If 2025 featured a mix of highs and lows in early care and education, 2026 is poised to bring a series of deeper challenges to the field, as states prepare to make difficult budget decisions in anticipation of the looming federal funding cuts.

“It’s pretty grim,” said Natalie Renew, executive director of Home Grown, a national initiative committed to improving the quality of and access to home-based child care, about the outlook for the sector.

“I don’t think anyone is particularly optimistic about child care” in the new year, added Daniel Hains, chief policy and professional advancement officer at the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC).

Over the last couple of years, in our individual coaching and long-term hybrid Instructional Leadership Collective work, the two of us have discovered a pattern. Regardless of which country we are working in, school and district leaders and their teams are focused on the same common themes when we engage them in cycles of inquiry to come up with a problem they want to solve.

In surveys with nearly 1,000 leaders we have worked with over the last couple of years, it has become clear that there are 11 problems educators are working really hard to solve. So, for this post in the new year, we wanted to highlight the problems, which we also refer to as critical issues. In our inquiry cycles, leaders tell us they have been working on them for multiple years.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of critical issues, nor is it written in any particular order of importance, but we have grouped them into three categories, which you will see below. As we know, politics, especially the divisive politics we are experiencing in the U.S., infiltrate our schools, but the reality is that none of the leaders who we work with talks about politics as one of their top priorities. Politics is merely something they have to navigate—the topic for a future blog post—so they can get to those other problems.

Larry Huff was named superintendent of Rockford Public Schools in Illinois after having led Elkhart Community Schools in Indiana since 2024. Huff is credited with leading major gains in student learning, teacher support and school-community partnerships at Elkhart Community Schools.

In Wisconsin, Superintendent Glenda Butterfield-Boldig is moving to the Clinton Community School District from the Bowler School District. Butterfield-Boldig also served as superintendent of the White Lake School District.

Matthew Cheeseman, who has served as superintendent of Beaufort County Schools since 2019, will take the helm of Craven County Schools in North Carolina on Feb 1. Cheeseman led Perquimans County Schools from 2016 to 2019 and was recently named the 2025–2026 Southeast Region 2 Superintendent of the Year.