In 2026, States and Congress Will Need to Mitigate the Damage to PreK-12 Education

The year 2025 will go down in history as one of the most disturbing, destabilizing, unproductive, and perplexing years of federal education policy. How will 2026 compare? Our team is watching for more shake-ups and seeking signs that policy leaders can put students, families, and educators back on the agenda. Below are questions we are asking and our recommendations for how Congress and state policymakers can mitigate current and future damage.

As 2025 concluded, ED still existed, but had been largely hollowed out by several reductions in force and six interagency agreements that moved core functions to other agencies. Significant damage will come from these agreements. They create additional bureaucracy and move critical functions to the Department of Labor and other agencies that have no expertise in the varied educational resources needed to support PreK-12 students. They also hurt career and technical education (CTE), disrupting ties to higher education programs. Many education analysts now expect ED to try to farm out the Office of Special Education Programs to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. As we wait for more details to emerge, state and local education leaders are bracing for chaos, delays, inefficient uses of staff time, and a damaging ripple effect that will eventually hit schools and their ability to meet students’ needs.

In early 2025, Democracy Forward’s legal team began efforts to reverse these actions by supporting a coalition of organizations in suing President Donald J. Trump and ED Secretary Linda McMahon for unlawfully dismantling an agency created by the U.S. Congress. Lawsuits like these are likely one reason why ED brought back more than 200 staff members of the Office of Civil Rights last month (probably hastened by a backlog of cases), though ED officials said the reinstatement is temporary. (To keep up, see the multiple civil rights trackers that federal policy analysts and nonprofit organizations are populating.)

Congress should not sit idly by while ED is chopped up. Members should use their powers to gather and publicize evidence of the inefficient harmful impacts of carving up ED into disconnected pieces across various other federal agencies.

Meanwhile, funding for an array of federal education programs is in serious question. Last summer, school district leaders had to cope with the administration placing unprecedented holds and freezes on school funding already allocated by Congress, and in December, it held back funding from the Full-Service Community Schools program. Appropriators in Congress are now contending with a budget request from the Trump administration that, if enacted, would take an estimated $35.34 million from K–12 schools in each congressional district, on average, and would zero out funding for key programs, such as those for English Learners (Title III).

Members of Congress should stand firm in defense of federal funding for PreK-12 public schools, maintaining or increasing existing funding streams rather than enacting the administration's requested cuts to support for schools and students, including English learners and migrant students. The Senate has a bipartisan bill that would mostly keep funding levels the same as the prior year, but it’s unclear whether it can reach an agreement with the House and avoid another government shutdown at the end of this month.

Lawmakers should also move legislation that opens avenues for strengthening public education and innovating within it. We see signals that some members of Congress plan to put forward bills to support educators, serve youth in schools to prepare them for the workforce, provide funding for youth apprenticeships, and support and update federal education R&D.

While many aspects of our current approach to teaching and learning are working and need to be protected, there are plenty of areas that do need to be revisited. States are in a difficult position, as they are being asked by the administration to do more, with less money. Here are some ideas for state leaders on the core issues that New America is focused on:

Funding equity

States must protect public education funding, even as they face challenges born of federal cuts and threats to the economic growth that powers state revenue collection. They should ensure that state support for the highest-need districts is maintained. They should also take action to reduce the number of especially high-need districts through school system boundary change. As more states consider redistricting, especially district consolidation, as a response to declining enrollment, legislators can also ensure that boundary changes further the cause of educational equity. By drawing new school district boundaries to capture more racially and economically mixed neighborhoods, they can bolster district’s local tax bases and give more diverse student populations much fairer access to local school funding.

Educators

Even before these events unfolded, states were struggling to attract and retain talented educators, who are the most important school factor for students’ engagement and outcomes. As policymakers make tough decisions moving forward, they should place the Six-Strand Strategy for Educator Excellence at the heart of their decision-making. Through this approach, which purposefully intertwines six core educator policy strands, state and local leaders can steadily and simultaneously strengthen every aspect of their educator workforces, and lift our students and communities to success.

One way state and local leaders can support a Six-Strand Strategy is by investing in evidence-based shifts to our school staffing and instructional models. New America and other members of the Coalition to Reimagine the Teaching Role are working to provide ideas and proof of concept for more strategic staffing models that strengthen the educator workforce and produce more engaging and effective student learning.

Early learning

Concerns abound that states will have to reduce their spending on early education in response to tighter budgets and federal cuts, including the potential elimination of the Preschool Development Grants, which go directly to states. Our Early & Elementary Education team has details on those cuts and what 2026 will mean for early learning, as states like Maryland have already stopped enrolling new families in subsidy programs for child care. The challenges can feel daunting but state leaders should find inspiration in states that are making progress towards increasing access to affordable and high-quality early care and education, such as Vermont, which has significantly increased provider payments while improving the availability of child care subsidies. Additionally, several states, including Illinois, Maine, and Texas, have allocated millions of additional dollars in efforts to improve child care availability and affordability while improving workforce wages.

Technology

On December 11th, Trump announced an executive order that aims to preempt state-level AI regulations by directing federal agencies to build a national AI policy framework; it also directs agencies to pursue litigation or condition funding to challenge state laws seen as “onerous.” Ultimately, preemption requires codification by Congress which is reported as unlikely. And state leaders are likely to continue introducing and enacting legislation to regulate AI, pushing back by arguing that states have the right to pass these laws.

As these debates unfold, states and education systems must ensure they build strong digital literacy skills as a means of safeguarding students’ ability to critically engage with AI tools, evaluate and interpret digital information, and participate fully in learning and future workplaces.

Pathways during and after high school

State leaders can help young people move from high school to economic security by promoting alignment across education and workforce systems, supporting innovative college and career pathway models, and promoting research and cross-sector collaboration to expand access to opportunity.

State and local leaders are already building these systems, introducing new models like high-quality youth apprenticeship and experimenting with new approaches for career advising in the age of AI.

English learners

Throughout 2025, federal support for students classified as English learners (ELs) and other immigrant-origin students was severely fractured, from early childhood education through higher education.

States have the ability to bolster their legal and regulatory frameworks for ELs and other immigrant-origin students. States can codify federal civil rights and certain educational guarantees, like ensuring undocumented students have access to a free public education as Massachusetts and Illinois did in the 2025 legislative session. States can also establish offices to provide oversight and enforcement over educational civil rights, like in California.. This action may be particularly necessary given both the decimation of the Office of Civil Rights within the Department of Education and the changed enforcement priorities.. States can also update their funding systems to account for the needs of ELs and other immigrant-origin students, like Utah, Texas, and New Mexico recently did. States should take particular notice of how to mitigate the funding fallout caused by enrollment declines particularly among newcomers.

And lastly, local school boards can also step up by adopting model EL policies that complement school districts' responsibilities under state and federal accountability systems and elevate their approach to educating these students.

Students with disabilities

The Trump administration’s rhetoric and actions around children with disabilities is cause for grave concern. With cuts to staff at ED’s Office of Special Education Programs, states have lost the guidance and technical assistance they rely on to comply with federal special education law. States should partner with one another to share best practices and innovations for following the law and providing high-quality education and related services for young children and students with disabilities. Without federal oversight, advocates will have to hold their states accountable, as the quality of education for students with disabilities could vary widely from state to state.

Reductions in Medicaid funding through H.R. 1, known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, will likely affect access to critical services for children with disabilities. Medicaid is the third-largest source of funding for early intervention services and the fourth-largest funder of school-based services, supporting more than half of children who receive special education and related services. State legislatures should use tools like cost modeling to consider H.R. 1’s impact. They can also respond with programs that improve services for children with disabilities. For instance, Illinois has passed legislation to improve access to early intervention services for babies in the NICU, and Ohio and Vermont have created programs to increase inclusion in early learning.

The Trump administration’s destruction of ED’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has made it much more difficult for families to pursue investigations of discrimination against their children on the basis of disability. OCR is currently managing approximately 25,000 pending complaints and roughly 7,000 active investigations, leaving families without a critical resource for protecting their children’s civil rights. States should consider how to increase capacity for civil rights protections and how to better connect families to legal resources.

Learning ecosystems

Children, youth, and families can tap into multiple sites throughout their communities to learn and build new skills—including public schools, early learning centers, libraries, parks, afterschool and summer programs, maker spaces, museums, programs that support pathways to apprenticeships and good jobs, and more. In a time of scarcity, states and localities should take stock of these assets and start connecting them to better support students, especially low-income students and other groups who too often cannot access them. Many community leaders, such as the pioneers behind Remake Learning, recognize the potential of these learning ecosystems; in a few months New America will launch a National Commission on Learning Ecosystems to develop policy recommendations for bringing them to more students.

As we did in 2025, New America will continue to work in 2026 to ensure students have access to a quality public education that enables them and their communities to meet their full potential. Restoring and improving upon ED’s capacity and functioning is critical to doing so, as is helping state and local education leaders use their resources as efficiently and effectively as possible. Continue to follow us for insights into what’s happening, as well as ideas for how to make what’s happening better.