This week, W/A Senior Vice President and Co-Director of Research David DeSchryver is taking over for Ben.

I’m tapping this out en route back from SXSW EDU, where I had the honor of presenting with Edunomics Lab Director and W/A Sr. Advisor Dr. Marguerite Roza about the state of school finance and what’s likely ahead for K-12. 

The room was full and energetic, but more cautious than optimistic after a tumultuous year of funding freezes, grant cancellations, and litigation. (Great White’s 80s hit “Once Bitten Twice Shy” applies and I’ll keep referencing it until conditions change or the eye rolls become too much.)

But how shy? Where are we in 2026 compared to 2025? Today, I’m looking back on the top 5 events of the first year of Trump’s second term and ranking their severity and staying power for the K-12 market. I pull this from a longer, geekier list of events shaping the market today. If you want to learn more about that or think other events should be on the top five, get in touch. I look forward to the reactions. 

1. OMB Formula Fund Withholding — July 2025.
The unexpected stomach punch. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) delayed $6.2 billion in expected July 1 formula fund releases—including Title II-A, III-A, IV-A, IV-B, and WIOA Adult Education—citing alignment with presidential priorities. Districts that had already committed to staffing and summer programming faced immediate cash-flow shortfalls. Funds were eventually released, but the precedent of mid-cycle formula funding freezes altered planning assumptions. Congress has since addressed OMB’s ability to do that again (more below), but this was a trust-crusher for local CFOs trying to plan out the next few years, and it's going to take time to recover. 

2. ESSER Liquidation Freeze & Two-Tiered Reinstatement.

Secretary McMahon voided ESSER liquidation extensions on March 28, 2025, freezing more than $3 billion in COVID-19 relief reimbursements before a court order partially reversed the action. States that sued were excluded from "project-specific" extensions, creating a two-tiered reimbursement system (red and blue). Districts planning ESSER-funded purchases faced unexpected cash-flow gaps and uncertainty about whether reimbursements would materialize. ED eventually released the funding, but it caused concern about other prior funding agreements with the agency. 

3. January 2025 OMB Discretionary Grant Freeze.
OMB Memo M-25-13 directed all agencies to pause discretionary grants pending review for alignment with executive orders on DEI, immigration, and gender policy. Although formula programs were nominally exempted, the freeze injected deep uncertainty into competitive grant pipelines and signaled that grant awards already made could be revisited. In the end, courts threw this out, but the episode made it clear that grant oversight management was a tool that the administration would use in support of its objectives, a strategy that’s playing out in 2026, as we have noted earlier. 

4. ED Structural Disruption: Layoffs, OCR Backlog & Interagency Transfers.
Mass layoffs gutted ED's program and compliance capacity—IES lost 100+ staff, OCR built a backlog of 25,000 unresolved cases, and the Office of Educational Technology was shuttered. Interagency agreements have begun to transfer CTE, Title I and other programs to the Department of Labor, creating ambiguity about which agency governs what. But all throughout, there's never been a concern about the amount of funding and the timing of the funds. So, while there has been disruption in the support at the state level and some local level, the predictability of these funding streams has not been affected.

5. FY2026 Appropriations — Congress Holds the Line.
The February 2026 Consolidated Appropriations Act preserved core formula funding—Title I at $18.4 billion, IDEA at $14.2 billion—rejecting the administration's proposed $11.8 billion cut and the House proposal to eliminate Title II-A and III-A. The bipartisan vote signals Congressional resistance to deep structural cuts, and OMB interpretations about what Congress meant to allocate and when. The bill does not constrain the administration's interagency transfer authority, but it sends a clear signal that Congress expects the funds to arrive in full and on time in 2026. 

So, where are we as of March 2026?
Despite an extraordinary year, most federal dollars ultimately came through. Congress pushed back on OMB, and the FY2026 appropriations process set clearer guardrails. With the worst of the federal drama likely behind us, school leaders may (I hope) shift their attention to harder, slower-moving challenges: declining birth rates, flat enrollments, and the unforgiving arithmetic of rising costs against marginal revenue growth.

This week, Clever released its annual Cybersecure report, which found that in 2025, more than half (52%) of U.S. school districts experienced a cybersecurity incident—representing a 16-percentage-point increase year-over-year. 

The report, co-authored by W/A's own Evo Popoff and Daimen Sagastume, draws on a Q4 2025 survey from over 500 U.S. district technology and security leaders.

For years, adaptive learning promised high-quality, hyper-personalized education at scale—but the technology struggled to deliver on that vision. Today, advances in AI are reopening the conversation. 

On March 18 at 2 p.m. ET, you’re invited to join an intimate conversation with institutional leaders and course design experts on what this next wave of adaptive learning looks like in practice.

This message is brought to you by Skillwell.

This week, Democratic attorneys general from 17 states filed a lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s expansion of college admissions data collection for the Integrated Postsecondary Data System (IPEDS). The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, and involves Massachusetts, California, Maryland, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawai’i, Illinois, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin.

The plaintiffs argue that the “scope, breadth, and rushed process” of implementing the new reporting requirements harms institutions. Even with limited guidance from the Education Department and an unusually fast turnaround, institutions face potentially severe consequences for noncompliance, including potential loss of federal funding.

The plaintiffs also claim that the Trump administration is attempting to unlawfully transform the nonpartisan National Center for Education Statistics into a “mechanism for law enforcement and the furthering of partisan policy aims.”

Education Department Press Secretary Ellen Keast defended the new requirements: “American taxpayers invest over $100 billion into higher education each year and deserve transparency on how their dollars are being spent. The Department’s efforts will expand an existing transparency tool to show how universities are taking race into consideration in admissions. What exactly are State AGs trying to shield universities from?” [POLITICO Pro, subscription model]

Hosted by ISTE+ASCD and Whiteboard Advisors, the Solutions Summit is a one-day, exclusive event that convenes leaders from across the education ecosystem. This year’s Summit will be held on Sunday, June 28, 2026, from 9 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. and will feature a mix of interactive panels and small-group activities focused on real-world decision-making, product impact, and the future of learning.

Language barriers are one of the most persistent challenges in the modern workplace—and one of the most overlooked.

This week, W/A’s Matt Tower sat down with Katie Brown and Sonali Joshi to discuss EnGen's acquisition of Cell-Ed, Inc. Together, they're helping employees connect across language barriers by building practical, workplace-relevant English fluency and teaching English-speaking colleagues enough of their coworkers' native languages to bridge the gap from both sides.

Check out W/A Jobs, which features 3,652 career opportunities from 314 organizations across the education industry. A few roles that caught our eye over the past week: