Every few months, someone asks me a version of the same question: Who actually reads this newsletter? It's a fair thing to wonder.

When we sent the very first edition of Whiteboard Notes on May 11, 2012, it went to a grand total of 232 clients and friends.

The lead items that week: The Senate deadlock over whether student-loan interest rates would double, Arne Duncan’s case for reforming the teaching profession, and states including Florida, Georgia, and Minnesota puzzled over what to do about "online learning."

If you want a laugh, the first few editions are worth a look. They're a time capsule of education policy and newsletter design in 2012.

Fourteen years later, the answer to "Who reads this?" is a little more complicated.

This summer, we took a look at the four newsletters that now comprise “W/A Media” to see who is actually on the other end of these emails.

As it turns out, our 232-person "friends and family" has grown up. Today, we’re reaching 51,000 active subscriptions at more than 10,000 different organizations.

More than three-quarters of those readers use a work or institutional address—a school district, university, company, foundation, association, or government inbox. That doesn't tell us everything about how they read, but it is a pretty good indication that these newsletters travel through professional networks.

Look a little closer, and the patterns get even more interesting.

We count readers from 568 public school districts, including all 10 of the nation's largest systems and three-quarters of the 100 largest. These are district leaders and staff in New York City and Chicago, in Houston, Columbus, and Los Angeles Unified—systems that together enroll millions of students. And they read from hundreds of smaller and mid-sized districts, too.

We also count readers from more than 1,200 colleges and universities. The Ivies and flagship publics, certainly, but also the online, competency-based, and broad-access institutions rewriting who gets to earn a degree. Arizona State University has the most subscribers of any organization on our lists, with more than 200 Notes readers.

Then there is the money that moves the sector: the venture and private equity investors who finance it; the operators and builders at Google, Amazon, Pearson, HMH, and hundreds of other companies; and the foundations supporting so much of the work.

Of course, many of our readers are policymakers working in state agencies, legislatures, the U.S. Department of Education, and on Capitol Hill. In recent months, some of these readers, including Alabama's Eric Mackey, Virginia's Jenna Conway, Maryland's Carey Wright, and Louisiana's Cade Brumley have joined us for in-depth Q&As about their work.

Put together, our newsletters reach a broad audience—but not one with a single set of interests. Each publication serves a different part of the education and workforce world:

The audiences overlap, but each has its own center of gravity. Nearly two-thirds of our readers subscribe to just one title. More than 12,000 read at least two, and 672 subscribe to all four.

And they get read. Each newsletter carries a 50%+ open rate and a nearly 10% click-through rate—which is especially strong given our propensity to tinker with them late into the evening of publish days.

Together, these titles make up W/A Media. A labor of love contributed to by nearly every member of the Whiteboard Advisors team. We’re grateful to have you as a reader.

For more information on our audience, we've pulled more detail—and information for organizations interested in reaching it—into this short deck.

Now, on to this week's news.

Superintendents’ priorities shifted sharply this year. Budget shortfalls and declining enrollment now top the list of district leaders’ concerns, displacing reading achievement and teacher recruitment, according to a new RAND report.

By the numbers: 54% of district leaders identified budget shortages as one of their three most pressing challenges, up from 33% in 2025. Declining enrollment rose from 25% to 36%.

Academic and staffing concerns moved in the other direction. The share of leaders naming reading achievement fell from 44% to 32%; math achievement declined from 40% to 34%; and teacher recruitment and retention dropped from 42% to 35%. That doesn’t mean those problems have been solved. RAND’s interviews with 38 district leaders suggest budget pressures are making them harder to address. [Education Week, subscription model] 

The expiration of federal COVID-19 relief funds is only part of the story. Superintendents pointed to rising salaries, transportation and facility costs; growing special education needs; continued demand for mental health supports; and state funding that has not kept pace. One leader said the price of a school bus had doubled from $80,000 to $160,000 over six years.

Declining enrollment compounds the problem by reducing per-pupil revenue without producing equivalent savings. Buildings still need to be maintained, buses still need to run, and schools still need enough teachers to operate.

Districts are responding by competing more directly for students. 40% are considering marketing campaigns promoting their public schools. A third are looking at expanded pre-K, and another third are considering new extracurricular or specialized programs.

Those strategies expose the central tension in RAND’s findings. Districts need to invest in the programs that attract and retain families at precisely the moment they have less money to spend. Increasingly, district leaders are being asked to cut their way to financial stability while investing their way back to growth.

On July 21, the House Committee on Education and Workforce moved 10 bills through markup and to the House floor. Several education bills were included, with a focus on (1) strengthening parental authority, (2) defining AI’s role in K-12 classrooms, and (3) modernizing workforce systems. According to Chairman Tim Walberg (R-MI), these bills aim to advance “commonsense policies that put students, parents, workers, and job creators first.”

Four of the bills stood out to our team:

These bills addressed several distinct policy landscapes, ranging from Title XI to AI literacy in the classroom. The MATCH Act passed the House committee unanimously, while the other bills fell along party lines. While we don’t know whether the Senate will take any of these bills up, they provide an important barometer for what is top of mind for federal legislators in education.

Last week, W/A VP Matt Tower sat down with Proctorio founder and CEO Mike Olson to talk about the company's origin as an accessibility tool, its evolution into a critical piece of university assessment infrastructure, and the rapid pace of change in the academic integrity space since the advent of ChatGPT in 2023.

The USDA is raising federal school meal reimbursement rates 3.54% for 2026-27, its annual inflation adjustment tied to the Food Away from Home CPI. For most lunches, that works out to a single penny. Schools serving fewer than 60% free and reduced-price meals get 45 cents; those above the threshold get 47. Breakfast rates climb 2 to 11 cents depending on category, and schools certified for performance-based cash assistance get another 9 cents per reimbursable lunch. The new rates began July 1 and will run through June 30, 2027. [K-12 Dive] 

Nutrition directors advocated for a lot more. The School Nutrition Association (SNA) is pushing Congress to pass the Healthy Meals Help Kids Learn Act, which would add 45 cents per lunch and 28 cents per breakfast, but the bill has sat in the House Education and Workforce Committee since last October with no movement. In an SNA survey from January, 95% of nutrition directors said they had serious or moderate concerns about keeping their programs financially afloat three years out.

Public schools closed more than 1,000 campuses in 2025-26, the fourth straight year of  increased closures, according to NCES data released last week. The drivers are a shrinking youth population and the end of COVID-relief money that had been covering budget gaps. Marguerite Roza, a W/A senior advisor and director of Georgetown's Edunomics Lab, calls it "the big shrink": federal projections have enrollment continuing to fall from the 2019 public school enrollment peak, with schools on track to lose close to 4 million students by 2031. [The Washington Post, subscription required] 

Big districts are already acting. In May, Philadelphia voted to close 17 schools and says it has 70,000 more seats than it needs. Houston, Pittsburgh, and Broward county quickly followed with closure announcements of their own.  Researchers expect the trend to continue, and they flag a new problem alongside it: students who attended schools that were closed and then vanished from the rolls entirely, likely into homeschooling or untracked microschools. As Foundry10’s Sofoklis Goulas said, "The unaccounted-for student is the most worrisome."

The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a new report this week, which revealed that the number of students with disabilities being served in general education classrooms has grown substantially in recent years. Nationally, 1.1 million more students with disabilities spent at least 40% of the school day in general education classrooms in the 2023-24 school year than in 2012-13—a 25% increase. Growth in inclusion was recorded across most disability types; however, children with specific learning disability (e.g., dyslexia), speech or language impairment, and other health impairments remained the most common, followed (not closely) by kids with autism.

More than 7 million students receive special education services under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which mandates that students with disabilities be provided a free appropriate public education in the “least restrictive environment.” According to the Department of Education, inclusive practices can positively impact outcomes for all students and foster a stronger sense of belonging; however, those practices must be underpinned by intentional investment and resources, rather than a lack thereof, for students with disabilities to reap any benefits. [Disability Scoop]

Check out W/A Jobs, which features 3,504 career opportunities from 319 organizations across the education industry. A few roles that caught our eye over the past week: