Across the education field in the United States, a renewed conversation is underway about the purpose of public education and how schools can better prepare students for a rapidly changing world. Advances in AI are raising questions about how the education system needs to evolve. At the same time, persistently poor and inequitable student outcomes, declining public school enrollment, and shifting funding priorities are increasing pressure on many education nonprofits to adapt their strategies and operating models.

Over the past year, The Bridgespan Group has convened and interviewed more than 20 education nonprofit leaders to better understand what they are seeing and how they are navigating this moment. Many described a field in transition, while equity-focused organizations reported facing particularly acute resource pressures. A number of leaders we spoke with intend to collaborate more with peers, public systems, philanthropy, and cross-sector partners; others worried that education redesign could repeat the mistakes of past reform efforts, namely excluding students, families, and communities—particularly those from historically marginalized populations—from designing solutions that fit their needs. 

Taken together, these conversations point to a practical conclusion: this moment cannot be met on an organization-by-organization basis. Rather, strengthening the education system to effectively prepare students to thrive in this changing future will require the collective work of a more representative field that brings together system leaders, funders, AI and technology leaders, policymakers, nonprofits, researchers, educators, and representative groups of students and families—and imbues them with a bias toward action.

The Next Chapter in Education

The next chapter in education is being defined less by a single disruption than by several pressures converging at once.

Student needs remain significant. Five years after the onset of COVID-19, national student outcomes show worrisome challenges that suggest a problem broader than pandemic-era learning losses. New district-level data from the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford found that, compared with a decade earlier, reading scores were down in 83 percent of school districts where data were available, while math scores were down in 70 percent. The New York Times reports that these declines cut across income, racial, and geographic lines. National Assessment of Educational Progress results show a similar pattern of concern: twelfth-grade reading scores were the lowest recorded, twelfth-grade math scores were the lowest since 2005, and gaps between the lowest- and highest-performing students have widened. 

AI is also adding urgency to questions about the future of learning and work. It may create opportunities for personalized learning, educator support, and school redesign. But it also brings risks around student learning, responsible adoption, and equity, particularly if the communities most affected by education redesign are not involved in shaping it. At the same time, AI is already influencing the workforce, raising questions among educators and nonprofit leaders about what jobs schools need to prepare students for, what skills those jobs will require, and how learning experiences can be designed to help students thrive in that evolving future.

Philanthropic funding dynamics are also shifting against a backdrop of federal education funding and capacity reductions. Bridgespan analysis of Foundation Maps and the Grantmakers for Education Benchmarking 2025 report showed that the total K-12 education philanthropy reached an all-time high of $9.6 billion in 2022 (a 30 percent increase from 2018), leveling off at $9.5 billion in 2023. Yet funding aimed specifically at supporting low-income students and students of color declined by 48 percent, from $2.1 billion in 2021 to $1.1 billion in 2023. This may help explain why many equity-focused organizations are feeling especially constrained, even as education remains an area of philanthropic interest. And this is before the more recent disruptions to federal education grants.¹

In response, many leaders reported feeling the need to look beyond their own organizations. Some are exploring partnerships, mergers, or other forms of strategic collaboration. But they also described a gap: the field lacks adequate spaces where the right mix of actors can come together around shared questions and coordinated action.

Many leaders are already living these pressures every day. The value of naming them is not to tell nonprofits what they already know, but to ask what these pressures make possible (or even necessary) right now. Across our conversations, three opportunities stood out for education nonprofits seeking to meet this moment and help shape what is coming.

Opportunity 1: Help reimagine education through stronger, more representative collaboration

Education nonprofits can help ensure that the next chapter of education is shaped by the right mix of voices. The questions facing the field are too large for any one organization or sector to answer alone: What knowledge, skills, and experiences will students need to thrive? How can schools and youth-serving organizations prepare young people for a changing workforce and civic life? And how can new tools, models, and partnerships expand opportunity rather than deepen inequities?

Bridgespan’s field-building research has found that durable progress rarely comes from individual organizations acting alone. It often requires many actors working together around a shared problem, with the relationships, knowledge, resources, and infrastructure needed to support collective action. For education nonprofits, that means helping create the conditions for a broad and diverse coalition—including system leaders, funders, technology leaders, policymakers, employers, educators, researchers, students, and families—to test emerging solutions, learn together, and make better decisions. Education nonprofits and field catalysts can play an important role in helping to connect groups across the field.

Opportunity 2: Know where your organization is uniquely positioned to contribute—and find partners for the journey

Education nonprofits can also use this moment to reassess where they are best positioned to contribute. That can begin with a clear-eyed look at what is most distinctive about the organization’s work, where students and community needs are growing, which parts of the model are financially durable, and where the organization may need to adapt.

For some organizations, that may mean doubling down on a core program or population. For others, it may mean exploring adjacent areas of work, new fundraising approaches, or different ways to partner with public systems, peer organizations, or funders. Some may also consider deeper forms of strategic collaboration, including shared infrastructure, joint fundraising, coordinated talent strategies, mergers, or acquisitions. Some field actors—including Education Leaders of Color, America’s Promise Alliance, and NewSchools Venture Fund—are beginning to explore ways to support strategic collaboration across the education nonprofit field. Those options will not be right for every organization. But in a constrained environment, they can create opportunities to preserve mission, strengthen capabilities, reduce duplication, or expand reach.

The most useful partnerships are likely to begin with a specific question: What are we trying to accomplish together that we cannot accomplish alone? From there, nonprofits can identify who needs to be involved, what role each actor can play, and whose voice is missing. In this moment, that last question is especially important. Leaders we spoke with emphasized that many existing forums do not yet include the right balance of perspectives, including leaders of color, equity-focused organizations, system leaders, students and families, technology companies, policymakers, and innovation-focused actors.

Opportunity 3: Keep equity at the center as AI reshapes education

As AI moves quickly into education, work, and civic life, education nonprofits can help ensure that equity remains central to how new tools, models, and policies are designed and used. Much of this innovation is happening outside traditional education organizations, creating a risk that solutions will be built without enough input from the educators, students, families, and communities most affected by them.

Our 2020 report, Field Building for Population-Level Change, and our experience to date found that achieving population-level change requires meaningful coordination across a field’s actors. The report also emphasizes that how field-building work is done matters. In our conversations with funders and our review of fields that achieved population-level change, funders consistently noted that how they did the work was a major factor in their success. Fields are also more likely to make durable progress when the people closest to the problem—and likely to the solution—help shape the work. Drawing on the theory of targeted universalism from john a. powell, director of the Othering & Belonging Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, the report affirms that population-level change depends on designing solutions that serve the most marginalized, which requires field-building efforts to include diverse identities and viewpoints.

Education nonprofits can bring student, family, educator, and community realities into conversation about AI design, governance, and literacy. They can also raise questions about access, bias, privacy, student agency, teacher support, and the risk of widening gaps between well- and under-resourced schools and communities. And they can help ensure students have access to AI literacy and fluency, and to broader skills they need to use emerging tools thoughtfully as work expectations change.

***

The future of education will be shaped by choices being made now: about technology, funding, school models, public policy, workforce needs, and the purpose of learning itself. As education nonprofits navigate this volatile context, they can help ensure that the people closest to students have a meaningful role in designing education systems that prepare young people for the future of work, civic life, and community leadership.

Edited by Robyn Porteous