14 Trends in K-12 Education that will accelerate in 2026-2023

🔭 The point of prediction lists isn’t to be 100% accurate. The point of this list is to survey the horizon for strategic insights that will help school boards, trustees, superintendents, heads of schools and other K-12 system leaders ask good questions or spark important conversations when reviewing strategic plans or hiring their next leader.

K-12 education is notoriously bad for (a) being slower than almost every other sector to adapt; (b) getting too distracted by present urgencies and ideological pendulum swings that feel disproportionately important; (c) spending from seemingly endless funds with an almost religious zeal, on the wrong things.

Here’s 14 trends in K-12 education that will accelerate in the next 5-years. They will create exciting opportunities and improvements, but also create systemic challenges.

(1.) The traditional 8:30am–2:30pm>>>Monday-Friday>>in-person school day? … It will slowly, then rapidly change, becoming more fluid or disappearing altogether in some schools.

(2.) AI will raise the floor of teaching quality. Better student achievement data will expose less effective teachers and schools far more transparently.

(3.) “Master” teachers will reach and teach far more students (and make more money) as a partial (and necessary) response to the local and global teacher shortage.

(4.) Coaching humans to flourish will matter far more than teaching and assessment… But teacher credentialing frameworks and university training programs won’t adapt.

(5.) The number of graduates attending university will decline as learners demand clearer added-value beyond the degree, and expert-led, lower-cost, modular alternatives emerge (that employers will trust just as much).

(6.) The most sought-after schools will differentiate by relationship, belonging, and intergenerational community.

(7.) Value-based and faith-informed education will continue to grow.

(8.) K-12 systems will face a rapidly widening leadership and innovation gap.

(9.) The line between “school” and “non-school” learning will blur, especially benefiting neurodiverse learners… this is already well underway.

(10.) Standardized university entrance exams in math and sciences will return, with AI making assessment scalable, adaptive, and almost cost-free by 2030.

(11.) Math curricula will undergo rapid system-wide revision, as nation-wide declining numeracy and quantitative readiness become impossible to ignore.

(12.) Schools and boards will need to recruit more executive and strategy leaders from outside education.

(13.) Hands-on, craft-based learning will surge as authentic human-made work gains a resurgent value in an automated, AI-saturated world.

(14.) The ideological pendulum will bounce… schools shift back to more emphasis on citizenship and economic readiness.

In January I will unpack each of these and suggest ways that they might have implications for everyone’s work or industry.