12 Charts That Defined Education in 2025

Le plus ça change…

The past year marked the beginning — or re-beginning — of a new, old era in American schools: the Trump administration’s second term, which promised an explosion of school choice programs, further rollbacks on controversial content in classrooms, and a radical reduction in the federal government’s intervention in public schools. There was a new sheriff back in town.

To one extent or another, those priorities have all been embraced as predicted. But they were also the K–12 hallmarks of President Trump’s first term, however, the somewhat muddled results of which were largely overwhelmed by the chaos of COVID. Even beyond the pendulum lurches between presidencies, many of the perennial debates over education policy, politics, and governance in the United States seem to carry echoes of the distant past: Will the U.S. Department of Education cease to exist? Too bad we can’t ask Ronald Reagan.

Yet education research shows clearly how the renewed fervor of the second MAGA wave has, in some senses, fulfilled the hopes and anxieties embedded in the first. While educators previously warned that fear of immigration authorities could depress school attendance among English learners, multiple studies now persuasively link ICE and Border Patrol operations with rising absenteeism in local schools. Early evidence from states implementing voucher-like programs suggest an enthusiastic uptake among families that could have barely been dreamt of in the 2010s. And the president’s prior wariness of vaccines has now gone national, with county-level analyses of MMR shots revealing unmistakable downward movement since 2020.

Pandemic, Politics, Pre-K & More: 12 Charts That Defined Education in 2024

Indeed, this fruitful year for social science came even as the White House made good on campaign commitments to liquidate Education Department staff, cancelled dozens of contracts with research firms, and rescinded grants that had been awarded through the National Science Foundation. It remains to be seen to what extent these steps will limit the public’s insight into how schools perform and children learn, but the early signs are foreboding.

For now, though, it’s worth reviewing the empirical insights that taught us the most about education in 2025. Welcome to the year in charts.

ICE

Immigration Enforcement Worsened Absenteeism

The impact of the Trump administration’s clampdown on illegal immigration this year was felt immediately, with the number of detainees held by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement rising by more than half between January and August. That aggressive approach is correlated with a meaningful decline in school attendance, according to a brief released by Stanford University economist Thomas Dee.

Event-study estimates, student absences by month during the 2024–25 school year. (Proceedings of the Academy of Sciences of the United States of America)

Studying the aftermath of a Border Patrol raid in California’s Central Valley — initiated a few days before President Trump was inaugurated, using tactics that would later be halted by a federal judge — Dee found that student absences increased by 22 percent across five surrounding school districts. Extrapolated across the rest of the school year, he calculated, the reduced attendance would result in over 700,000 lost days of student learning.

As ICE Actions Ramp Up, Study Cites 81K Lost School Days After California Raids

Similar trends were observed in a study focusing on Connecticut and Rhode Island, where absences for English learners increased by 4 percent. Just as striking, data from Florida showed that Spanish-speaking students at schools that were more exposed to heightened immigration enforcement experienced both lower academic achievement and fewer disciplinary incidents.

Learning Loss

Districts Still Lag Pre-COVID Achievement

More than a half-decade after the first COVID-19 cases were detected in the United States — today’s high school seniors were just wrapping up the sixth grade when emergency school closures were announced — K–12 learning has not fully recovered in most communities.

On average, test scores in both math and reading are roughly half a grade level lower in 2024 than in 2019. (Education Recovery Scorecard)

A February report from the Education Recovery Scorecard, a research consortium dedicated to studying the pandemic’s effects, found that just 6 percent of American elementary and middle schoolers live in school districts where average math or reading levels have returned to the levels seen in 2019. Combining state test scores for 35 million students with results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a federally administered exam known as the “Nation’s Report Card,” the authors estimated that the average American pupil was still a half a grade level behind pre-pandemic achievement in both core subjects.

