At CRPE, we study how assessment, accountability, and oversight can strengthen public education while fostering equity, innovation, and continuous improvement. Our research examines how traditional accountability frameworks can narrow teaching and constrain schools’ ability to adapt, and we explore approaches that measure what truly matters for student success—academic growth, deeper learning, and readiness for life beyond school. We also investigate how oversight can balance school autonomy with strong protections for access and quality, ensuring that all students are well served. Across this work, our goal is to inform accountability systems that uphold public trust while enabling schools to innovate and respond to the diverse needs of their communities.
Everyone needs foundational math skills. Numeracy predicts higher earnings, better health, and increased access to fast-growing jobs. Algebra is the gateway to advanced math and to many college and workforce programs.
Public school districts are facing an existential threat. Demographic shifts and school choice policies are exacerbating declining enrollment. A diminishing role for the federal Department of Education alongside broad economic uncertainty could further erode state and local revenues.
In American education, the scars of the “accountability wars” still run deep. More than two decades after the federal No Child Left Behind Act established punitive, high-profile accountability requirements for America’s K–12 schools, states and districts remain wary of debates over testing, student performance, and school improvement.
Across the country, school leaders are reimagining how students learn—designing models that are more engaging, effective, and connected to the world students are entering.
A new report from the American School District Panel, a research partnership between RAND and CRPE, examines how districts define and facilitate civic learning in an era of political polarization, competing instructional priorities, and uneven state support.
In May 2025, we spoke with about a dozen superintendents across the country—and others who work closely with them—about challenges stemming from recent national events, including a much smaller United States Department of Education (ED), likely changes in federal Title I funding and oversight, and the various executive orders aimed at shifting more responsibility to the state and local levels.
The biggest mistake most state education agencies (SEAs) make is not a matter of policy but of mindset: Too many assume their primary function is to monitor compliance with state and federal laws rather than be agents of change that materially impact the lives of students.
The Trump administration is following the Project 2025 agenda, vowing to turn federal education programs into block grants or issue blanket waivers that would let states see money in any way they want.
