W/A’s Thomas Rodgers is filling in for Ben this week.

Four days a week, I sort through a few hundred education headlines to put together that evening’s What We’re Reading. Once you get used to the deluge, you start to notice which stories keep coming back.

This fall, it’s school closures. Hardly a day goes by without a new district announcing a plan, a board pushing back a vote, or parents packing a meeting with handmade signs.

On Tuesday, I opened the newsletter with a $34 million Los Angeles Unified campus that has sat empty since 2021. Vandals have punched holes in its floors and ceilings, and the district pays about $20,000 a month for security and maintenance, the Los Angeles Times reports. Two days later, news items included closure-related stories from Portland, Salem-Keizer, Seattle, Philadelphia, Chicago and Loudoun County.

Marguerite Roza, who runs Georgetown’s Edunomics Lab and is a senior advisor here at Whiteboard, calls the school closures trend “the big shrink.” Public school enrollment totaled 48.8 million in 2025-26, down 3.7% since 2017-18, according to her analysis in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal. Births peaked in 2007. The smaller cohorts born five or six years ago are now arriving in kindergarten. Mississippi, where I grew up, has lost more than 7% of its students since 2019.

New York offers a complication for anyone expecting spending to fall neatly alongside enrollment. A report released today by the city comptroller finds that public schools lost nearly 22,000 K-12 students in 2025-26, even as the number of students with disabilities keeps rising and English learners remain a larger share of enrollment than a decade ago. The report attributes the enrollment decline largely to fewer children overall in the city. There are fewer students to educate, and the ones who remain need additional support.

The outcome of all of this is more than 1,000 public schools closed in 2025-26, the fourth straight annual increase, Stateline reports. But there are a few other things that stand out in the sea of closure news.

The savings only go so far. Portland Public Schools still projects a $65 million budget gap next year. Salem-Keizer’s is $46 million. Portland Superintendent Kimberlee Armstrong opened her board report this week with a single slide explaining that closures would concentrate resources to strengthen educational opportunities with fewer available dollars, OPB reports. St. Louis projects $20 million in annual savings from closing nine schools, but the Post-Dispatch notes it’s still unclear how the district will pull it off. Philadelphia’s plan to close schools and renovate others would cost $3 billion, including $2 billion in grants it hasn’t secured. Consolidation comes with its own bill.

The empty building is the next problem. St. Louis already owns about 20 vacant schools from earlier school consolidation. Seattle, which is weighing mergers for at least six schools, heard from a PTA leader worried about what happens to a building afterward: it sits empty, gets looted, becomes an eyesore. The LAUSD campus shows what that can look like. Districts need a plan for the property that outlasts the vote to close it.

Former growth districts are making cuts, too. Loudoun County, Va., was one of the fastest-growing counties in America not long ago. Enrollment has dropped from 84,175 to 77,077 since 2019, and administrators have proposed closing four rural elementary schools, including one open since 1912. Board members learned about a hiring freeze at the same meeting. Farther south, public schools across Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties lost about 35,000 students in a single year, the Sun Sentinel reports. The map of places planning for fewer students keeps expanding.

The politics are local and getting louder. Oregon’s governor sent Portland a letter urging leaders to “take the time” to get it right; her challenger says she wants to keep small schools open. Philadelphia City Council members spent today asking Mayor Parker to step off the sideline.

In Chicago, where the 2013 closure of 50 elementary schools still shapes the debate, about a dozen of the 45 school board candidates say they would support some closures, Chalkbeat reports. More than 140 of the district’s roughly 500 schools are less than half full. Some candidates supporting closures are making the case around what severely underenrolled schools struggle to offer: challenging classes, sports teams, school plays and enough classmates to sustain them. Opponents warn of further disruption in predominantly Black neighborhoods that have already endured years of disinvestment.

Parents have practical questions that enrollment projections alone won’t answer. How much longer will the bus ride be? Will a dual-language program survive the move? What happens to the after-school programs and family services housed in the neighborhood school? Those are questions about whether the transition will leave children better off.

The decisions are arriving in quick succession. Wake County votes on Election Day, Nov. 3, on a $680 million school bond largely intended to improve existing buildings, a reminder that slower enrollment growth doesn’t eliminate facilities needs. St. Louis votes on its closure plan Nov. 10, Salem-Keizer Dec. 8 and Portland Dec. 15. Seattle’s board could act in late February.

There are some ideas worth watching. Stateline points to California’s requirement that financially stressed districts complete an equity impact analysis before closing or consolidating a school. RedefinED Atlanta’s executive director suggests temporary stabilization funding to support both displaced students and the schools receiving them, along with tracking how those students fare after the move. Approving a closure is one decision. Making the transition work takes considerably longer.

Marguerite’s observation that stuck with me is that many sitting superintendents and board members have never led a district through contraction. They’re now learning a skill they haven’t been able to practice, in public, on a deadline.

