From Graduation Stages to Market Pages ... Let's Reflect on the 25/26 School Year
Written by Michael McKenna, Director of Tuck Advisors. To receive regular updates, subscribe to his LinkedIn newsletter.
For more than twenty years, June meant one thing to me: the final sprint. Closing out the school year. Tying up IEPs, finishing evaluations, navigating the organized chaos of end-of-year logistics. And above all else, standing on a gymnasium floor or a football field, watching seniors cross a stage and receive a diploma that represented years of work by students, families, and the educators who showed up for them every day.
I miss that. I won't pretend otherwise.
But this June, my vantage point is different. I'm no longer thinking about closing out the school year and graduation. I'm thinking about the market. The vendors, investors, founders, and policymakers whose decisions will shape what happens inside those buildings long after the caps and gowns are put away. I'm thinking about what the 25–26 school year revealed, and what it signals for everyone working at the intersection of education and business.
The view from outside the district is different. Not better, not worse, just different. What I can see now that I couldn't see then is how the conditions inside schools become market signals. How the frustrations educators carry every day are also, if you know how to read them, roadmaps for where the real opportunity lies.
Four themes have defined this school year with enough consistency and urgency to deserve a close look as we wrap up 2025–26.
The Literacy Crisis Isn't a Crisis Anymore. It's a Condition.
After more than two decades in K–12, I've watched the literacy conversation cycle through urgency, policy, and disappointment more times than I can count. What's different now is the legislative weight behind it.
A growing majority of states have enacted or are actively implementing science of reading legislation, and the federal conversation is moving in the same direction. New federal proposals aim to tie literacy funding explicitly to the science of reading. States are funding literacy coaching, expanding early grade offerings, and moving to retire long-discredited instructional methods. The policy environment is the most aligned it has ever been with what research has told us for thirty years.
But here's what I keep coming back to: legislation mandates a direction, not a destination. The districts seeing real movement — the ones behind the gains researchers are calling the "Southern Surge" — invested in professional development infrastructure, not just curriculum compliance. The science of reading is not a program. It's a practice. And building that practice across a system takes time, training, and sustained will that outlasts any single policy cycle.
The companies and organizations that understand that districts need implementation support, not just instructional materials, are the ones positioned to matter in this next phase.
Mental Health: The Infrastructure Gap Is the Real Problem
By 2026, awareness of the student mental health crisis is nearly universal. Capacity is where the system is breaking down.
The picture across the country is consistent: most public schools say they cannot effectively serve every student who needs mental health support, and that reality hasn't meaningfully improved in years. The counselors closest to the work say much of the same thing. That the system cannot keep meeting an escalating crisis at the point of acute need alone, and must shift toward proactive, early intervention.
What I find notable is how the framing has evolved. When I was a principal, mental health was something we addressed when a student was in crisis. What the most forward-thinking districts are building now is something different — systems of early identification, tiered support, and community partnership that treat behavioral and emotional wellbeing as part of the instructional environment, not a supplement to it.
The challenge is structural. Counselors are overwhelmed. Funding is uncertain. Districts are responding by expanding telehealth partnerships, embedding social-emotional supports into daily instruction, and looking for scalable models that don't require hiring a specialist for every student in need.
The phrase I keep hearing from practitioners: we're not lacking insight, we're lacking infrastructure. That gap is both a challenge and a significant market signal.
The EdTech Reckoning: From "What Should We Buy?" to "What's Worth Keeping?"
The question districts are asking in 2026 has fundamentally shifted. The pandemic forced rapid technology adoption without reflection. Now comes the reckoning.
The story is familiar to anyone who has walked a district's tech stack. The number of tools a single system manages has ballooned. Teachers and students alike juggle far more platforms than anyone can reasonably use well, and satisfaction with that fragmentation is low. The era of technology for technology's sake is over.
Districts are now scrutinizing every tool in their stack against a harder standard. Does it fit into real teacher workflows, does it demonstrate measurable impact, and can it justify its cost alongside everything else competing for the same budget?
True consolidation isn't about fewer logins. It's about one connected environment where data, tools, and workflows operate together rather than in silos. The districts moving in this direction are finding real results — reduced licensing costs, freed IT capacity, and teachers who can actually focus on instruction rather than platform management.
For EdTech companies, the message is equally clear: retention matters more than acquisition, and outcomes matter more than features. The businesses that have invested in implementation fidelity, clean data integration, and documented impact will stand apart from those still relying on novelty.
AI in K–12: The Operational Layer Is Being Overlooked
Every conversation about AI in education defaults quickly to student-facing tools — adaptive learning, writing assistance, personalized tutoring. Those conversations matter. But there is a parallel story that deserves more attention, and it starts in the back office.
Across HR, finance, facilities, and transportation, district leaders are increasingly saying the same thing directly: the administrative burden on school systems is substantial, largely invisible to the EdTech market, and ripe for transformation. The market is saturated with AI products built for teaching and learning. Far fewer are aimed at the operational layer that keeps a district running and that is precisely where the clearest opportunity now sits. Tools that bring greater efficiency and accuracy to the work behind the scenes, and that let districts do more without growing payroll, stand to deliver value the instructional market has largely overlooked.
The readiness picture on the instructional side is also still a concern. A growing number of states have published official AI guidance for schools, which is meaningful progress. What lags is teacher capacity. Many educators report feeling unprepared to use AI tools effectively, let alone to guide students in using them critically. The professional development infrastructure that would close that gap hasn't kept pace with adoption. This isn't a technology failure. It's a human capital investment failure.
The districts getting this right are approaching AI the same way the best ones approached literacy reform: as a system-wide capacity-building challenge, not a tool deployment problem. That means professional development, clear policy guardrails, and leadership that models intentional use rather than simply mandating it.
What This Means — And Why June Feels Different Now
If you work at the intersection of education and business, these four themes are not independent. They are interconnected signals about what K–12 systems actually need from their partners right now.
Districts are not looking for more programs. They are looking for fewer, better ones. Platforms that integrate cleanly, prove their impact, and support educators rather than layer additional complexity on top of already strained systems. The organizations earning trust in this environment are the ones that understand a school building before they sell into one.
I think about the seniors crossing those stages this month. Their teachers spent this entire year navigating a literacy policy landscape in transition, a mental health demand that outpaced every resource available, a technology environment that asked too much of everyone, and an AI moment that arrived faster than any training prepared them for.
That is the reality behind the market. It is easy to lose sight of from the outside.
I try not to.
If this analysis was useful, share it with a colleague who sits at the intersection of education and business.
If you're a founder, investor, or leader in the education space, let's connect!