Research: Learning Recovery Has Stalled, Despite Billions in Pandemic Aid

Even given the enormous federal funding spent to offer catch-up instruction, the prospect of improvement can’t be taken for granted: Scant improvement was seen in student scores between 2022 and 2024, with reading performance actually declining after schools reopened.

“Given all the money that’s been spent, and the fact that students already lost ground between 2019 and 2022, you would have expected that there would be some bounce-back in reading,” Harvard economist Thomas Kane told The 74. “But no, actually.”

Academic Achievement

K–12 Learning Was Stagnant Before COVID

The academic damage inflicted by the pandemic has been well chronicled by Kane and others. But a range of voices rose this year from around the K–12 world to critique other sources of the national school stagnation, including social media and a growing emphasis on equity.

One, Stanford economist Eric Hanushek, circulated a brief this fall charting the trajectory of educational outcomes in the 21st century, arguing that the years preceding 2020 were no golden era of academic achievement. According to his estimates, only one-quarter of the decline in students’ average reading performance since 2013 — often described as the high-water mark of learning, as measured by NAEP — took place during the pandemic itself. What’s more, he continued, the cost of that lost educational growth could number into the many trillions of dollars as time goes by.

It is an assessment largely shared by the equally prominent University of Virginia researcher James Wyckoff, who released his own paper looking at similar trends earlier in the year. That study asserts that the roots of learning loss began even earlier than is typically assumed, in the years spanning the Bush-Obama transition, and notes an abundance of potential explanations (including smartphones, Great Recession-related school funding cuts, and the implementation of Common Core standards).

Readers can expect to see more such forensic examinations of the last few decades. As the shadow of COVID recedes further into memory, policymakers will need to come to grips with the K–12 fundamentals that hurt student performance in the 2010s.

ESA’s

Education Savings Accounts Lift Private School Enrollment — and Tuition

The march of private school choice picked up steam in 2025 as eight states either adopted or expanded the availability of education savings accounts, which provide families thousands of dollars to use for private tuition or other K–12 expenses. Most were conservative bastions like Idaho, Wyoming, or Tennessee — Texas, in particular, is poised to become the largest school choice marketplace in the country — but New Hampshire also became the first blue state (albeit Republican-led, for the moment) to join the party.

(National Center for Research on Education Access and Choice)

With so much of the country stampeding toward the policy, social scientists are also beginning to understand its effects. In a paper that dropped in September, Tulane University’s Douglas Harris and Gabriel Olivier studied the 11 states that enacted universal ESAs between 2021 and 2024, ultimately discovering that they led to slight bumps in both private school tuition (5–10 percent) and enrollment (3–4 percent) compared with other states. The bump in costs is particularly noteworthy, they argue, given that many private schools already substantially raised their prices during the COVID era.

In Arizona, the Typical ESA Recipient Already Attends Private School, Study Finds

While that study incorporated data on nearly 60 percent of all U.S. private schools, the RAND Corporation also released a much more focused look at the ESA picture in one state, Arizona. That work also revealed that the switch from income-targeted to universal ESAs led to a 12 percent jump in elementary school tuition; in a pattern that will likely take hold elsewhere, the number of students participating in the program also leapt from 12,000 in 2021 to almost 90,000 in 2024.

Digital Distractions

Cell Phone Bans Boost Student Performance

While the ESA wave is still building, the push for phone restrictions in classrooms has exploded to an even greater extent. Thirty-seven states have either passed laws to curb phone usage in K–12 schools or required school districts to adopt their own policies to similar effect. The movement caught fire over the last few years in response to complaints from families and educators that digital devices present a major distraction during the school day.

In a study investigating the effects of such restrictions in Florida, University of Rochester Professor David Figlio and RAND economist Umut Özek found that bans were associated with slight improvements in standardized test scores (1.1 percentiles, on average, two years after a ban was put in place) that were somewhat larger for male students and those enrolled in middle or high school. A substantial portion of that boost, they write, is attributable to improved attendance resulting from the bans.

