families will continue to be sidelined in being able to most effectively support their children’s learning and development.”

The aims to end what it calls “discriminatory public school district boundary lines” in all 50 states by 2030. 

Members say past efforts to address this issue are weak and ineffective. allowed students to transfer within their school district, while 19 and the District of Columbia permitted them to transfer elsewhere. But many programs are voluntary on the part of receiving schools. Some require a sign-off from a student’s home school district or charge tuition for families seeking to make a switch.

Many do not allow parents to appeal a decision.

“The existing open enrollment laws are deeply flawed and limited,” said Tim DeRoche, president of Available to All, a coalition member. “They are circumscribed in very deliberate ways in many, many states.”

Proponents of robust open enrollment laws tout of 1,000 people from across the nation that showed two-thirds favored allowing a child to attend any public school in the state. The notion was particularly appealing to Black respondents: 76% favored the idea. 

A Charles organization called ., which pushes for expanding learning opportunities, including school choice, is leading the effort. Coalition members discuss the issue with policymakers and publish examining state laws that criminally prosecute parents for using addresses other than their own to enroll their children in public school. 

They also explain how states can address the lasting impacts of redlining, a decades-old practice that branded some communities as financially risky — a label linked to current education disparities and zoning restrictions. 

Jorge Elorza, chief executive officer of Democrats for Education Reform, another coalition member, said children should be free to pursue their education in schools that meet their needs.

“It comes down to expanding the options that families have over the schools they have access to,” he said. 

To that end, for example, is working with lawmakers in South Carolina to advance . 

, the group’s chief operating officer, noted, too, that Idaho recently widening the opportunity for children to attend schools of their choosing. 

Currently, parents in that state must apply for a transfer, with priority given to those who wish to switch within their home district. School officials may deny such a request if the student had been expelled, has a history of significant disciplinary issues or was chronically absent, or if the new district does not have capacity. 

Challenges against zoning rules have arisen in other parts of the country as well, including in New Jersey, where the Latino Action Network and NAACP, among others, in 2018. They cited residency requirements that often keep Black and Latino students in subpar schools. A judge rendered a on the case last fall.

Opponents of open enrollment laws fear they could drain low-performing schools of their best students, but coalition members say that not all families whose children attend troubled schools seek to switch, even when given the chance. 

Students who feel loved and supported by their educators often stay, Jedynak said. But, she added, simply having strong open enrollment policies forces public schools to improve or specialize in order to attract students.. 

Public schools in Arizona, which have among the least restrictive open enrollment policies in this country, for students for years. 

, president of 50CAN, another coalition member, recalls his mother and grandmother trying to devise a way to get him into a better middle school outside their southwest Baltimore zone. 

His aunt, a teacher in the city schools, knew how to navigate a pathway to a better education, and Bradford ultimately tested into a magnet school. But not all children have relatives who understand the system. 

“This is a hidden but treacherous problem that many American families are navigating all the time,” he said. “It is widely known and understood, but rarely talked about.” 

Bradford said school choice is most often available for the lucky and the rich, including those families who can afford homes in wealthy neighborhoods with high-performing schools. The remainder are often left behind, with some opting to break the law for their children — a choice that can bring about dire consequences. 

can land parents, friends and family members in jail. Kelley Williams-Bolar, for example, in 2011 for sending her two young daughters to a school they were not zoned to attend outside Akron, Ohio. 

She said parents should not be penalized for trying to secure a better future for their children. 

“This is not malicious, trying to steal, trying to do something horrific,” she said, adding that many people in her community face the same dilemma. “I don’t know a parent yet who would say it’s OK for (their children) not to get all of the fundamentals they need. Everyone wants their child to have the best education.”

If that means upending rules that have governed admissions for generations, that’s fine, she said. 

“It’s time to go back in, re-evaluate and make change,” she said.

Disclosure: yes. every kid. is a grantee of the Stand Together network. Stand Together Trust provides financial support to ����Ӱ��.

The Carnegie Corporation of New York, Stand Together Trust, Walton Family Foundation and Nellie Mae Education Foundation provide financial support to 50CAN and The 74. Campbell Brown sits on 50CAN’s board of directors. Brown co-founded ����Ӱ�� and sits on its board of directors.

