TOP TASKS

Follow Hawaii’s lead in building broad support for kid-centered legislation

The HawaiiKidsCAN team is on a run in the Aloha State, with three priority bills passing out of committee, including two with unanimous support. 

Executive Director David Sun-Miyashiro and Deputy Director Erica Nakanishi-Stanis started with a charter school facilities bill that establishes public-private partnerships to reduce both time and costs in creating new school buildings. That bill was voted through by the Senate Education Committee and the Senate Ways and Means Committee, setting it up for a floor vote and crossover to the House.

The team also continued their work to better support students on a clear path to a meaningful career. This year they focused on improving the Hawaii Promise Scholarship, which takes care of tuition costs and other fees at local community colleges for students in need of financial support. The HawaiiKidsCAN team is advocating for new incentives to apply for federal financial aid and administrative fixes that aim to minimize confusion and expand access. The bill with those improvements has passed out of the House Higher Education Committee, House Finance Committee and a full House floor vote.

The major focus, however, has been the next step in a multi-year campaign to bring to the islands the literacy reforms that are working in so many other states. Over the past several years, the team has sparked the public conversation by screening the Right to Read film in Honolulu and bringing literacy advocate Kareem Weaver to meet with legislators and stakeholders. Those conversations led to HB1784, a 2026 priority bill for HawaiiKidsCAN that mandates both dyslexia screeners and educator training on the science of reading. After mobilizing hundreds of parent, student and partner advocates, the bill has cleared the House Education Committee and Finance Committee.

“The lesson I learn over and over again is that you have to be in this for the long haul,” Executive Director David Sun-Miyashiro reflected. “Broad support happens over years, not overnight, and I’ve found that initial opposition is often masking a lack of information. We spent a lot of time helping both the community and elected officials understand both the problem, the solution and what other states were doing. That takes time, but I’ve found it’s almost always worth it.”

HawaiiKidsCAN is also supporting a bill from Believe In Better Policymaker Fellow Rep. Trish La Chica to improve math outcomes by providing elementary schools with numeracy coaches. The Honolulu Star-Advertiser recently reported on the bill and quoted HawaiiKidsCAN’s support. We’ll continue to follow HawaiiKidsCAN’s progress and share updates on the legislative journey as it happens

Follow Connecticut’s lead in pursuing a broad agenda of reform 

The legislative session is well underway in Hartford, Connecticut and the ConnCAN team is tracking ten priority bills in advance of a committee deadline on March 23. Each of the ten bills has already had a public hearing.

On literacy, SB 220 would expand investments in structured reading, with 108,000 children across the state poised to receive additional support if the legislation becomes law. The bill also expands high-dosage tutoring, ensures districts use benchmark assessments aligned with the science of reading, and requires educator preparation programs to teach structured literacy to prospective teachers. 

On math, HB 5034, a priority of Governor Ned Lamont, would redesign Connecticut’s high school math pathways to better align with workforce needs, create a new Math Specialist endorsement for educators, and launch a statewide MathCON professional learning conference, modeled on the state’s successful ReadCON. If both bills pass, Connecticut would follow New Mexico as the second CAN state in 2026 to secure wins on both math and reading in its legislative session.  

“I think there’s wide acknowledgement that our students deserve high-quality math and reading supports,” ConnCAN Deputy Director Hamish MacPhail told us. “And, while we’ve made some important changes, primarily in reading, we’re not where we want to be. What we’re finding in Connecticut is that these policy priorities in math and reading speak to each other and leverage the same interventions and support structures, namely high-dosage tutoring. There’s an advantage to building additional supports for students in both subject areas simultaneously.”

But literacy and math are just the start, as ConnCAN pushes forward with other reforms, the most important being improvements to the school funding model. SB 7 and HB 5002 would tie Connecticut’s school funding formula to inflation and ensure that all school types, including charters, are included in the funding formula. In addition, SB 138 would improve the application process for charter schools and HB 5329 would create a Connecticut Education Innovation Fund to give districts grants to try new school models alongside regulation waivers.

ConnCAN is also pursuing comprehensive reforms to its teacher pipeline. SB 221 expands eligibility for the Aspiring Educator Scholarship to up to $10,000 per year. HB 5216 provides $1,000 per week to student teachers, reducing the financial barrier that keeps prospective educators from completing their training. HB 6223 would extend state health plan access to charter school paraeducators.

Key Resources

Education Next reviews A Fuller Education, a new PBS documentary on Howard Fuller, celebrating his long career as a champion of school choice.

The American Federation for Children has launched a tracker for the new federal Education Freedom Tax Credit, showing which states have opted in so far.

Available to All’s new report examines redlining in New York, finding one of the strictest residential assignment systems in the country.

At The 74, Kevin Mahnken reports that Oregon’s 165-day school year, one of the shortest in the country, is drawing scrutiny after the state ranked near the bottom on the 2024 NAEP. Over the course of K-12, Oregon students receive more than a full year less instruction than the national average. And in our recent State of Educational Opportunity in America survey, Oregon parents ranked that state 49th out of 50 in the crucial indicator of whether you would send your child back to the school they go to today if you could do it all over again. 

New America reports on how family attitudes toward apprenticeships have shifted since 2017, finding that concerns about college have grown and apprenticeships are increasingly seen as an important complement to gain real world skills even among students who are planning to go to college. 

AEI‘s Preston Cooper asks whether computer science is still a hot major in college, finding that enrollment dropped eight percent last year as students worry about the job market for recent graduates.