The 5 Ws of Ed Reform
March 3, 2026
Well friends, it's March already and if the pace of the last two months is any indication, 2026 is shaping up to be a big year in the reform space. This week's 5Ws looks at why Democrats risk repeating a familiar mistake on education funding, what intentional AI integration in schools actually looks like, how Indianapolis is modeling the kind of structural reform cities need, where choice is quietly expanding faster than the debate acknowledges, and why the equity case for expanding options has never been stronger or clearer.
Here’s what I’m watching and why it matters.
WHO:
Democratic governors face a defining question: are we the party that puts families first, or the party that protects institutional orthodoxy while families pay the price? Our party spent more than a decade rightly excoriating Republican governors who refused Medicaid expansion. The logic was simple: when the federal government offers states money to help working families, ideological objections are illegitimate. Few made that case more forcefully than Sen. Bernie Sanders who is now urging Democratic governors to refuse free federal dollars that would help K-12 students access tutoring, test prep, transportation, and other academic support. The same logic he once condemned is now his explicit recommendation.
In my latest piece for The Hill, I make the case that Democrats must not follow him down this path. 27 states have already opted into the Federal Scholarship Tax Credit. It costs states nothing. And as I wrote in the essay, the program “gives lower-income families access to the very tools affluent families already deploy as a matter of course. That is not privatization. It is equalization.”
WHAT:
The next wave of ed-tech is here, and we’re already repeating old patterns. Kelsey Piper’s look at why schools keep losing the technology bet is required reading for ed-tech optimists and skeptics alike. She makes the case that the technology that existed in 2020 was already sufficient to deliver personalized education to every student in America, the problem was that 13,000 school districts each made their own purchasing decisions based not on rigorous evidence but vendor pitches. The result was billions spent that mostly didn’t move the needle: laptops now sit in 88% of public school classrooms while reading and math scores are worse than they were in 2015. If we don’t fix what went wrong with ed-tech 1.0, there’s no reason to believe AI will go any differently.
That’s what makes the more intentional approaches worth watching. Like The New York Times profile of North Star Academy, where teachers built a senior elective around a “driver’s license” framework, teaching students to prompt responsibly, analyze AI’s consequences, and develop personal use guidelines. The goal: teach students to drive AI rather than be driven by it.
And if you’re looking for a broader vision of what learning should actually look like in the Age of AI, Kim Smith and the LearnerStudio team have just released Bringing the Future into Focus — an anthology of 40 thinkers, practitioners, and leaders wrestling with exactly that question. As Smith writes in the foreword, “the window for re-architecture is open.”
It’s definitely worth your time.
WHEN:
Structural reform windows are rare, and Indiana just opened one. Brandon Brown of The Mind Trust makes a compelling case in The74 that House Enrolled Act 1423, which creates the Indianapolis Public Education Corporation, is the most ambitious public school restructuring since post-Katrina New Orleans. The new mayor-appointed board will unify transportation, manage facilities, and establish a single performance framework for both district and charter schools. IPS becomes one operator among many, competing on equal footing with charters that already enroll a majority of Indianapolis’s public school students.
The legislation addresses a $44 million structural deficit and an $8,000-per-pupil funding gap that has disadvantaged charters for years. Crucially, it appears to separate the education of children from the management of operations, a distinction that should be the model for every city grappling with declining enrollment and lagging achievement. The question for other cities is whether they’ll wait for a crisis to force the same conversation.
WHERE:
A new analysis of 27 states found that nearly 16% of publicly funded students already attend something other than their assigned school, a larger and faster-growing trend than most realize. The lesson for districts facing declining enrollment: proactively compete for families or lose them.
Meanwhile across the pond. Helen Baxendale’s review of Nick Gibb and Robert Peal’s Reforming Lessons chronicles how synthetic phonics mandates, knowledge-rich curriculum, and explicit instruction lifted England from 26th to 11th in PISA math rankings, the global benchmark for comparing education systems internationally. The irony is, Gibb’s playbook was built largely on American research.
We exported the ideas. Now we need to match the discipline!
WHY:
Because the data is catching up to what reformers have been arguing for years. Drawing on 50CAN’s new 23,000-parent survey, Marc Porter Magee finds that parental school satisfaction, sense of choice, and tutoring access are all ticking up since 2024. Most strikingly, the equity gap in tutoring access between low- and high-income students narrowed from 12 to 8 points. In other words, school choice expansion is extending to working-class families what wealthy families have always had.
To that end, DFER-NY’s own Jacquelyn Martell put it plainly in the NY Daily News: choice already exists in New York City, it’s just rationed by wealth. Private school tuition now tops $70,000 a year in the five boroughs, more than the median household income in most neighborhoods. As she argues, charter schools are tuition-free public schools that give working-class families access to high-quality options without requiring a large bank account or a new zip code. That’s what public education is supposed to be. If we believe in fairness, school choice cannot be a luxury good.