With amounts ranging from $3,200 to $7,500 per child, depending on family income, the program is expected to be the second largest in the nation, after Florida’s. The budget that included the plan passed 26 to 17 in the Senate and 70 to 40 in the House, with five Democrats crossing the aisle. 

The bill’s passage was the culmination of years of work for Marcus Brandon, a former Democratic state representative who considered himself a progressive and once thought vouchers were “evil.”

“My constituents are the ones that led me here. They’re the ones that talked about the lack of educational opportunities,” said Brandon, who represented the Greensboro area until  2015. He’s now executive director of NorthCarolinaCAN, part of the 50CAN network, which advocates for school choice nationwide. 

With the vote, North Carolina becomes the ninth state with a universal school choice program in a year of unprecedented expansion. Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, Utah and West Virginia now have ESA programs open to all. Oklahoma has a universal tax credit program. Ohio has a universal voucher program and in Indiana, the family income ceiling for a voucher is set so high that it’s . Opponents argue that universal ESAs hurt funding for public schools and largely go to families whose children never attended the public system rather than those seeking to escape failing schools. 

“If this funding was instead allocated to our public schools, the budget could more than double teacher raises” for the next two years, said Mary Ann Wolf, president and executive director of Public School Forum, an advocacy group that . “Half of our teachers do not make a livable wage.”

But advocates say the programs are giving families the freedom they need to personalize learning for their children.

“We’ve seen incredible wins for students over the past two years, and we expect to see school choice continue to grow and benefit families across the country in the coming years,” Patricia Levesque, CEO of ExcelinEd, a school reform organization, said in an email.

North Carolina has had that provides between $9,000 and $17,000 annually for students with disabilities since the 2018-19 school year. A separate voucher program supports low-income students attending private schools. Both programs have seen over the past year as the state expanded eligibility. Those programs will now be combined under the new universal ESA, which will go into effect in the 2024-25 school year. 

“The real breakthrough with this new legislation is the universality,” said Marc Porter Magee, founder and CEO of 50CAN. “We know that parents are hungry for an education system that recognizes the uniqueness of their children and ultimately, ESAs enable families to craft the education that’s right for them.” 

Brandon expects roughly 80% of the 126,000 students in the state’s private schools to take advantage of the ESA. For comparison, almost 67,000 students are using Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Account, including homeschooling families. While homeschoolers won’t be eligible in North Carolina, it would be relatively easy, Brandon said, for families in pods or microschools to qualify for an ESA. He thinks current homeschooling families would choose that route. 

“All it takes is a fire and health inspection,” he said.  

He thinks 70% of students in public schools and 30% using choice programs is a “healthy split.”

Similar to opponents of vouchers in other states, Wolf is concerned that the plan will especially hurt schools in rural areas.

“Eighty of our 100 counties are rural,” she said. “Our schools are the hub of so many of our communities.”

Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, who declared over the voucher issue and with the Republican-dominated legislature over education issues, announced that the budget would become law without his signature. it a “bad budget that seriously shortchanges our schools.” But it also includes a he wants.

Opponents want greater guardrails on how families spend the money and say students using ESAs should be required to take the same assessments as students in public schools. 

The bill would require the state superintendent to recommend a standardized test for students on vouchers in private schools. But Wolf said her concerns go beyond academic performance.

“Should our public dollars be going to private schools that can discriminate, that don’t have to be accredited, that are held only to minimal transparency?” she asked. 

Brandon said he leans toward as few restrictions as possible.

“I do not ever want to compromise the flexibility and the uniqueness of what private means,” he said. “ can spend $40,000 for his kid and understand that that is a quality education. All parents are just like him. They are able to recognize a school that’s working or is not working for their child.”

Offered the job by then-Mayor Bill de Blasio, Carvalho in private, then presided over a televised school board meeting that featured three hours of supporters all but begging him to stay. In the end, Carvalho remained.

greeted the move in Miami, but it didn’t go over so well in New York, home to the nation’s largest school district: Eric Phillips, de Blasio’s press secretary, , “Who would ever hire this guy again?”

Four years later, Phillips has his answer: Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second-largest school system.

The drama of the hire was underscored by Pedro Noguera, dean of the University of Southern California Rossier School of Education, who likened the move to “LeBron coming to the Lakers.” But Los Angeles offers only the most recent example of an oversize personality with huge ambitions taking over a district’s top job. Right now, all three of the nation’s largest school systems are run by energetic reformers, a rarity even in big-city schools circles.

All of them greet Spring 2022 full of promise — and problems. Over the next few years, they’ll enjoy unprecedented funding as taxpayers throw billions of dollars at schools to scrub away deficits caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

But all three districts are rapidly losing students. And unions, emboldened by 2021 victories around remote instruction and, in recent years, high-profile strikes, could be formidable obstacles to their priorities. In Chicago, new schools CEO has already faced down a citywide teacher walkout.

In addition to Carvalho and Martinez, who are both immigrants, New York City Mayor Eric Adams in December named , the founder of a small network of public boys’ schools, as the new school chancellor. Banks’s schools have stood out for, among other reasons, employing many male teachers of color.

All three “definitely seem reform minded, which I think is super exciting and a real breath of fresh air,” said , superintendent of the Catholic independent Partnership Schools network. 

“I think it really speaks to the moment we’re at as we’re coming out of COVID,” she said. The pandemic “provided an uncomfortable reminder” of the need for leaders who will put children’s needs first. 

Billions in new funding … until 2024

Martinez, Chicago’s new schools CEO, is of Chiefs for Change, a group that advocates for increased school choice, effective teacher preparation, and standards-aligned curricula. But it also rails against “onerous bureaucracy” in schools. That credo will certainly be challenged by the sheer scale of federal intervention: some in COVID-related relief since 2020.

In New York, state lawmakers in 2021 increased funding to New York City by nearly half a billion dollars. By next year, a lawsuit settled last year to equalize urban school funding could bring that to $1 billion, said president of Bank Street College and New York City’s former senior deputy chancellor. “So there is a significant infusion of new dollars into the school system that can be used to dig into systemic issues. And that’s very rare.”

As in districts large and small elsewhere, the three leaders are “all drinking from a firehose” of funding, said of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. But that also places extra responsibility on them: “No one can blame lack of funding as their excuse for not getting things done,” she said.

But unless Congress acts, all that extra funding will run out in 2024. None of the three new leaders agreed to be interviewed for this piece.

, who leads the AASA, the nation’s school superintendent’s association, said many leaders are using the cash to upgrade facilities. But spending it on generous raises or new instructional positions could actually put them at odds with unions, since those jobs won’t be sustainable.

“The financial cliff is only two years away,” he said.

A ‘friend of charters back at the helm’

A product of New York City’s public schools, Banks cut his teeth founding and the network of five unionized Eagle Academy public schools in New York City and Newark.

While the schools aren’t charters, Banks has said he supports charter schools. He told in December that families “are desperate for quality seats, quality schools … And if the traditional public schools were offering that, you wouldn’t see such a mass rush to the charter schools.”

Banks created the Eagle Academy schools to serve academically struggling boys of color in grades six through 12 who often face harsh discipline. As chancellor, he said, his first priorities are to expand early childhood education, improve career pathways for older students, and to combat students’ trauma.

, president of the United Federation of Teachers, the city’s union, has known Banks for years. “I’ve been at his schools and I found them to be quite well-run,” he said. All the same, running the largest school district in the nation will force him to tame the city schools’ “mammoth bureaucracy.” 

The last two mayors have restructured the school system six times, Mulgrew said. “And every time, all they did was add another layer.”

In his , Banks on March 2 acknowledged that many families have “decided to vote with their feet, and to say, ‘We’re going to find other alternatives and other choices for our children.’” 

He promised an overhaul of the bureaucracy, including requiring district superintendents to reapply for their jobs. And he took direct aim at the way many schools teach reading, criticizing a method developed by a Columbia University Teachers College professor that “has not worked” with many children. He promised to shift to a method that emphasizes explicit phonics instruction, among other changes.

Banks has also said he’d like to transform city schools from the bottom up by handing to “principals who know what they’re doing,” according to the speech. He also wants to tweak how standardized tests are used, allowing students to show they’ve mastered content in other ways.

