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Beyond Metrics: Rehumanizing Educational Change Through Engaged Scholarship with Dr. Olajumoke Beulah Adigun

Posted on February 11, 2026 by T Hatch | Leave a comment

In January’s Lead the Change (LtC) interview Dr. Olajumoke Beulah Adigun argues that academia must move away from speed and metric driven cultures and toward slow, engaged, and contextually grounded scholarship that prioritizes sustained transformation over superficial change. Dr. Adigun is an assistant professor of Educational Leadership at Oklahoma State University The LtC series is produced by co-editors Dr. Soobin Choi and Dr. Jackie Pedota and their colleagues at the Educational Change Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association. A PDF of the fully formatted interview will be available on the LtC website.

Lead the Change (LtC): The 2026 AERA Annual Meeting theme is “Unforgetting Histories and Imagining Futures: Constructing a New Vision for Educational Research.” This theme calls us to consider how to leverage our diverse knowledge and experiences to engage in futuring for education and education research, involving looking back to remember our histories so that we can look forward to imagine better futures. What steps are you taking, or do you plan to take, to heed this call?

Dr. Olajumoke Beulah Adigun (OBA): There was a time when a researcher’s identity was defined not by a multiplicity of publications but by work that formatively altered the quality of life for communities. This is a historical dimension of our work that we need to ‘unforget,’ and it speaks directly to AERA’s 2026 theme. The reason this matters is simple: it is difficult to be preoccupied with hurried scholarship while being present with the slow and often-messy work of transformation. This is a salient point in Amutuhaire’s work (2022), which makes a compelling argument that the ‘publish or perish’ culture is perpetuating inequality in academia while undermining the potential generative impact of scholarship in resource-poor regions, where solutions to development problems matter more than publication counts. We have tried the hurried approach, and while it has produced more motion in the policy and politics of education, it has yielded less progress in sustaining outcomes. In the article “Over-Optimization of Academic Publishing Metrics,” Fire and Guestrin (2019) highlight that although publishing metrics continue to rise, their substantive value has significantly diminished. Drawing on Goodhart’s law, they illustrate how these metrics lose meaning when manipulated through practices such as self-citation and inflated reference lists. Furthermore, data show that in 2023 alone, over 10,000 research papers were retracted globally due to issues related to accuracy and integrity (Tran, 2025), underscoring how an emphasis on speed creates a metaphorical chasm that invites errors and potential gamification.

Boyer’s (1996) scholarship of engagement offers a useful frame for understanding the gap in the field of educational change: the problem is not a lack of knowledge, but the failure to translate knowledge into lived reality. This perspective resonates with the slow knowledge argument against the counterproductive acceleration of the process of inquiry (Berg & Seeber, 2016). In the realm of slow knowledge, the journey towards knowledge acquisition honors both the process and the outcome. It recognizes that it takes time to master the conditions within which knowledge can be successfully applied (Orr, 1996). When it’s all said and done, knowledge needs to be contextualized, adapted, and sustained long enough to produce enduring change (Adams et al., 2022). We can also think of this as an invitation to recenter the transformative focus of our change work. If transformation is defined by sustained change, we need to come to terms with the fact that sustaining change requires time for it to be tested, to mature, and to develop a life of its own, allowing its sustainability to become more autonomous than forced. This aligns with design-based implementation research, which emphasizes that knowledge should be generated within the contexts where it will be applied (Penuel et al., 2011).

“The problem is not a lack of knowledge, but the failure to translate knowledge into lived reality.”

My response to the AERA 2026 call has been to fundamentally rethink how I prepare educational leaders, challenging both myself and my students to move from propositions to praxis, from eloquent narratives to actual doing. In a recent course, Instructional Strategies for Adults, rather than requiring papers containing propositions of what well-designed adult instruction should be, my students used real data to design a professional development website, which we called a workshop-in-a-box. They spent each week developing sections grounded in scholarly evidence while applying them to real-world adult learning needs in their respective contexts. With this approach, rather than students telling me what they would do, they did it. At the end of this class, students reported feeling more prepared for real-world leadership challenges, with several already sharing their plans for implementing their designs in their districts. They felt proud of their work, saying they designed the kind of professional development they would want to attend, even though they lacked a frame for articulating it before the class.

This andragogical shift also mirrors my research process. My earlier work relied primarily on quantitative, ex post facto data to examine and understand patterns in various constructs of interest in education. This work has yielded important insights and continues to inform my scholarship. Somewhere along the way, as my colleagues and I began working on the Transformative Leadership Conversations framework (Adams et al., 2022), I became increasingly attentive to the value of applied research in the work we do. When I started my appointment as an assistant professor at Oklahoma State University, the invitation to lead the existing ECHO Education Nigeria initiative emerged at a particularly timely moment, offering both a challenge and an opportunity to make my scholarly engagement more expansive through applied inquiry. Working alongside both scholar and practitioner colleagues, we are implementing and learning how sound theoretical propositions about virtual professional development transfer to those serving in under-resourced environments. ECHO Education Nigeria is a virtual professional development platform that supports educator learning and growth, while promoting collaboration among educators across Nigeria and neighboring African countries. This work, though slow, has been productive and has led to a feature on the Project ECHO website highlighting our efforts to expand the applicability of the framework in a new context.

This shift represents my commitment to unforgetting what education and education research once were: embedded processes of learning, doing, unlearning, relearning, and redoing. I am imagining a future where education research is an actual search process, a slow but deeply meaningful engagement with reality that bridges the gap between knowing and transformation.

Lead the Change (LtC): What are some key lessons that practitioners and scholars might take from your work to foster better educational systems for all students?

OBA: Three lessons emerge from this work that I believe can guide practitioners and scholars in the field of educational change. First, we must recalibrate our aim from change to transformation, which simply means enduring change. Educational systems are saturated with change initiatives, yet transformation remains elusive. The distinction matters because change can be episodic and surface-level, but transformation aims at well-saturated and sustained change that produces a new system of outcomes. In my work with teachers in Nigeria, I witnessed how professional development that merely introduced new practices faded quickly, while approaches that allowed time for adaptation, testing, and iteration became the lifeblood of the work. We can think of transformation as the unforced rhythms of change; it must be cultivated with patience and sustained through commitment. This requires us to resist the pressure for quick wins and instead invest in the slow, and often unsensational work.

“We can think of transformation as the unforced rhythms of change; it must be cultivated with patience and sustained through commitment.”

Second, the quality of our work matters more than the quantity. This is particularly challenging in an academic culture that rewards productivity metrics over meaningful impact. Yet when I observe my students designing professional development they themselves would want to attend, or when I see Nigerian teachers responding to our adaptation of the ECHO framework in ways we never imagined, I am reminded that one piece of deeply contextualized, genuinely useful work is worth the time and effort it takes. I see this same pattern in my work with one of the largest fatherhood support organizations in Oklahoma (Birthright Living Legacy), where a simple evidence-based curriculum I developed for a small network of fathers five years ago has now become a flagship programming element providing training and guided action for hundreds of fathers across the state (Adigun, 2020; 2022). I would argue that our institutions, promotion systems, and funding mechanisms need to be reimagined around permission structures that value depth, rigor, and impact over volume and speed.

Third, and most critically, learning is fundamentally reciprocal. As practitioners and scholars, we take learning to people, but we cannot successfully produce transfer without learning from those we serve about what makes knowledge work (or not) in each unique context. They have just as much to teach us as we have to teach them. My Nigerian colleagues taught me more about adaptive leadership, resourcefulness, and instructional creativity than any textbook could convey. They showed me which theoretical propositions held up under resource constraints, and which required radical reimagining. When we noticed a decline in attendance at our virtual sessions, we reached out to participants to understand the reasons behind this trend. We discovered that while interest remained high, many participants struggled with reliable internet connectivity. However, we also learned that connectivity was more affordable and dependable when they used specific platforms, such as WhatsApp. With this insight, we decided to break our live sessions into bite-sized, low-data video segments and upload them to the WhatsApp group. This adjustment led to a reassuring resurgence in participant attendance and engagement, bringing back a much-needed momentum to the work. This example makes clear that reciprocity is not just ethically right; it is methodologically essential. If we approach communities as recipients rather than co-creators of knowledge and the knowledge delivery process, we will continue to produce research that looks elegant on paper but fails in practice. These lessons converge on a call for patience, genuine partnership, and humility as we press towards educational change.

Lead the Change (LtC): What do you see the field of Educational Change heading, and where do you find hope for this field for the future?

OBA: I see the field of educational change heading toward a more transformational stance. What I mean by this is that the field will not only be about changing the formal systems of education, but also about the community-embedded reach of the work. Further, the accelerated pace of knowledge introduced by non-human automation, such as AI, obliges the field to move into innovative ways of doing what we do. With this reality at the forefront, we are compelled to dig deep rather than simply reach wide. We are compelled to rehumanize our work, making it an endeavor by humans, with humans, and for humans. Collaboration will become the new superpower, and contextual applicability will be the new genius.

I find hope in this field for the future because people are beginning to ask the right questions. It is no longer a secret that speed and volume are not producing the kinds of results we want; therefore, we are compelled to be open to other means. It is also no secret that the tyranny of performative scholarship (Fire & Guestrin, 2019) has created much unhealth in our profession. I see funding agencies beginning to value implementation science and community-partnered research. I see perspectives like slow knowledge gaining traction, and I see intentional collaborations that center reciprocity.

My deepest hope lies in the rising generation of scholar-practitioners who refuse to separate knowing from doing, who insist that research be accountable to the communities it claims to serve, and who are willing to do the slow, messy work of transformation. These emerging scholars understand that in an age of AI and information abundance, our unique contribution as humans is not speed, but wisdom. The kind that comes from sustained presence, deep listening, and genuine partnership. If we can create the conditions for this kind of work to flourish, the field of educational change will not only survive but thrive.

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Posted in education reform, Educational change, Educational Leadership, equity, higher education, Lead the Change

Tagged education, education equity, Educational change, Educational Leadership, Educational Policy, Research, Research Methods, Teaching, technology, writing

Education policies and academic pressure: Stability & change in the education system in China (Part 2)

Posted on January 29, 2026 by T Hatch | Leave a comment

Can real changes be made in a system dominated by exams and academic pressure? Thomas Hatch explores this question in the second post in a series drawing from his conversations with Chinese educators and visits to schools and universities in major urban areas like Beijing, Nanjing, Shenzen, Shanghai and Suzhou. The first post in this series described how some innovative schools in China are putting in place more student-centered learning experiences. Future posts will discuss the use of AI in an experimental primary school; increasing concerns about students’ mental health; and the technological and societal developments that may allow for the emergence of a more balanced education system.

For previous posts on education and educational change in China see “Boundless Learning in an Early Childhood Center in Shenzen, China;” ”Supporting healthy development of rural children in China: The Sunshine Kindergartens of the Beijing Western Sunshine Rural Development Foundation;” The Recent Development of Innovative Schools in China – An Interview with Zhe Zhang (Part 1& Part 2);” “The Desire for Innovation is Always There: A Conversation with Yong Zhao on the Evolution of the Chinese Education System (Part 1& Part 2);” “Beyond Fear: Yinuo Li On What It Takes To Create New Schools (Part 1);” “Everyone is a volcano: Yinuo Li On What It Takes To Create A New School (Part 2);” “Surprise, Controversy, and the “Double Reduction Policy” in China;” ”Launching a New School in China: An Interview with Wen Chen from Moonshot Academy;” and ”New Gaokao in Zhejiang China: Carrying on with Challenges.”

