🛝 On Paper, It All Adds Up

Welcome to Playground Post, a bi-weekly newsletter that keeps education innovators ahead of what's next.

This week's reality check: American public schools took in $1 trillion for the first time, about 22% more real money than a decade ago. Chronic absenteeism keeps falling, but so slowly that researchers now expect half the pandemic spike to become the permanent baseline. Survey of 1,122 educators, three-quarters said their schools lack enough trained staff for English learners with disabilities.

Data Gem

About 90% of districts require civics instruction, but only 35% offer students hands-on civic experiences and just 13% require them, according to a RAND and CRPE survey covered by K-12 Dive.

$1 Trillion Went In. Teacher Pay Went Down

In April, the National Center for Education Statistics reported that the 50 states and Washington, D.C., took in $1 trillion in revenue for K-12 public education in 2023-24.

It's a milestone worth sitting with, and an analysis by Chad Aldeman for The 74 breaks down what the number actually bought.

Adjusted for inflation, schools had 22% more money to spend than a decade earlier. Federal revenue jumped 65%, and state and local revenue each rose 18%.

Over that same decade, schools served about 500,000 fewer students.

More money. Fewer kids. Now the part that doesn't follow.

The average public school teacher earned $72,030 in 2023-24, up from $56,610 ten years before. That looks like a raise of nearly $16,000.

In real terms it's a decline of about $2,500.

A trillion dollars arrived and teachers lost purchasing power.

Where it went instead: more employees, and more expensive ones to insure. Districts added teachers plus far more aides, counselors, principals, and support staff, and in 2023-24 schools spent $197 billion on employee benefits. 

For every $1,000 in salaries, districts paid another $438 in benefits.

The pressure is now the defining problem in the superintendent's office.

Financial shortages are the single greatest challenge facing districts, according to 54% of superintendents surveyed by RAND, a figure up more than 20% from last year. It displaced last year's top concerns, academics and teacher recruitment, in a single survey cycle.

The costs are unglamorous and unavoidable. 

One superintendent said the price of a school bus doubled from $80,000 to $160,000 during his six-year tenure. Another put it plainly: "special education costs, transportation and utilities … they're outpacing what the state can give us."

Staffing is the trap. 

Leaders described using pandemic relief funds to add positions supporting student wellbeing, and those roles are now too difficult to eliminate. Nearly every leader interviewed said costs are outstripping revenue, yet they remain reluctant to cut staff for fear of worsening workloads.

So districts are competing for enrollment instead. 

40% are running marketing campaigns to families about the benefits of public schools, 33% are expanding pre-K, and 33% are adding extracurriculars or specialized programs.

For education innovators, this is a market where the money is real and the visibility isn't. Compensation and benefits modeling that shows a board exactly how a $1,000 raise becomes a $1,438 cost. Staffing-allocation analytics for districts that added roles with relief funds and can't see which ones to keep. And enrollment-marketing and parent-preference tools, since two in five districts are now selling their own schools to their own families.

Absenteeism Is Falling. Just Not Fast Enough to Count

Here's the good news districts have been reporting for three years: chronic absenteeism is going down.

From its 2022 peak, chronic absenteeism across 44 states and D.C. fell nearly 3 percentage points in 2023, just over 2 points in 2024, and just under 1 point in 2025.

The pace is decelerating faster than the problem.

At that rate, the American Enterprise Institute projects that roughly half the pandemic-era increase in absenteeism becomes the long-term baseline. 

Before the pandemic, about 15% of students were chronically absent. 

By 2022 it was 28.5%. 

In 2024-25, across 39 states and D.C., it was 23%.

New research puts a price on the districts that stay stuck. NWEA analyzed MAP Growth data for grades 3-8 across 2,000 districts, defining consistently high absenteeism as high rates in 2022, 2023, and 2024 alike.

Those districts sat about 50% further from pre-pandemic math recovery than districts that never had high absenteeism. Reading gaps were smaller.

