At the DLAC Ignite conference in Sacramento in February I presented a session called “Seven digital learning trends that you should know.” I also took part in a session exploring what our attendees saw as key trends in their schools and states. This blog post presents my original seven trends, plus three trends from the discussion.
1. Enrollment is continuing to shift away from traditional districts.
Different data sources vary at the margins, but the broad direction is clear. District enrollment is down, while private schools, charter schools, homeschooling, and ESA-funded options are gaining ground. This does not mean district schools are disappearing; most students still enroll in their district of residence. But more families are acting like education consumers, and more states are creating policies that allow them to do so.
2. The district response to competition is often overstated.
There is a theory that school districts, when faced with enrollment loss, will innovate and build new options that families want. That does happen in some places, and there are strong examples worth studying. But from what we are seeing at DLAC, those examples are still exceptions. In too many states and communities, the response has been slow, limited, or disconnected from what families are actually choosing. One clue is to follow the funding flows. When public dollars start moving elsewhere and districts still do not adapt in significant ways, that tells you something. Two signs that will show that a district is truly adapting: 1) it is putting funds into marketing and communications with prospective students and families, and 2) it is letting schools of choice, which are attracting students back into the district, control at least some of the funding that is generated by the new students.
3. States are increasingly functioning as laboratories of democracy in digital learning and school choice.
Florida, Texas, and Arizona are ahead of most of the country in expanding ESAs and voucher-like mechanisms. Meanwhile, some states still place major restrictions on online learning or have policy environments that make innovation difficult. A family’s access to digital learning options depends heavily on geography, and that gap is widening.
4. This is not quite a clean red-state versus blue-state divide.
California is a good reminder that school choice scrambles typical liberal/conservative politics. The state has features of policy and practice that allow far more choice and options than some other blue states like New York and New Jersey, including independent study and charter structures that give parents meaningful room to choose curriculum and learning arrangements. Colorado is not as far along as California, but it has several elements pointing in the same direction including the (Democratic) governor’s support of developing SGOs under the new federal law. If the most aggressive choice policies in red states continue to produce visible results, I think there is a plausible bipartisan path to more choice and options, though it may look different in different states.
5. Microschools are still overhyped.
I do not mean they are unimportant. I mean that the rhetoric around them still tends to outpace the numbers and the operational reality. Many microschools are small, fragile, and highly dependent on a founder or a narrow set of conditions. At the same time, I do not dismiss them. ESAs make the economics more feasible, and AI may make some staffing and instructional models more workable than they were even a year or two ago. I remain skeptical of the hype, but more interested in the category than I was before.
6. AI is accelerating at a pace that many educators still have not internalized.
I said in Sacramento that if you are not using paid AI tools every day, you probably do not yet understand what is happening. I realize that sounds blunt, but I believe it. You do not have to love AI to recognize that it is already changing knowledge work, student work, and the economics of teaching and learning. Even educators who think AI is overblown still need to understand it, because their students are going to live in this world whether adults are ready or not. After Sacramento, I heard a description that captured what I was trying to say even better: you have to use AI to develop an “intuition” of what it can do—and what it will be able to do as it develops further.
7. Online and hybrid schools are both more vulnerable to AI and better positioned to respond to it than most other parts of K-12.
These schools are vulnerable because AI agents can already handle many traditional asynchronous tasks. A lot of coursework that was once considered legitimate evidence of learning is becoming easier to outsource to AI. But online and hybrid schools also have an advantage. They are generally more accustomed to changing tools, redesigning workflows, and operating at scale across distance and time. In other words, the schools under the greatest pressure may also be the ones best equipped to adapt.
Moving on to the key trends that the group discussion settled on:
8. Student mobility rates have increased
Higher than average student mobility rates have always been a factor in many online schools, but DLAC Ignite attendees reported that mobility rates have increased in their schools. They believe that the increase in school and educational choices has led more students and families to try different options more quickly. They are seeing more cases of students coming in mid-year after having started the new school year with a new option that didn’t work out.
9. Elementary online learning enrollments are declining
Discussion participants reported that enrollments in their online elementary schools have dropped. We have seen data supporting this view. During the pandemic all online school enrollments increased significantly. After the pandemic receded, numbers dropped back down but not to the earlier baseline. However, elementary numbers decreased more than high school numbers. The fact that we are hearing this in early 2026 suggests that the trend is continuing, perhaps as elementary age students who were in online schools shift to homeschooling. Of course, this doesn’t mean across the board declines for all schools.
10. Rapid pace of legislation
We heard that the pace of legislation affecting online schools is increasing, and my Google news feed supports this view as well. We have heard of threats to online school and program budgets in many states, including Idaho and Colorado, and accountability concerns in Tennessee and elsewhere.
That was the core of the conversation in my sessions in Sacramento. The details will keep changing, but I do not think the direction will. Enrollment is shifting, states are diverging, district adaptation is uneven, and microschools remain a question mark. AI is arriving faster than school systems are prepared for. For people working in digital learning, this is not a time to watch from the sidelines. It is a moment to pay attention, make choices, and move.
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