Recently, one of us (Morgan Polikoff) was serving on a webinar panel about the state of American education in 2026. He received the question, “What’s currently keeping you up at night?” This is a good question to kick off the Ed Policy Hub Substack.
The simplest way to answer the question is to state the persistent truth—the U.S. education system does not serve well too many children, especially Black and Brown children and those from low-income backgrounds. Opportunities and outcomes are inadequate and heavily stratified, and our policy systems don’t do enough to solve these problems. These inequities are not simply gaps in outcomes; they reflect long-standing structural barriers and uneven access to educational opportunity. Addressing them is central to our mission and must remain at the heart of how we understand California’s educational landscape. Unfortunately, there is nothing new about this reality.
There is something particularly urgent about this moment, though. While the system has always been challenged, the struggles of 2026 are as heightened as they have been in many decades. And it’s this heightened level of struggle, with massive challenges pummeling the system from multiple directions, that concerns us and motivates us today.
This inaugural post of the Ed Policy Hub Substack identifies what we—the leaders of the Hub—view as the most foundational challenges currently stressing California’s education systems. We introduce five major challenges here, and in the next five posts (unfolding over the ensuing five weeks), we dig deeper into each of the challenges, bringing in fresh insights and data. These are the things that keep us up at night and that, we hope, the EdPolicy Hub can help policymakers and practitioners solve over the coming years.
Challenge 1: Student Achievement
Since COVID roiled schools in 2020, the level of concern about students’ educational achievement has steadily risen. We knew going in that COVID-induced school closures would likely harm student learning, and those harms materialized. But despite considerable effort and investment, we have been unable to redress COVID’s negative effects on student learning. What’s more, we now know that the downward trends over the last five years are actually a continuation of declines that began around the mid-2010s. These declines are especially sharp for our lowest-performing students, widening the gap between high- and low-performers, and contributing to longstanding inequities in opportunities and outcomes across groups. And no one is quite sure what’s driving the declines, though a combination of factors is likely to blame. In the next post, we will discuss some of the key trends in student achievement in the Golden State and nationally, in terms of levels of achievement as well as gaps and changes over time.
Challenge 2: Student Engagement
COVID didn’t just drive down student learning; it drove kids out of the classroom. During the pandemic, it was no surprise that student absenteeism spiked dramatically. But five years later students are still missing about 50% more school than they were before COVID. This is just one indicator of a seeming crisis in student engagement, with kids feeling checked out of a curriculum that is not relevant to them and that may not be preparing them for success in adult life. As with achievement, these trends seem to be worst for our most underserved students, who have long felt disconnected from a curriculum that doesn’t reflect their experiences or aspirations. In the second post we will break down the major issues in student engagement in California and nationally.
Challenge 3: Student Wellbeing
Nearly all children are now attending schools that have some form of device restriction in place, a reaction to the widespread view that cell phones in schools are, at best, a distraction from learning. But these actions are also perhaps the strongest current response to the crisis of student social and emotional wellbeing. Concerns about student mental health are not new, but they seem to be turbocharged and especially acute for students facing economic stress or systemic discrimination, and schools are being asked to solve these problems more directly (perhaps without the resources and training they need to do so). The rollout of GenAI may exacerbate this challenge, as experts worry greatly about how children’s underdeveloped brains will handle AI-generated content. In the third post we will identify these challenges in student wellbeing and make an urgent case for cross-system solutions to these complex problems.
Challenge 4: Money
As educational institutions are dealing with these major challenges, demographic and policy changes are leading to declining enrollment and increased budgetary strain on traditional public school districts. Many school districts are losing children as birthrates decline and the cost of housing drives families out. Other budgetary pressures—the costs of healthcare and pensions, for example—are also a major factor, and these pressures fall unevenly across systems. In the fourth post, we will identify some of the most essential resource issues currently facing our schools.
Challenge 5: Complex Political Pressures
Education has always been influenced by contemporary politics, but there is no question that the politics of the current moment are unusually fraught, and they are putting tremendous pressure on schools. Whether it is the impact of immigration enforcement or the contentiousness around racial and LGBT-related topics in schools, educators and leaders are under intense scrutiny. These debates are deeply entangled with questions of race, identity, and belonging, and the complex dynamics make the work of pursuing equitable improvement in education both more urgent and more complex.
These five challenges are what currently keep us up at night as we think about how we can support California’s—and the nation’s—educational systems to improve. Over the coming weeks we will offer more details about these challenges, and we will aim to provide some signs of optimism that the state has the tools we need to begin addressing them.
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of any affiliated institutions or organizations.