3 Conversations to Follow in 2025

#Leadership Read time:
Chaotic times call for clear, concise vision.

 

Federal level changes

In the last quarter of 2024, the hype far outweighs the happenings—but that might not remain the case in 2025. That’s why we’ll be curious to see how federal level changes to the Department of Education (DOE) trickle down to state legislatures and eventually to districts.

Conservative candidates have taken aim at the DOE since the early 1980s. (You can read an interesting history of both the fight against DOE and the birth of Education Week.) The idea isn’t new, but it’s regaining momentum.

Proponents of maintaining the department point out the blow to federal protections for students with disabilities currently provided under the Individual with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which ensures both individual resources and training to provide a free and appropriate public education. Protections for students’ civil rights could also suffer.

Arguments for dissolving the department at the federal level center around spending woes and the belief that education decisions belong to individual states—an interesting twist given most education decisions are already made at the state or local level.

Funding and specific challenges to curriculum are top targets, but the path to successfully axing the DOE is murky. The only thing left to do is wait and see—and stay involved at the state and local level.

 

Increasing parent engagement

Navigating parents’ rights in the school district looks like involving parents in district decision-making, but more importantly, it requires engagement in their individual children’s progress, goals, social, and academic growth.

As parents push for transparency and influence on what children learn and read, their collaboration can make the most impact when it’s linked with their individual children’s performance. However, the desire to voice opinions on higher-level strategy has also become acceptable in school communities. In that event, district leaders can manage the process involved in gathering community feedback without controlling the substance of responses.

Advisory boards welcome families to provide input in a structured way for specific initiatives. An advisory board or committee may meet for a short period to solve a tricky problem or serve in a long-term capacity to guide the vision of the school or district.

All families should be offered an opportunity to be involved, whether English is spoken in the home or not. In 2024, tools exist that open the door to families in the school community in just about any language an Internet browser can translate.

All educators care what happens to every student. A parent can become the expert in their child’s individual experiences, engagement, and education. This is the personalized learning path so crucial to children’s growth: a deeply involved, engaged adult. In 2025, parent engagement could soar.

 

Making an academic recovery

As 2024 comes to a close it’s impossible to ignore the dismal (or, perhaps more kindly, “very stable level of mediocrity”) results in the nation’s most recent standardized testing report cards.

The trends continue to gently fall, each snowflake a real-life kid who is struggling with reading, math, science, or all three and more. While squabbles over the path to success flare, the reality is kids are not learning as well as they could be. (Wow, it actually sounds kind of fixable when we put it that way!)

So how do we reverse the downhill trend of test scores? Two ways we’ll be watching in 2025:

1. Teaching (or re-teaching) kids how to learn (and think about their own learning!)
2. Technology (or lack thereof) in the classroom

It’s not enough to blame literacy in crisis on screens and enact reactionary scorched-earth policies to foil the endless-scroll siren song. If the idea is to reconcile the lack of curiosity keeping students slumped and under-literate, the situation calls for meeting students where they’re comfortable. And that means a mobile-friendly location full of their peers and friends.

It's time to push kids forward into learning while speaking their same language, capitalizing on their comfort zones, and engaging with authentic texts. Even if those might be, well—texts.

Instead of pushing mobile technology out the door, consider that most families rely on a mobile device to connect and engage with schools in general. Instead of bypassing preferred communication, lean into the message regardless of the medium.

At least, in 2025 we’ll try to rekindle the love of learning itself, regardless of the screen dimension.

In this season of reflection, sharing, and gratitude, there’s absolutely no better place to begin than school. We reflect on our education experiences and the ones teachers toil diligently to craft in classrooms today. We share our ideas and each other’s best interests. And we’re grateful for the educators and staff who show up day in and day out to serve.


 
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