Banning Smartphones at Schools: Research Shows Higher Test Scores, More Exercise

Not all of the news was rosy. Male students, and particularly African Americans, also saw elevated rates of disciplinary infractions and suspensions in the wake of a phone ban taking effect, though that trend mostly subsided by the second year following the adoption.

Academic Standards

Exam-Free Admissions Lowered Standards at UC

The late-breaking leader for the most stunning chart of the year came in November, with the release of a bombshell analysis from the faculty Senate of the University of California San Diego. A working group convened to study the academic preparation of the top-ranked research institution’s students reported that over 12 percent of incoming freshmen in 2025 could not meet high school math standards — a figure that had increased by a factor of 30 since 2020. An astounding 8 percent of freshmen could not perform to middle school standards in the subject.

While COVID-era learning loss is undoubtedly to blame for some of these developments, the faculty group also cast blame on slumping standards at both the K–12 and higher education levels. Among students channeled into the university’s remedial math course, which was originally designed to teach a tiny fraction of freshmen, roughly one-quarter were admitted with 4.0 GPAs.

Those deceptive grades became a crucial indicator of student readiness in 2020, when the UC system moved away from considering ACT and SAT scores in admissions decisions. Whatever the chief explanation for these results, one thing is clear: At an internationally recognized college, considerable numbers of students are paying tens of thousands of dollars per year to be taught material they should have mastered years ago.

Workforce

Interest in Teaching Lower Among Men, Non-Whites

A wave of recent research has identified a pronounced decline in the prestige of the teaching profession and the job satisfaction of in-service educators. In a paper circulated in September, academics from the University of Virginia and Texas A&M put that swoon in particularly stark relief by investigating exactly who expresses interest in becoming a teacher.

Gathering data from 64 million college applications between 2014 and 2025, the authors were able to assess the aspirations and traits of high school seniors who declared an interest in the teaching profession. The group was polarized heavily on lines of sex, with males roughly one-third as interested in the career as females. Black students, similarly, were only about one-third as enthusiastic about teaching as their white counterparts.

Even more intriguing, the paper leverages the applicants’ college recommendations to get a detailed view of how they were perceived by their high school teachers. Rated on a set of personal characteristics, potential future educators were described as being relatively higher in leadership, integrity, and care for others — but relatively lower in intellectual promise, academic achievement and self-confidence.

Public Health

Vaccination Rates Are Lower

(Journal of the American Medical Association)

The politics of public health have also become more divisive of late, particularly in response to pandemic-era public health measures. This year, the ascent of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy — who challenges the medical consensus that childhood vaccines have no relationship to autism — marked a dramatic change in federal policy toward pediatric medicine.

New Research: Childhood Vaccination Rates Drop Across 1,600 U.S. Counties

A June research letter published in the Journal of the American Medical Association gives reason to think these fractures are leading to real consequences. Using data from 32 states, the authors calculate that vaccination rates for measles, mumps, and rubella have declined significantly since the emergence of COVID. Across roughly 2,000 counties, more than 1,600 reported declines during that period, and only four states (California, Connecticut, Maine, and New York) saw increases in the median vaccination rate at the county level. Around the nation, the average rate fell from 93.92 percent to 91.26 percent; the herd immunity threshold is 95 percent, the authors note.

“I think this is only going to get worse,” one pediatrician and vaccine advocate told The 74. “I think vaccines are under attack.”

Demographics

Enrollment Losses Are Steeper in Wealthier Schools

COVID scrambled the populations of districts across the country, with early estimates showing a 3 percent drop in total U.S. public school enrollment in the 2020–21 school year. But that exodus was seen in radically different magnitudes depending on school demographics, according to research from Boston University’s Joshua Goodman and Abigail Francis.

Focusing on data from Massachusetts, the pair showed that the state’s white and Asian enrollment figures were significantly lower (3.1 percent and 8.1 percent, respectively) by fall of 2024 than pre-pandemic trends would have predicted. Black and Hispanic enrollment, meanwhile, is now actually higher than expected — a major change in racial composition just in the course of a half-decade.