Among low-poverty districts, recovery didn't vary by absenteeism at all. 

Among high-poverty districts, it varied enormously: those with high absenteeism were roughly 40% further from math recovery.

Absenteeism isn't a uniform drag on learning. It compounds with poverty and disappears without it.

Eighteen states have formally adopted a goal of cutting their 2022 absenteeism rates in half by 2027, a target set by Attendance Works, EdTrust, and AEI. 

The current pace won't get them there.

"If the pandemic brought a shift in the culture of attendance among US students, families, and schools, then it may take nothing less than another cultural shift," wrote AEI's Nat Malkus, "back to the attendance norms that were in place just seven years ago."

For education innovators, the asymmetry is the targeting instruction. Attendance interventions priced and designed for high-poverty districts specifically, where the same absence rate costs measurably more learning. Recovery planning tools that model attendance and achievement together instead of tracking them in separate dashboards. The national rate is improving. That's not the same as the problem shrinking.

The Students Who Need Two Kinds of Help Get One

English learners now make up more than 10% of US public school enrollment, and schools have never had enough trained staff to serve them.

In a March survey of 1,122 educators who work with English learners or oversee their instruction, the EdWeek Research Center found 55% say their district or school doesn't have enough appropriately trained staff.

For one group, the number jumps.

75% said staffing was insufficient for English learners with disabilities, the students known as dually identified.

These students have a legal right to two things at once: language support to develop English proficiency, and the specialized instruction their disability requires. 

In practice, the professions that deliver those services barely talk to each other.

With little planned collaboration between general education, English-learner, and special education teachers, dually identified students get their special education needs met at best, said Lizdelia Piñón of the Intercultural Development Research Association in Texas.

"Having a disability shouldn't prevent a student from developing bilingualism," she said.

The failure is often just a calendar. 

Scheduling conflicts push schools to prioritize special education services over language services, said Silvia DeRuvo, who directs multilingual learners with disabilities services at WestEd, and in suburban districts a single English-learner teacher may be spread across five or six schools.

DeRuvo has reviewed IEPs where she couldn't tell the student was an English learner until she reached the accommodations section.

The plan is legally required to serve both needs. Sometimes it doesn't mention one of them.

The geography of the shortage is also backwards from the assumption. Rural districts were most likely to report insufficient staffing at 67%, versus 54% of suburban and 49% of urban districts. Small districts under 2,500 students reported 61%, against 53% of districts above 10,000.

Demographics moved faster than staffing. In Louisville's Jefferson County district, English learners went from about 5% of students to more than 20% in twenty years.

"They are a unique group that sits outside of our kind of big toolkit of strategies we might use," said Conor Williams of the Children's Equity Project.

For education innovators, a legal mandate with no workforce behind it is a durable market. Paraprofessional-to-certification platforms, since the districts solving this are all running the same play with local universities and no shared infrastructure. And shared-specialist scheduling for the rural and small districts reporting the worst shortages, where one teacher covering six buildings is a routing problem before it's a hiring one.

⚡️More Quick Hits

This week in education:

• Oklahoma's teacher preparation pipeline has shrunk about 40% since 2013 — traditionally trained educators now make up fewer than half of new classroom hires, and emergency-certified teachers account for a growing share of first-year staff after making up 0.5% of the workforce in 2010

• Arkansas districts now tie at least 40% of some tutoring vendor payments to student performance — outcomes-based contracting is spreading as ESSER funding ends and community pushback on classroom technology continues

• Texas public colleges can now consider the Classic Learning Test in admissions — the state's own commissioned study found the CLT, SAT, and ACT all of sufficient rigor, while cautioning that the evidence doesn't make them equally comparable or equally defensible

• More colleges offer emergency aid than ever, and far fewer students are getting it — Hope Center analysis found the share of institutions offering emergency aid rose while the share of students receiving it collapsed, with most students unaware the aid exists at all

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