His ascendance stands in contrast to previous leaders who have looked suspiciously on the charter sector. New York actually caps the number of charter schools statewide at 460, with just 290 allowed for nearly 1 million students in New York City. While it’d take a state-level change to allow more, choice advocates said Banks can eloquently make the case.

“It feels to me like this is the moment where we can really see that there is a friend of charters back at the helm of New York City schools, which I think is really great to see, and I know is probably sending some shockwaves,” said Porter-Magee.

So far, at least, Banks hasn’t forcefully pushed to lift the cap, in December, “We want to scale excellence. So if that means opening a few more charter schools, that’s what we’re going to do … if we can get the state to approve it.” But he said he’s also encouraging the philanthropic community “to lean in on the traditional public school system, because at the end of the day, most of our children will continue to go to our traditional public schools.”

Enrollment downturns

Carvalho, who led Miami-Dade schools for 14 years, has been able to compete with charters by creating centralized data systems that allowed him to keep track of students’ academic progress better than most big-city leaders during the pandemic, Rees said. 

A Portuguese immigrant, Carvalho grew up in Miami and worked restaurant and construction jobs early on. He came up through the ranks in Miami-Dade, starting out as a high school science teacher and becoming a new breed of area leader: one who sticks around. Before he took the top job in 2008, Miami-Dade “was a revolving door for superintendents coming and going,” Domenech said.

Sticking around paid off. In 2012, the district won the coveted $1 million Broad Prize for Urban Education, which recognizes school districts that have shown academic improvement while narrowing the achievement gap. More recent findings from the district’s Office of Academics and Transformation paint a : While Black students’ graduation rates rose from 62.4 percent in 2011 to 85.6 percent in 2020, just 40 percent of Black students in 2019 were proficient in reading; 44 percent were proficient in math. 

With parents clamoring to remediate lost instructional time during the pandemic, Domenech said Carvalho brought in “a very creative” program that contracted with camps to provide summer school.

Carvalho’s long tenure — the average big-city leader sticks around — is “a testament to his savvy in terms of the politics, in dealing with the board, in dealing with the community, in dealing with employee groups,” Domenech said.

He’ll need that savvy in Los Angeles, which also has recently featured a revolving door of superintendents, a strong union and an outspoken, ever-shifting school board — it currently has three seats open in the next election. In Los Angeles, Carvalho will work at the pleasure of the school board. Meanwhile, Banks and Martinez will work for the mayors of their respective cities.

During his second week at LAUSD, Carvalho unveiled a that includes expanded preschool, year-round learning and a “Parent Academy” offering coursework to help parents understand their children’s education. He’d also lengthen the school year and offer teachers more professional development. He acknowledged that he’d have to negotiate with the city’s teachers union about those last two ideas.

Carvalho last month told ����Ӱ�� the district must expand school choice if it wants to keep from “bleeding out students” from a system that, while much bigger than Miami, has fewer than one-third as many school choice options.

Los Angeles students, he said, basically have two choices at the moment: magnet schools and charter schools. “Whoever decided to restrict choice on the basis of those parameters?” he asked. “Where are the programs in L.A. where we see long waiting lists of parents? Why aren’t we expanding more of those programs to where the demand is?”

He has the district consider an “explosion of offerings” for students, including dual-enrollment programs, International Baccalaureate programs, fine and performing arts magnet schools, and single-gender schools, among others. “I’m less concerned about the dynamic of dialogue that usually separates people into two camps: charter versus non-charter. I’m more interested in programmatic offerings that benefit kids — period.”

Carvalho suggested that the district analyze which programs motivate students to travel long distances from their neighborhoods and offer more of these. “I can fill an entire wall with a repertoire of options for parents. Why aren’t we offering all of that?”

Throughout the pandemic, all three cities have struggled to retain and, in some cases, even find their students. All have seen in .

of the California Charter Schools Association said a crashing birth rate across California is a cause for concern. And net migration has actually dipped “into the negatives” as home due to anti-immigration policies and economic uncertainty.