I’ve always heard that Chinese schools – in the grip of the Gaokao, the college entrance exams that drive so much of the academic pressure in China – are unlikely to change. But during my visits to schools and universities there over the past two years, it was clear that education in China has changed, in numerous ways, both in the last 40 years and just in the last few years as well. Those changes include the achievement of near universal enrollment through lower secondary school and dramatic increases in the number of students enrolling in college – including a five-fold increase in the decade between 1999-2009. Enrollments in kindergartens have also risen over 25% since 2012, with more than 90% of preschool-age children enrolled in kindergarten by 2023.

Expansion of higher education in China, 1999– of all eligible children in China 2015. *China Statistical Yearbook* n.d.

Gross enrollment in secondary school as a percentage

Along with those dramatic developments, China has made significant changes in educational policies that have helped to create the conditions – and “niches of possibility” – that can support more student-centered and innovative educational experiences at all levels of schooling. In fact, since 2001, the Guidelines for Pre-school Education have emphasized development of child-centered play. In addition, a new national pre-school law that took effect in 2025 specifically prohibits the introduction of an elementary school curriculum into kindergartens and pre-schools. For older students, changes in the Gaokao and in the regulations governing private schooling that created some flexibility to develop more innovative schools and learning experiences. At the same time, these kinds of changes in policies reflect somewhat conflicting purposes that have also contributed to the academic pressure and competition that continues to reinforce a focus on conventional academics.

“[C]hanges in policies reflect somewhat conflicting purposes that have also contributed to the academic pressure and competition that continues to reinforce a focus on conventional academics.”

Changes in the Gaokao

Although many of us in the US think of China as a centralized government that exercises tight control across the whole country, provincial and municipal governments also have considerable discretion, particularly when it comes to education. The regional differences in policies and policy enforcement may allow for the development of alternative educational approaches in some places rather than others. For example, the kinds of micro-schools that have emerged in the US since the pandemic, began to appear in some parts of China even before the school closures. Dali, described as China’s “hippie capital” or “Dalifornia,” became a popular destination for remote workers during the pandemic and others looking to get away from everyday pressures. It’s also a place where new, small educational programs, many unsanctioned, have sprouted for students who have dropped out or want to get away from the academic pressure.

Children build a stove of mud and bricks for a school project.[Photo by Chi Xiao For China Daily]
Micro schools aim to make a major impact, *China Daily*

How China’s Western-style micro schools seek to free kids from the stresses of traditional education

Among the most significant differences in educational regulations, local governments can even produce different versions of the Gaokao with different questions and cut-off scores. That means that any central attempts to change the Gaokao have to be coordinated across regions. For example, in 2014 to help reduce some of the academic pressure, the central Chinese government launched initiatives to provide students with more flexibility and choice in the exams. As Aidi Bian reported in “New Gaokao in Zhejiang China: Carrying on with challenges,” an Education Ministry document guiding the Gaokao reform specified that provinces were to adapt the reform based on local context. In Zhejiang, one of the first provinces to undertake the reforms, key changes included requiring only three compulsory exams – Chinese, mathematics, and English – and allowing students more choices in the three elective exams, which include subjects like chemistry, biology, geography, politics, history, and technology. In addition, instead of having to take all the tests once in June, students were allowed to take the elective subject tests starting in the second year of high school (in October and March). They can also take each elective subject test and English twice and use the highest grade for their admissions application.

The changes did not always achieve their aims, however, as some have tried to “game the system” by choosing subjects that top students are less likely to take. In addition, taking some electives earlier may help some students but it also prolongs the Gaokao schedule and it means that the test pressure is distributed throughout the high school years. Furthermore, reflecting the regional variations, only 8 of the 18 provinces that were originally scheduled to undertake the reform had started the new policy by 2018.

New Gaokao in Zhejiang China: Carrying on with challenges

Complicating matters further, over the years, different regions and municipalities have set different cut-off scores and created “extra-point” schemes to increase access to higher education for certain groups. Although the government has placed more restrictions on these schemes in recent years, historically, “bonus” points have been awarded to members of some minority ethnic groups to support their assimilation into society, to the children of Chinese who return from overseas, and to children of Taiwanese residents. Some provinces have also awarded points to those who demonstrate “ideological and political correctness” or have “significant social influence” including children of Revolutionary Martyrs, and some categories ex-servicemen Many of those I spoke to also explained to me that students in some of the larger cities have a better chance to get into China’s top universities than their peers from around the country. That’s because Tsinghua University, Peking University, and other top institutions have admissions quotas that explicitly admit more students from urban centers like Beijing and Shanghai.

These kinds of policies have been part of the expansion of higher education that has benefited those in all economic classes, but that has also fueled rising inequality and a growing rural-urban divide. Given these problems, the central government has advocated for the elimination of the Gaokao bonus schemes that contribute to these inequalities. However, these advantages are part and parcel of a paradoxical system that embraces exams and competition as the fairest and most transparent way to identify academic potential but can also allow for some special privileges and where some may try to “game the system.” The recognition of special privileges is reflected in the use of another term I frequently heard, guanxi, which refers to the importance of networks of trusted friends and families that can provide access to power and social and economic advantages. Although as an outsider I find it hard to understand how both the tradition of national entrance exams and guanxi can coexist, both are deeply rooted in Chinese history and culture, developing a thousand years ago in imperial China where the rule of law was not well-established and where many people had to rely on trusted family and friends for support and protection.

Changes in policies related to private schooling

At the same time that there have been contradictory efforts to change the Gaokao, changes in education policies gradually allowed the development of private schools and encouraged foreign investment in the education sector. In concert with the changes in regulations that opened up the economy after 1977, school options for students expanded significantly, including the development of private primary and secondary schools that prepared students for admissions to universities in the UK, the US, and elsewhere. Those developments contributed to the establishment of 61,200 private schools by 2003, serving over 11 million students; but by 2020, that number had increased to almost 180,000 private schools enrolling more than 55 million students. Those numbers amounted to almost one third of all primary and secondary schools in China and almost one fifth of all students.

In recent years, however, new regulations governing private education have reversed the expansion of private primary and secondary school options. In 2021, for example, a new “Law on Private Education” went into effect. The 68 articles of the new law restrict how education can be monetized; establish stronger oversight of private and non-profit operators of schools; and require the curriculum of private schools to align more closely with those of public schools with adherence to the national curriculum more strongly enforced. In addition, foreign entities are prevented from having ownership stakes in Chinese private schools and foreign textbooks have been banned. Regulations promoting “patriotic education” in all schools have also been established.

“The 68 articles of the new law restrict how education can be monetized; establish stronger oversight of private and non-profit operators of schools; and require the curriculum of private schools to align more closely with those of public schools”

Within this changing policy context, the economic downturn, a declining population, and the COVID pandemic, the rush to open new private and international schools has been followed by a wave of school closures. To avoid closing, other private primary and secondary schools have tried to attract more students by diversifying their offerings. Those changes include offering programs that lead to entrance to Chinese universities in addition to their programs leading to other university qualifications. As one account of the changing landscape of international schools put it, “Whether it is a newly built international school or an old international school, “domestic college entrance examination courses + AP/A Level courses” and ‘domestic further study + overseas study’ have become high-frequency hot words in the enrollment brochures.” Ironically, these efforts to diversify their offerings contribute to the challenges that private schools face in trying to create a more balanced educational experience that distinguishes themselves from government subsidized schools.

Changes in tutoring and academic demands?

At the same time that the Chinese government put more limits on private schools, they also enacted the “Double reduction policy” which sought to address the increasing pressure on students and curb the explosive growth of the private tutoring sector. The policy, Opinions on Further Reducing the Burden of Homework and Off-Campus Training for Compulsory Education Students, both limited the amount of time students in primary school could spend on homework and banned most private tutoring (reflecting the “double” in double reduction).

Following the initial implementation, some surveys reported that many Chinese parents agreed with the double reduction policies and felt their concerns about their children’s education had eased. At the same time, the restrictions mean that many teachers have had to take on more responsibilities, more work, and more pressure. One study, published after the policy went into effect found that over 75% of Chinese teachers experienced “moderate to severe anxiety” with almost 35% of primary teachers and over 25% of middle school teachers at high risk of suffering depression. Chinese policymakers have even acknowledged that teachers are “teachers are more tired” and “teachers’ anxiety has obviously increased compared to before.”

“[Many Chinese parents agreed with the double reduction policies and felt their concerns about their children’s education had eased. At the same time, the restrictions mean that many teachers have had to take on more responsibilities, more work, and more pressure.”

At the same time, the policy had an immediate impact in reducing the availability of private tutoring and other supplemental education programs, that, ironically, may have contributed to the stress and concern of the many students and parents who felt they needed extra support to compete in the exam-based system. Just seven months after the implementation of the policy, the Ministry of Education reported the closure of over 110,000 companies, almost 90% of the companies focused on in-person or online tutoring in primary and middle schools. Those changes in turn contributed to stock prices of many tutoring-related companies to drop by 90% or more. According to some accounts, one of the tutoring CEO’s, on his own, lost over 10 billion dollars because of the policy. With a corresponding loss of over 100 billion dollars in China’s education market, the closures contributed to dramatic reductions in the availability of related educations jobs in China and layoffs of hundreds of thousands of workers. A once growing market for English-speakers to tutor Chinese students online also dried-up almost overnight.

Under these conditions, those tutoring-related companies that found ways to continue operating often did so with higher fees that can contribute to greater inequities. Correspondingly, some parents reported that the costs of private tuition have doubled for them, “Our burden has not been reduced at all,” one parent lamented, and described the situation using a common expression that likened the continuing competition for entrance into the top universities to “thousands of troops and horses pushing and shoving to cross a single-plank bridge.”

“Our burden has not been reduced at all,” one parent lamented, adding that the continued competition for entrance into the top universities is like “thousands of troops and horses pushing and shoving to cross a single-plank bridge.”

In the latest set of complexities and contradictions, additional policy changes, particularly a decision to reduce the number of middle school students who can enter academically-oriented high schools have also increased the competition for high scores on the Zhongkao, China’s high school entrance exam. Implemented at least in part to address labor market shortages, the earlier policies on national vocational education development require that approximately 50% of high school students attend vocational high schools. But that reduction in the percentage of students who can attend the academic high schools, have led some to conclude that the Zhongkao is the new Gaokao, generating even more academic pressure on students and parents at an even earlier age.

Later this month: Could concerns about academic pressure lead to real changes in conventional schooling?

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Tagged China, education, Educational change, Educational Policy, Learning, news, Teachers, Teaching

What do innovative schools in China look like? Stability & change in the education system in China (Part 1)

Posted on January 22, 2026 by T Hatch | Leave a comment

Can China reduce the pressures of the national exams that dictate which students get into top universities? Is it possible to maintain a strong academic focus and expand support for student-centered learning and students’ overall wellbeing at the same time? Thomas Hatch explored these questions during interviews with Chinese educators and visits to schools and universities in Beijing, Ningbo, and Dongguan, Shanghai, Nanjing, and Suzhuo in 2024 and 2025. Over the next few weeks, Hatch shares some of what he learned from those experiences. In the first post in this series, he describes the “niches of possibility” both inside and outside the school day in China where the conditions can support more student-centered learning. In subsequent posts, he discusses changes in education policies, educational technology and AI, and other societal conditions that both support and challenge the development of a more balanced education system.

