NEPC Press Releases

New Report Surveying School Board Members Offers Nuanced Snapshot but Falls Short on Guidance

National Education Policy Center — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 03:07:00 -0500

BOULDER, CO (March 26, 2026) — A recent Fordham Institute report surveys more than 5,000 school board members across over 3,000 districts, finding they are disproportionately White, college educated, and often current or former teachers, with politics and beliefs that largely mirror both the U.S. public and their local communities.

In their review of Who’s on Board? School Boards and Political Representation in an Age of Conflict, Arizona State University professors Carrie Sampson and Jeanne M. Powers find the report offers a useful snapshot of board composition, political orientation, and perceptions.

A key strength of the report is its use of nationally representative and enrollment-based weighting, yielding a relatively nuanced picture. These data show modest differences between board members and the public on perceptions of school quality, school choice, and teachers’ unions. The report flags these gaps, along with the underrepresentation of Black and Hispanic Americans, as concerns.

Yet the report offers no guidance for addressing them. It also suffers from some leading and ambiguous question wording, raising concerns on findings about charter schools and school quality.

The reviewers caution that the main body of the report is accompanied by an especially problematic Foreword, which misrepresents the study and advances unsubstantiated claims using partisan language, overstating some findings, and ignoring others. For instance, the Foreword frames board members’ relatively lower support for charter schools under a heading asking whether boards are “the most anti-charter groups in the country.”

Overall, Sampson and Powers conclude the results are informative but offer little for policymakers, in large part because the report lacks clear recommendations.

Find the review, written by Carrie Sampson and Jeanne M. Powers, at:
https://nepc.colorado.edu/review/school-board

Find Who’s on Board? School Boards and Political Representation in an Age of Conflict, written by David M. Houston and Michael T. Hartney and published by the Fordham Institute, at: https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/research/whos-board-school-boards-and-political-representation-age-conflict

NEPC Talks Education: Building and Sustaining Equity-Centered Principal Pipelines

National Education Policy Center — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 23:32:53 -0500

BOULDER, CO (March 19, 2026) — In this month’s episode of NEPC Talks Education, Christopher Saldaña interviews Dr. Ain Grooms, professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison; Dr. Joshua Childs, professor at the University of Texas at Austin; and Dr. April Peters, professor at the University of Houston. Their joint research examines the design and implementation of equity-centered principal pipelines. In this month’s podcast, they offer insights into building and sustaining educational leadership systems that genuinely center equity.

All three researchers emphasize that developing equitable principal pipelines requires districts to reflect deeply on their local histories and use that knowledge to design leadership development systems that advance student outcomes, particularly for students of color, students from low-income backgrounds, and English language learners. Peters notes that especially because principals substantially influence student outcomes, districts must actively support them. She invites districts pursuing equity-centered principal pipeline design and implementation to think carefully about who is responsible for supporting school leaders, what those support structures look like, and how they connect to the broader goal of student success.

Childs emphasizes that principals cannot be understood apart from the larger ecosystem in which they work, which includes students, families, community members, and central office divisions. He identifies several significant challenges facing school leaders today, including a shortage of experienced administrators, the emotional and mental health toll of leadership, and the lasting erosion of community trust in schools that began during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Peters and Grooms address the shifting political context that has complicated equity-centered work in recent years. Facing budget cuts, heightened scrutiny, and hostile policy environments, districts have had to become increasingly flexible about how they pursue equity goals. Grooms describes how some partnering districts are responding by reimagining their community engagement plans, and actively bringing in voices that are otherwise rarely included when decisions are made about hiring principals, setting budgets, or closing schools.

All three guests offer encouragement and practical guidance for educational leaders looking to pursue the work of creating equity-centered principal pipelines. Peters counsels leaders not to go it alone, to plan proactively for political opposition, and to hire people with genuine equity commitments at their core. Grooms reminds listeners that equity work is a long, ongoing process. Throughout, the researchers express genuine optimism, pointing to the resilience of equity-committed scholars, the dedication of practitioners they have observed across districts, and the promise that well-designed principal pipelines will ultimately benefit the students and families those systems are built to serve.

A new NEPC Talks Education podcast episode, hosted by Christopher Saldaña, will be released each month from September through May.

Don’t worry if you miss a month. All episodes are archived on the NEPC website and can be found here.

