Parents could be convinced to change views on opt-outs While most Americans support a parent’s right to remove their child from certain classroom lessons, some parents may be convinced to change their views when presented with counterarguments.

That’s according to an article published in August by the Brookings Institution that presents an analysis of several high-quality national surveys asking about parental opt-outs.

Authors Dan Silver, Morgan Polikoff, and Anna Saavedra from the University of Southern California researched the topic following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on Mahmoud v. Taylor, which provides that parents can opt out their children from lessons that infringe on their religious freedoms.

The USC researchers found that surveys over the last few years show around 60 percent of Americans favor a parents’ ability to remove students from certain lessons, especially those centered on race and sexual/gender identity. However, the authors also cite an experiment in one of their surveys that shows parents’ views could be swayed by presenting the downsides of opt-outs.

In a fall 2023 survey conducted by USC, all respondents were presented with a vignette about a parent requesting their child be opted out of a lesson that includes content the parent disagrees with. The researchers then randomly asked half of the respondents to read the following paragraph:

“The teacher believes that all students should participate, because learning about content they might not otherwise hear or learn about helps them. They might see a new perspective, learn to be a critical thinker, or simply learn an important new fact. And it can be hard for a teacher to accommodate every parent’s wishes for every lesson for every child.”

Reading the paragraph about downsides reduced support for opting out from 57 percent to 41 percent, with significant reductions across political views.

“Taken together, these various survey results suggest that Americans are supportive of parents’ ability to opt-out, but they are open to counterarguments,” according to the authors. “School districts could share this sort of language — or language more tailored to local context and issues — with families as a way to ensure they are considering the issue from multiple angles. In fact, we imagine a carefully crafted message coming from a trusted local educator might have an even larger effect on opt-out support than the message in our survey experiment.”

Read the full article at www.brookings.edu/articles/most-americans-support-parental-opt-out-of-school-curriculum-until-they-consider-the-downsides.

Report: Women hold third of supt positions at large districts Women now hold one-third of the superintendent positions in the nation’s 500 largest school districts, according to new data released by national education strategy firm ILO Group.

The data also show that superintendent turnover continues at historic levels, reaching a three-year high in 2025.

These are among the major findings of the 2025 update of the Superintendent Research Project, the only publicly available database and analysis of who is leading the nation’s largest districts, led by ILO Group.

“The role of superintendent is one of the most influential in public education and yet data show that districts and states continue to face destabilizing turnover,” said Dr. Julia Rafal-Baer, co-founder and CEO of ILO Group, in a news release. “This year’s findings make clear that the leadership churn we once considered temporary is now the new normal, and it is straining districts at the very moment students need steady, effective leadership the most. By tapping into the full pool of highly qualified, battle-tested leaders already in our schools and state education agencies, we can both improve leadership stability and ensure every community has the leadership it needs to meet today’s challenges and deliver for students.”

The 2025 release of the Superintendent Research Project shows that:

• Turnover remains high, with 114 of the top 500 districts (23 percent) experiencing at least one leadership change in the past year. That’s up from 20 percent the year before and higher than pre-pandemic historical averages of 14-16 percent.
• The last three annual data updates have shown that superintendent transitions were more frequent during the pandemic than before it, and that high rates of leadership turnover have persisted.
• One in three superintendent roles is now held by a woman (33.2 percent), an increase from the previous year. Despite year-over-year improvement, at the current pace of change, parity between women and men is not projected until 2054, nearly three decades from now.
• In the largest 100 districts half of all new superintendents appointed this year were women.

Read the full news release and access more data at www.ilogroup.com/news/new-release-finds-women-now-hold-one-third-of-top-500-superintendencies-turnover-remains-elevated.

Supts survey: Politics and budget are top stressors While superintendents reported less stress in 2025 compared to 2023, politics and budgets are two of the most common sources of job-related stress according to a new national survey of district leaders.

The American School District Panel was published in September by the nonprofit RAND Corporation and contains data from 208 districts that completed surveys in spring 2025. Researchers focused mainly on differences between superintendents in large districts (those serving 10,000 or more students) and small districts (those serving fewer than 3,000 students).

Among the findings, small-district superintendents cited budgets as the most common source of job stress in 2025, whereas large-district superintendents said political issues are the most common source of stress in their jobs.

Around half of small-district superintendents considered the role worthwhile in 2025, despite its stresses and disappointments, compared with seven in 10 large-district superintendents.

The responses also showed differences between what large district superintendents spend more time on versus their counterparts in small districts. As in 2024, superintendents in large districts spent most of their time on communications, particularly school board communications, while those in small districts devoted most of their time to school facilities, school staff communications, and budget.

Small- and large-district superintendents indicated that instruction, school data, parent communication, and communication with school staff should be where they devote most of their time; they also indicated that facilities, budgets, and school board communications should not be their most time-consuming activities.

Read the full survey at www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA956-36.html.