The schools I visited in China were stunning. They were elite schools – public, private, and international – in major cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Ningbo, and Dongguan. Each school had tremendous resources far beyond what a typical school in China might have. What’s more, these schools had facilities that rivaled – or surpassed – those of any of the top schools I have visited in the US, Finland, and Singapore. These schools in China are still focused on conventional academics and on preparing students for exams and college admissions, but they are also developing a variety of student-centered, “hands-on,” and collaborative, learning experiences that offer more opportunities for students to pursue their own interests and support their wellbeing. In that sense, they are not that different from the top public and private schools in the US and around the world that are trying to implement some innovative and engaging educational approaches at the same time that they continue to prepare their students for entrance into top local and international universities. But my visits and my conversations with Chinese educators revealed strikingly different assumptions about innovation and educational change. In the US, the “innovators” I talk to are often seeking to “revolutionize” education and transform almost every aspect of schooling. In contrast, in China, innovative educators often emphasize a more incremental approach to school improvement. That approach aims to integrate a traditional focus on academic knowledge with more progressive pedagogies designed to support the development of the whole person and to foster a wider range of abilities like creativity and critical thinking.

“[I]n China, innovative educators often emphasize a more incremental approach to school improvement. That approach aims to integrate a traditional focus on academic knowledge with more progressive pedagogies designed to support the development of the whole person and to foster a wider range of abilities like creativity and critical thinking.”

I saw this kind of hybrid approach at almost every one of the elite schools I visited in China (as well in other schools in Asia like the Olympia School in Hanoi). Moonshot Academy, a private K-12 school launched in 2017 in Beijing, offers an education “rooted in China and oriented to the world;” the HD schools, a network of private bilingual schools with campuses in four major cities, describes their approach as striving to “foster a global perspective and integrates the best of Chinese and Western culture to develop the talents of the children it serves.” also reflects this hybrid approach. Wenping Li, formerly principal at Tsinghua University High School and a founding member and head of the Tsinglan School, a private bilingual international school, in Dongguan described Tsinglan’s approach as an “integration of Chinese and Western education, rooted in China with Tsinghua Characteristics.“ These schools, as well as a number of others I learned about, show how to create time and space to pursue more student-centered and hands-on activities, even in a system with intense academic pressure such as China’s.

“Niches of Possibility” for Student-Centered Learning in China

Although student-centered learning activities are in some sense “counter–cultural” in Chinese schools (as well as in many other systems around the world), these kinds of activities do not have to be forced into the schedule to replace conventional instruction or to take time away from academic subjects. Some schools in China are finding and creating what I call “niches of possibility” where the conditions are more amenable for more student-centered learning and supporting the development of a wider range of abilities. In the process, the schools are taking advantage of places both inside and outside the regular school day where students can pursue projects and other collaborative inquiries and activities in some core courses and elective classes, extra-curricular programs, summer camps, field trips, competitions, school improvement projects, cultural celebrations and festivals.

In the primary schools I visited, the attention to student-centered learning, critical thinking and creativity was evident in “signature projects.” In these projects, students worked for several weeks to solve a problem or design a product related to a particular theme or issue. Sometimes all grades and classes would focus on a broad theme like sustainability, but in most schools each grade took up a different theme like water or the seasons designed explicitly to fit the students’ interests and development levels. At the E-Town Experimental Primary School, a public school in the Beijing National Day School network, the products from these projects include cardboard houses and origami creatures that the students designed and constructed. These and other products spill out of their classrooms, taking over the hallways and serving as visible representations of the school’s philosophy and interdisciplinary approach.

At the middle school level, the student-centered projects often focused on a specific problem or issue in the local community. Students in an interdisciplinary global studies course at the HD middle school in Ningbo, for example, developed products to enhance the history and culture of their city, just south of Shanghai, the oldest and now second-largest port in China. The project, like many of the high school projects I observed, followed a design-based thinking process that included researching the history of the port and developing an understanding of the kinds of products and services that might help support tourism in Ningbo. Building on what they learned, one group of students designed souvenirs incorporating a new symbol they created to represent the city. In the process, the students not only learned about the design and manufacturing process, they also learned how to deal with a crisis caused by an unscrupulous factory owner who failed to deliver the souvenirs they had paid him to produce. Another group scripted, filmed, and edited a video to celebrate the port city, but only after having to convince city officials and security guards to fly their drone over the harbor.

The high school facilities at the Beijing National Day School

The high schools I visited certainly emphasized preparation for college entrance exams, but students can also engage in many different self-directed, interest-based, and project-based activities. The Beijing National Day School is well-known both for the success of its graduates and for its innovative educational approach and personalized curriculum system. Encompassing both a public school that prepares students for the Gaokao and a private international school preparing students for colleges outside China, BNDS offers 327 Subject Courses, 29 Exploratory Activities, 164 Career Exploration options, and 172 Student Societies. As one teacher at the school described it, “If there are 1,000 students, then there are 1,000 different course timetables.” Although alternative schools in many contexts, often develop outside of or on the margins of conventional systems, BNDS developed their model as part of a pilot program supported by the Ministry of Education, and it has been recognized publicly for its success through awards like a 2014 designation as the only “Flagship Public School in Beijing for Comprehensive Educational Innovation.” BNDS has now expanded its approach in a network of more than thirty schools in Beijing and other areas

Other high schools I visited, such as Beijing City Academy, created a variety of inter-disciplinary courses, including research and design courses where students can develop and carry out investigations of issues of special interest to them as a regular part of their schedule. At the HD Schools network’s Ningbo High School, 9^th and 10^th graders can enroll in a two-year long course sequence to learn design thinking and to prepare to carry out their own research and action projects as 11^th and 12^th graders. Illustrating the kinds of projects I observed at many of the schools I visited, at the Shanghai Shangde Experimental School, I witnessed presentations of projects that included the design of an “anti-tipping” device to prevent classmates from tipping too far back in their chairs; a “proof” that used that used Godel’s incompleteness theorems to show that AI cannot replace human judgement in legal decisions; and the production of a competition-winning remote-controlled race car.

As a result of these developments, even with most classes devoted to conventional academics, students at these schools now encounter repeated opportunities to engage in projects throughout their K-12 experience. At the Tsinglan school, those opportunities include, at the kindergarten level, an investigation of their community that results in the development of a brochure introducing new teachers to local resources and sites; science fair projects in primary school; a 5^th grade service project linked to the UN’s Sustainable Goals; end-of-the-year capstone projects in 6^th and 7^th grade and a culminating “passion project” in 8^th grade. Although the emphasis on preparation for college ramps up at Tsinglan’s high school, students can also participate in a “project-period” (after AP exams and other tests have been completed in May) in which they develop a research project in a subject of interest and complete it with some guidance from a mentor.

Creating supports and incentives for student-centered learning

The schools have also found ways to demonstrate the value of innovative educational activities by connecting student-centered activities to field trips and cultural explorations and competitions, cultural celebrations and longstanding Chinese values and traditions. These strategic moves help to create more supportive conditions for developing a “hybrid” system combining key elements of Chinese and Western educational approaches.

Field trips

Beijing City Academy has embedded research and design projects in an extensive set of field trips where the trips themselves provide students with the rewards for their hard work. These efforts began with a one-day trip to a local site and then a two-day camping trip for the 4^th grade students. Building on the initial success and popularity of those projects, the trips have now grown to include a week-long cultural exploration of Beijing for students at many different levels, and, for older students, a three week-long cultural exploration of a site somewhere in China. Those extended trips generally involve a week for the students to prepare; roughly a week for the visit; and a week of activities in which the students follow-up and reflect on the experience. These trips usually culminate in performances and presentations where the students shared what they learned (and demonstrate the value of the trips) to their peers, parents and teachers. Notably, the high school students can also elect to work with their teachers in designing and organizing the trips, including booking hotels, arranging transportation, and taking care of other trip logistics.

Cultural festivals, community-wide celebrations, and competitions

The schools I visited also take advantage of holidays, cultural celebrations, and community-wide events to provide a meaningful context for students to pursue projects, make presentations, and create performances. At BNDS, for example, one teacher in a Chinese literature class engaged her 7^th & 8^th grade students in a project to learn about “coming-of-age” ceremonies in different communities. In the project, students researched youth development and related ceremonies; wrote reports on what they learned; and produced “flash talks” in which they summarized their reports in 1-minute speeches. The class voted to determine the best speeches, and then the winning students performed their speeches at a ceremony in front of the whole school. At the HD School in Ningbo, middle school students organized a “Cyclathon” to raise money for a local children’s hospital. That event, like other public events at the school, provided opportunities for students to set up booths to sell products they had made and to share performances they had been working on at the same time that they gave members of the wider school community the opportunity to see the value of these student-centered activities

The HD School “Cyclathon,” covered in a local news broadcast

Similarly, at BNDS, every year on the Friday after the college entrance exam, students participate in the “Red Window Fair,” a community wide festival in which students present and share their learning results and sell products to interested teachers and schoolmates. According to the school, the products “can be derived from students’ personal interests, community activities or courses,” and “the purpose of the Red Window Fair is to drive learning motivation from the end of the course chain, improve the implementation of courses, and stimulate students’ internal motivation.” Reflecting the interest in competitions, students vie to be one of the “top ten sellers or even the sales champion” (who will be recognized at the Fair’s opening ceremony the following year), and the students can also participate in the “fierce competition of the auction.”

“The purpose of the Red Window Fair is to drive learning motivation from the end of the course chain, improve the implementation of courses, and stimulate students’ internal motivation.”

Many of the schools I visited also encouraged students to participate in a broad range of electives and extra-curricular programs and activities by embedding projects in contests and connecting more student-centered activities to national and international competitions in areas like robotics, debating, and sustainability. Although contests and competitions do create more pressures for students, they are also consistent with the long history of imperial exams and rankings, and they result in highly valued awards and rewards recognized in the college admissions process and by parents and the public more generally.

Challenges for expanding student-centered learning in China

Pushing the boundaries of conventional instruction in any system is not easy. Illustrating the challenges, one of the most innovative schools I visited in 2024, the Etu School, a private school in Beijing has faced financial and regulatory challenges that by the end of 2025 threatened to close the school. Furthermore, even if a few schools can create more innovative learning experiences, there is no guarantee that those innovations will spread across the system. Isolated successes do not necessarily lead to system-wide change, particularly when the successes depend on considerable resources and unusual conditions.

Given the pressures and prevailing conditions, will most schools in China — just like schools in the US and around the world — find it easier to focus on the “innovative” activities that fit into the conventional system with the least disruptions? Schools might adopt just one project period or field trip or cultural experience or celebration (after exams are over) without creating a better balance between conventional and more student-centered activities. What’s more, concerns about the quality of public performances and products and the desire to win competitions might also encourage teachers and parents to dive in and take over or to try to “game the system” to ensure that their child, class or school produces the “best” project-based results. As with any “hybrid,” even innovative activities may become more conventional over time. In the process, projects and other “innovative” educational activities can find a place in the regular school day without disturbing many other aspects of conventional schooling. Under these conditions, expanding the work of innovative schools and taking advantage of the niches of possibility for supporting student-centered learning will depend on changes in many other institutions and the larger society as well.