“This is not about ‘The affluent went to Tahoe during the pandemic to hunker down,’” she said. “This is real and it’s permanent and it’s creating challenges across the state.”

An ‘innovative and data-informed’ school integration experiment

Born in Mexico, Martinez emigrated to the U.S. with his family when he was 5. He is in a family of 12 children with deep ties to Chicago’s public school system — three of his sisters and some 28 nieces and nephews attend local public schools. 

Martinez was working in finance for the Archdiocese of Chicago in 2003 when then-Chicago Public Schools Superintendent Arne Duncan hired him as chief financial officer. He remained there until 2009 — Duncan moved on to serve as U.S. Education Secretary under President Obama. Martinez made a name for himself leading the San Antonio Independent School District through a redesign, beginning in 2015, that ����Ӱ�� dubbed “one of America’s most innovative and data-informed school integration experiments.”

Using family income data, he mapped poverty levels for each city block. Then he integrated schools not by race but by income and, among other factors, by parents’ education levels. Three years later, San Antonio’s 90 schools and 47,000 students were among the fastest-improving in Texas.

In Chicago, he faces something entirely different: a 330,000-student system that’s as families leave the city. Recent enrollment data show that while 43,500 new students enrolled for the first time this year, 54,000 left between the last school year and this one.

On the job in Chicago for seven months, Martinez has already his first major crisis: the city’s teachers in early January voted to not show up for work until COVID-19 safety demands were met. 

Martinez proposed a host of measures, including building-level testing to determine when to close schools. But the union, with memories of an that ended with millions in extra spending, insisted on more strict measures, including negative PCR tests for all staff, students, and volunteers in order to keep schools open. 

The strike lasted just under a week after the district agreed to increase testing options, allow remote learning on a case-by-case basis, and secure more KN95 masks. Despite the agreement, union Vice President Stacy Davis Gates Mayor Lori Lightfoot as “unfit to lead our city. She’s on a one-woman kamikaze mission to destroy our public schools.”

‘This is the moment that unions should be at their strongest’

, a school consultant and occasional columnist for ����Ӱ��, said the political climate in all three cities reflects a desire by voters more broadly and parents specifically, to pull back from “super-progressive” policies, such as the Defund the Police movement, to more centrist strategies that simply ensure a solid education for all. Parents “just want a school system they can count on, that’s reliable, that is just serving their kids.”

, president of the education advocacy group 50CAN, said Adams, the New York mayor, campaigned on not just a return to moderation but normalcy: “The schools are open, the subways are safe. The restaurants work. People are back in their offices. That’s almost nostalgia now, and people crave that. And I think these candidates got that. And their education choices reflect that too.”

At the same time, unions are on the ascent. With their to in-person instruction amid COVID-19 spikes and a handful of recent in recent years, they’ve seen their and influence grow after years of declining membership. 

“This is the moment that unions should be at their strongest,” said , a resident senior fellow at the R Street Institute, a libertarian Washington, D.C., think tank. “This is a health crisis, and unions are designed to make sure that they’re protecting the health and safety of their members.”

But over the past few years, he said, unions in many places have “overplayed their hands” by demanding that instruction stay remote. The arrival of these new leaders may signal something different altogether: The new leaders are by no means union supporters, even if voters in each of their solidly blue cities are.

Rees, of the charter schools group, noted that Banks hired Dan Weisberg as first deputy chancellor. Since 2015, Weisberg has served as , a national nonprofit (formerly called The New Teacher Project) that has trained thousands of teachers outside of traditional teachers colleges. Since its founding in 1997, it has had a complicated relationship with unions. 

In 2018, after the U.S. Supreme Court dealt unions a blow by making a portion of members’ dues optional, Weisberg wrote that he disagreed with the decision, calling it “a matter of basic fairness that teachers who reap the benefits of collective bargaining should also share in the costs.”

But Weisberg also called the decision “a blessing in disguise” for unions, which he said “are now forced to finally confront an existential threat that’s been brewing for years: They’re losing touch with more and more of their members.”

Rees said Weisberg’s hiring “gives us confidence that there’s a new sheriff in town and that things are going to be a little bit different, or at least that the reform community and the charter school community will have a seat at the table.”