Superintendents’ top concerns in 2026 are budget shortfalls and declining enrollment—a significant shift from a year ago, when academic achievement and recruiting teachers topped the list, a new survey from RAND and the Center on Reinventing Public Education at Arizona State University finds.
The change comes as districts face state and national efforts to expand school choice options, declining birth rates, and persistent inflation that has strained budgets.
“This is quite a large shift from one year to the next,” said Benjamin Master, a senior policy research at RAND and author of the report. “We don’t normally see this kind of change.”
As part of their American School District Panel, RAND and CRPE surveyed 481 district administrators between March 18 and May 4, asking them to identify their top three concerns for their schools in 2026. Researchers weighted the results by district size, locale, poverty level, race and ethnicity composition, and region to generate nationally representative results.
Fifty-four percent of administrators identified “addressing budget shortages” as a top concern, compared to 33% in 2025. Thirty-six percent identified “addressing declining enrollment,” compared to 25% in 2025. Rural and suburban administrators were more likely to identify budget shortages as a top concern, and suburban administrators were less likely to identify declining enrollment than leaders of urban and rural districts.
The top two answers to the 2025 survey were “raising reading achievement,” at 44%, and “recruiting and keeping effective teachers,” at 42%.
“Everything else has gotten more expensive,” one superintendent told researchers in an interview. “I mean, keeping the lights on, salary increases, all those things.”
Leaders participating in structured interviews with researchers also cited inadequate state funding, mandatory cost-of-living increases in employee pay, retaining additional staff positions added when districts relied on federal COVID-19 aid, increasing special education costs, and state mandates to purchase high-quality curricula.
An increased focus on boosting student enrollment
Concerns about achievement and staffing are still high, superintendents told researchers. But they are overshadowed by budget and enrollment concerns because districts struggle to identify spending cuts they could easily make without addressing staffing and valuable student programs.
Talk about new school choice programs have also raised concerns about retaining students.
Congress included a new tax-credit scholarship program in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed July 2025, allowing taxpayers to claim dollar-for-dollar tax credits in exchange for donations to organizations that grant private school scholarships and scholarships covering some expenses tied to public schools, such as tutoring and after-school programs. Thirty-one states plan to opt into the federal tax-credit scholarship, according to an Education Week analysis, and three governors have said their states won’t participate.
Budget concerns have also accompanied the Trump administration’s unorthodox administration of federal grants and worries over legislative proposals to cap property tax in a handful of states, although those issues weren’t referenced in the RAND report.
In interviews with researchers, superintendents also cited movement of students during the COVID-19 pandemic, additional charter schools, changes in their local labor markets, and out-migration as contributors to enrollment declines.
Survey respondents said their districts are planning or considering strategies to retain and attract students, including marketing campaigns, expanding pre-k services, and specialized programs.