Next week: Can changes in education policies create flexibility in schools without increasing academic pressure? Stability & change in the education system in China (Part 2)

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Tagged ai, education, Educational change, Educational Policy, Learning, Teachers, Teaching

Celebrating Extraordinary Educators from Africa’s Aspire Fellowship Programme

Posted on December 26, 2025 by T Hatch | Leave a comment

As we look back on 2025, we’d like to celebrate some of the extraordinary work in education we learned about this year. In this case, we’re highlighting the work of the Aspire Leadership Fellows of the Africa Leadership Academy. The Aspire Fellowship Programme is a cohort-based program that brings together leaders from across Africa who have started or are leading innovative schools and educational organizations. The Fellows work with global education leaders to expand and sustain their organizations. For those interested in learning more about this work or making a donation, we’re providing the Aspire profiles and websites of several of the Fellows who shared their work with graduate students from Teachers College, Columbia University, in Thomas Hatch’s class on School Change this fall.

Soofia International School

Highlight: Running a lean Cambridge model at a community-funded school catering to children from diverse families in rural Lesotho- some facing significant socio-economic challenges and other instabilities

Year Founded: 1990

Grade: Nursery/Pre-Primary, Primary, Secondary, AS & A Level

School Vision: To deliver affordable, globally benchmarked education with a strong emphasis on equity, innovation, and holistic development.

Jayant Vijayakumar is Chief Academic Advisor at Soofia International School in Lesotho, where he leads strategic planning, academic innovation, and AI integration. Under his leadership, Soofia—serving over 1,300 students—has embraced flipped learning, launched coding and robotics programs, and pioneered student-led engagement models. Jayant’s approach blends academic rigour with emotional intelligence, technology, and values-based education, ensuring access and excellence for learners from all backgrounds. He trains educators, drives curriculum reform, and builds partnerships that extend Soofia’s impact across Lesotho and beyond. Passionate about transforming outdated education systems, Jayant’s work is driven by a belief that inclusive, holistic education can empower the next generation of thinkers, leaders, and changemakers in Africa and the world. Donation/Support link

Planning for Tomorrow Youth Organization

Highlight: Refugee-founded and refugee-led education which started with 26 students in a boardroom, and has grown to serve more than 800 students

Year founded: 2007

Grade Focus: K-12

School vision: A healthy and self-reliant community with knowledge and skills.

Daniel, also known as Khalid, is a Congolese Refugee who has resided in Uganda for the past 26 years. Leveraging the DAFI scholarship, Khalid earned an MS in Environmental Health and a Bachelor of Statistics Degree. He leads this refugee-led youth initiative dedicated to empowering vulnerable refugees and Ugandans towards becoming healthy and self-reliant. P4T Schools delivers comprehensive educational services, including improved teaching methodologies, a school feeding program, engaging children in debate, games, and sports. The overarching goal of these schools is to evolve into centers of excellence, with a focus on nurturing Innovative Leaders and Changemakers.

Kevin is an Education Coordinator and Early Childhood Development project manager at P4T. She attained a BS in Education under MasterCard Foundation Scholarship. She did teaching practice at Mandela Secondary school, taught at the North Green School and had a one-year volunteer experience as a teaching assistant at Lancaster Mennonite School in Pennsylvania, USA. Kevin uses her positive attitude to encourage others to work hard and bring about a positive impact in their communities. She is very passionate about giving back “because in one way or the other it is what made her who she is, a transformative leader.” Donation/Support link

Inmates Educational Foundation (IEF)

**MAHFUZ ALABIDUN**
Inmates Educational Foundation
Nigeria (Lagos, Oyo, Osun, Kano, Abuja, and Ebonyi states)

Highlight: Running a school system in Nigerian correctional centers to provide access to formal and informal education as a form of reformation and reintegration for inmates.

Year Founded: 2018

Grade: Nursery/Pre-Primary, Primary, Secondary, National Open University

School Vision: To provide educational opportunities to inmates, empowering them to reintegrate into society and become productive citizens..

Mahfuz Alabidun is the Founder and Executive Director of Inmates Educational Foundation, a nonprofit delivering education in Nigerian correctional centers. With over 500 learners across six states, IEF offers academic, vocational, and reintegration programs that support inmates’ transformation and reintegration into society. Under his leadership, the foundation has received national recognition, including the Governor of Lagos State Social Impact Award. A TEDx speaker and education reform advocate, he is passionate about building inclusive systems that restore dignity and create second chances. Through education, Mahfuz is rewriting the narrative of incarceration in Nigeria—one learner, one center, one future at a time. Cohort 5 Year Founded: 2018 Grade: Nursery/Pre-Primary, Primary, Secondary, National Open University School Vision: To to provide educational opportunities to inmates, empowering them to reintegrate into society and become productive citizens. Donation/Support link

Humanitarian Services Action (HuSA)

Highlight: Running a school model that not only educates but also heals and empowers children, especially those affected by conflict, displacement, and poverty; with focus on Protection and Integrated Mental Health and Psychosocial Support Services (MHPSS).

Year Founded: 2020

Grade: Nursery/Pre-Primary, Primary

School Vision: To create a new generation of African leaders and change-makers who are self-reliant and capable of lifting others.

Sumi Hamid is a refugee leader and the Founder and Executive Director of Humanitarian Services Action Organisation (HuSA) in Kikuube, Uganda. A survivor of displacement himself, he grew up in Kyangwali Refugee Settlement and now leads community-based initiatives that provide education, mental health support, and protection services to refugee children and families. After overcoming years of interrupted education, Sumi pursued a career in social work and made the bold decision in 2023 to leave formal employment and fully commit to building HuSA. His organization now serves over 130 children with early education and supports women and youth with microgrants, GBV response, and psychosocial care. Rooted in lived experience, his work champions dignity, empowerment, and community-led change—offering vulnerable children and families the opportunity to learn, heal, and thrive. Cohort 5 Year Founded: 2020 Grade: Nursery/Pre-Primary, Primary School Vision: To create a new generation of African leaders and change-makers who are self-reliant and capable of lifting others. Donation/Support link

Ajibu Community

Highlight: They produce their own play-learning resources which are used to combine play-based learning interventions with life skills development, ensuring that children not only succeed academically but also explore their innate talents and build strong social-emotional and entrepreneurial skills to reach their full potential

Year Founded: 2021

Grade: Nursery/Pre-Primary, Primary, Vocational Training for mothers

School Vision: To create a model Play-Based Learning school in Eastern Uganda where education is focused on academic excellence and skills development so that there’s a clear path for every child to succeed in life.

Timothy David Wambi is the Founder of Ajibu Community Organisation (Ajco) in rural Mayuge, Uganda. Timothy leads grassroots education reform through a dual-impact model: supporting public primary schools and running a vibrant community learning center. Ajco currently educates 77 children aged 3–7 and empowers young women—many of them survivors of early marriage—to become trained educators. Timothy’s model integrates play-based, life-skills learning and develops low-cost teaching materials to improve literacy, numeracy, and STEM outcomes in under-resourced schools. Timothy works to ensure that no child is denied the right to quality education and that local solutions are part of lasting transformation in Uganda’s rural education landscape. Donation/Support link

Itinga Charity Education Foundation

Highlight: The only inclusive secondary school in Northern Uganda catering to students with diverse abilities such as the blind, low vision, cerebral palsy, intellectual disabilities, and physical challenged, studying alongside their abled peers.

Year Founded: 2024

Grade: Secondary

School Vision: To empower students to thrive, regardless of ability, and promotes a culture of acceptance and inclusion

Acen Kevin (Daniela) is the Founder and Executive Director of the Itinga Charity Education Foundation (ICEF) and Director of St. Mary Goretti Secondary School Ngetta in Northern Uganda. Holding a Bachelor’s degree in Accounting and Finance, Kevin spearheads initiatives that deliver inclusive education to students with and without disabilities, including learners who are blind or physically challenged. Under her leadership, ICEF partnered to establish the region’s first inclusive secondary school, now serving 45 students from across Uganda. She drives accessibility through scholarships, assistive technologies, and inclusive teacher training. As Board Chair of the school’s academic committee, Kevin is dedicated to upholding quality and equity in education. In 2025, she was awarded the MTN Changemaker Grant for her groundbreaking work in assistive learning. Kevin is deeply passionate about creating a future where all learners— regardless of ability—have the opportunity to thrive. Donation/Support link

Isrina School

Highlight: Spearheading the “Recycles Pay” project at Isrina School which empowers parents to offset children’s fees by generating income from recyclable materials

Year founded: 2016

Grades served: K-6

School vision: A world where every child, regardless of their economic background has equal access to quality education

Grace is a fervent champion of inclusive education, dedicating herself to this cause since the age of 15. Fueled by her personal experiences, she remains resolute in her mission to guarantee equitable access to quality education for every child, irrespective of their background. Notably, she advocates for environmental sustainability and spearheads the innovative “Recycles Pay” project, empowering parents to offset their children’s fees through the use of recyclable materials. With her certification as a Microsoft Educator, Grace actively pursues the enhancement of learning experiences and seeks to broaden educational access, aiming to disrupt the cycle of poverty through the delivery of high-quality education. Donation/Support link

Tsion Academy

Highlight: Focused on providing free, quality education to out-of-school children in underserved communities using a personal and scalable funding model called the “Big Brother or Sister where each child is matched with a “Big Brother or Sister”—an individual donor who would commit to supporting the child’s education monthly or by term.

Year Founded: 2022

Grade: Nursery/Pre-Primary/Primary/Secondary

School Vision: To restore dignity, build character, and equip each child with the tools they need to thrive academically, emotionally, and socially.

Adeola Tolulope Abayomi is the Founder and Executive Director of Tsion Academy, a free school for out-of-school children in Ile-Ife, Nigeria. A trained lawyer (LLB, BL) and the visionary force behind Evolufy Africa. Tsion Academy currently serves over 140 children aged 4 to 13, delivering quality, inclusive education to underserved communities. Through Evolufy Africa’s two branches—Tsion Academy and Maendeleo Africa— Adeola advances access, equity, and youth empowerment. She is passionate about building sustainable, replicable school models that drive genuine transformation. Her work bridges grassroots action and systemic change, offering hope and opportunity to the next generation of African leaders. Donation/Support link

Smart Bilingual Academy

Highlight: Creating equitable education access to students in second cities.

Year founded: 2022

Grades served: K-6

School vision: All children reach their full-potential and are agents of change in their schools, communities and the world.

With a remarkable 15-year background in supporting social innovations, Tchanlandjou has been instrumental in mapping key actors and organizations within ecosystems for collective systemic impact. Since joining Ashoka in 2013, he has held the pivotal role of Regional Director for the Sahel region, where his strategic vision and ability to inspire and mobilize diverse partners have yielded significant accomplishments. Notably, Tchanlandjou spearheaded the creation of the Education and Youth Clusters, pivotal initiatives that have greatly enhanced Ashoka’s impact in the Sahel. In 2016, he further demonstrated his entrepreneurial spirit by founding ‘SeddoInvest,’ a start-up focused on identifying and preparing a pipeline of young social ventures and attracting investments to accelerate their development. He founded SBA after seeing first-hand the profound disparity between the quality of education available to students in Dakar, and in rural and per-urban areas in Senegal. Donation/Support link

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Posted in Africa, education reform, Educational change, Educational Leadership, Educational Policy, equity, Lesotho, Nigeria, Uganda

Tagged Africa, education, Educational change, Educational Leadership, Educational Policy, Learning, Lesotho, news, Nigeria, Teachers, Teaching, technology, Uganda

Centering Equity Through Historical Grounding and Collective Educational Change with Latrice Marianno

Posted on December 21, 2025 by T Hatch | Leave a comment

In December’s Lead the Change (LtC) interview Dr. Latrice Marianno argues that meaningful educational improvement must be historically grounded and explicitly centered on equity and justice, not treated as a side effort within school improvement. Despite current challenges, she calls for collective, systems-focused approaches that dismantle structural barriers and urges educators and scholars to continually act as if radical transformation in education is possible. The LtC series is produced by Elizabeth Zumpe and colleagues from the Educational Change Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association. A PDF of the fully formatted interview will be available on the LtC website.

Lead the Change (LtC): The 2026 AERA Annual Meeting theme is “Unforgetting Histories and Imagining Futures: Constructing a New Vision for Educational Research.” This theme calls us to consider how to leverage our diverse knowledge and experiences to engage in futuring for education and education research, involving looking back to remember our histories so that we can look forward to imagine better futures. What steps are you taking, or do you plan to take, to heed this call?

Dr. Latrice Marianno (LM): Recently, I had the opportunity to attend the Association for the Study of Higher Education’s (ASHE) annual conference in Denver. During my time there, I visited the Museum for Black Girls and encountered this quote from Angela Davis above one of the exhibits: “You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.” For me, this quote embodies the work before all of us. To heed this year’s call, I am continuing to deepen my work around equitable school improvement in a few ways.

First, I am ensuring that my work is continually grounded in the historical context that has produced and/or maintained the inequities we continually see in education. Critical policy genealogy, which focuses on understanding the origin and evolution of policies (Brewer, 2014; Meadmore et al., 2000), is something I have been drawn toward and intend to engage with more deeply. I find it critically important to understand how policies came to be and the issues those policies were intended to address as that insight can shed light on how educational policies create or maintain inequities. One example that illustrates the importance of understanding the histories of educational policies is the history of state teacher certification policies. While characterized as a policy aimed to enhance the professionalization of teachers (e.g., Hutt et al., 2018), requirements for teachers to pass exams to become certified have long reinforced inequities in access to entering the teaching profession (e.g., Carver-Thomas, 2018). Understanding the history of these policies means an awareness that these certification policies were popularized as a way to justify lower pay for Black educators and later the displacement of Black educators (e.g., Fultz, 2004; Tillman, 2004). Remembering our histories is a necessary foundation if we are to reimagine educational systems.

Second, I will continue focusing on interrogating systems, policies, and practices in educational spaces both in my teaching and scholarship. My work focuses on examining how school improvement systems can be reimagined and redesigned to better support educational leaders to engage in meaningful and justice-centered improvement. For example, Marianno et al. (2024) focuses on state-influenced school improvement plan templates and the extent to which educational leaders are prompted to think about and address inequities. This work opens a conversation regarding how this tool (i.e., school improvement templates) might be redesigned to support educational leaders to center equity in the school improvement planning process. Currently, I teach in a principal preparation program which has allowed me to continually engage with educators and aspiring educational leaders around what this could look like in practice. My teaching allows opportunities for me to learn from and alongside my students as we collectively think about the supports, tools, and professional learning that support educational leaders to think critically about equitable school improvement and act on those commitments in sustainable ways. For example, in my course on data-driven school improvement, we use Bernhardt’s (2017) program and process evaluation tool to prompt them to think about ways school policies and practices create or maintain inequities – an activity they have found useful in prompting them to notice and reflect on inequities within their schools and districts.

Featured Exhibit at the Museum for Black Girls

Finally, I am committed to supporting and engaging in collective futuring in educational spaces. This commitment means sharing my work in practitioner-friendly formats (e.g., policy reports, and/or practitioner journals like Educational Leadership or Phi Delta Kappan), rather than solely academic journals. This commitment also means continuing to challenge assumptions about what it means to improve a school and supporting educators and educational leaders to think critically about school improvement and educational justice as intertwined endeavors. To envision beyond our current system and imagine what could be. To “act as if it were possible to radically transform the world” and “to do it all the time.”

LiC: What are some key lessons that practitioners and scholars might take from your work to foster better educational systems for all students?

LM: Recently, my work has focused on understanding school improvement planning (SIP) processes and how educational leaders think about and work toward redressing inequities through those processes (Marianno, 2024; additional work forthcoming). Through this research, I found that educational leaders viewed equity as either an implicit part of school improvement planning or absent from that process, and that school leaders were not prompted to think about equity within the SIP process. These views and approaches undermined the district’s expressed equity focus by creating a disconnect between their policy intent and implementation. In my work, I argue for the need to explicitly connect equity with school improvement and begin to identify opportunities to center equity within a process that can often be thought of as parallel to school improvement rather than an integral part of those efforts.

“I argue for the need to explicitly connect equity with school improvement.”

Ultimately, I hope my work inspires folks to be transgressive – to push against the boundaries of what is typically considered improvement within the current educational system (e.g., lack of explicit focus on redressing inequities within improvement efforts). To continually question the assumptions that undergird our collective work in improving education for all students, especially those from historically marginalized backgrounds. To believe in radical transformation and work toward it in our pursuit of educational justice. Toward this end, there are a few key lessons I hope folks can take from my work which collectively emphasizes the importance of being systems-focused, centering the knowledge and experiences of marginalized students and communities, and then leveraging that knowledge to design more just futures.

First, there can be no educational improvement without a focus on redressing inequities. Too often equity is treated or understood like a side project rather than integral to the work of educational improvement (Marianno, 2024). However, as scholars like Gloria Ladson-Billings and Michael Dumas have argued, substantively improving education requires explicitly attending to the racism and antiblackness that shape the current educational system (Dumas, 2016; Ladson-Billings, 2006).

“Too often equity is treated or understood like a side project rather than integral to the work of educational improvement.”

Second, we must focus on reimagining our systems, policies, and practices toward educational justice (Welton et al., 2018). There has been a popular illustration that people, particularly in education, have used to describe equity. This illustration shows three individuals of varying heights standing outside of a fence watching a baseball game. One individual is tall enough to see over the fence without additional support while the other two need additional and varied support. While this illustration has multiple iterations, there is often a comparison between equality and equity in which equality represents everyone getting the same number of boxes to stand on, and equity representing everyone getting what they need to, in fact, see over the fence. The version that most resonates with me includes a visual representation of liberation as the removal of the fence. For me, this representation highlights how education broadly and schools specifically have been designed with particular people in mind (in this case the individual tall enough to see without additional support) and how the removal of the fence would serve everyone. I firmly believe that to ensure marginalized students have equitable and just educational opportunities, experiences, and outcomes, it is critical that our collective work (practitioners and scholars alike) focuses on removing the fences (i.e., barriers) that marginalize students and lead to inequities. Engaging in educational improvement in this way centers the experiences of marginalized students, such that educational spaces are designed with them in mind.

Finally, we must recognize the value of collective knowledge and experiences. Brandi Hinnant-Crawford (2020) notes that we need to “intentionally harvest the collective wisdom of many” to “envision better and plot a course for how to get there” (p. 43). That is, futuring for education requires honoring and valuing the knowledge and expertise of diverse stakeholders – teachers, educational leaders, students, and caregivers. In particular, we need to view students and caregivers as valuable partners who can aid in both addressing the educational problems schools are facing and support imagining an otherwise.

LtC: What do you see the field of Educational Change heading, and where do you find hope for this field for the future?

LM: Honestly, I’m not sure where I see the field of educational change heading. The current climate makes that picture a bit hazy for me. We’re in such a significant period of retrenchment with attacks on academic freedom in higher education, undermining of public education through funding cuts and dismantling the Department of Education, and backlash for anything remotely equitable or inclusive. It is disheartening, though unsurprising. This moment in our history reflects longstanding patterns in American history where movements toward justice are met with resistance and retrenchment. As Decoteau Irby’s (2021) work and the Angela Davis quote shared earlier both remind us, the current moment is a reminder that systems of oppression are constantly at work. We have to act as if we can radically transform the world all the time because systems of oppression are constantly mutating and reinventing. With that in mind, I do have hopes for the field moving forward.

I hope we move toward deeper recognition that equity and justice must be central to educational improvement, not a side project or parallel effort. This is the work. There is no meaningful school improvement work divorced from a focus on educational justice. In my own work, I’ve seen how educational leaders are often unclear about how to integrate equity into improvement work or treat equity as an implied focus undergirding their improvement efforts but in ways that actually undermine those efforts (Marianno, 2024). Specifically, district leaders viewed equity as an implied focus and foundation of all of their school improvement efforts. However, this approach led school leaders in that district to believe that equity was absent from the process altogether and left them unsure of where and how to integrate equity in their improvement efforts because it was not explicitly discussed. Moving forward, I hope we regard equity and justice as non-negotiables that guide how we define problems, reorganize educational systems, and measure the success of educational improvement efforts.

I hope we move toward a more historically grounded approach to school and systems improvement. To meaningfully redress inequities, we must understand how past policies and practices created the systems we currently have. Tracing policy histories, such as the racialized roots of teacher certification requirements or gifted education (e.g., Mansfield, 2016), reveal that many present-day inequities are not accidental, and reinforces the understanding that policies are not neutral. I hope the field continues to deepen its engagement with historical analysis, recognizing that remembering the past is essential for imagining futures that depart from it.

I hope the field continues to shift toward more systemic and collective approaches to educational improvement. When working with aspiring educational leaders in my course on data-driven school improvement and building on the work of scholars like Brandi Hinnant-Crawford (2020), I find they often leave the course with a better understanding of how school systems, policies, and practices shape disparities within their schools and districts and the importance and value of collective approaches to their improvement work. This is my hope for the field – that we engage these ideas not just intellectually but as part of our praxis.

Despite the current moment we’re in, I hope that both scholars and practitioners act as if radically transforming education is possible – and that they do it all the time.

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Posted in education reform, equity, Interviews, Lead the Change

Tagged education, education equity, Educational change, equity, Lead the Change, news, Politics, Teaching, technology

The HundrED Global Collection for 2026

Posted on December 9, 2025 by T Hatch | Leave a comment

This week’s post highlights education innovations from the 2026 Global Collection curated by HundrED. HundrED was established in 2015 to support the identification and implementation of scalable education innovations worldwide. Since 2017, HundrED has celebrated the annual global collection at an Innovation Summit, which this year was held in conjunction with the WISE summit. To see how this year’s collection of innovation compares to previous years, see the IEN posts on the HundrED Global Collection for 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, & 2019.

HundrED’s Global Collection for 2026 featured one hundred solutions from six continents selected from more than 800 submissions. The report on the 2026 Global Collection noted that common themes among year’s innovations were access to education, equity, wellbeing, and creativity as well as a 100 percent increase in the number of innovations using some form of educational technology. Some of the panels from the Innovation Summit discussed key findings from the report and introduced this year’s innovations.

Key focus areas of the Global Collection 2026

This year’s selections for the global collection include: Alpha Tiles (Mexico); Girl Boss Program (India); Outdoor School (Singapore); AfriKids’ Powerhouse Communities (Ghana); Inteligente (Brazil); TOY For Inclusion Play Hubs (Netherlands); Peace Tracks (United States).

