As the federal administration reduces the size and scope of the U.S. Department of Education, many are wondering what might happen to K-12 education without national monitoring and funding to ensure schools provide a quality education to all students – particularly the most vulnerable.
Concerns have surfaced over eliminating federal education funding, significant reductions in education staff and potential impacts on the country’s ability to collect and understand educational outcomes across states. This is a moment of intense transition that requires thoughtful navigation to maximize opportunity and minimize risk.
This moment feels especially complicated for student-centered learning advocates who have long championed revisions to federal policies to support better assessment and accountability systems that align with personalized instruction. We want the opportunity to design meaningful systems, but not in a world without student protections and federal funding for K-12 systems.
Two years ago, KnowledgeWorks and 10 national partner organizations working at the nexus of learner-centered education and school quality systems convened more than 200 policymakers, practitioners and students to explore future possibilities for school quality systems. We wrestled with future scenarios to develop a bold vision for school quality that would honor each learning community’s unique context while ensuring the quality of every learner’s experience. A vision for school quality systems emerged, articulated through five themes and recommendations for transformation: shared purpose; defining and validating learning; holistic and reciprocal school quality measures; data and improvement; and systems change.
One of the scenarios that informed this vision seems to be unfolding today. This article looks back at that scenario and participants’ observations from the convening to offer insights on how we might navigate the present moment.
Minimal Federal Footprint scenario
What if, amid extreme political polarization, the nation’s education laws were reformed to reduce federal monitoring of school quality and focus on key indicators? What if there were widespread support for student-centered learning because many people realized its value in helping learners succeed in an uncertain future – but also a lot of variation in what it looked like?
In this Minimal Federal Footprint scenario, we might find that:
- Many different approaches to student-centered learning were used, with educators implementing them to different degrees depending on how much support they received in carrying them out
- States were only required to report a narrow slice of data to the federal government, with leeway to determine what else to include in their school quality systems
- Reduced federal monitoring left broad space for local improvement cycles and innovation
- In some communities, learner-centered education and next-generation balanced assessment systems drove equity, while in others, equity decreased
- AI and powerful data analytics helped people understand quality across different kinds of learning environments to provide a rich picture of local school quality and fuel innovation
Opportunities and risks
When working with this Minimal Federal Footprint scenario, policymakers, practitioners, students and national influencers identified key tensions and tradeoffs related to five aspects of school quality systems:
- What priorities for student learning might be set?
- What information about student progress and school quality might be valued?
- How might evidence be collected?
- Who might use data and why?
- How might school quality systems inform strategies to ensure success for every student?
Opportunities and risks for school quality systems:
What priorities for student learning might be set?
Opportunities
- Communities could have considerable flexibility to set learning targets and craft pathways toward them
- There could be a strong focus on academic knowledge and skills that communities deemed critical for future success
Risks
- Communities could remain traditional and overlook content critical for workforce success, as well as opportunities for future-focused transformation
- More focus on community standards could lead to tensions between community and individual goals and lack of clarity about how to manage them
What information about student progress and school quality might be valued?
Opportunities
- Shifting power structures could reinvigorate community conversations about student success, resulting in a broadened range of input and output measures anchored in community values
Risks
- Communities might not prioritize information on student health and wellness or address specific demographic needs, such as the success of multilingual learners
- There would likely be more variation among school districts than exists today
How might evidence be collected?
- Community dashboards could reflect a balanced portfolio of qualitative and quantitative data from local, state and federal sources
- Data collection tools such as performance assessments might improve the quality of data and increase learner agency
Risks
- Data collection processes could occur less frequently and lack technical quality
- Those processes might not provide a meaningful picture of school and student performance
Who might use data and why?
Opportunities
- Performance reports might emphasize strengths and growth areas for students and schools, ensuring continuous improvement for all
- School quality systems could become more balanced, making effective use of qualitative data at the local level
- Feedback loops across all levels of the system could help identify where support were needed
Risks
- Infrequent and limited data collection could leave parents, students and communities unable to make determinations about school quality
- Spotty data collection could also limit students’ and families’ involvement in making use of data to inform learning
How might school quality systems inform strategies to ensure success for every student?