On November 12, Whiteboard Advisors is convening state and federal leaders at Gallup in Washington, D.C., to talk through what the election means for education in 2027. The day opens with Casey Sacks, U.S. Assistant Secretary and CFO at the Department of Education, and features Under Secretary of Education Nicholas Kent, Treasury Deputy Assistant Secretary for Tax Policy Kevin Salinger, California State Superintendent Tony Thurmond, Ohio Higher Education Chancellor Mike Duffey, Broward County School Board member Allen Zeman, the Republican Governors Association’s Stephanie Groen Cummings, NPR’s Cory Turner, and advisors to Govs. Wes Moore and Jared Polis. More speakers will be announced soon.

Sessions cover the election results, the backlash against AI and edtech, the new federal tax credit scholarship program, and higher ed accountability. The conversation is held under the Chatham House rule, and attendance is capped at 175.

Request an invitation here.

Today, the U.S. Department of Education (ED) finalized new regulations governing the U.S. higher education accreditation system.

Get caught up: These new regulations are the output of the Accreditation, Innovation and Modernization (AIM) negotiated rulemaking committee, which met in April and May to produce the draft regulations on which the final rule is based. ED published a proposed version in August and collected public comments through September. The final rule makes only minor technical changes to that draft, leaving the core of the committee’s consensus language intact. Because the rules are finalized before November 1, they will go into effect on July 1, 2027.

These sweeping regulations will fundamentally change the accreditation system. Key provisions include:

What’s Next

Barring legal challenges, the regulations will take effect next summer. Unlike many of the Trump administration’s other major regulatory changes (e.g., the RISE final rule that implemented graduate loan borrowing caps or the AHEAD final rule that operationalized Workforce Pell), the regulatory changes included in the AIM package were not expressly required by Congress which may make it more vulnerable to legal challenges.

Today, the State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA) released its fifth-annual State EdTech Trends Report. The report, developed in collaboration with Whiteboard Advisors, explores how state education leaders are responding to a growing national conversation about technology in schools while AI keeps moving to the center of their work.

The findings show states taking on more responsibility for how technology is used in classrooms, from AI policy to cellphone bans to what schools buy, often with small teams and limited budgets. 74% of respondents say their state lacks a dedicated, sufficient edtech budget, and 76% have five or fewer staff working on edtech.

Key Findings

The debate over classroom technology isn’t going away any time soon. Increasingly, the question for state leaders is whether the technology in schools is safe, effective, and worth the investment. As Stephen Dackin, director of the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce, writes in the report’s preface, “Our answer should not be to reject technology, and it should not be to adopt it without question.”

Over the past two weeks, leaders from the six National Math Improvement Project (NMIP) districts shared their work with peers  at the Council of the Great City Schools Fall Conference in Boston and the NCSM Annual Conference in Denver. The sessions were standing room only. The questions from district leaders, partners, and researchers were specific and practical: how to schedule acceleration without tracking students out of it, how to tell whether implementation is working, and how to build enough math expertise among adults to sustain the work.

Those questions reflect where many large districts are right now. Most have adopted high-quality instructional materials (HQIM). The harder work is making materials, schedules, professional learning, and supports for students function as one system and at scale.

Math has become an increasingly important priority across states. In September, California became the latest state to act, with a new law requiring schools to screen K–2 students annually for math difficulties and provide added supports. According to an Education Week tracker, 22 other states have passed laws or implemented new policies on math education since 2022, and 14 states now require early math screening paired with intervention. State boards are also making moves, as NASBE analysis found that 20 state strategic plans now include numeracy goals.

These policies set requirements or minimum expectations for diagnostic screening, intervention, instructional materials, and access to advanced coursework. States do not typically specify how a district serving hundreds of thousands of students should redesign its schedule, train its coaches, or decide which students complete Algebra I in eighth grade. That work happens in districts, and implementation at scale is the focus of the National Math Improvement Project, a community of practice formed in 2022 whose six districts serve 2.3 million students. 

District teams presented on a range of topics related to math strategy and implementation. Three threads stood out.

Cyberthreats against American schools have continued to increase in volume and complexity. A new report from the Center for Internet Security and the Multi-State Information Sharing & Analysis Center revealed that more than half of K-12 schools and districts (51%) were affected by a cybersecurity issue in the 2025-26 school year, and about one-third (34%) reported at least one cyber incident that impacted school operations. Today’s cybercriminals are more frequently targeting humans through phishing schemes and social engineering than the technical vulnerabilities of institutions. Investments in identity security measures like Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) can be especially valuable and protect user credentials from being compromised. [K-12 Dive]

Young people have more options for paths after high school than ever, but often don’t have access to the data or insights they need to make informed decisions about their future. With a $10 million, multiyear grant from NextLadder Ventures, national nonprofit CareerVillage aims to change that. The funds will enable expansion of and upgrades to Coach, CareerVillage’s AI-powered career coach that supports personalized career  guidance and exploration. Since its launch in 2024, Coach has helped more than 150,000 people in over 120 countries, with 90% of users reporting improved career readiness.

Check out W/A Jobs, which features 3,741 career opportunities from 327 organizations across the education industry. Hiring? For $250/month or $1,000/year, organizations can post an unlimited number of jobs with no per-job fees.

Check out W/A Jobs, which features 3,295 career opportunities from 304 organizations across the education industry. A few roles that caught our eye over the past week: