Six trends to watch in K-12 schools in 2024

This post originally appeared on the Christensen Institute blog and is republished here with permission.

Key points:

As we move toward the start of 2024, parent power, rethinking assessments, and career and technical education (CTE) for every student are some of the trends sweeping across K-12 education .

Here are six major trends that educators, parents, and policymakers should understand.

1. The rise of homeschooling

It is not new to observe that homeschooling has grown significantly in recent years since the start of the pandemic and has become even more diversified. Even the main media have chosen noticed the trend and called it the fastest growing segment of schooling. My reading is slightly different. The news should be that the growth of homeschooling in the wake of the pandemic is proving much more complicated than people originally expected. But the breakneck growth has slowed. It may even be declining.

2. Parental power

The most important trend is that parents feel much more empowered to make decisions about their children's education. Not only are they choosing homeschooling, but more and more families are choosing other alternative forms of education, such as Private schools, charter schoolsvirtual schools, microschools, and a variety of hybrid homeschooling arrangements in which parents combine their children's education from a variety of options.

Parents are also stepping up within schools by advocating for changes in curriculum and instruction, whether to move to teaching reading based on evidence of how students become good readers, or to the way the books in the school library reflect the values ​​of a community.

But overall, this parent power movement is creating a flourishing of different school arrangements, as parents want to make sure their children make developmental progress. A big question for this movement will be the sustainability of the offering of microschools and other educational options. Many of the microschools that have emerged are small cooperatives that a single teacher, dissatisfied with his public school, decided to create. Will these communities be sustainable in the long term? At best, it is unclear. For-profit and nonprofit companies also continue to grow to fuel the microschool movement, from Wildflower School's Montessori microschools to Acton Academy and Kaipod Learning.

3. Education Savings Accounts

Related to the parent power trend is the growth of education savings accounts (ESAs), with 13 states that we now have policies of this type. ESAs are not vouchers. They are a much deeper way to support educational choice in which the state funds a savings account and a family can spend the dollars in that account on a wide range of educational goods and services. This is different from a voucher, which is essentially a use-it-or-lose-it ticket to one type of educational service (a school). With an ESA, there is an incentive for a family to buy value and save money until they find the right service for their child: they can spend the money on school tuition, piano lessons, online courses, equine therapy, and more. ESAs are popular among people with different political beliefs. But so far they have largely been approved in right-wing states. There is an ongoing debate about accountability for these dollars, with some arguing that parental decision-making is the ultimate responsibility, while others want more traditional accountability measures to be implemented.

4. Challenges for traditional school districts

Many traditional school districts continue to struggle in this context. They have lost students, particularly in urban and high-poverty districts, to other schools. They have shrunk because there are fewer students thanks to a broader demographic decline in new births that began in 2008 and has not changed. They have struggled with chronic absenteeism.

What lies behind many of these struggles is a one-size-fits-all mentality that clashes with educational pluralism and parents' more active desires for personalized support and school models to ensure their children make progress. Additionally, the compliance mentality prevalent in many districts has further hindered them. That mindset can be seen in many districts' immediate action to ban generative ai, rather than exploring how it could help them achieve their goals for every student.

What should schools do? That is the theme of my book, From reopening to reinventing. But in short, they should create autonomous educational offerings in which they can lean on the drive for personalization and rethink schooling.

5. Portrait of a graduate and rethinking the evaluation

An increasing number of states have taken steps to create portraits of a graduate—what they believe students should know and be able to do upon graduation. These measures are much broader than the standards underlying required graduation requirements. But, to this point, they are also largely aspirational. They are not supported by assessments that verify that a student has mastered the competencies underlying such portraits. That's part of what's creating a window to rethink assessment more broadly. The Carnegie Foundation, in partnership with ETS, New Meridian, Schoolhouse.world and others, are seeking to take advantage of this situation. I hope this movement opens a broader window for mastery-based or competency-based learning, so that we prioritize the success of every child, not just the few who can keep up with the steady pace of schooling.

6. CTE for everyone

There is growing recognition that the “college for all” movement of recent decades has not served all students well. Many students who begin bachelor's programs do not complete them. When they leave college with student debt, the results are horrendous. There is a growing recognition that we need to bring back career and technical education, but that the mistakes of vocational education, which was often a race-based tracking system, must not be repeated. Instead, the way forward should be to ensure that all students experience meaningful work-based learning as part of their middle and high school experiences. These experiences can help them begin to learn about different career options; develop their sense of what they like and don't like about themselves; understand what it takes to do certain careers: the path, the time, the money; and build social capital so they can go out and take advantage of the opportunities that interest them. As dual enrollment increasingly blurs the line between high school and college, we must also ensure that meaningful work-based learning experiences become part of middle and high school for all students, and who can then make informed decisions about their post-high school lives. route.