Claudio Sanchez Predictions For What Will Happen In Education In 2017 : NPR Ed : NPR

Claudio Sanchez Predictions For What Will Happen In Education In 2017 : NPR Ed : NPR:

5 Education Stories To Watch In 2017

NPR Ed's Claudio Sanchez gives us his top five education predictions for 2017.

LA Johnson/NPR

 Every year for the past few years, I've dusted off my crystal ball and offered a few predictions for the new year. Back on November 9 though, I threw out the ones I had been working on and started over. The election of Donald Trump altered the landscape for K-12 and higher education and created greater political uncertainty in the debate over how to improve schools. Here's my revised, updated list of predictions for 2017.

Prediction No. 1

Donald Trump's focus on school choice, vouchers and his overall ambivalence about the federal role in education will complicate matters for ESSA (the Every Student Succeeds Act). That's the recently revised federal law through which billions of dollars flow to states and local school districts. Most of that money targets low-income kids and students with learning disabilities.

Now, though, how that money is distributed and who gets it is an open question. The new administration is likely to encourage more private, for-profit groups to compete with public schools for that money. Watch for a significant disruption in 2017 as states try to figure out how the Education Department under Trump will move forward, especially on education funding and government sponsored vouchers.

As Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers warns: "There will be a war." Which leads to:

Prediction No. 2

Both the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association — the nation's two largest teachers' unions — have vowed to oppose much of Trump's education agenda. The biggest fights will unfold in GOP-led states where lawmakers have long argued that unions stand in the way of promising reforms because they're more interested in their dues-paying members than they are in children. These political skirmishes will test the political power of unions like never before. I predict that in 2017 we will see unprecedented legal challenges to collective bargaining rights and the unions' power to collect dues.

Prediction No. 3

My third prediction is that one of the casualties of a leaner federal education budget will be early childhood education. Remember that the Obama administration supported the expansion of quality preschool because of the social and academic benefits that the research is pointing to. This created incentives in many states to invest more of their own money in preschool programs by matching federal funds for Claudio Sanchez Predictions For What Will Happen In Education In 2017 : NPR Ed : NPR: