The Biggest Student Learning Challenges Schools Will Face in 2025–26

As we approach the 2025-26 school year, K-12 educators are facing a complex landscape of challenges that demand immediate attention and strategic solutions. While the pandemic may have long passed, its educational aftershocks continue to reverberate through classrooms nationwide. Understanding these challenges through a data-driven lens is essential for school leaders who want to drive meaningful success for their students.

The good news? Research-based instructional approaches offer proven pathways to address these persistent challenges. By examining the data and exploring targeted solutions, we can transform obstacles into opportunities for student success.

Challenge 1: The Persistent Achievement Gap Crisis

The numbers paint a stark picture of educational inequality that has deepened since 2020. Achievement gaps that existed before the pandemic have not only persisted but widened across demographic lines. Students from low-income families, English language learners, and students of color continue to face disproportionate academic challenges.

Performance gaps take root in the earliest years of children's lives and do not vanish, creating a cascade effect that impacts students throughout their educational journey. These gaps manifest differently across subjects, with particular challenges in foundational skills that are essential for future learning.

The Solution: Equity-Centered Instructional Design

Addressing achievement gaps requires a fundamental shift toward instructional approaches that prioritize equity and accessibility. The most effective strategies focus on ensuring all students can access grade-level content while receiving appropriate support.

Key strategies that close achievement gaps:

Coherent Learning Progressions: Build instruction systematically where each lesson connects to previous knowledge, helping students develop deep understanding rather than isolated skills. This approach helps students see the connections between concepts and builds confidence in their ability to tackle complex problems.

Multiple Representations: Present concepts through visual, symbolic, and contextual representations, making abstract ideas accessible to diverse learners. When students can approach the same concept through different modalities, they're more likely to develop robust understanding.

Inclusive Problem-Solving: Design rich, open-ended problems that allow students to enter at their level while working toward grade-level standards. This approach maintains high expectations while providing multiple pathways to success.

Embedded Support Systems: Provide detailed guidance for supporting students who need additional scaffolding without compromising the rigor of the content. This might include sentence frames, graphic organizers, or peer collaboration strategies.

Mathematical Discourse and Reasoning: In mathematics, particularly, emphasize communication skills and conceptual understanding. When students can explain their thinking and make connections between ideas, they develop the deep understanding that transcends demographic predictors of achievement.

Research-based curricula like Illustrative Mathematics® exemplify these principles through their systematic approach to equity, demonstrating how thoughtful instructional design can make grade-level content accessible to all students.

Challenge 2: The Chronic Absenteeism Crisis

Perhaps no challenge is more pressing than the attendance crisis gripping American schools. The U.S. rate of chronic absenteeism reached about 31% in the 2021-2022 school year and decreased to 28% in the 2022-23 school year. This means that more than one in four students is missing at least 10% of the school year, a critical threshold that significantly impacts academic achievement.

The scope of this challenge is staggering. The number of elementary schools experiencing 30% or more chronic absence jumped from 3,550 in the 2017-18 school year (prepandemic) to 19,828 in 2021-22 and remained elevated at 15,714 in 2022-23. This isn't just a temporary pandemic effect, it's a fundamental shift in attendance patterns that requires immediate intervention.

Research confirms the direct connection between attendance and academic recovery. School districts with lower rates of chronic absenteeism saw greater post-pandemic learning recovery from 2022 to 2024, making attendance a critical factor in educational success.

The Solution: Engagement-Driven Learning Experiences

Addressing chronic absenteeism requires creating learning experiences that students find meaningful, relevant, and engaging. The most effective approaches focus on building intrinsic motivation by connecting learning to students' interests and real-world experiences.

Core strategies that boost engagement:

Authentic Assessment: Move beyond traditional tests to create opportunities for students to produce real work for real audiences. When students see their learning as having genuine purpose and meaning, they're more likely to attend consistently and engage deeply.

Community Connections: Connect classroom content to local issues and community partnerships, making school feel relevant to students' lives. This might involve service learning projects, local history investigations, or partnerships with community organizations.

Student Agency: Provide meaningful choices in learning topics, methods, and products. When students have voice in their education, they develop ownership that drives consistent attendance and engagement.

Collaborative Culture: Build strong classroom communities where students support each other's learning. Social connections are a powerful motivator for school attendance, particularly for students who may feel disconnected from academic content.

Celebration of Growth: Create regular opportunities to showcase learning progress and celebrate achievements. When students see their advancement and feel recognized for their efforts, they're more motivated to continue attending and participating.

Real-World Problem Solving: Engage students in investigating questions that matter to them and their communities. This approach helps students see the relevance of their learning and builds the critical thinking skills they need across all subjects.

Programs like EL Education demonstrate how these principles can be integrated into comprehensive instructional approaches that significantly improve student engagement and attendance.

Challenge 3: Learning Recovery and Foundational Skills Gaps

The academic recovery from pandemic-related learning loss remains incomplete, with particularly concerning gaps in foundational skills that students need for future learning. These gaps aren't just about missed content – they represent fundamental deficits in the building blocks of literacy, numeracy, and scientific thinking.

Students entering the 2025-26 school year may be missing critical foundational skills that are typically developed in earlier grades. This creates a complex challenge for teachers who must simultaneously address current grade-level standards while filling in essential prerequisite knowledge.

The Solution: Grade-Level Content with Embedded Skill Development

The most effective approach to learning recovery maintains high expectations while providing strategic support for foundational skills within grade-level content. This approach avoids the trap of endless remediation while ensuring students develop the skills they need to succeed.

Key strategies that support learning recovery:

Phenomena-Based Learning: Engage students with real-world phenomena that naturally integrate multiple concepts, helping them see connections across topics while building foundational skills through authentic investigation.

Scaffolded Inquiry Practices: Develop critical thinking, analysis, and communication skills through guided inquiry that builds systematically. Students learn to ask questions, gather evidence, and construct explanations while accessing grade-level content.

Formative Assessment: Use continuous assessment tools to identify and address gaps in real-time rather than waiting for summative evaluations. This allows for immediate intervention and prevents small gaps from becoming larger problems.

Differentiated Support: Provide multiple entry points and representation modes to ensure that students with different learning needs can access the content. This might include visual supports, collaborative structures, or technology tools.

Coherent Storylines: Structure learning around coherent narratives that help students understand how concepts connect, making learning more memorable and meaningful. This approach helps students retain information and transfer learning to new contexts.

Scientific Sensemaking: Focus on helping students understand the "why" behind concepts rather than just memorizing facts. When students can make sense of what they're learning, they're better equipped to apply their knowledge in new situations.

OpenSciEd exemplifies this approach in science education, showing how students can engage with grade-level scientific phenomena while developing the foundational skills they need for future learning.

Challenge 4: Teacher Capacity and Professional Development

Effective instruction requires teachers who are well-prepared and supported. Many educators are struggling with the dual challenge of implementing new approaches while addressing the diverse needs of students who have experienced varied learning disruptions.

Professional development must be both comprehensive and sustainable, providing teachers with the tools they need to succeed with research-based practices while building their capacity to adapt instruction for diverse learners.

The Solution: Comprehensive Professional Learning Systems

Sustainable educational change requires ongoing, job-embedded professional learning that helps teachers develop deep understanding of effective practices while building their capacity to adapt instruction for diverse learners.

Essential components of effective professional learning:

Content Knowledge Development: Help teachers understand both the "what" and "why" of the content they teach. This is particularly important for elementary teachers who may feel less confident with certain subject areas.

Pedagogical Content Knowledge: Support teachers in understanding how students learn specific content and what misconceptions they might have. This knowledge helps teachers anticipate student needs and design more effective instruction.

Formative Assessment Strategies: Develop teachers' skills in understanding student thinking in real-time and adjusting instruction accordingly. This includes both formal and informal assessment techniques.

Discourse and Reasoning Skills: Build teachers' capacity to facilitate meaningful classroom discussions where students explain their thinking and make connections between ideas.

Inclusive Instruction: Provide strategies for supporting diverse learners within grade-level content, including English language learners, students with disabilities, and students from varied cultural backgrounds.

Collaborative Planning: Create structures for teachers to work together in designing and refining instruction, sharing expertise and supporting each other's growth.

Sustained Implementation Support: Provide ongoing coaching and support rather than one-time training sessions. Change takes time, and teachers need continued support as they develop new skills.

Research-based curricula like OpenSciEd, Illustrative Mathematics, and EL Education all include comprehensive professional learning components that support teachers in making these instructional shifts effectively.

Challenge 5: Technology Integration and Digital Equity

The pandemic accelerated technology adoption in schools, but the integration of digital tools into instruction remains uneven. Many schools struggle with digital equity issues, where students have varied access to devices and internet connectivity at home.

Additionally, teachers need support in using technology to enhance rather than replace effective pedagogical practices. The challenge is finding the right balance between digital tools and hands-on, collaborative learning experiences.

The Solution: Purposeful Technology Integration

Effective technology integration focuses on using digital tools to enhance learning rather than replacing proven pedagogical practices. The most successful approaches use technology strategically to support student thinking, collaboration, and authentic assessment.

Principles for effective technology integration:

Tool for Thinking: Use technology to help students visualize concepts, explore relationships, and test hypotheses. Digital tools should support and extend student thinking rather than replacing it.

Authentic Communication: Leverage technology for research, creation, and sharing of student work with real audiences. Students might use digital platforms to conduct research, create multimedia presentations, or connect with community partners.

Data Collection and Analysis: Incorporate technology as scientists and mathematicians actually use it – for gathering data, conducting analysis, and communicating findings. This mirrors real-world applications and builds digital literacy skills.

Collaborative Platforms: Use technology to facilitate collaboration and peer learning, particularly when students can't be physically together. Digital tools can support student discussions, peer review, and collaborative problem-solving.

Accessibility Support: Leverage technology's capacity to provide multiple means of representation, engagement, and expression. Digital tools can help level the playing field for students with diverse learning needs.

Digital Citizenship: Integrate lessons about responsible technology use, media literacy, and digital ethics into content instruction rather than treating these as separate topics.

The key is maintaining focus on learning goals while using technology to make those goals more accessible and engaging for students.

Moving Forward: A Research-Based Approach to Transformation

The challenges facing schools in 2025-26 are significant, but they're not insurmountable. Research-based instructional approaches offer proven pathways to address these challenges because they're grounded in evidence about how students learn best.

Effective curricula and instructional approaches share several key principles that make them powerful tools for addressing current challenges:

Equity-Centered Design: The most effective approaches are designed with equity as a core principle, ensuring that all students can access grade-level content regardless of their starting point.

Coherent Learning Progressions: Quality instruction builds learning systematically, helping students develop deep understanding rather than isolated skills.

Authentic Assessment: Students demonstrate their learning through meaningful tasks that mirror real-world applications and connect to their interests and experiences.

Comprehensive Teacher Support: Sustainable change requires ongoing professional learning and support that helps teachers implement effective practices.

Student Agency: Effective instruction provides opportunities for student voice and choice, building the intrinsic motivation that drives engagement and attendance.

Taking Action: Steps for School Leaders

As you consider how to address these challenges in your school or district, consider these evidence-based action steps:

Start with Data: Use your local data to identify which of these challenges are most pressing in your context. Chronic absenteeism rates, achievement gap data, and teacher feedback can help you prioritize your efforts.

Invest in Professional Learning: Sustainable change requires ongoing support for teachers. Plan for multi-year professional development that helps teachers develop deep understanding of research-based practices.

Create Systems for Support: Ensure that teachers have the resources, time, and support they need to implement new approaches effectively. This includes everything from materials and technology to collaborative planning time.

Engage Families and Communities: Partner with families and community organizations to address attendance challenges and create authentic learning opportunities that connect to students' lives.

Monitor Progress: Use formative assessment data to track student progress and adjust instruction accordingly. Regular check-ins help ensure that interventions are working and allow for course corrections when needed.

Build Leadership Capacity: Develop teacher leaders who can support implementation and sustain change over time. Change is more likely to stick when it's supported by multiple leaders throughout the organization.

Address Root Causes: Look beyond surface-level symptoms to address the underlying causes of challenges like chronic absenteeism or achievement gaps. This might involve addressing social-emotional needs, building cultural responsiveness, or improving school climate.

The 2025-26 school year presents both challenges and opportunities. By understanding the data, choosing research-based solutions, and committing to sustained implementation, we can create learning environments where all students thrive. The path forward requires dedication, collaboration, and a commitment to equity, but the potential impact on student learning makes this work both urgent and inspiring.