Debbie Critchfield doesn’t talk about Idaho education the way politicians usually do. There are no vague commitments to excellence or carefully hedged optimism. When she says something is working, she has data. When she says something isn’t, she’s already working on a fix. And when she disagrees with a policy, she says so clearly and explains why.

On the latest Ever Onward Podcast, Idaho’s Superintendent of Public Instruction joined host Tommy Ahlquist and co-host Roger Quarrels, himself a former superintendent and the executive director of the Albertson Foundation, for a wide-ranging conversation that covered real progress, persistent challenges, bureaucratic friction, and her vision for what Idaho schools could look like with better leadership and smarter accountability. Critchfield has just announced her bid for a second term, and the conversation makes clear why.

The Progress Is Real

After years of pandemic disruption and stagnant metrics, Idaho’s reading numbers are moving in the right direction. Critchfield cited the highest K-3 reading scores since 2007, with kindergartners showing 13% growth from fall to spring last year and overall K-3 reading up 11% across the same period. Graduation rates are at a ten-year high. These aren’t small wins.

The driver, she said, has been a focused push on balanced literacy, the approach most people know as phonics-based reading instruction. The state invested in teacher training, worked with colleges and universities to align how new teachers are prepared, and coordinated the funding to support implementation. The governor’s office partnered on advocacy for the dollars. It worked because it was a plan, consistently followed, with the right pieces aligned behind it.

The other major shift has been in how Idaho defines success after high school. For years, the state tracked a “go-on rate” to college and watched it sit stubbornly around 40%, which meant 60% of graduating seniors were effectively invisible to the metrics that were supposed to measure the system’s success. Critchfield is now working on a federal waiver that would allow Idaho to count military service, apprenticeships, and direct workforce entry as legitimate post-graduation outcomes. “I’m not going to miss the opportunity,” she said. “We want Idaho to get credit for the good work we’re doing rather than being judged against a federal template that doesn’t fit our state.”

The Math Problem

Reading is improving. Math is not, at least not yet. Critchfield was direct: somewhere around sixth, seventh, and eighth grade, Idaho students start falling off in math performance, and the state hasn’t solved it.

Part of the answer, she thinks, is building better foundations at the elementary level before students hit the harder material. Part of it is the inherent difficulty of middle school as a developmental stage. And part of it is a more fundamental question about what math Idaho students actually need.

She raised a statistic that, as she acknowledged, isn’t popular in some education circles: 80% of college majors don’t require math above college algebra. Yet Idaho’s K-12 system has been routing essentially every student through an engineer-track math sequence regardless of their interests or goals. Her office is now developing essential math standards, a core set of skills every student needs regardless of what comes next, while preserving the higher-level pathway for students who want or need it.

“Should every single kid be taking a calculus class?” she asked. “Maybe not. If you can satisfy essential math skills in a welding class or a carpentry class, we can do that. Carpentry is all math.”

Quarrels added the teacher preparation dimension: knowing math and being able to teach it effectively are entirely different skills, and educators who went straight from being strong math students into the classroom may never have applied math outside an academic context. The connection between math concepts and real-world application, which CTE programs are already making, is what makes the material stick.

School Choice: The Principle Is Right, the Policy Has a Gap

Critchfield’s position on school choice is nuanced in a way that’s worth understanding. She’s a believer in the principle. Idaho has expanded options for families significantly in recent years, open enrollment, tax credits for private school tuition, a growing charter sector, and she thinks giving parents genuine choices is the right direction. Competition, she has seen, does push traditional public schools to improve.

Where she parts ways with the current implementation is on accountability for public dollars. When school choice programs direct taxpayer money to private settings, those dollars currently operate under far less transparency than any public school is required to provide. Public schools post every dollar publicly. The tax credit program relies on random audits as its accountability mechanism, which means many recipients may never have to show how the money was spent at all.

“Can you think of any other place where local citizens elect someone, put their taxes in, and the government says just trust us?” she asked. “We want to see what you did with the money.”

Her view isn’t that parents can’t be trusted. It’s that taxpayer dollars, wherever they go, should be subject to the same basic transparency that applies everywhere else in government. She’s hopeful that accountability provisions can be added in future legislative sessions, and thinks that change would actually reduce much of the opposition the current policy faces.

The Funding Formula Is 30 Years Past Its Expiration Date

Idaho schools are operating under a funding formula from 1994. The classroom it was designed for no longer exists. The result, Critchfield said, is that when districts say they need more money, what they often mean is that they can’t get money to where it’s actually needed because the formula locks it into line items that made sense a generation ago and don’t today.

She’s been asking the legislature to loosen some of those categorical restrictions and give districts more flexibility to align their spending with their actual plans. So far, the answer has been no, partly because the rigidity in the formula came from exactly the problem she’s trying to solve: past leaders who couldn’t demonstrate how they were using money led lawmakers to lock it down. Rebuilding that trust requires demonstrating consistent results, which is partly why her strategic plan legislation matters so much.

Requiring a Plan, and Enforcing It

One of the most consequential pieces of legislation Critchfield has shepherded this session would require every school district and charter school in Idaho to have a strategic plan focused on math and reading improvement, reported to the state, with real consequences for districts that don’t make progress.

The structure is graduated: a conversation in year one if goals aren’t being met, more state involvement in budget and training decisions in year two, and direct state intervention in year three for districts still failing to improve. It’s not punitive by design. It’s a support system that gives the state actual tools to help underperforming districts rather than just hoping things improve.

“Every year we graduate 20,000 students from Idaho high schools,” she said. “Every year we’re not getting it done for kids, that’s 20,000 kids that just left our system. I hope we did right by them.”

Quarrels cited the research: a student who falls behind two consecutive years in elementary school statistically never recovers. That urgency, felt viscerally by Critchfield, is what’s driving the legislation. The bill has passed the House and is moving through the Senate.

What comes through most clearly in the conversation is that Critchfield is playing a long game with a short-game mentality. She thinks in terms of systems and tenure and structural change, but she measures success one graduating class at a time, and she’s not willing to accept another year of flat outcomes while waiting for the conditions to be perfect. That combination is rare in any institution, and in public education it may be what Idaho needs most right now.

Debbie Critchfield has announced her bid for a second term as Idaho Superintendent of Public Instruction. Learn more about Idaho’s education landscape at idahoednews.org.