6 Top Education Stories For 2025

From Forbes.com. Everyone loves to predict. Me, too.

Here are some of the education stories to watch for in the coming year.

The School Voucher Debates Shift

After a period of explosive growth, school voucher advocates have found themselves facing new resistance, notably from rural Republicans. In November’s elections, states that went hard for Donald Trump also went hard against school vouchers. In Texas, after rural Republicans refused to fall in line with Governor Greg Abbott’s desire for school vouchers, Abbott and allies poured millions of dollars into races to get a voucher-friendly majority in the legislature.

School vouchers have never been approved by voters. That’s why voucher laws have all been created by legislatures, and why voucher advocates carefully avoid the term “voucher.”

Meanwhile, Congress is poised to created a federal school voucher program that would add to the federal deficit and force school vouchers on states that have so far rejected them.

School voucher rhetoric has shifted, deliberately, from talk about freedom and choice to the language of the culture wars, painting public schools as indoctrinating students in far left radicalism and gender ideology. Watch for voucher policy discussion to shift further away from ideas of real choice and more toward the “choice” of replacing secular public school with properly religious tax-payer funded private school.

The Oklahoma Catholic Charter Challenge

If the Supreme Court decides to hear the challenge to Oklahoma’s proposed Catholic charter school, the result could shake up both the world of public and private schools.

If states are required to fund religious charter schools, state legislatures will have to figure out which religions are entitled to taxpayer dollars to fund their schools (and if the answer is “all of them,” taxpayers will have to deal with that). At the same time, private religious schools will find themselves competing with tax-payer funded religious charter schools.

There are four more. Read them here.