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Posted in About K-12 International Education News, Educational change, innovation

Tagged Educational change, educational innovation, HundrED, innovation

Innovations in providing children with food and nutrition: Scanning the headlines for new ways to support students’ health and wellbeing after the pandemic (Part 2)

Posted on November 19, 2025 by T Hatch | Leave a comment

In part 2 of this two-part post, Sierra Bickford scans recent news and research on education to list some of the innovative approaches schools and communities have developed to make sure all students got the food and nutrients they need during and after the school closures of the COVID-19 pandemic. Part 1 outlined the essential role access to food and nutrition plays in supporting healthy development for students both in the US and around the world. These posts are part of IEN’s ongoing coverage of what is and is not changing in schools and education following the school closures of the pandemic. For more on the series, see “What can change in schools after the pandemic?” For examples of micro-innovations in other areas, see IEN’s coverage of new pathways for access to college and careers and new developments in tutoring: Building Student Relationships Post-Pandemic in School and Beyond; Still Worth It? Scanning the Post-COVID Challenges and Possibilities for Access to Colleges and Careers in the US (Part 1); New Pathways into Higher Education and the Working World? Scanning the Post-COVID Challenges and Possibilities for Access to Colleges and Careers in the US (Part 2); Tutoring takes off and Predictable challenges and possibilities for effective tutoring at scale.

The school closures of the COVID-19 pandemic disconnected children around the world to critical sources of food, including school meals. Fortunately, educators, community members and others have developed a host of new mechanisms, resources, and partnerships to make sure children get access to healthy and healthier meals. These “micro-innovations” include new ways to work with community partners, including farmers, nonprofits, chefs, and local vendors and local ingredients to improve nutrition, strengthen regional economies, and increase student engagement. Other developments include using centralized kitchens and new policies and regulations to increase production and lower barriers to access. A few notable efforts also show how several countries have reworked funding structures to sustainably scale school meal programs. All these initiatives are helping to reduce costs, elevate meal quality, and ensure every child can eat with dignity and ease.

How to Use Community Partners and Local Ingredients

Zambia: Schools across Zambia are receiving funding from the One Hectare Program to support student run gardens and greenhouses. These gardens help supply school meals and make the community less vulnerable to drought and famine; it functions not only as extra food but also an opportunity to learn. The gardens are taken care of by the students who learn valuable skills such as “drip irrigation, organic sack gardening, and environmental protection.”

Kenya: In 2024, Kenya launched its national chapter of the school meals coalition and created a meals program that focuses on relying more on regional resources by employing local farmers growing region specific foods such as sorghum, cowpeas and potatoes. This not only increases the nutritional value of school meals but also supports local small business farmers. In collaboration with the Ministry of Health and the World Food Programme, the Ministry of Education is also developing a national menu guide in order to encourage the production of more sustainable and diverse meals.
France: Legislation has been passed to accelerate the transition to a more sustainable and healthier diet. Regulations put in place since 2021 include requirements for certain percentages of ingredients to be purchased from local and sustainable sources and specify some meal content for school lunch programs. For example, “out of 20 meals, children must be offered no more than four starters with a fat content of 15% or more; at least four fish-based meals (or a dish containing 70% fish or more), and at least 8 whole-fruit desserts.”
Hawai’i: The State Department of Education created a pilot meals program, the ’Aina Pono Farm to School initiative. Through the pilot program, students at schools such as Mililani High School in Oahu were able to sample various healthy, less processed dishes and give their personal feedback on menu choices. As a result, students ate far more of the meals on offer, reducing food overproduction at the school by 20%.
Tasmania: Schools in Tasmania are outsourcing at least one day of food preparation to local charity. Loaves and Fishes get produce from local vendors and cook the food either on or off site. These schools are selected through a competitive application process.
Haiti: Local farmers in Haiti’s Northeast strengthen nutrition and economy by supplying food to school canteens. The World Food Program purchases up to 9,990 tons of local produce to support struggling farmers and supply school meals to approximately 15,000 students across 200 schools with local nutritious food.

New York City: The “Chefs in the Schools” initiative brings in local professional chefs to create nutritious cost effective menus for schools. The chefs also provide training for staff.
Canada: Canada’s first national school food program, funded by 1 Billion dollars in federal funds, is rolling out amid rising need, with provinces and local providers striving to expand hot meal offerings despite funding gaps, aging infrastructure and growing demand from families struggling with food costs.

Using Centralized Kitchens:

France: Centralized kitchens in France prepare 6,000 to 10,000 servings a day of high-quality food following strict food safety protocols. This cuts down on cost and increases quality.
Hawai’i: The Hawaiʻi’s Farm to School Action Plan connects schools with local farms to provide fresh, nutritious meals, support farmers, and promote sustainable food systems through a regional kitchen model and community collaboration.
Sweden: A pilot program transforming school canteens with student-designed spaces, surplus-produce energy bars, and sustainability initiatives has boosted engagement and healthy eating while highlighting the need for long-term investment and multi-agency collaboration to sustain its success.

Lowering barriers to food

Africa: Food4Education (F4E) is transforming school feeding in Africa through a sustainable, locally sourced model that provides nutritious, affordable meals while supporting local farmers and communities. By 2030, they aim to feed 1 million Kenyan children daily and help other African governments feed 2 million more, creating a scalable blueprint to end classroom hunger across the continent.
New York City: In response to rising concerns about federal budget cuts to SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, a school in Brooklyn has partnered closely with the community organization El Puente and other stakeholders to support their students.

Colorado: All Colorado public school students will continue to have access to free school meals after voters approved two state referendums on November 5th, 2025, one of which — Proposition MM — will raise state income taxes for those earning an annual income of $300,000 or more.
United States: A streamlined certification structure has been implemented for a summer food assistance program launched last year. In the first year, some families missed out on Summer food benefits because of confusing enrollment, limited outreach, and short deadlines, despite the program proving highly effective for those who received it. To address the problem, more families will be enrolled automatically, if they are on certain public benefit programs, including free and reduced price school lunch.
Ghana: The Ghana School Feeding Programme has found most Ghanaian caregivers prefer on-site school meals over cash or take-home rations, with their choices shaped by program satisfaction, time constraints, and local food prices, suggesting school feeding programs could be more effective by tailoring modalities to regional and household needs.

United States: Starting in the 2027–28 school year, the USDA will ban online processing “junk fees” for students eligible for free or reduced-price school meals, aiming to expand the policy in the future to ensure all children can access healthy school meals without extra charges.
California: Schools are offering food trucks to boost lunch participation. Called the Cruisin’ Cafe, the food truck gets more seventh- and eighth-grade students to eat lunch during school. Students won’t have to pay anything for their meals or walk across campus to get lunch at the cafeteria.
New York City: New York City is investing $150 million to expand modern, café-style cafeteria upgrades to more schools after seeing that redesigned dining spaces boosted student participation in school meals and helped reduce stigma amid rising child food insecurity.

United States: Districts are using the federal Community Eligibility Provision to offer free school meals by strategically clustering schools to maximize reimbursement, clearly communicating and reassessing eligibility data each year, and boosting revenue through expanded breakfast programs like breakfast-in-the-classroom or breakfast-after-the-bell.

Changing Financing Systems

Bolivia: Since 2000, the government in Bolivia has supported what has come to be called the Complementary School Meals Program. By 2019, with investments of more than 100 million US dollars, the program provides school meals to more than 2.2 million students – almost 80% of all school-age children and youth. To fund the program, the government has turned to taxing natural resources, specifically hydro carbons, program.
Mozambique: In Mozambique, $40 million in debt service payments were channeled to school meals by using debt swaps and broader debt relief strategies to redirect repayments toward national education and nutrition priorities.

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Posted in Covid-19, education reform, Educational change, Educational Policy, Nutition

Tagged Covid-19, diet, education, Educational change, Educational Policy, food, Health, nutrition

Teaching in the Age of Generative AI: Lead the Change Interview with Bernardo Feliciano

Posted on November 6, 2025 by T Hatch | Leave a comment

In October’s Lead the Change (LtC) interview Bernardo Feliciano’s discusses his work through the AITeach Co-design Lab at UMass Lowell; this work brings educators, researchers, and technologists together to co-create strategies and tools for teaching in this age of AI. The LtC series is produced by Elizabeth Zumpe and colleagues from the Educational Change Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association. A PDF of the fully formatted interview will be available on the LtC website.

Bernardo Feliciano (BF): Currently I am working with colleagues to build a co-design lab that brings together educators from very different contexts to develop approaches to teaching and learning in a world where generative AI is a reality. The lab is called the AITeach Co-design Lab @ UMass Lowell. (The hyperlink goes to one of many one-pagers we have been developing for partners representing different disciplines and sectors).

In the AITeach Co-design Lab, as collaborators we aim to create a structured space where we as a diverse group of educators, researchers, and technologists co-develop practical tools, strategies, and prototypes that respond to the reality of generative AI in education. The intention is not only to design usable products but also to study how to structure co-design itself to help schools navigate AI’s challenges and opportunities. In our co-design sessions, educators, researchers, and technology build spaces where we can address challenges in education and AI that are too complex for any one actor to solve (Snowden & Boone, 2007; Senge, 1990). The Lab functions as a structured environment where we can bring our problems of practice, iterate on small pilots, and use those cycles to build local capacity rather than waiting for top-down policy.

As an adjunct professor, I am also teaching a class on family and community engagement with schools. These roles constantly remind me that people bring distinct personal, professional, and institutional histories into every space. For me, futuring is less about projecting a single vision of “Education with a capital E” and more about the relational, actor-to-actor work of helping people shape their futures from the personal, professional, and institutional histories they inherit. That’s the direction my work is taking me.

The way I approach this is by convening diverse groups around developing tangible projects. The process matters as much as the specific product, whether it’s a research article, curriculum binder, a chatbot teaching/learning companion prototype, or a strategy for helping parents connect to schools. What is essential is how people can communicate their histories, connecting, adapting, negotiating, and reworking them to address problems in the present into a viable future. The varied personal and institutional histories participants bring are neither external resources to be tapped nor barriers to be overcome, but active materials in our negotiation of effective, situated teaching and learning. Innovation emerges as members work through these histories, adapting them in relation to one another to meet particular needs. I may not care whether my own work is labeled research, practice, or a mix of both, but as co-designers we must respect each other’s perspectives, even as those perspectives shift through negotiation. AI brings this into focus. At its core, AI is an immense bank or reservoir of the past, trained on and providing access to what is already known or has already been done. The future is not contained in the AI itself—nor can it be left to AI to imagine for us. The future comes from how we draw on that past to build something meaningful with and for the people in front of us. We explore generative AI as both a design partner and an object of study. Co-designers prototype tools like tutoring agents or parent communication bots, while also interrogating what it means to teach with, against, or around AI in everyday classrooms.

Of course, I have to use my own history, experience, and learning as a researcher, teacher, administrator, entrepreneur, and non-profit professional to leverage the network of histories that generative AI offers. But more than before, I can inform, contextualize, and connect the convening and teaching I do now with the work of so many more people and peoples (to some extent) who came before.

LtC: What are some key lessons that practitioners and scholars might take from your work to foster better educational systems for all students?

BF: One lesson is that teachers cannot be treated as passive implementers of someone else’s design. Too often, educational change is imagined as developing a curriculum or program in one place and distributing it everywhere. That assumes context does not matter and is peripheral rather than integral to learning and teaching. Our relationship to knowledge is always relational and always contextual.

