Predictions for the 2026/2027 School Year
Written by Michael McKenna, Director of Tuck Advisors. To receive regular updates, subscribe to his LinkedIn newsletter.
This is the first September I haven't gone "back to school" since I was five years old. For the first time, I watched September arrive from the outside. No opening faculty meetings, no classroom walkthroughs, no first-day photos in the hallway.
This year, I spent the last few weeks taking stock of where the sector is headed. The only difference is that I'm doing it now as a Director at Tuck Advisors instead of a Chief Academic Officer, which means I'm reading the same signals through a different lens.
Here are my predictions for the 26/27 school year, and what each one means for the people building, buying, and selling in this space. It was supposed to be my top 10, but I couldn't leave out some important topics...
1. AI Fluency, Professional Development, and Policy Fall Further Behind
Every superintendent I talk to knows AI policy is coming. Very few have actually finished writing one. That gap isn't about awareness. It's about capacity. Writing a real AI policy takes legal review, community input, and teacher training time that most districts don't have lying around. The professional development infrastructure needed to close this gap hasn't kept pace with adoption, and I don't expect that to change meaningfully in one school year.
For vendors, this is an opening. Districts that can't build policy and training capacity internally will look for partners who can hand them something closer to turnkey, not just another tool that assumes the governance question has already been solved.
2. Special Education Staffing Solutions and Software Remain Hot
The special education staffing shortage isn't new. I lived it as a CAO, chasing certified staff for positions that stayed open all year. It has hit a point now where districts will be looking for creative solutions to fill short-term and long-term special education teacher positions as well as related-service providers. Virtual providers, outside staffing companies, job-sharing: all options are on the table.
IEP management, progress monitoring, and compliance documentation are now handled by various software platforms. But many of these platforms weren't built specifically with special education teachers and administrators in mind. Companies that build tools around the actual workflow of special education staff, and that make administrative tracking and compliance genuinely easier rather than just digital, are the ones I expect to see deal interest keep building around through the year.
3. Student Behavior and Mental Health Continue to Strain Schools
Demand for mental health support keeps climbing. Districts continue to lack the capacity, personnel, and budget to provide comprehensive programming for students.
What I find notable, watching from outside now, is how tangled behavior and mental health have become. A lot of what shows up as a discipline referral is a mental health issue underneath, and many districts still treat the two as separate systems with separate staff and separate data. The districts making real progress are the ones building tiered, proactive systems rather than responding only at the point of crisis. That shift, from reactive to proactive, is where I'd point anyone building in this space.
4. Screen Time Guardrails Continue
The pendulum swung hard toward devices over the last decade. It's swinging back, and it's swinging back through legislation and parent feedback. Phone bans, screen time limits, and a harder look at 1:1 device programs are showing up in more state legislatures and more district policies this year.
Vendors, especially those that sell into the K-3 market, definitely need to pivot and think differently about student access. The winning pitch in 26/27 sounds like: shorter sessions that accomplish more, tools that show a teacher exactly when to log off, dashboards that flag overuse instead of celebrating it. The vendors who rebuild their value proposition around less time and better use of it, before the guardrails become law in more states, are going to be the ones still in the conversation when procurement season hits.
5. Consolidation Is King
Districts, colleges, and vendors are all shrinking into fewer, larger entities, and it's the same underlying math in every case: declining enrollment, tighter margins, and a buyer base consolidating faster than the vendor landscape serving it.
I've written before about the EdTech reckoning districts are living through right now, the shift from "what should we buy" to "what's worth keeping." That reckoning is accelerating consolidation on the vendor side too. Districts don't want more logins. They want fewer, better, connected tools. The vendors who can't demonstrate integration and measurable impact are the ones getting cut in this next budget cycle and getting pushed out by a company that can.
6. Early Childhood Interest Grows
I've spent a lot of time this year writing about early childhood, and for good reason. Global education deal activity hit 514 transactions in the first half of 2026 and Pre-K–12 reclaimed its position as the most active end market in the sector. Nearly a quarter of all Pre-K–12 deal activity in H1 2026 was in the early childhood segment specifically.
