Settling In

Six weeks in: telling a real curriculum mismatch from ordinary settling-in friction, and what can be swapped without losing the rest of the year

Every family in this dispatch now has a school year running, whether it started clean in late August or was assembled under pressure with no summer to plan it. Somewhere around week five or six, a specific worry shows up in nearly all of them: the curriculum a parent researched carefully or grabbed out of necessity is not landing the way it was supposed to. A child resists a subject every single day, a program that looked rigorous on the shelf turns into a nightly fight, or a parent quietly suspects the whole thing was the wrong choice. Most of what gets read as a curriculum problem at week six is actually normal adjustment friction that resolves on its own by week ten or twelve. Some of it is a genuine mismatch that will not improve no matter how long a family waits it out, and waiting on that kind past a reasonable point costs a semester a family did not need to lose. This issue works through how to tell the two apart, subject by subject, and what a mid-year swap actually requires versus what a family can fix without buying anything new. Plus the policy dispatch, on the federal tax credit guidance due by the end of September, the still-unpublished North Carolina scholarship organization list, and a caveat about this dispatch's own publication lead time.

Two prior issues in this dispatch, the one built for a family that chose its start date and the one built for a family that had no summer to plan in, converge on the same calendar point: somewhere around the fifth or sixth week of a school year, a parent starts to wonder whether the curriculum itself is the problem. This issue takes that worry seriously without validating it automatically, because most of what surfaces at week six is ordinary adjustment friction: a new routine, an unfamiliar format, a child testing whether resistance works on a parent who has not yet held a firm line. That kind resolves within another month or two of steady use and does not require a purchase. A smaller, real category does not resolve, no matter how consistently a family runs it: a program pitched at the wrong level for a specific child, a format that fights how that particular child learns regardless of effort, or a subject that has become a genuine flashpoint, not an ordinary hard day. The issue gives a short, concrete test for telling the two apart by subject, not by the curriculum as a whole, since a single box curriculum can be working in math and failing in language arts at the same time. It then covers what a family should actually do about a confirmed mismatch: swap only the subject that is broken rather than the whole program, treat the sunk cost of an already-purchased curriculum as irrelevant to a decision about a child sitting in front of it today, and use publisher exchange and return windows where they still apply instead of assuming a full loss. Plus the policy dispatch: the U.S. Treasury Department's proposed regulations for the federal Educational Choice for Children Act tax credit are due by the end of September 2026, North Carolina's list of approved scholarship-granting organizations has still not been published as this dispatch goes into production, and this issue is explicit that its policy items were drafted before its own publication date, given how quickly this particular story has moved over the summer.