The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching

06/16/2026

Our new Future of High School Innovation story looks at three school systems that decided to redesign how students learn in the classroom and what happened when they did. In Indiana, Virginia, and Philadelphia, educators are rebuilding daily instruction around competency and transparency. In doing so, they are creating purpose and agency in their students, leading to positive results that show up in student trajectories.

Read what Building 21, Concord Community Schools, and Roanoke County Public Schools are changing in their classrooms to create more opportunities outside of them. Please read and share: https://na2.hubs.ly/H068Mlt0

06/15/2026

Our latest Learning Landscape rounds up what's worth paying attention to right now in education policy. From AI in classrooms and on colleges campuses, shifts in federal education policy, the real reasons students are skipping college, and local communities reimagining what high school can be.

Browse this month's reads:

THE LEARNING LANDSCAPE TRACKS THE ED-POLICY SHIFTS AND STRATEGIES TRANSFORMING EDUCATION THROUGH A MONTHLY ROUNDUP. Tailored for a diverse coalition ... Read more

06/11/2026

One thing we hear consistently from educators, researchers, and school leaders in secondary and higher education is that there isn't a shortage of good ideas. It's that the good ideas don't always connect. Great pilots stay in one school. Pathways don't link to what comes next. K-12, college, and the workforce still operate in separate silos.

That's what drives our R&D Agenda for High School Transformation -- to build a shared, replicable, scalable new education architecture that lets good ideas travel, from one school to the next, and from high school into the opportunities that follow.

Modernizing the American high school means redefining what success looks like and how we help young people get there. Reimagining ... Read more

06/01/2026

A new report from Gallup, the Walton Family Foundation, and GSV Ventures finds that Gen Z's enthusiasm for AI is cooling, even as their exposure to it grows.

This indicates that young people are asking serious questions about what AI does to creativity, to critical thinking, to the quality of their learning. Those are the right questions, and they are the questions a generation entering this moment should be asking.

Explore Gen Z's perceptions of their life, school and outlook for the future.

05/29/2026

Roanoke County Public Schools is advancing one of our eight actionable priorities in our R&D Agenda — actionable forms of assessment that capture the full picture of student learning.

K–12 "I Can" statements describe what collaboration, critical thinking, and communication skills look like at every grade band. The capstone is a senior portfolio defense, where students curate evidence from classwork and community experiences and stand before a panel to defend their learning journey. Last year, roughly 300 seniors earned the Opportunity Ready diploma seal. This year, they’re aiming for nearly 80% of graduates.

This is what the future of assessment looks like, and Roanoke County is helping us build it.

05/27/2026

In Henrico County, Virginia, our partners at Mills E. Godwin and J.R. Tucker high schools are rebuilding the ninth-grade experience around project-based learning and a community-developed durable skills framework, through the Carnegie Foundation and XQ Future of High School Network.

The early outcomes are striking. Fewer behavioral incidents, less chronic absenteeism, and stronger student grades.

Through a partnership with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, two Henrico County high schools launched a pilot program this school year to redesign the ninth-grade experience for students.As part of the nationwide “Future of High Schools Initiative Series,” Mills E. Godwin ...

05/26/2026

We recently launched a series with the American Council on Education, highlighting Opportunity Colleges and Universities (OCU). Today's latest installment focuses on California State University, Stanislaus (Stan State).

As an , serving a student body that is 70 percent first-generation, Stan State demonstrates that broad access, deep community partnership, and long-term student success can go hand in hand. This profile highlights the leadership decisions and practices, rooted in ‘’cariño” and possibility, that are helping drive economic mobility for students and the Central Valley communities they serve.

We invite you to read the full profile and learn more about what’s working at Stan State: https://na2.hubs.ly/H05KYwT0

05/14/2026

In rural Charlottesville, Indiana, Eastern Hancock has engaged students, families, educators, employers, and policymakers as genuine co-designers of a new vision for learning. Through quarterly Community and Family Engagement meetings drawing over 150 partners who sought more personalized options, the district has built the kind of broad, sustained stakeholder alignment that makes transformation durable. That shared vision led to the launch of the Indiana Microschool Collaborative — the state’s first publicly funded rural microschool network.

Superintendent George Philhower has carried that shared vision all the way to the state level, helping shape Indiana's reinvented graduation requirements so that policy reflects what communities actually need. At Eastern Hancock, innovation flows in both directions between school and community.

https://na2.hubs.ly/H05vn9k0

05/13/2026

For more than a century, American high school has measured learning largely in seat-time and academic content.

Our new Skills Progressions, developed with ETS, are part of a longer effort to build what we call a new architecture for high school — one in which the capabilities that shape long-term success, like collaboration, communication, and critical thinking, can be taught, demonstrated, and credentialed with the same rigor as anything else students learn.

Read more about the work:

Across the country, communities are redefining what it means to BE “graduate-ready.” Our new research-based framework establishes clear definitions for ... Read more

05/12/2026

"The barriers are not students. It's often the structures wrapped around them."

It's worth returning to our interview with Dr. Alan Cheng, the new Supervising Superintendent for High Schools at NYC Public Schools, on what it actually takes to redesign American high school at scale, and why the work is less about changing young people than about updating the systems built around them.

Explore this Q&A with Dr. Alan Cheng, the new Supervising Superintendent for High Schools at New York City Public Schools. ... Read more