Tag Archives: Educational change

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 Passionate about transforming outdated education systems, Jayant’s work is driven by a belief that inclusive, holistic education can empower the next generation of thinkers, leaders, and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.

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?

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

Scaling and Adapting Tablet-Based Supplemental Learning in Malawi, Sierra Leone, and Tanzania: Joe Wolf and Kira Keane on the Evolution of Imagine Worldwide (Part 3)

Posted on September 3, 2025 by T Hatch | Leave a comment

In the third part of this three-part interview (see Part 1 and Part 2), Joe Wolf and Kira Keane discuss the role of teachers in a table-based supplemental learning model and the efforts to adapt the model to three different contexts in Africa. Part one described the evolution of Imagine Worldwide’s approach and part two discusses Imagine Worldwide’s approach to make the work sustainable by building partnerships with government officials and local community members. The tablet-based program at the center of Imagine Worldwide’s work, developed by software partner onebillion, serves as a supplement for regular instruction, with each child in a school spending a targeted 150 minutes per week working independently on problems related to reading and mathematics. Imagine Worldwide partnered with the Government of Malawi to rollout the program in 500 schools in Malawi in 2023-24, with the ultimate goal of expanding to all 6000 primary schools, serving 3.8 million learners in standards [grades] 1-4 annually. Joe Wolf is the Co-CEO and Co-Founder of Imagine Worldwide, and Kira Keane is the Director of Communications. (Photos/graphics are from Imagine Worldwide unless otherwise noted.)

Thomas Hatch (TH): What can you tell us about the work that has to be done with teachers to scale and sustain the tablet-based model?

Joe Wolf (JW): The role of facilitator in the model is relatively straightforward. You don’t need a highly trained adult, and they don’t have to be a teacher. It can be a community volunteer or someone else, and that’s made it a very scalable model in terms of human capital. That’s important, because there just aren’t enough humans in these educational contexts. What makes this so scalable, in my opinion, is that when you have a single child and you have a single tablet, there’s an interaction between the child and the content that creates learning gains. When you move to one hundred kids, that linkage doesn’t change. When you move to a million kids, that linkage doesn’t change, you still have the relationship between the child and the content. Things do get more complex in that you have more equipment, and you have more schools, and you need to make sure that the equipment doesn’t get stolen. But when you have a model that depends on human capital, you need more and more and more teachers; and those teachers need to stay trained; and they need to show up every day; and they need to be able to engage one hundred children at the same time. It’s ten out of ten in terms of complexity when you have an inadequate number of teachers and you have to train those teachers to somehow be effective for those one hundred learners.

[W]hen you have a single child and you have a single tablet, there’s an interaction between the child and the content that creates learning gains. When you move to one hundred kids, that linkage doesn’t change. When you move to a million kids, that linkage doesn’t change, you still have the relationship between the child and the content.

TH: This is definitely a critical problem – how can programs be effective if they depend on more qualified teachers than can ever be supported? But then there are legitimate concerns that programs that don’t rely on teachers are sending the message that teachers aren’t important and that we don’t need those adults. How do you address those concerns that you’re trying to replace teachers with technology?

KK: That issue has really been top of mind for us, particularly as we think about our communications around the program. One very conscious decision we’ve made is to go back into the community to report on our research results. This means going back to teachers and saying, “Look, this is how your students are doing. This is what we’re learning. This is how this work can support you. This is how it reinforces your instruction.” From the beginning, we’ve really tried to include teachers as well as parents and community leaders in saying that “what you’re part of has implications not only for your own children and your students, but for the country.” We’ve had to be very mindful of that and of making sure that we build in feedback opportunities for teachers. Now in our implementation research, we have researchers going out into the community, conducting workshops and creating opportunities to hear from teachers so that we can continue to improve that process. But so far, our early implementation results and qualitative information coming from teachers is that it’s highly, highly popular.