Notably, declines in public school enrollment were at their most extreme in Massachusetts’s wealthiest communities, where families were more likely to decamp to private or charter schools that prioritized reopening for in-person instruction: The total number of students who disenrolled from the most affluent districts (those ranked in the top 20 percent of average income) greatly exceeded departing students from districts in the bottom 80 percent.

Early Learning

Montessori Preschool Beats Other Models

The long-respected Montessori pedagogical model has gained a buzzy cultural prominence of late, as evidenced by the burgeoning craze for wooden toys in new parent groups. New evidence from the University of Virginia and the American Institutes for Research suggests that all those building blocks are well worth the price tag.

(University of Virginia/American Institutes for Research)

In a study of roughly 600 students in preschool and kindergarten, the researchers pointed to large benefits from attending one of two-dozen public Montessori programs. Compared with a control group, the Montessori students (randomly selected through an admission lottery) enjoyed sizable advantages in executive function, reading, and short-term memory. What’s more, partly thanks to larger class sizes, the program cost over $13,000 less per child than conventional preschool offerings over a three-year span.

Public Montessori Outperforms Other Early Ed Programs, Study Finds

Considering the increasing demand for this type of schooling, parents can likely expect to see more private Montessori options emerge in the coming years. But the authors conclude that expanding access to public programs “may be a cost-effective way to sustain early learning gains at least through the end of kindergarten.”

Education Polarization

College Majors Shift Students’ Politics

Much of the last two decades of political history have been characterized by “education polarization” — the increasing tendency of voters without college degrees to vote Republican while their more credentialed counterparts favor Democrats. The question is whether that phenomenon is the effect of college itself, or simply the product of ideological self-sorting.

According to a paper by two Israeli academics, the actual content of college courses plays an important role shifting undergraduates along the partisan spectrum. Drawing on hundreds of thousands of survey responses from undergraduates at 377 colleges, the authors learned that students increase in “liberal” or “far-left” self-identification by seven percentage points between college entry and graduation. That average conceals a great deal of variation, however: Controlling for a swath of variables like pre-college ideology, life goals, and intended major, the data suggests that the act of studying social sciences or humanities makes students four percentage points more likely to consider themselves on the political left relative to those focusing on natural sciences. Majoring in economics or business, meanwhile, decreases that likelihood by six points. While all college students tend to slide leftward in their cultural politics, economic issues like taxation are particularly sensitive to major choice.

In all, the influence of enrolling in social science or humanities coursework over voting preferences is about equal to the effect of growing up in a heavily Democratic congressional district. If all students in left-leaning disciplines switched to business or economics, the paper estimates, education polarization would decline by roughly one-third.

Critical Race Theory

CRT in Classrooms Isn’t a Myth

The debate around critical race theory in schools has raged for much of the last half-decade, with many conservatives alleging that children are bombarded daily with messages derogating American history and Western values. Defenders of public education have responded by calling CRT an obscure sub-discipline of legal education with little purchase for K–12 students.

In January, a survey of 850 students published in the journal Education Next offered some evidence that CRT — or, at least, some of the key ideas proliferated by its academic theorists — does indeed find its way into high school classrooms. More than one-third of respondents said their teachers characterized the United States as a racist nation “often” or “almost daily,” while similar proportions reported hearing frequent messages about the racist complicity of white people and police officers. At the same time, majorities of pupils also said they’d been taught that the country had made strides toward racial equality since the 1970s.

Poll of High Schoolers Shows Many Are Taught That America Is ‘Inherently Racist’

It is difficult to say with certainty which areas see more of this kind of teaching, or even in what context such statements are made. “I’m sure there are schools where it’s not happening at all,” University of Missouri Professor Brian Kisida told The 74. “I’m also sure that there are schools where it’s happening quite a bit, and it’s really ingrained in the approach that those schools take.”