Education has always lived in the complex space where cause and effect are only clear in hindsight (Snowden & Boone, 2007). Simon (1973) describes these as ill-structured domains existing in a state of dynamic heterogeneity in which diverse elements and relationships continually shift, preventing stable equilibrium and requiring ongoing adaptation (Pickett et al., 2017). Ill-structured problems cannot be solved by importing outside solutions but only by negotiation among those struggling with them. I do not believe that educational change—or improvement—comes from a fixed product or process delivered with fidelity. It is an ongoing process of learning through which people shape what they inherit—choosing what to keep, what to adapt, what to reject, and what to forget. It is a process I have found universally involves dynamics of local alliances, conflicts, and negotiations. The lesson I take from this is that if you want to improve schooling, you have to engage with the people who are doing the teaching and learning.

“We explore generative AI as both a design partner and an object of study . . . If you want to improve schooling, you have to engage with the people who are doing the teaching and learning.”

Working on my dissertation underscored this point. I wrote about using one-on-one meetings in a researcher-practitioner partnership to organize co-designing a computer science (CS) curriculum for middle schools. My experience brought home to me that there is no such thing as “shared understanding.” What emerges is never a single, final agreement but alignment good enough to act together, sustained through negotiation as perspectives shift. For example, teachers and researchers sometimes differed on how much detail a lesson plan should contain. Some wanted highly specified steps, others only broad outlines. Rather than force uniformity, we kept both versions and moved forward. That flexibility allowed the work to continue without pretending the difference had been resolved.

My work with different kinds of organizations has shown me how funding and infrastructure shape what is possible. This point is kind of obvious but still seems to bear repeating. Creativity and goodwill are not enough without sustainable and intentional support. For example, in the CS Pathways partnership, we shifted from MIT App Inventor to Code.org’s App Lab during remote learning. That solved one problem but created new ones around district procurement and accounts, showing how infrastructure shapes outcomes. In our recent Lab kickoff meeting, one participant noted that even when AI-enabled data tools existed, district procurement rules blocked their use — showing how funding and infrastructure filter what is possible.

At the same time, I saw that students’ and teachers’ own histories can be powerful resources for change, if we work out how to support them as they need to be supported. In one part of the CS Pathways project, students framed their app design around civic issues in their community, such as neighborhood safety and access to resources. Their lived experiences pushed the curriculum beyond abstract coding skills into work that mattered locally. This reframed computer science as a civic as well as a technical practice and shaped how we sequenced and supported instruction in those classes.

LtC: What do you see the field of Educational Change heading, and where do you find hope for this field for the future?

BF: In my experience, the field often moves toward building monoliths: “the system,” “the conceptual framework,” “the workforce,” “education technology.” Instead of these monoliths, we need to work with lesson plans and pacing decisions that make up “the system,” the overlapping frameworks that guide practice rather than a single “conceptual framework,” the varied teacher and student histories that constitute “the workforce,” and the specific tools and artifacts, from binders to chatbots, that become “education technology.” Monoliths can make things easier to talk about but also risk obscuring the negotiations and translations that are inseparable from those very systems. These relational dynamics are not add-ons. They are the system itself, as much as the actors are (Latour, 2005). As in the earlier example of teachers’ differing preferences for lesson plan detail, the system took shape through the negotiation itself, not through a fixed agreement imposed from outside.

“Relational dynamics are not add-ons. They are the system itself.”

I would like to see the field shift toward paying closer attention to the actor-to-actor interactions and dimensions. That is where change takes shape: when people with different histories and contexts negotiate how to carry those histories forward. I see promising work moving in this direction: Playlab.ai’s participatory approach to AI tool-building, Victor Lee’s co-design of AI curricula with teachers, Penuel and Gallagher’s (2017) and Coburn et al.’s (2021) and others’ emphasis on research–practice partnerships , and Bryk et al.’s (2015) improvement science cycles. The Cynefin co-design principles we are enacting in AITeach — probe, sense, respond — are themselves evidence of a field moving toward valuing negotiation and adaptation over fixed models (Snowden & Boone, 2007).

This is also where I find hope. In my dissertation research, I have seen how a small change in the structure of a meeting can reshape how colleagues relate to one another. Having a teacher go first in one-on-one meetings shifted the dynamic, allowing their concerns to set also frame a negotiation rather being a response to requirements. I have seen middle school students reframe ideas in ways that exceeded what I could have planned, such as attempting to build an app to help students and teachers share resources more effectively in school. Students translated apps they were familiar with into tools for their own purposes, which required reimagining instruction around their designs rather than trying to make pre-existing apps seem interesting. This approach may cause an instructional headache but least it provided an authentic motivation for learning an aspect of coding.

Some might call this the interest or work “micro-level,” but I avoid that term because it suggests hierarchies and fixed layers. I prefer to describe it as the translational dimension: the ongoing work of shaping futures from inherited histories by deciding what to keep, what to adapt, and what to let go.

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Posted in Interviews, Lead the Change

Tagged AERA, ai, artificial intelligence, education, Educational change, Educational Leadership, Lead the Change, Teaching, technology

Building Student Relationships Post-Pandemic in School and Beyond

Posted on October 30, 2025 by T Hatch | Leave a comment

What’s involved in strengthening relationships among students? This week, Hannah Nguyen surveys some of the news and research that discuss the possibilities for creating a whole ecosystem of relationships to support students in schools. This post is one in a series exploring strategies and micro-innovations that educators are pursuing following the school closures of the pandemic. For more on the series, see “What can change in schools after the pandemic?” For examples of micro-innovations in tutoring and access to college see: Tutoring takes off; Predictable challenges and possibilities for effective tutoring at scale; Still Worth It? Scanning the Post-COVID Challenges and Possibilities for Access to Colleges and Careers in the US (Part 1, Part 2).

Strengthening student relationships can begin in schools, but ultimately it involves building a whole ecosystem of relationships that supports students and their connections with their peers, their teachers, and the members of their families and the wider communities. Healthy relationships support students’ academic achievement, engagement in school, and social-emotional development. In particular, students’ friendships can provide emotional support that contributes to their learning, and strong connections to the members of their school community have a positive correlation to students’ level of engagement and motivation which also supports higher academic performance. In addition, students’ relationships play a crucial role in their sense of belonging – the extent to which students feel personally accepted, respected, included, and supported by others in the school environment. In turn, students with a strong sense of school belonging are more likely to report high levels of academic motivation, less likely to experience emotional distress, and less likely to be absent or drop out. A sense of school belonging has also been shown to reduce behavioral issues and promote mental health, while its absence is linked to loneliness, depression, and risk of suicide.

Despite the well-documented benefits of strong interpersonal connections in educational settings, many students today lack access to these supportive relationships. The COVID-19 pandemic compounded the challenges for developing positive relationships as the school closures and quarantines contributed to social isolation and increased loneliness, stress, and anxiety among students as well as adults. Showing just how widespread the impact has been, these disruptions to relationships extended far beyond school settings contributing to a 40% increase in babies lacking strong emotional bonds with their mothers just after the onset of the pandemic.

Even with some awareness of the negative impact of the pandemic on students’ relationships, educators may underestimate the extent of the problem. Julia Freeland Fisher and Mahnaz Charania, who have written extensively about the power of peer relationships, note that over 85% of adults in K–12 schools report that they are building strong relationships with students, but only 45% of students reported experiencing such strong developmental relationships with their teachers. In addition, less than 40% of 10th graders say “‘most of the time they feel they belong at school’” while more than 60% of parents with 10th graders think they do.”

“Less than 40% of 10th graders say ‘most of the time they feel they belong at school’ while more than 60% of parents with 10th graders think they do.”

Moreover, access to supportive relationships is not equitably distributed: factors like race, socioeconomic status, parental education, gender, and immigration status shape the extent and quality of students’ peer relationships and networks—and, consequently, the social capital available to them. For instance, LGBTQ+ students are shown to be over 10 percentage points less likely than their heterosexual and cisgender peers to feel close to others at school, while girls also report lower relational connectedness than boys by more than 10 percentage points.

Students’ declining feeling of connectedness with consistent disparities for LGBTQ+ and female identifying students after the pandemic 2021-2023 (Peetz 2024)

Addressing challenges of disconnection like these can certainly begin in classrooms and schools, but the external relationships in which students and schools are embedded—including those with mentors, families, and the broader community—are essential sources for the development of a whole system of supportive relationships. It’s important to note that students spend only 13% of their time in school, leaving 87% of their lives dependent on the relationships and environments beyond the classroom. Studies have shown that parental support strongly predicted lower levels of work avoidance, indicating that families of students play a primary role in keeping students motivated and goal-oriented. Furthermore, community conditions play a critical role in shaping students’ academic success, often rivaling or even outweighing the influence of family support. Children in high-poverty neighborhoods may be exposed to antisocial peers, leading to diminished academic progress—even in otherwise nurturing households. Yet, supportive communities with strong social cohesion and access to resources or social capital can buffer against these disadvantages, boosting early academic outcomes even in high-poverty areas. Together, these findings emphasize that relational networks—across school, home, and the community—lays the foundation for physical, mental, and academic support.

“Relational networks—across school, home, and the community—lays the foundation for physical, mental, and academic support.”

From this perspective, students’ relationships and networks can be seen as embedded in a broader, community-wide ecosystem rather than as a product of isolated institutions. When one part of that system falters, the entire structure can be weakened or even collapse. This underscores the importance of an interconnected educational ecosystem, where overlapping relationships between students, educators, families, and community members form a foundation for a supportive and effective learning environment.

Interconnectedness of schools, family, and broader community are essential for building a strong foundation for educational ecosystems that support student learning and engagement

What can be done to foster strong relationships in and beyond schools?

Developing a stronger, more equitable educational ecosystem begins with intentionally nurturing the relationships that fuel student learning and wellbeing. Fortunately, schools do not have to wait for large-scale reform: educators and communities are already implementing micro-innovations—small but powerful and tangible shifts in practices, routines, and resources—that foster connection and support. These include efforts to make visible the connections among students and between students and teachers; to deepen family-student ties through more inclusive school-family communication; and to expand community-student connections through partnerships with local organizations.

Connecting students and teachers

Relationship mapping enables teachers to document and visualize the relationships and social networks among their students. In 5 Steps for Building & Strengthening Students’ Networks, Fisher and Charania describe several relationship building strategies including relationship mapping tools. Many of those tools begin with the development of color-coded lists that teachers can use to indicate students with whom they have strong relationships as well as those who may be more socially isolated. Teachers can also engage their own students in developing maps of the peer relationship in their class, and the same social network mapping strategy can be used to document students’ relationships beyond the school with members of their families as well as with mentors and members of community organizations and health and service agencies. As Fisher and Charania put it, “Not only does relationship mapping provide more detailed information regarding whom your students know and turn to—it can also surface relationships that you could enlist more deliberately to expand supports or opportunities at your institution.”

“Not only does relationship mapping provide more detailed information regarding whom your students know and turn to—it can also surface relationships that you could enlist more deliberately to expand supports or opportunities at your institution.”

The Relationship Check Tool assesses the quantity of relationships and the quality of those relationships as well. The tool is a free survey offered by the Search Institute and discussed as well by Fisher and Charania. The survey is designed to support self-reflection and conversation to help practitioners, educators, and families assess where their connections with young people are strong and where they could grow. This tool helps adults gain insight by asking them to reflect on the quality of their relationships with youth, not as a formal assessment, but as a prompt for intentional dialogue and improvement. It is designed to spark meaningful conversations among peers or between adults and young people about the support, care, or challenge present in those relationships. While not built as a diagnostic instrument, the tool can empower users to identify strengths and gaps in their relational practice, creating awareness that can translate into more purposeful relationship-building in classrooms, schools, or home settings.

