Our Predictions for 2025

We’re continuing our prediction tradition to kick off the new year here at Overdeck Family Foundation. Beginning in 2023, each December, our leadership team has sat down to reflect on what we’d seen across the education and philanthropic landscape, in addition to what we’d learned from our peer funders and grantee partners.

We did the same this past year and used the insights to analyze how our predictions for the previous year fared, as well as outline what trends and shifts we anticipate in the year ahead. This collaborative process helps us more deeply understand the opportunities and challenges coming up for our grantees and their beneficiaries, while also informing our grantmaking strategy in 2025 and beyond.

You can see our full 2024 list of predictions here, which we’ve summarized in the table below to reflect how we fared.

Going forward, we anticipate continued challenges across the education sector, with some notable opportunities for progress. Below is our list of predictions for 2025:

Academic Recovery & Performance

1. Academic recovery will continue to be slow, on average, but there will be an increasing number of bright spots, including some from unlikely places, including out-of-system, rural schools, and districts that have been taken over by states. —Anu Malipatil, Vice President

Last year, we hypothesized that after several years of disappointing test scores, academic performance will begin to rebound. Sadly, we were proven wrong, with most data demonstrating that academic recovery stalled out in SY 2023-24. Yet we know that bright spots do exist.

This year, we’re amending our prediction to focus on settings that we believe will continue to show improvements and are approaching education a bit differently. This includes out-of-system options as more parents choose alternative schooling methods; rural schools, which for many years were left behind in post-pandemic recovery; and districts that have experienced state takeovers, such as what we see in Houston Independent School District.

2. More states will join New York and Massachusetts in shifting away from formal summative assessments, at a time when more parents report no longer trusting grades as a primary measure of their children’s progress. —Elaine Perez, Director, People & Operations

We predicted last year that concerns about grade inflation would continue to increase, and new research suggests that our prediction was not only accurate but, for the first time, parents are putting more stock in communication with teachers versus grades to understand how their children are performing. That’s why the recent trends away from summative assessments are so troubling. These assessments, though flawed, did provide schools and families with a baseline understanding of student achievement.

At the same time, we do expect to see an expansion of new assessment designs that are integrated into student learning and almost invisible in nature, providing more opportunities for educators to support students in real time. We also expect to see a growth in voice-enabled assessments, especially in literacy across kindergarten through second grade, providing an opportunity to assess skills in multiple languages.

Early Childhood Education

3. Individual state support for childcare and Pre-K will increase based on parental demand and emerging evidence of benefits not only for children, but also for family earning potential. —Lina Eroh, Senior Director, Communications

Last year we wrote about the continued difficulty with staffing early childhood education centers given high costs and a tight labor market. This year, we expect staffing to remain challenging, but do see some evidence that states will play a bigger role in creating high-quality early learning environments and ensuring they are properly staffed.

We believe states will be driven to make these investments not only by parental demand, but because of emerging evidence that Pre-K, when it incorporates best practices such as using a high-quality curriculum and providing educators with aligned professional development, helps set children and families up for success.

EdTech/AI

4. Artificial intelligence (AI) will continue to make inroads in assessment, content accessibility, and personalization, with generative AI (genAI) demonstrating impact for increasing educators’ efficiency and skills. —Anu Malipatil

In 2024, we predicted that AI would become more integrated into edtech products, but the efficacy of AI interventions would remain difficult to confirm. This prediction was somewhat accurate, but we failed to hypothesize where AI would have meaningful impact in just one year: coaching for educators. Specifically, several studies have shown AI’s early promise at supporting educators to improve their teaching.

Still, we’re in the early days of both research and possibility when it comes to genAI’s ability to improve the teaching profession. In the coming year, we expect to see more examples and emerging evidence of genAI impacting teacher productivity and effectiveness through support of professional learning, instructional coaching, and analysis of student data and lesson planning. At the same time, though perhaps less trendy, we believe predictive AI, will continue to have benefits for student learning by providing individualized assessment, content, and support based on student progression.

5. To survive the tech talent hunt and continue to meet beneficiary needs, we’ll see more examples of nonprofits partnering with for-profit entities. —Elaine Perez

Last year we predicted new nonprofits will struggle to keep up and compete with for-profit organizations in hiring tech talent. The prediction was mostly accurate: we saw evidence that the demand for tech talent continued to outpace supply, making it difficult for nonprofits to compete in a tight labor market.

This year, we expect a mentality change—if you can’t beat them, join them. We believe more nonprofits will partner with for-profit companies and the benefits will be bidirectional. Specifically, these partnerships will allow for-profits additional access to users, while helping nonprofits tap into technology that improves the scalability of their services. We already see examples of this in the professional learning space, such as the partnership between Teaching Matters and TeachFX, which has developed a generative AI-enabled coaching tool that provides educators with real-time feedback to strengthen their instructional practices.

Lastly, as AI impacts program delivery and content, we also expect that it will impact operations, with the number of leaders implementing AI strategies and tools for operations doubling in 2025.

