A New Roadmap for K-12 Education in the Post-Pandemic Era

K-12 educators around the country are scrambling to save jobs and programs created in the last few years as they face the end of the federal funds aimed at helping schools recover from the pandemic.

The Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) Fund gave school districts nearly $200 billion, which they leveraged to pay for high-dosage tutoring, early literacy support, leadership development, enhanced counseling, expanded student exposure to career pathways and other endeavors. But when access to that money ends later this year, school administrators will face stark choices.

To make a difference now, they will have to do more with less and come up with answers to some tough questions. Can educators free up essential resources from ineffective programs? Will they close buildings that have dwindling numbers of students? Should states put money into a coalition to expand evidence-based reforms? How should school leaders address funding inequities and invest in historically marginalized students?

School administrators cannot rely on existing strategies and instead should use the lessons learned from the last few years to boldly envision and invest in the future.

Successful System Change Starts with Effective Leadership

The University of Virginia Partnership for Leaders in Education (UVA-PLE) — a joint venture of UVA’s Darden School of Business and School of Education and Human Development — has closely examined recent successful system change efforts to better understand what education leaders need to do next.

UVA-PLE finds that our most successful partners focus their change efforts to be more responsive to the reality of schools, teachers and students. These teams collectively display three attributes:

1. They ignite action with a compelling vision and a willingness to disrupt the system. Leaders courageously face up to harsh realities, drive focus and allocate resources to where change is possible.
2. They build coalitions for sustained effort. Enduring change can’t be top down or bottom up but must include administrators, teachers, students and the larger community.
3. They lead the learning and embrace evidence. Leadership teams consider opportunities and risk-taking with a data-driven approach so that they can understand and amplify what is working.

Darden professors helped UVA-PLE revamp its framework for successful change leadership to focus on those attributes. In 2022, Professors Jim Detert and Bobby Parmar worked with stakeholders to develop hypotheses for what would drive K-12 system success in the post-COVID landscape, which led to UVA-PLE's landmark “Exploring New Frontiers for K12 Transformation” report. This work was later advanced in discussions at PLE’s 20th anniversary led by Professor Gabe Adams and lecturer Rachel Brozenske, contributing to UVA-PLE’s roadmap for leaders navigating the future.

Together, this learning informs much of UVA-PLE's revamped design of leadership development efforts within its Core Partnership, which includes sessions on understanding and addressing causal challenges led by Parmar and a multi-day program on delivering second-order change with increased stakeholder inclusion, engagement and problem-solving led by Professor Laura Morgan Roberts. Some of the most recent successful change efforts emerging from UVA-PLE's Core Partnership include:

• In Ector County, Texas, student achievement rose after the district reorganized to focus on talent development and rigorous academics. The district also dramatically increased internship and associate degree credit opportunities.
• In Oklahoma City, the district consolidated schools before the pandemic, and it has used the savings to invest in instruction, student support, leadership development and popular student programs that focus on technology. These actions led to a decrease in the number of underperforming schools from 30 to 10 and an increase in districtwide proficiency in 14 of 14 tested areas in grades 3 to 8.
• In Englewood, Colorado, a focus on instructional leadership and systems helped every school that had been placed on the state’s accountability watch list move to good standing, and one of those schools received the state’s highest rating.

Today, too much attention is being paid to issues that are very unlikely to help current students. That must change. Emerging AI efforts, for example, show great promise but, like past technological innovations, will have negligible student impact unless leaders design them with greater attention to coherence and rollout.

UVA-PLE is partnering with faculty at the School of Education and Human Development to revamp internal learning and evaluation systems to better identify successful initiatives. Systems need to invest more in ways that advance educational outcomes now and lay a stronger foundation for future ingenuity. Leaders must be supported as they make tough choices and reimagine resource allocation.

The end of ESSER funds isn’t something to fear. Rather, it can be a galvanizing moment. Now is a time to invest resources boldly in successful strategies and in leaders who are ready to insist that teams work together to achieve compelling results.

William Robinson is executive director of the University of Virginia Partnership for Leaders in Education (UVA-PLE). A version of this story originally appeared as an op-ed in The Hechinger Report.