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Executive Summary

In 2025, states, school leaders, and parents have an opportunity and responsibility to take action to ensure that more American children have access to a high-quality education and to ensure that the next generation is prepared for the dramatically changing workforce that awaits them in adulthood.

The challenges in American education are well known. For more than half a century, national leaders have attempted to close the socioeconomic achievement gap, including by equalizing public school funding levels. Yet the test score gap between children from rich and poor households has largely remained, and even widened after prolonged school closures during the pandemic. Despite an average government expenditure of more than $15,000 per pupil annually, an alarming percentage of American children are not mastering basic skills in reading and mathematics. American students are performing behind their peers in many developed nations in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).

Along with these challenges, the elementary and secondary education sector is undergoing historic changes that provide opportunities to encourage innovation and offer better learning options for millions of students. As of late 2024, 13 states have enacted universal education choice programs that give parents the option of choosing a nonpublic school for their children or of using a state-funded education savings account (ESA) to customize their learning experiences. Roughly 22 million children (40 percent of students) across 33 states and Washington, DC now have the opportunity to attend a school of their parents’ choice. This historic decentralization provides a mandate for the traditional public education sector to innovate, particularly as national public school enrollment is declining and is projected to continue declining over the coming decade. In addition, ongoing technological innovation, including the development of artificial intelligence (AI), has the potential to provide new low-cost tools to help students and teachers alike.

For more than half a century, the federal government has been funding research and development (R&D) activities aimed to encourage innovation and best practices in American classrooms. While the federal education R&D sector has a mixed record of success, the R&D enterprise (including the Institute of Education Sciences and other federal education R&D and statistical collection activities supported by the Department of Education) offers states, school leaders, and parents opportunities to leverage best practices to promote innovation and better learning options and outcomes.

For several years, the Foundation for American Innovation has been providing policy recommendations for Congress and the executive branch to improve the return on investment of the federal education R&D enterprise—most recently, October 2024’s report “Strengthening the Federal Education R&D Enterprise: Recommendations for 2025 and Beyond.” This report addresses a different question: what can governors and other state policymakers, school leaders, and parents do to apply best practices and promote innovation to improve local education outcomes and prepare students to succeed in a changing workforce? In brief, we offer the following recommendations.

Governors and state policymakers should:

• Continue to expand parental choice options, for example by enacting universal ESAs, to give parents the ability to use a share of public funds to ensure that their children receive a high-quality education.
• Mandate the implementation of science-based approaches to reading instruction.
• Identify and replicate best practices for promoting STEM education and related instruction in the public school sector to help students prepare for future workforce opportunities.
• Improve transparency about public schools’ academic performance and school finance by publicly reporting school report cards in a timely and accessible manner so that they are useful to parents and the public; and
• Plan for and apply new technologies, including AI, to provide high-quality and customized instruction (including digital tutoring) and to complement other teaching and administrative tasks.

School leaders and teachers (in both the public and private sectors) should:

• Review publicly available evidence about best practices from the education R&D enterprise and implement evidence-based methods to improve instruction; and
• Consider whether and how new technologies, including AI, could enhance students’ learning opportunities.

Parents should:

• Become informed customers about evidence-based best practices and school quality to maximize their opportunity to choose the best school, learning environment, and/or instructional services for their children; and
• Seize the new opportunities to enhance their children’s education, for example by choosing schools, and/or by complementing their learning opportunities by taking advantage of free or low-cost options to improve K-12 education.

While Congress and federal policymakers have an important role to play in improving the value of the federal education R&D enterprise, American children cannot afford to wait for Washington. Governors, state policymakers, school leaders and teachers, and parents all have a responsibility and opportunity to act. This report is intended to provide them with a roadmap to promote innovation and better learning opportunities for the nation’s 50 million K-12 students, so that they can successfully enter a continually evolving workforce.