What Generation Z Is Teaching School Leaders About Work
A few months ago, a young teacher sat across from me and said something that stopped me in my tracks. “I love teaching,” she said. “I just don’t want teaching to become my whole life.”
As a millennial school leader who entered the profession during an era when educators often wore exhaustion like a badge of honor, I initially found myself wrestling with her statement. Part of me wanted to respond with all the familiar talking points about sacrifice, commitment, and doing whatever it takes for kids.
Instead, I listened. And the more I listen to teachers from Generation Z, the more I realize they are forcing educational leaders to confront an uncomfortable question: “Have we confused dedication with depletion?”
Denver District Accused of Keeping Kids In English Learner Program Far Too Long
When Jen Hanson, a veteran multilingual educator, first arrived at Denver’s Cherry Creek School District in June 2025, she said she quickly suspected the district was creating its own rules for moving students out of its English learner program, leaving her to question whether it was holding on to kids — and the state and federal funding they brought in — for far too long.
The 52,000-student district evaluated children’s English proficiency based on how they scored on a nationally used test called WIDA ACCESS and on two other measures, as required by the state.
Within days of taking the post, Hanson said she found more than 5,700 students between the 2021-22 and 2025-26 school year who had hit the WIDA scoring benchmark, but many were not evaluated on their language skills, the first step in ultimately moving kids out of the program. If they were deemed English proficient, they would be placed in general education classes under a two-year monitoring phase.
3 snapshots of the state of education right now
More than 54 million students are set to return to the classroom this fall. Here’s some data about the state of teaching and learning to improve decision-making.
Homeschooling remains popular
Roughly 4.2 million K12 students were homeschooled in 2024, according to new data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Homeschooling has grown in popularity since the pandemic, particularly among families who want more control over what their children are taught.
An estimated 6% of all school-aged children are homeschooled, according to the National Home Education Research Institute. The homeschool population has grown between 2% and 8% each of the past several years.
The teacher workforce
Nearly six million teachers will lead the nation’s classrooms this school year. Among them, roughly 57% are elementary or middle school teachers and more than three-quarters are female, according to the Census Bureau.
Still, the teacher pipeline is shrinking, according to a report from the Learning Policy Institute.
Over the past decade, the number of college students interested in the profession has fallen to its lowest level in 50 years. Additionally, enrollment in higher ed prep programs dropped by nearly 100,000 candidates between 2012-13 and 2014-15 but has remained stable since.
For chronic absenteeism, pandemic recovery is possible but still uncommon
It remains fairly uncommon for school districts to have rebounded from significant increases in chronic absenteeism experienced during the pandemic, according to new research published by the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University.
In fact, just 13% of districts studied had reverted to their pre-pandemic chronic absenteeism levels by the 2024-25 school year, the research showed.
Researchers defined “substantial increases” in chronic absenteeism for districts as a more than 10 percentage-point increase between the 2017-18 or 2018-19 school years and 2021-22.
Nation’s Report Card shows an uneven pandemic recovery
Nine-year-olds are recovering academic ground lost during the pandemic, with reading scores now statistically on par with pre-COVID levels and a growing share of students demonstrating foundational math and literacy skills.
The findings come from the 2025 National Assessment of Educational Progress Long-Term Trend Assessment, released by the National Center for Education Statistics. The assessment tracks reading and mathematics performance among 9- and 13-year-olds and provides a historical record dating back to the 1970s.
With States’ Increasing Power Over Schools Comes Great Responsibility
A decades-long push to give states more authority over education has increasingly taken shape through initiatives such as the Trump administration’s proposed Make Education Great Again grant program. The proposal would consolidate $220 million in rural education funding and 16 other federal programs — including literacy grants, education for homeless students and after-school initiatives — into a single $2 billion block grant designed to give states greater flexibility in addressing local educational needs.
Supporters of the proposal argue that programs like MEGA reflect a broader recognition that states and local communities are often better positioned than Washington to understand the unique challenges facing their schools. Rather than maintaining fragmented federal programs with rigid compliance structures, decentralization efforts seek to give states more authority to innovate, coordinate resources and tailor solutions to regional realities.
How 33,000 teachers want leaders to improve school culture
Well-being is the area where teachers want the most assistance, but many school and district leaders feel unprepared to help.
A staggering 93% of educator requests for support were health-related, including time for wellness, opportunities to recharge, support check-ins and small moments of encouragement, a new report from edtech company Alpaca found. However, fewer than one-third of school and district leaders expressed confidence about promoting health, the lowest figure across all leadership domains measured in the report.
This disconnect could lead to staffing woes for superintendents. In a separate survey from Horace Mann, 58% of teachers reported burnout severe enough that they might leave the profession within three years, with mental health a contributing factor.
3rd-Grade Retention Isn’t Really About Kids — It’s About Adults Who Teach Them
Should kids be held back in third grade if they can’t read?
As of this year, 18 states say yes and impose some form of retention policy linked to a child’s reading scores, according to the advocacy group ExcelInEd. But the question of retention has been hotly debated as a tool to drive reading scores, with Ohio weakening its version in 2023 and Michigan dropping its requirement in 2024.
On one side, research suggests that third grade reading scores are predictive of a student’s likelihood of academic success through middle school and into high school. Children who fall behind in the early years struggle to ever get back on track.
U.S. schools face a crisis as the number of children drops
As American women have fewer babies each year, the number of young children in the United States is dwindling. The trend is now catching up to the nation’s public school districts.
There are simply fewer children to attend school in America today: The number of public school students in kindergarten through 12th grade has fallen in 30 states since the mid-2010s.
Declining enrollment has hit many of the nation’s largest urban school districts, including Los Angeles, Chicago and New York, a New York Times analysis found. But smaller and suburban districts are shrinking at a similar rate.
Biting, kicking, wandering the classroom: Teachers say there’s a rise in misbehavior even among the littlest kids
First, there was the child who had zipped his entire face inside the hood of his green sweatshirt.
“Is that a good choice?” Quinn asked.
“Yeah?” responded a muffled voice.
Then, there was the girl in pink leggings who stood up from her seat, wandered over to Quinn as she was teaching and stood next to her at the front of the room.
“Can you go sit in your spot?” Quinn whispered. The girl stayed put.
A few minutes later, there was the boy spinning around uncontrollably from his corner of the carpet in the front of the room, kicking students near him with his black and white sneakers.
“Your feet are not safe,” Quinn told him. He stopped and sat on his knees, bouncing up and down as Quinn continued her lesson.
Teaching first grade has always involved dealing with wiggly and talkative kids. But it hasn’t always been quite like this. Over the past 10 years, Quinn has seen an increase in challenging behavior and more emotions among her 6- and 7-year-olds, with a particular ramp-up since the pandemic.