Opportunities
- Increased transparency on a wide range of measures could help communities better target interventions to students most in need
- Real-time data about both inputs and outputs could support timely interventions
Risks
- Innovation would likely be isolated in pockets
- Absence of clear guardrails and a loss of federal resources could make it difficult to ensure the success for every student
- Communities with greater resources would likely benefit compared to those with fewer resources
Navigating this moment
Insights from this conversation may help education constituents navigate today’s shifting landscape with resilience and success. While the near term indicates a varied landscape for school quality systems, a moment exists to advance new approaches that maximize many of these opportunities while also activating strategies that mitigate the risks.
As the education constituents who wrestled with the Minimal Federal Footprint scenario concluded in Beyond the Horizon: Blazing a Trail Toward Learner-Centered School Quality Systems, approaches to school quality must shift from centering education systems to centering learners and their communities. Future school quality systems need to provide flexible and supportive environments for authentic, community-owned improvement while ensuring a focus on the success of each student. These changes would reinvigorate learning communities and build trust in their leadership.
Five key shifts are needed to realize this vision for learner-centered school quality systems:
Shared purpose
From top-down systems
To reciprocal systems that center those closest to the learning
Defining and validating learning
From narrow notions of student success
To models that embrace essential knowledge and transferable skills
Holistic and reciprocal school quality measures
From heavy reliance on a single assessment measure
To systems that report on holistic data at each level of the system to strengthen transparency and ownership
Data and improvement
From the punitive use of data
To data use for continuous improvement
Systems change
From incremental, disconnected change efforts
To sustained transformation
Building state and local capacity
State and local leaders need time, resources and expertise to move toward this vision for the future of learner-centered school quality systems. Unfortunately, recent federal staff reductions and funding cuts place an undue burden on education leaders to innovate in a time of scarcity. Partnerships among government, philanthropy and business are ever more critical, with collaboration on a set of key strategies being essential for meaningful transformation.
Advancing the field
Leaders working across education settings need opportunities to test new models and approaches with deep support from a network oriented toward driving systems transformation. Useful pilots include:
- Competency-based assessment pilot
- Accountability pilots
- Locally driven models
- More holistic measures for school quality
States are well positioned to explore these efforts within their state graduation and school quality systems. As they build capacity for larger-scale change, they can engage in conversations with the U.S. Department of Education about targeted federal waiver opportunities that enable states to create greater coherence between their systems and the federal one.
In addition, working groups or similar structures are needed to dive deeply into key topics such as:
- Equity and inclusion
- New funding models
- Technical quality in measurement, including a key focus on rethinking comparability
These working groups can study and disseminate best practices to continuously improve the quality of implementation as fresh approaches to school quality systems evolve from pilot phase to widespread adoption.
Cultivating supports
People working across education settings also need opportunities to build capacity related to:
- Community and stakeholder engagement
- Assessment and data literacy
- Models for sustained transformation (funding, governance, collaboration)
Learning agenda
Lastly, the education field must advance a learning agenda to study challenges and overcome barriers to the quality implementation of new approaches to school quality. Key questions include:
- What protections are needed to ensure communities center the needs of those less fortunate when developing and advancing innovative approaches?
- As communities aspire to incorporate more holistic data in their school quality systems, what measures are most valuable for driving community success?
- How might assessment systems and standards frameworks evolve to incorporate academic knowledge and durable skills?
- What might be the benefits and tradeoffs of minimizing the federal assessment footprint? Are there strategies that might produce meaningful information for policymakers while still creating space for communities to develop systems that emphasize improvements to instruction?
Finding ways forward together
The recent disruptions to K-12 education can feel overwhelming and, at times, chilling. It will be hard to adjust to a new balance of decision making across the local, state and federal levels as we contend with an increasingly contested society, a shifting economy and other disruptive forces. Even though familiar structures that have provided important guardrails are straining and cracking, we have the opportunity to consider new ways of understanding educational outcomes that could provide useful information and help educators support every learner. We also have the opportunity to consider what approaches to assessment might suit the diversifying education landscape and support individual learning and growth.
These are not the conditions in which we prefer to innovate, but we must find a path forward that calms the chaos and restores focus on the needs of students and schools. Promising outcomes from these innovations might help foster reasoned and careful adjustments to state accountability and assessment systems that have lasting positive impacts on the nation’s K-12 education systems. New educational governance structures and decision-making processes might emerge to help school districts and state departments of education incorporate a wide range of actors and voices to support deeper ownership of student success across the education system.
These possibilities are energizing. They have the potential to change K-12 education in all the best ways. Let’s lean into this energy and build something lasting together.
