When Districts Are Buying Academic Resources, How Do They Plan for the Long-Term?

How do schools pick textbooks, ed-tech tools, and other instructional materials while keeping long-range goals in view? For nearly half of district and school leaders, the answer starts with their strategic plan.

New survey data from EdWeek Market Brief shows that 48% of district and school leaders turn to strategic plans to guide their conversations, and nearly as many say they start budget discussions and get decision-makers talking early in the budget process.

The nationally representative survey, which was conducted by the EdWeek Research Center from June to August 2026, was supported by a grant from the Gates Foundation.

In the survey, 163 district leaders and 150 school leaders were asked which approaches they’ll take to ensure their decisions about spending on academic resources in the next budget cycle are strategic and long-term, not just short-term.

The results show how those leaders are weighing the purchasing decisions they’re making now alongside their larger goals, and shine a light on ways education companies can help in that process.

As many districts face budget deficits driven by rising costs and falling enrollments, they are choosing academic resources that support both their academic goals as well as their financial goals, said James Stoffer, CEO of Abre, which aims to help districts analyze spending and long-term strategy through data analysis.

“Alignment [to a strategic plan] is becoming a filter for spending,” he said.

Many of the districts Abre is working with use its data intelligence platform to bring together different silos of data to better understand the big picture of their spending, including on academic resources, he said.

Something he’s heard from districts is that as many face financial difficulties, it’s becoming even more important that their instructional materials purchases meet their fiscal priorities or reduce workloads.

“The reality is it’s efficiency. Can you help me find money or save money? Can you help me find time or save time?” Stoffer said.

If a company is able to point to data that support their adoption, in addition to student outcomes, they can better stand out among the competition.

Companies that can help leaders “find time, save time, find money, or save money,” Stoffer said, are “going to have a significantly better leg up than those that are just standing on the academic returns, because the academic [result], as we know, isn’t necessarily an isolated variable.”

One of the largest problems that comes up with districts’ use of strategic plans — and education companies’ use of them to understand districts’ goals — is that they often end up sitting “on a shelf,” said Shannon Buerk, founder and CEO of engage2learn, which helps districts design and implement strategic plans.

Buerk’s organization talks to districts about the importance of focusing on strategic design over strategic plans, she said, since creating a strategic design allows school systems to be more nimble with their planning, evaluate results more frequently, and change course quickly.

“You can’t hold on to strategy for more than a quarter in the current environment,” she said. “For districts, at the very least, you’ve got to really be updating your planning process at least every academic year, if not addressing it every six months.”

Vendors can play a role in helping districts, particularly when it comes to providing updated data, analysis, and feedback to a product’s implementation so district leaders can make more informed decisions through the process.

Relying on just the results of summative, state-mandated testing can slow down that process, said Emily Parfit, a partner at Education Resource Strategies, and the evaluative period may need to include a range of other data points.

“Student test scores often aren’t available until well after you have to have approved your budget, so people who say, ‘You have got to be looking at the outcomes to inform decision-making,’ don’t understand the timing challenge,” she said.

One option would be to evaluate the usage, implementation fidelity, and teacher and principal feedback from a newly rolled out program, like a tutoring initiative, to understand its effect on students earlier on.

“Those are satisfaction measures that are a really great way to see whether something is on a path to impact,” she said. If immediate feedback is largely negative, “that’s a really good indicator that it’s not worth waiting six months to see if those kids’ test scores went up.”

EdWeek Market Brief’s survey found that just over a fifth of respondents, 22%, say they make a point to get information from the results of pilots or tests of products sooner in an effort to make a more strategic decision while budgeting for academic resources.

Those early results were even more important to assistant principals and school leaders, with 28% saying that they’ve turned to pilot and product results earlier on in the process in order to make more strategic spending decisions. Just over a quarter, or 26% of district-level administrators said the same, compared to just 7% of building principals, a statistically signficant difference.

Making that data available to school leaders can be an important part of the decision-making process, Parfit said.

“There’s a big piece around data transparency and who gets engaged in making meaning of those early results,” she said.

When it comes to strategic plans overall, the EdWeek Market Brief survey found that district and school leaders located in western states were more likely to say they used strategic plans to guide their decision-making on academic resources, with 67% saying they turned to the documents during budgeting.

Just over half, or 52%, of respondents in southern states say the same thing, compared to 44% in the northeast and 33% in the Midwest.

The geographical differences may be influenced by the fact California requires all districts have at least a three-year strategic plan, Buerk said, compared to other states that may just require one-year improvement planning.

It is possible to make a three-year strategic plan while leaving room for much of the volatility seen in education today, including funding shifts, Buerk said.

“You can still be strategic about your funding, and then update it when you have your actual amount. You’re looking at strategic direction, strategic design, and then [using] that information and data when it comes to you to update that within the strategy,” she said

Getting superintendents’ buy-in to think beyond the current year was a popular strategy with 21% of respondents, but was even more of a go-to for those in rural or town settings, the data show. More than a third, 35%, say they work to get their top district executive to think beyond the current budget year in order to make purchasing decisions guided by long-term strategy.

The statistically significant difference could be due to the higher level of autonomy provided to deputy superintendents and other academic chiefs in large urban or suburban districts, compared to rural areas where superintendents may be more hands-on.

“In smaller systems, the superintendent’s going to be more in the weeds there, and larger systems, you have a much more distributed model where the finance team might be driving the ROI reflections,” said Parfit.

Larger districts also tend to experience more ups and downs when it comes to funding, Buerk said, which makes it harder to make long-range spending decisions. But those that do tend to do better in the long-run.

“It’s even more reason to be strategic. What we see is that the districts that are able to think more strategically and longer term about their funding, and they’re tying that to strategy, they end up doing better no matter what the volatility is in funding,” she said.

Overall on the survey, only 9% of district and school leaders said they’ve started getting more input from vendors earlier in the budget process.

Instead, companies may find that more K-12 stakeholders are weighing in on whether their products make the cut. District leaders are increasingly giving their chief financial officers and technology officers a bigger say in purchasing decisions, Stoffer said.

Those roles were once “just a checkbox at the end of an evaluation period,” he said, but are now being brought in much earlier. They’re working to assess if a product aligns with the strategic plan, as well as the districts’ technology stack and financial goals, and if it doesn’t " the answer is no,” Stoffer said. “We’re not even evaluating it.”