Deal activity here has been quiet compared to the rest of K-12 for years. That's changed fast in 2026, and I don't see it slowing down heading into 26/27. State-level funding expansion, from Vermont's universal pre-K entitlement to New York's push to guarantee every four-year-old a seat, is de-risking the demand side of the business model in a way that makes early childhood operators genuinely attractive to buyers who weren't looking at this segment two years ago.
7. AI Tools Target Backend Ops
Every conversation about AI in education defaults quickly to student-facing tools. Adaptive learning, writing assistance, personalized tutoring. Those matter, but there's a parallel story getting far less attention: finance, HR, facilities, special education compliance, and transportation.
The administrative burden on school systems is substantial and largely invisible to the EdTech market, and that's precisely where the clearest opportunity now sits. The buying decision is also easier here. Less pedagogical scrutiny, clearer cost savings, and a faster procurement cycle than anything touching instruction directly. I expect more capital to chase this market in 26/27 than in any prior year.
8. MTSS, PBIS, and UDL Become Mainstream
Every district says they do MTSS. Few have the data infrastructure to do it well. As PBIS and UDL frameworks get folded into the same conversation, that gap between the claim and the underlying capability becomes more visible, and more consequential for compliance and outcomes reporting.
This is a place where a well-built platform and meaningful professional development can earn trust quickly. I'd watch this category closely as districts comprehend the need to implement these frameworks with fidelity to best serve their students.
9. Data Interoperability Shifts from Nice-to-Have to Must-Have
The tools exist. The interoperability between them still mostly doesn't. Districts are sitting on a stack of point solutions that don't talk to each other, and that's both the daily operational headache for the people running these systems and the acquisition thesis for anyone trying to roll up the category.
I expect interoperability to move from a feature buried in the sales deck to a top-line requirement in RFPs this year. The vendors who solved this problem early are going to have a real advantage over the ones still treating it as a nice-to-have.
10. Enrollment and Funding Declines Persist
State budgets are tighter, federal signals are mixed, and enrollment keeps softening in a lot of districts. The mix of tight state budgets and inconsistent federal signals makes planning genuinely hard for district leaders heading into 26/27.
This is the variable that determines whether every other prediction on this list gets funded or starved this year. Every district leader I talk to is building a budget with less certainty than they had even twelve months ago.
11. The Learning Recession Continues
Pandemic-era learning loss hasn't fully closed, and in a lot of places, progress has stalled. This isn't a headline anymore, and that's part of the problem. It's quietly become the baseline, and baseline problems get less urgency and less funding attention than emerging ones, even when they're just as serious.
The districts seeing real movement are the ones treating the science of reading, and academic recovery more broadly, as a system-wide capacity-building challenge rather than a curriculum purchase. That's a harder story to tell a school board than "we bought a new program," but it's the one that actually works.
12. SGOs Influence the K12 Sector
Scholarship granting organizations are coming in 2027 and we are all holding our breath as we learn more details soon. Public school enrollment continues to decline as more and more families pursue non-traditional school options. SGOs could increase this momentum.
This is a structural shift, not a policy footnote. It changes who the buyer is for a meaningful slice of the K-12 population, and vendors built exclusively around traditional district procurement should be paying close attention to how quickly this segment is growing.
If you want to learn more about SGOs, check out this upcoming webinar I'm doing with Rayna Glumac and RYE Collective.
13. Purchasing Decisions Center on Outcomes
For years, plenty of EdTech purchasing decisions got made on user experience, sales relationships, or vague promises about engagement. That's shifting. Tighter budgets mean district leaders have to defend every purchase with something closer to evidence, and that pressure is pushing outcomes data from a nice-to-have in the sales pitch to a requirement for renewal.
The businesses that have invested in implementation fidelity, clean data integration, and documented impact are going to stand apart from the ones still relying on novelty and brand.
What This Means
Thirteen predictions is a lot for one school year. A sector that used to move on one or two big shifts a year is now absorbing too many at once, and every buyer, founder, and district leader is being asked to prioritize all of them with roughly the same budget they had last year.
I'll be writing about several of these in more depth over the coming weeks. If one of these thirteen is keeping you up at night, whether you're running a district or building a company around one of these problems, I'd like to hear about it.
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!