NEPC podcast episodes are also available on Apple Podcasts under the title NEPC Talks Education. Subscribe and follow!

Cautionary Brookings Report Attempts to Weigh Opportunities and Risks of Generative AI in Education

National Education Policy Center — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 02:53:09 -0500

BOULDER, CO (March 12, 2026) — A recent Brookings Institution report synthesizes findings from a year-long study of generative artificial intelligence (AI) in education, concluding that its potential harms to young people’s learning and development currently outweigh its benefits.

In his review of A New Direction for Students in an AI World: Prosper, Prepare, Protect, University of Colorado Boulder professor William R. Penuel found it to be a useful tool to anticipate potential benefits and harms of AI but found it weaker in offering any clear blueprint for changing the trajectory of AI in education.

The report identifies three focus areas for action: promoting AI tools that support evidence-informed pedagogies; developing holistic AI literacy; and advancing trustworthy AI tool design, governance, and guidelines that prioritize safety, privacy, and healthy development.

The report’s strength lies in its breadth of perspectives and research. It provides decision makers with a wide range of ideas. But it offers little help in selecting and evaluating options for ensuring that AI is used to benefit rather than harm young people’s well-being. Also, it does not systematically weigh evidence by quality or type, leaving readers to draw divergent conclusions. More concerning, decision makers are presented with numerous recommendations but minimal guidance on how to evaluate or implement them, including little clarity about which stakeholders should carry out its 12 proposed actions.

Ultimately, Professor Penuel concludes, the report serves as a useful overview of the complex issues surrounding generative AI in education, though its impact is constrained by a reluctance to decisively assess whether future benefits can meaningfully outweigh current risks.

Find the review, written by William R. Penuel, at:
https://nepc.colorado.edu/review/generative-ai

Find A New Direction for Students in an AI World: Prosper, Prepare, Protect, written by Mary Burns, Rebecca Winthrop, Natasha Luther, Emma Venetis, and Rida Karim and published by the Brookings Institution, at: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/A-New-Direction-for-Students-in-an-AI-World-FULL-REPORT.pdf

Public Education Threatened by Decades of Manufactured Crises

National Education Policy Center — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 02:08:49 -0600

BOULDER, CO (March 3, 2026) — Critiques of public education have intensified in recent years. While public schools do indeed have real areas in need of growth and improvement, many of today’s attacks are generated and amplified by organizations seeking to manufacture crises. These narratives often ignore counterevidence, and they use deceptive language to portray the system as broadly failing, even hopeless.

To examine these destructive critiques, Huriya Jabbar and Daniel Espinoza of the University of Southern California authored a policy brief, The Cycle of Disinvestment in Public Schools: How Public School Criticism Drives Policy and Disinvestment, released today by NEPC. The brief identifies five core narratives used to portray a failing education system: claims of underachievement, inefficiency, inequality, lack of school choice, and indoctrination.

The brief warns that overstated crisis narratives fuel a cycle of disinvestment: Eroding public confidence leads to reduced funding and enrollment, which strains schools and invites further criticism. This cycle weakens the public system while advancing privatization of what has long been considered a public good.

Each of the five core narratives is poorly grounded, according to Jabbar and Espinoza.

The “achievement” attack rests on disappointing test scores while downplaying the powerful influence of poverty and inequality on student performance. Polling consistently shows that parents rate their own public schools highly, even as they accept the broader myth that public schools nationwide are failing, revealing a gap between lived experience and manufactured narrative.

Charges of inefficiency similarly rely on narrow test score measures and attacks on unions, despite evidence that increased funding improves student achievement, especially for low-income students.

Claims that public schools exacerbate inequality ignore research showing that inequitable funding and broader social conditions drive disparities, and that public education remains essential to addressing them.

Advocates of vouchers and expanded school choice argue that families lack options, yet recent research finds large-scale voucher programs tend to lower student outcomes and increase segregation.

Allegations of indoctrination depend on sensationalized examples that ignore the largely uncontroversial, inclusive nature of most classroom instruction.

Amid COVID-19 disruptions, culture wars, rapid voucher expansion, immigration enforcement in schools, and federal policy and funding threats, the danger to public education is acute. Without correction, manufactured crises will continue to justify underinvestment, deepen inequality, and roll back hard-won gains in equity and student outcomes. Jabbar and Espinoza call on policymakers to counter manufactured narratives with evidence and to work toward reversing prior disinvestment by promoting equitable funding of instruction and facilities.

