The Six Words Driving the Education Debate in 2026

2026 is already off to a hot start. It’s probably dumb to try and predict things in such an unpredictable world, but what the heck, we’re just having some fun around here, so I’ll give it a go.

Rather than predicting what states might pass choice laws or what candidates might win elections, I’d like to highlight six words that I predict will come up again and again in discussions about education in general and school choice in particular.

I’ll start general and get more specific. Without further ado:

“Rage bait”

Rage bait was the Oxford English Dictionary’s word of 2025. (And yes, both they and I see that it is two words.) Rage bait is, “online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive.” After X made it possible to see where accounts are located, it became clear that there are people all around the world pumping rage bait content into the social media feeds of Americans, and nothing good is coming from it.

The world of education and school choice have both seen their share of rage bait. Choice opponents love rage bait. Just look at the number of headlines from stories of a single ESA family using their funds to buy Legos or a trampoline. These dollars are a rounding error in funding for the program and would be spent in a public school on useless tat without anyone batting an eye. But one ESA family does it and the rage bait machine whirrs to life.

Don’t fall for it. And, don’t mistake rage bait-induced engagement with actual interest or feeling about a topic. It’s artificial, ephemeral, and moves on to the next target of two-minute hate in the time it takes to swipe up.

“Slop”

Sticking to the topic of social media, over the course of 2025 I started to notice just how much of my social media feed was goofy, low-effort, clearly AI-generated garbage. This has come to be known as slop. It is starting to make platforms like Facebook, that now inundate users with posts from accounts that they don’t even follow, unusable. Even high-effort and earnest sites like Reddit are seeing clearly AI-written posts “Karma farming” to get likes and upvotes. It’s all very dreary.

Slop is already coming to education with teachers sounding the alarm on AI-generated student essays (and some educators getting called out for their own AI-generated content).

But this could get wilder and weirder and 2026 might be the year it happens. Imagine opening your social media and seeing a “video” from a classroom with a teacher doing something terrible and forwarding it or tweeting about it without realizing it was made by AI. Some people will be more susceptible to slop than others, and school board meetings, principals’ phone lines, and PTAs could be swamped with accusations and “evidence” of any number of things happening, only none of it actually did.

As I said above, don’t fall for it.

“Transparency”

Looking more specifically at school choice, I predict that transparency will be one of two words that we see over and over again in 2026. I watched this interview with Iowa gubernatorial candidate Rob Sand (the ESA discussion starts around the 13:30 mark) and it was illuminating that he would not come out and condemn the ESA program whole hog. The interviewer picks up on this, and even with additional prodding, Sand never says he is against the program as a whole, just that he has a problem with the program’s lack of transparency.

I predict this is going to be one of opponents’ key tactics in 2026. They know that choice is popular and that coming out directly against choice programs is bad politics, so instead they are going to try and pick at programs and advocate for more reporting and documentation and regulations that will make programs more kludgy and onerous and poorly functioning, all in the name of promoting vaguely positive concepts like transparency. As Sand spells out in the interview, he would want to layer on bureaucracy and processes that would make private schools into the public schools that they providing an alternative to and call that progress.

“Accountability”

If it’s not transparency that opponents wield as a weapon against ESA and other choice programs in 2026, it is going to be accountability. For the same reason that talking about transparency rather than condemning choice programs as a whole is a more palatable vector of attack, talking about accountability gives opponents an in without running afoul of public opinion.

Accountability is a useful cudgel because it means different things to different people. Accountable to whom? For what? For people who don’t like choice programs, there is never enough accountability, and there is an infinite number of metrics that can be collected and reports that can be required to be written.

It is clear that for many even in the lukewarm-to-choice category, “accountability” means annual state standardized testing and some kind of school grading, be that A through F or something similar. I don’t think I need to go into too much depth about how deleterious such a regime would be for private schools that explicitly exist to do something different to the traditional public school system.

“Participants”

Getting even more niche, figuring out who is participating in choice programs will be a key research question in 2026. The challenge is that who participates in choice programs is not a static set. Preliminary data from several states points to a changing student population as programs mature. Because we have dozens of programs around the country that are at different stages in their maturation, the answer to the question who participates? might be different in different places. It also might be different in the same state at different times. There is probably not one answer to the question, and I know that we will not be the only ones trying to unpick this.

Colyn Ritter had a great post last year showing what data states are reporting on student participation and offering some examples for other states to follow in making data available and useful.

“Supply Side”

Yes, I started with a two worder and I’m ending with one too. If you’re one to enjoy the old Wayne Gretsky adage skate to where the puck is going then the supply side is where the puck is going in educational choice in 2026. For private school choice programs to work, we need a supply of great providers. These are schools, tutors, therapists, technologies, co-ops, and a lot of other interesting possibilities that ESAs can fund. If programs can attract a lot of these, they will succeed. If they cannot, they will fail.

Here is where regulation is so important. It is not that hard to draft innocuous-enough looking regulations that make it much harder for small providers to enter choice markets. I’ve written about fire and building codes that, depending on the jurisdiction, can kick in when schools hit five kids. If every new learning environment needs to spend six figures on fire sprinklers before they can operate, we are just not going to see a large enough supply side response to meet the demand of parents and children.

In 2026, as the federal government publishes rules related to the federal choice program, and as states ramping up their programs outside of initial narrow student eligibility categories try to provide opportunities to tens or hundreds of thousands of children, the supply side and its constraints will come up again and again.

This was originally published to our Substack.