Curriculum & Implementation

6. While early literacy will continue to be a priority, momentum for early math will increase. —Josh Lotstein, Senior Director, Grantmaking

In 2024, we believed that more states would formally adopt curricula and policies aligned with the science of reading. Our hypothesis bore out: to date, 40 states and the District of Columbia have passed laws and policies on evidence-based reading practices in schools.

Early literacy and the adoption of policies aligned with the science of reading will continue to expand in 2025, but we’re also tracking momentum for early math, or as some call it, the science of math. Longitudinal research has found that the strongest predictor of third grade math and reading achievement is early numeracy skills. Given the focus on improving math outcomes in the U.S., we expect that early math advocates will use the playbook from the science of reading to call for the same types of reforms when it comes to math instruction, beginning with a focus on children with disabilities and expanding to impact teaching for all students.

7. More schools and districts across the country will take aim at the five percent problem and increase their attention on the adoption and usage of the products they buy. —Josh Lotstein

We know based on rigorous studies that many of the organizations we fund have the ability to have a measurable impact on student learning. Yet, when these products and interventions are deployed in the real world, we often fail to see the impact at scale. The more we learn, the more we believe this is due to a failure of fidelity of implementation, with too few students accessing the program or service at the recommended dosage.

In 2025, we believe more districts will concentrate on the adoption and usage of the products they procure. As part of this focus there will be growing mutual accountability for outcomes between districts and providers. To help accomplish that, we expect to see double-digit growth in districts using pay for performance contracting models, ensuring both the purchaser and the provider are committed to outputs and/or outcomes throughout the contract period. But, while there will be increased demand and adoption, whether this type of approach will yield widespread change will remain elusive until future years.

Economy/Staffing

8. Economic headwinds in education markets will increase as budgets tighten and pandemic relief funding expires, resulting in slower growth and consolidation. —Lucy Brainard, Director, Portfolio Success & Operations

Much has been written about the ESSER funding cliff and its impact on school finances and nonprofit revenue streams. So far, we haven’t seen much fallout from the expiration of relief funding, but we expect that to change in SY 2025-26. Specifically, as school budgets tighten, we’ll see an outsized impact on both education nonprofits and for-profits. We’ve already seen that investment in for-profit edtech is on track to hit its lowest amount in years, with some predicting that we haven’t yet hit rock bottom.

But less VC funding for for-profit companies doesn’t mean it’s good news for nonprofits either. We’ve already seen signs of slower reach and earned revenue growth for some of our grantees, and believe this trend will increase in the coming years as schools have to make tough decisions about their spending. This will result in slower growth and, potentially, consolidation that may cross lines between the nonprofit and for-profit worlds. Ultimately, the impact will be felt more by schools that serve lower-income students and the programs designed to support their learning.

9. The expiration of ESSER funding and the tighter funding climate for schools will lead to significant cuts to afterschool and summer programs. —Jon Sotsky, Senior Director, Strategic Impact & Learning

Last year, we correctly predicted that funding cuts would impact staffing, especially for schools that hired extra staff during the pandemic. This year, we believe fiscal challenges will be manifested through reduced investment in afterschool and summer programming, limiting the impact these programs can have on addressing important challenges including chronic absenteeism, isolation, and mental health challenges.

My colleague Emma Banay recently wrote an op-ed arguing for the importance of out-of-school programs at a time of funding cuts, not only for their potential academic benefits, but for their ability to improve student social-emotional development with advantages like improved interpersonal skills and stronger peer-to-peer and peer-to-adult relationships. We believe these benefits are especially essential in 2025.

Student Mental Health & Engagement

10. Efforts to engage families won’t be enough to address chronic absenteeism. Schools will need to make significant changes to engage students more fully. —Lina Eroh and Jon Sotsky

Over the last year, we’ve invested heavily in interventions, research, and resources to combat chronic absenteeism and increase attendance. Our efforts seem to be helping the general trendline: absenteeism is improving, though it’s still far higher than pre-pandemic. And, local efforts to combat absenteeism through community and family engagement and increased accountability seem to be making a difference, such as in Rhode Island.

But after almost two years of this work, we’ve come to the conclusion that efforts to engage families won’t be enough to get kids back to school. We believe chronic absenteeism rates will continue to decline in at least 75 percent of states, but not a single state will return to pre-pandemic levels. What will be needed to accomplish that is a bigger rethink of the school day, specifically what and how is taught. One of the most promising changes we expect to benefit in-school engagement are cell phone bans. We believe these bans will become more prevalent across the country, leading to improvements in student engagement and mental health. We’ve already seen research from outside the U.S. showing that cell phone bans can improve student mental health, particularly for girls, and we are considering additional funding here to better understand the impact.

But, cell phone bans on their own won’t improve attendance rates. For that, schools will have to rethink how they approach teaching, making it more relevant, engaging, and personalized to students. Edtech can help with that, as can the flipped classroom model and the use of high-quality instructional materials that are designed to engage and challenge. Only with these improvements, many of which the Foundation is excited to fund in 2025, will we see states return to pre-pandemic levels of attendance.

Header image courtesy of Khan Academy