Find The Cycle of Disinvestment in Public Schools: How Public School Criticism Drives Policy and Disinvestment, by Huriya Jabbar and Daniel Espinoza, at:
http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/disinvestment

Mississippi Lawmakers Should Be Wary of Universal ESAs – and EdChoice’s Claims

National Education Policy Center — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 02:36:54 -0600

BOULDER, CO (February 24, 2026) — A recent report from EdChoice estimates the long-term economic returns of a universal education savings account (ESA) policy in Mississippi. ESA policies provide taxpayer dollars to households that decline to send their children to public schools, allowing those funds to be used for private school tuition or other educational expenses. As ESAs and similar school choice programs expand rapidly across the country, rigorous research is essential to inform sound, evidence-based policymaking.

Although the EdChoice report attempts to measure the long-term economic benefits of a universal ESA, it contains significant methodological errors, questionable assumptions, and misleading conclusions. University of Washington professor David S. Knight reviewed Estimating the Long-Run Impact of a Universal ESA Program in Mississippi and found it offers limited value for informing sound public policy.

The report bases its projections on evaluations of programs that are not universal ESA models; the programs included in the analyses have substantially different fiscal approaches, including conventional vouchers and approaches that use tax-credits to fund the private-school subsidies. The report also overstates projected benefits while omitting a meaningful analysis of program costs, despite extensive evidence that such initiatives require significant state expenditures. By omitting these costs and relying on dissimilar policy models, the report presents an incomplete and potentially distorted view of the policy’s fiscal and economic impact.

As a result, Professor Knight concludes, the report risks misleading state leaders about how best to invest limited education dollars. Any lawmaker treating this report as definitive evidence for advancing a universal ESA proposal risks undermining what should be an informed, evidence-based debate. Legislators should instead examine the broader body of independent research.

Find the review, written by David S. Knight, at:
https://nepc.colorado.edu/review/mississippi-esa

Find Estimating the Long-Run Impact of a Universal ESA Program in Mississippi, authored by Martin Lueken and Michael Q. McShane and published by EdChoice, at: https://www.edchoice.org/research/estimating-the-long-run-impact-of-a-universal-esa-program-in-mississippi/

NEPC Talks Education: Demographic Change, Segregation, and the Future of School Equity

National Education Policy Center — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 01:31:45 -0600

BOULDER, CO (February 17, 2026) — In this month's episode of NEPC Talks Education, Christopher Saldaña interviews Erica Turner, associate professor of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Bryan Mann, associate professor of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of Kansas. Turner and Mann discuss the ways in which demographic change is reshaping American schools and how current policy responses can promote equity and integration.

Turner, author of Suddenly Diverse: How School Districts Manage Race and Inequality, describes how refugee resettlement, immigration, and migration of Black families seeking opportunity, as well as economic downturn, have led to shifts in the racial and economic composition of communities that were once predominantly white and middle class. These changes present challenges for districts whose leaders and teachers were unprepared for the diversity now present in their schools. Turner explains that district leaders often respond to these changes with business-oriented, race-neutral strategies such as performance monitoring, test-score-driven decision making, and marketing diversity. Such approaches typically fail to address the structural inequalities already embedded in schools.

Mann’s large-scale research reveals a striking paradox: While white student isolation has declined, particularly in suburbs, isolation for students of color has actually increased, especially in urban areas. He attributes this to both compositional shifts and the choices families make, noting that families of color often make more integrative moves into suburban districts, while white families moving into cities tend to seek out schools that are higher in socioeconomic status.

Both scholars emphasize that school choice policies, including vouchers and charter schools, have generally failed to advance desegregation, as more privileged families tend to exercise choice in ways that reinforce existing patterns of racial and economic segregation.

Turner and Mann urge policymakers and educators to move beyond race-evasive approaches, address structural inequalities directly, and consider the full trajectory of students’ experiences from early childhood through high school when pursuing integration and equity.

A new NEPC Talks Education podcast episode, hosted by Christopher Saldaña, will be released each month from September through May.

Don’t worry if you miss a month. All episodes are archived on the NEPC website and can be found here.

NEPC podcast episodes are also available on Apple Podcasts under the title NEPC Talks Education. Subscribe and follow!

California Education Experts Recommend LCFF/LCAP Reforms

National Education Policy Center — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 18:52:31 -0600

BOULDER, CO (February 19, 2026) — More than a decade after California enacted the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) to advance educational equity, the state’s lawmakers have begun to consider how to strengthen and modernize the policy to meet today’s challenges.

In a report released today by NEPC, Advancing LCFF Equity and Accountability, authors Michelle Renée Valladares, Jonathon Sawyer, and Kevin Welner of the University of Colorado Boulder outline important steps needed to strengthen the equity, effectiveness, and accountability California’s system, especially given the erosion of federal support for public schools. The report is grounded in recommendations from a group of knowledgeable and civically engaged Californians—education leaders, advocates, and community leaders.

While LCFF has helped connect funding to student needs, improve graduation rates, and increase local decision-making through Local Control Accountability Plans (LCAPs), the stakeholders these researchers spoke with explained that further action is necessary to provide the state’s students with the learning opportunities they will need to succeed. Rather than replacing LCFF, the policy memo calls for refining and enriching the system to address persistent opportunity gaps both inside and outside schools.

Community participants identified four shared priorities:

1. Increase education funding and improve transparency.
Participants emphasized that current funding levels are insufficient to meet equity and quality goals. They urged higher base and supplemental grants, exploration of progressive revenue options, and clearer public reporting on how funds are allocated and how investments improve outcomes.

2. Strengthen LCFF’s equity framework.
The report recommends more accurate measures of student need, including updated poverty indicators, regional cost-of-living adjustments, and recognition of students facing multiple challenges. Participants also support expanding categories to better serve unhoused students and Native American communities while protecting resources for highest-need schools.

3. Build participatory and reciprocal accountability.
Participants emphasized that genuine accountability must flow both ways—up to the state’s leadership as well as down to schools. Stakeholders also called for transforming LCAP processes into genuine community engagement platforms where parents, students, and community members can easily track goals, monitor progress, and influence decisions. Improved templates, better school-level spending data, and expanded engagement initiatives would help ensure accountability flows both to and from state leadership and local agencies.

4. Align education policy with broader systems of care.
The report urges greater coordination between schools and other public systems, including those addressing housing, healthcare, nutrition, child welfare, behavioral health, and transportation. Participants point to existing initiatives, such as community schools and youth behavioral health programs, as models for building integrated systems that better serve the whole child.

The overall message of the report is clear: Progress achieved through LCFF provides a strong foundation, but sustained and equitable investment, along with accountability measures, community participation, and cross-sector collaboration, are essential to close opportunity gaps. The participants in this study called on state leaders to renew their commitment to LCFF and LCAP, to build an education system capable of meeting 21st-century needs. The next decade must ensure that progress becomes lasting, inclusive advancement for all of California’s students.

Find Advancing LCFF Equity and Accountability, by Michelle Renée Valladares, Jonathon Sawyer, and Kevin Welner, at:
https://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/LCFF

Redrawing School District Boundaries as a Path Toward Educational Equity

National Education Policy Center — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 23:10:02 -0600

BOULDER, CO (January 29, 2026) — A recent New America report argues that states can advance educational equity by redrawing school district boundaries to reduce within-state fiscal and demographic disparities. While the analysis has some methodological limitations, it offers policymakers a useful framework for understanding how existing district lines shape unequal access to resources.

Christopher Cleveland and Joshua Almes of Brown University reviewed Redrawing the Lines: How Purposeful School System Redistricting Can Increase Funding Fairness and Decrease Segregation. Their review assesses how well the report meets its goals, and it identifies areas where additional research could strengthen the discussion.

The report models three redistricting strategies: a “blank-slate” approach that creates new districts from Census tracts, a county-aligned approach that uses county boundaries, and targeted mergers of existing districts. Compared with current district maps, all three models increase equity in access to local property tax revenue and improve racial and economic integration, with the blank-slate approach producing the largest gains.

Cleveland and Almes do point to the need for further analysis, particularly to incorporate real-world constraints and to compare redistricting with other equity-focused reforms. Yet they conclude that the report successfully positions district boundaries as a meaningful policy lever and prompts informed discussion of strategies to advance educational equity.