Peer Partner programs take many different forms, but they generally involve connecting two (or more) students who support each other in one or more activities. In some cases, peers may support each other in carrying out a physical activity, like running, or in getting to school or showing up for extra-curricular activities or clubs. By engaging in shared activities, students can develop relationships with peers they might not normally come in contact with. Some programs also focus specifically on connecting students to support their academic work. For example, at Acton Academy, Running Partners are peer accountability partners who help one another set daily goals, review progress, and provide encouragement throughout the school day. Students begin each morning by articulating their goals with their running partner, who then checks in to hold them accountable and offer feedback—whether by reviewing an essay, asking clarifying questions, or challenging them to aim higher. In younger grades, teachers adapt the practice by forming “housemate” groups of four, which broaden perspectives and make feedback developmentally appropriate. According to Acton educators, running partners not only help students “hold each other to a high standard of work” but also become an emotional support system, cheering one another on and offering encouragement when motivation dips.

Brief, reflective writing exercises can support students’ sense of belonging. In these exercises, students read first-person accounts from older peers describing common challenges—such as homesickness, academic struggles, or difficulty connecting with professors—and then reflect in writing on their own feelings and strategies for navigating similar experiences. The goal is to normalize these challenges and reassure students that feeling out of place is a typical part of the school experience. According to the researchers who have studied these exercises, students who participated reported feeling less anxious about fitting in and experienced slight improvements in academic performance, earning fewer Ds and Fs than peers who did not engage in the intervention.

Connecting students, schools, families, and communities

App-based platforms provide a relatively new way to connect parents and teachers. Apps like ClassDojo, Seesaw, Remind, and ParentPowered allow educators to share updates, videos, and messages with families in real time, giving parents a window into classroom activities they might otherwise miss. Teachers use these apps to reinforce learning at home, provide reminders, and communicate about student progress, while students can showcase work directly to their families. As Helen Westmoreland, director of family engagement at the National PTA, explains, these apps are “a starting place for good family engagement, not the ending place,” emphasizing that the tools work best when paired with thoughtful in-person connections.

Two-way (virtual) town halls were designed to give students and parents the chance to voice concerns, ask questions, and offer suggestions alongside updates from administrators. During the pandemic, these town halls were adapted from the usual, largely ceremonial, “parents’ nights”, at Knowledge and Power Preparatory Academy (KAPPA) in New York City to both learn from parents and students about their needs and to provide critical information about the schools’ response to the school closures. . These bi-monthly meetings became a critical means for understanding students’ social-emotional needs and academic challenges, allowing the school to make adjustments—such as changing start times to address students’ concerns about social distancing. Feedback from families also directly informed advisory lessons, social-emotional learning units, and academic goal-setting activities, ensuring programming responded to students’ needs.

Newcomer Liaisons and Newcomer Coordinators provide support to recently arrived immigrant students and their families. Newcomer liaisons are individuals or teams who serve as a dedicated point of contact who can work with immigrant families on issues like enrollment, programming, communication, and bilingual services. They can help students navigate school systems and access resources such as healthcare and clothing. By centralizing support, the liaisons aim to reduce the burden on teachers, improve students’ access to services, and foster a more equitable and responsive learning environment, particularly for newcomers in historically under-resourced schools.

Digital Directories have been created by organizations like Remake Learning to help students and schools connect with community members and organizations who can provide mentorship, apprenticeships and other learning opportunities. contact information for network members, programs, and organizations. At Remake Learning, the directory enables participants to see themselves as part of a larger network, access available resources, and browse calendars of events and engagement opportunities, strengthening connections across the ecosystem.

Learning Festivals are events designed to bring together schools and other people and organizations to showcase some of learning opportunities across particular communities. For example, Remake Learning Days, launched initially in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 2015, have now expanded to 10 different regions in four countries. These festivals provide creative, immersive learning experiences across diverse settings—including libraries, tech centers, schools, museums, parks, and community centers—who focus on hands-on, and maker-based education. Beyond providing opportunities for students to find out about learning opportunities in their community, these festivals can also help to foster connections among schools and other organizations in their communities and strengthen the whole learning ecosystem.

By starting with micro-innovations like these for even one aspect of relationship building—supporting connections among students, between students and teachers or among students, schools and the wider community—schools can lay the groundwork for a system where every student is seen, supported, and connected.

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Posted in Interviews

Tagged education, Educational change, Educational Policy, Learning, mental health, Teachers, Teaching

New Policies, New mandates, Uncertainty and Chaos: Scanning the Back-To-School Headlines in the US for 25-26 (Part 2)

Posted on September 17, 2025 by T Hatch | Leave a comment

This second part of IEN’s annual scan of the back-to-school stories brings together some of the headlines that focused on the effects of a flurry of executive orders and policy changes from Washington. The first part of the scan shared stories from outside the US, and, next week, we’ll review some of the other back-to-school headlines in the national and local press in the US.

For back-to school headlines from Fall 24: Politics, Policies, and Polarization: Scanning the 2024-25 Back-To-School Headlines in the US (Part 1); Supplies, Shortages, and Other Disruptions? Scanning the Back-to-School Headlines for 2024-25 (Part 2); Banning Cell Phones Around the World? Scanning the Back-to-School Headlines for 2024-25 (Part 3); Fall 23: Crises and Concerns: Scanning the Back-to-School Headlines (Part 1), (Part 2), (Part 3). Fall 22: Hope and trepidation: Scanning the back-to-school headlines in 2022 (Part 1), (Part 2) , (Part 3); Fall 21: Going back to school has never been quite like this (Part 1), (Part 2), (Part 3); Fall 20: What does it look like to go back to school? It’s different all around the world…; Fall 19: Headlines around the world: Back to school 2019 edition.

Tracking Trump: His actions on education, The Hechinger Report

Introducing the Trump K-12 education litigation tracker, Brookings

As Students Return to School, Educators Grapple With Chaos From Washington, The74

“As 47 million students return to school in the coming weeks, district leaders say they’re experiencing an uncertainty they haven’t felt since the pandemic. It’s “the amount of information that’s coming to you all at once,” said Jeremy Vidito of the Detroit schools. He laid out a litany of hardships, including figuring out “what’s true, what’s not. Emergency orders. Budget cuts.” But this time, the federal government is the source of the unease, as the Trump administration seeks to reduce more spending.” — The74

Funding

Your Guide to the Evolving Federal Budget and What It Means for Schools, Education Week

State Funding for Schools Is a Mess This Year, Too. Here’s Why, Education Week

$5 Billion in Federal Funding for Nine K–12 Formula Grant Programs Hangs in the Balance Between White House and Senate Proposals, LPI

“The Trump administration’s budget request for FY 2026 would cut overall education funding by nearly 16% compared to current funding levels” — LPI

House panel approves 26% cut to Title I funding for FY26, K-12 Dive

The House meets to vote on the bill that would cut the U.S. Department of Education’s budget by 15% for fiscal year 2026. *Source: K-12 Dive*

House Lawmakers Endorse Some—But Not All—of Trump’s Education Cuts, Education Week

Trump administration cancels dozens more grants, hitting civics, art, and higher ed, Education Week

Trump shifts millions of dollars to HBCUs and tribal schools amid deep education cuts, USA Today

Trump administration boosts HBCU funding after cutting grants for Hispanic-serving colleges, CNN

Trump Department of Education rolls out latest step to expand school choice nationwide, Fox News

“Department of Education sends guidance on private school kids obtaining federally-funded benefits, including one-on-one tutoring, counseling,” Fox News

Half of the states won’t comply with Trump’s push to defund schools over DEI, The74

Nation’s Report Card at risk, researchers say, The Hechinger Report

“While the Trump administration has vowed to preserve NAEP, it has overseen major cuts to staff who work on it and the elimination of more than a dozen tests” — Hechinger Report

How At-Risk Federal Data Is Being Rescued and Preserved, New America

Trump Admin. Wants to Scale Back Data Collection on Career and Technical Programs, Education Week

“The Trump administration wants to roll back rules for collecting data on state career and technical education programs instituted in the final days of the Biden administration and align the largest federal CTE program with the president’s first-day executive order making it federal policy to recognize only two sexes.” — Education Week

How Schools Will Feel the Federal Funding Cuts to Libraries and Museums, Education Week

Trump administration axes federal Blue Ribbon program that recognized high-achieving schools, Chalkbeat

FCC proposal would disconnect school bus Wi-Fi, hotspots from E-rate coverage, K-12 Dive

Students, schools race to save clean energy projects in face of Trump deadline, The Hechinger Report

Colorado state capitol rally in support of “The Green New Deal for Colorado Schools.” *Source: Emma Weber, The Hechinger Report*

Most—But Not All—Imperiled Federal Grants for Special Education Will Continue, Education Week

“The U.S. Department of Education says it wants projects aligned with Trump administration priorities.” — Education Week

Trump Canceled Millions for Special Education Teacher Training. What’s Next?, Education Week

Health

Schools prepare for the worst as RFK Jr. reshapes the vaccine landscape, The Hill

Confusion as Kids Head Back to School and RFK Jr. Calls the Shots on Vaccines, The74

Decreasing immunization rates among kindergarteners, *Source: The74*

Childhood Vaccinations Are Down. Schools Are Bracing for Outbreaks, Education Week

Schools brace for federal changes to lunch, The Hill

Trump law will cut food stamps for 2.4 million people as work rules widen, The Guardian

Civil Rights

How the Education Department is using civil rights laws to bring schools to heel, NPR

Trump’s Civil Rights Agenda Comes for Public Schools, Education Next

See Which Schools Trump’s Education Department Is Investigating and Why, Education Week

Some State Leaders Cheer as Trump’s Ed. Dept. Investigates Their Schools, Education Week

Schools Sue Trump, But It’s Getting Harder for Them to Recoup Money, Education Week

Trump administration targets race-focused school programs, The New York Times

“The Trump administration has launched investigations into school districts in Chicago and Evanston over programs aimed at supporting Black students, saying that efforts such as hiring Black teachers, expanding Black history and antiracism training may violate civil rights law. Supporters say the initiatives address systemic inequities and improve student outcomes, while critics warn they could be dismantled in court battles likely to reach the Supreme Court.” — NYT

Programs for vision and hearing loss harmed by Trump’s anti-diversity push, ProPublica

40 states could lose federal funds for sex ed if they keep gender identity in curriculum, ChalkBeat

“Posters are displayed in a Los Angeles Unified high school health education classroom in 2018. The Trump administration told 40 states to remove references to gender identity from a federally funded sex ed program and stripped California of its funding when it refused to do so.” Source: ChalkBeat

Ed. Dept. Will Release New Guidance on School Prayer, Trump Says, Education Week

Trump administration rolls back pivotal guidance about educational rights of English learners, Chalkbeat

For mixed status families, deportation fears cast shadow over new academic year, NPR

Next Week: Supplies, Support, Lunch and Fear: Scanning the National and Local Back-To-School Headlines in the US for 25-26 (Part 3)

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Posted in Back to school, early childhood education, education reform, Educational change, equity, Government Reports

Tagged Back to school, education, Educational change, Educational Policy, news, Politics, United States

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