Updated: This article has been updated with results of a Missouri income tax referendum.
As educators prepare for a new school year, concerns about students’ behavior, achievement, and well-being are top of mind, even as schools and districts face broader continuing challenges with financial uncertainty and political headwinds.
The EdWeek Research Center surveyed more than 1,000 teachers and school and district administrators about major challenges they expect to face in the 2026-27 school year. Given a list of 27 options, the largest proportion of respondents, 75%, identified student behavior as a major concern, followed closely by student engagement at 70%. The top five most common responses to the survey question, administered from April 29 to June 22, related directly to students.
The sixth most common answer was budget uncertainty, which 42% of respondents expect to be a major concern. The finding comes as declining enrollment, strained state budgets, inflation, and threats to federal funding have led many districts to make tough budgeting calls—including layoffs and school closures—and brace for continued uncertainty.
For schools, student well-being and financial stability are two sides of the same coin, educators said. Tight budgets have forced some schools to eliminate support-staff positions and programs that support positive student behaviors, social-emotional learning, and academic interventions.
“I’m never going to be in a position where I can control the budget or the state of the world. I don’t want to be,” said Kenneth Orange, the principal of Stearne Elementary School in Philadelphia. “As a leader, I have to do my best to navigate and plan around those things.”
The Philadelphia school board approved a $4.6 billion budget in May with $225 million in reductions. District leaders have said employees may be relocated to other schools and positions to help avoid job cuts. At Stearne, Orange met with the school’s administration for weeks of early morning meetings to determine how to do more with less. Among the tough calls: The school will lose one of two reading specialists this year—even as it continues a push to align instruction with the “science of reading.”
“How do we now take those gains we made and sustain them with just one person?” Orange said.
Thirty-seven percent of educators said their students’ behavior got “a lot worse” during the past school year, and 34% said it had gotten “a little worse.”
Many educators expect that trend to continue into the 2026-27 school year: 22% said they expect behavior to get “a lot worse,” and 28% expect it to get “a little worse.”
Those findings align with previous data. In a nationally representative survey of more than 5,800 teachers by the EdWeek Research Center from August through November 2025, 58% said student behavior and their ability to manage their classrooms would improve if parents had instructions about how to teach their children to behave appropriately at school. Fifty percent said tougher consequences for misbehavior would improve student behavior, and 47% cited more support from leaders on issues related to discipline.
Educators say a variety of factors have led to shifts in student behavior: Social and academic interruptions during the COVID-19 pandemic have made it more difficult for some students to resolve conflicts with peers; distractions from cellphones and more frequent screen time have affected attention spans and students’ ability to regulate their own emotions; and increasing divisiveness among adults has made it harder to find models of positive behavior.
“Student [mis]behavior has increased significantly over the years,” said a district-level administrator from Georgia who responded to the survey this spring. More leaders need the courage to make decisions with “students at the center” to resolve those concerns, she wrote in an open-ended survey response.
“Student behaviors are constantly changing, and there is no training on how to deal with the extreme disruptions to learning,” an elementary school principal from Louisiana wrote. “Education is not valued by families as it once was.”
Educators said budget cuts may make it more difficult to address student-behavior concerns.
“We have eliminated an assistant principal position even though we have increased discipline referrals by 1,500 over the past two years,” a high school principal from New York said.
At Stearne Elementary, leaders won’t fill an open position on the school’s climate-support team—which helps mediate student conflicts and encourage positive behavior—after a member took a position at another school.
Many educators expect the school funding volatility of the past school year to continue into the next one. Declining birthrates and increased school choice options may contribute to more uncertainty about per-pupil state funding. Changes in federal funding for programs like Medicaid and SNAP may lead some states to redirect education funding to sustain those programs.
Many administrators also fear the loss of federal funding, pointing to decisions made by President Donald Trump’s administration to suspend grants without warning. In June 2025, the administration told states it would withhold nearly $6.8 billion in federal formula funding for K-12 schools it was scheduled to dole out the next day, throwing districts’ plans to hire staff and continue programs into doubt as the new school year approached. Even after the administration restored that funding, administrators began preparing for future lapses.
District leaders must be thoughtful about maintaining priorities under financial constraints, said Christine Otto, the senior educational services director at the Multnomah Education Service District in Oregon, which partners with districts to provide school health, special education, and other services.
“Ultimately, how you spend your money shows your real values,” Otto said.
It’s easier to prioritize when schools are planning for additional funding, as districts did when Congress provided billions of dollars of COVID-19 relief funding during the pandemic, she said, but it’s more difficult to plan for declines in existing funding levels.
“I’m trying not to be a ‘sky is falling’ person, but I’m also trying to be realistic,” said Christina Hess, the superintendent of the Cole Camp, Mo., district.
Every year, elementary school teachers in the 723-student district may be asked to shift to a different grade over the summer to match surges of demand at different age levels without eliminating or adding new employees, she said.
In August, a referendum to phase out the individual state income tax is on the ballot, potentially adding to funding unpredictability. (Voters rejected the measure, with 83% of voters opposed, after publication of this article.) Hess has prepared for future belt-tightening by weighing which changes—including larger class sizes, employee pay freezes, or the elimination of school support positions—would have the smallest effect on students.
“Our culture and climate is amazing, but as we all know in education, that can turn on literally a dime,” Hess said. “It’s an appropriate analogy in this case—a dollar or a dime.”
Forty-one percent of respondents to the EdWeek Research Center survey this spring said they expect to see at least one school in their district close in the next three years, and 54% said they expect their district to lay off at least one teacher in the next year.
Most educators who responded to the survey, 64%, believe their jobs will be “a little” or “a lot more difficult” in the new school year.
Teachers were more likely than principals and district administrators to say they expect their jobs to be a lot more difficult.
“I’m overwhelmed. There is never enough time,” a New Hampshire high school English teacher wrote. “I never feel as though I’ve done my job well.”
Despite the difficulty, educators’ commitment to their work came through in survey responses.
“I love education, but the past two years have been so challenging that I would take a sabbatical if I could. It feels like the world is against us, we lack adequate funding, and closing five schools took a serious hit on our community...,” a district administrator from Texas wrote. “I will keep going because the kids deserve it, but the moments of hopelessness are real.”
Data analysis for this article was provided by the EdWeek Research Center. Learn more about the center’s work.