Find the review, written by Christopher Cleveland and Joshua Almes, at:
https://nepc.colorado.edu/review/redistricting

Find Redrawing the Lines: How Purposeful School System Redistricting Can Increase Funding Fairness and Decrease Segregation, authored by Zahava Stadler and Jordan Abbott and published by New America, at: https://www.newamerica.org/education-policy/reports/redrawing-the-lines-school-system-redistricting-increase-funding-fairness-decrease-segregation/

Report Seeking to Reform Special Education Leaves Key Questions Unanswered

National Education Policy Center — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 23:29:56 -0600

BOULDER, CO (January 22, 2026) — While special education in the United States has advanced civil rights and educational equity, persistent concerns about inequity, labeling, and segregation remain. A recent Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) report proposes a dramatic restructuring of special education, arguing that rising identification rates and persistent achievement gaps stem from a general education system built for uniformity rather than diversity.

However, in his review of Outmatched: Special Education Can’t Solve Problems Rooted in the Education Delivery System, University of Illinois Chicago professor Federico Waitoller warns that the report moves prematurely toward solutions without establishing a sufficiently evidence-based understanding of the underlying problems—or those proposed solutions.

The report argues that because general education is insufficiently responsive to diverse student needs, special education has become a default solution for unmet instructional challenges. It therefore calls for replacing the dual general–special education structure with a unified, needs-based system.

The analysis, however, has significant weaknesses. Its claims rest on broad assertions about systemic design flaws, supported by only limited descriptive data and selective use of research. Although the report identifies real and well-documented problems, such as reliance on psychological evaluations and inequitable access to services, it provides no empirical evidence linking these features to rising identification rates or widening achievement gaps.

The report also overlooks decades of scholarship on disability identification, disproportionality, and system design, and it does not engage with counterarguments that defend special education as a necessary specialized system.

While the recommendations are ambitious, they are not empirically grounded. Key questions about legal protections, expertise, accountability, and instructional quality for students with disabilities remain unanswered. As such, Prof. Waitoller concludes, policymakers are left with little direct guidance for reforms that would reliably safeguard the rights and learning needs of students with disabilities.

Find the review, written by Federico R. Waitoller, at:
https://nepc.colorado.edu/review/outmatched

Find Outmatched: Special Education Can’t Solve Problems Rooted in the Education Delivery System, authored by Ashley Jochim and Alexander Kurz and published by the Center on Reinventing Public Education, at: https://crpe.org/outmatched-special-education-cant-solve-problems-rooted-in-the-education-delivery-system/

Report on Artificial Intelligence in Education Offers Advocacy Framed as Policy Guidance

National Education Policy Center — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 00:33:35 -0600

BOULDER, CO (January 15, 2026) — As AI-powered technologies rapidly proliferate across classrooms, educators and policymakers are grappling with urgent questions about how to assess their impact on teaching and learning. Bellwether’s recent report seeks to guide that effort by promoting logic models as a framework. Logic models, the report argues, will move us beyond superficial metrics and toward more robust, evidence-based educational outcomes.

Bradley Robinson of Texas State University reviewed Measuring Artificial Intelligence in Education. He found it flawed in its overarching bias that AI integration in education is both inevitable and beneficial. Also, the report only rarely uses existing research to support its claims.

The logic models promoted by the report focus on four foundational components: inputs, activities, outputs, and outcomes. The report argues that such models can help stakeholders better understand how AI tools may influence instructional practices and student learning.

However, significant limitations of these models are not addressed in the report. By assuming from the outset that AI should be integrated into education, the report positions logic models as a value-neutral mechanism for ensuring that AI achieves its presumed potential. This framing obscures how logic-model approaches can simplify or ignore contextual complexity and overlook the risk of unintended harms. Rather than providing critical guidance for evaluating AI’s role in schools, the report ultimately offers methodological cover for predetermined conclusions about AI’s inevitability and desirability.

At a time when policymakers urgently need rigorous, balanced, evidence-based approaches, Bellwether’s report provides little support. Instead, Professor Robinson asserts, it serves more as a promotional document rather than as a critical examination of AI’s place in education.

Find the review, by Bradley Robinson, at:
https://nepc.colorado.edu/review/measuring-ai

Find Measuring Artificial Intelligence in Education, written by Michelle Croft, Amy Chen Kulesa, Marisa Mission, and Mary K. Wells and published by Bellwether, at:
https://bellwether.org/publications/measuring-ai-in-education/