JW: I also think that we just have to be realistic and fact-based with the current situation. In Malawi, there are one hundred kids per classroom and the average age in Malawi is 16 or 17 years old. It’s one of the youngest countries in the world. That means the number of kids is going to go up dramatically, but the level of resources is not going to go up dramatically. So you already have a problem, and the problem is going to get worse. You cannot build enough schools or hire enough teachers quickly enough or at low enough cost to solve this problem. That’s just the reality, and, in that context, many of these countries are eager to pursue innovative approaches. They’re not building bank branches. They’re going to mobile banking and now their mobile banking is so much better than ours. It had to be. It’s classic Clayton Christensen and his theories of disruptive innovation: where does innovation take root? It takes root in areas of non-consumption, where the status quo is not entrenched. The government of Malawi is really open about this and there is a real thirst for innovation. This is being well received by the government, by the communities, because what’s currently happening is not producing learning gains.

In addition, we have purposely situated ourselves in a supplemental, complimentary part of the government school’s timetable. There is already literacy and numeracy on the timetable, teacher led instruction, and that stays the same. Then we have a complementary supplemental period where every student is learning adaptively, and what we’re finding is that some of the biggest fans of that model are the teachers, because they’re saying, I have a little bit of a break during the tablet program, because the kids are super immersed in their own learning. The kids are showing up more often. Attendance is going up. They’re learning more; their attitude toward learning is improving. The teachers and the parents are seeing a higher return on investment of keeping the kids in school. There are just a lot of positive things that are happening for that teacher so that it isn’t in any way positioned as a replacement, as much as an aid that just makes their jobs easier and more sustainable.

“[W]e have purposely situated ourselves in a supplemental, complementary part of the government school’s timetable. There is already literacy and numeracy on the timetable, teacher led instruction, and that stays the same. Then we have a complementary supplemental period where every student is learning adaptively.”

TH: I think that’s so crucial. What a difference it might make for a teacher to have a period like that where they can see every student engaged. That’s just such a classic win-win. As we wrap-up, I’d love to hear more about scale-up. What have you learned from scaling across different contexts?

JW: We’ve come up with what we think are the preconditions for success in partnership with governments. We want to find governments that are already committed to:

Bringing technology into the classroom for teachers and students;
Boosting foundational learning; and
Providing solar electrification for their schools.

We want governments to be already moving on this journey. Then we’re helping them get there, as opposed to trying to convince them to do things. We are out of the convincing game. It doesn’t serve anybody. But we know we need strong government buy in, so we need strong leaders within the government that are committed. We also need a strong local ecosystem of partners that can execute. To help with that, we fill the position we call the “ecosystem coordinator.” That helps us act as a group that is solely dedicated to bringing together the disparate pieces and stakeholders and having them all march forward together to do this work. If you don’t have somebody who has this as their only job, the work will not happen because there’s too much else going on. The jobs are too overwhelming.

“We want governments to be already moving on this journey. Then we’re helping them get there, as opposed to trying to convince them to do things. We are out of the convincing game.”

We also need a funding community that is interested in the places that we’re working. We need bold philanthropic capital that’s willing to go first and willing to do the things that need to be done to get the full government buy in. We need support to get to a critical mass of schools. We need evidence that’s generated specific to that context. We need the ecosystem to be organized in a way that you can create an executable plan. Nobody can make decisions on whether this should go to scale, whether that’s the government or whether that’s funders, without having that done first. And it’s the perfect role of philanthropy to be that risk capital early within a country. What we’re in the process of proving, is that if we do that well, the program is in a position to go to scale with government support and they government is also in a position to mobilize more international and multi-lateral funding.

Organizationally, we’ve seen that the demand is everywhere. Every week, there are countries asking us work with them, but we’ve decided to focus on four countries of different sizes, with four different languages. We want to work in partnership with these government and prove that the model can, in fact, scale. Then at the end of that phase, we’ll just open source everything and try to bring in a lot more players beyond us. We’ve decide to hone in on what we’re calling our “scale portfolio” with Malawi, Sierra Leone and Tanzania being the first three countries that we’re prioritizing. Then we’ll also have a Francophone country in that portfolio. If we do this well, I think that will provide the evidence that’s needed to figure out how to scale this. At this point, adding a fifth or sixth or seventh country, that’s not what the world needs. We know the demand is there. It’s more important that we show how we can build a system, in partnership with a national government in different contexts.

TH: Have you had to make adjustments or adaptations so that the model you developed in Malawi can work in these different contexts?

JW: Absolutely. I think continuous improvement is the DNA of our organization. How do we make the procurement better? How do we make the training better? How do we make those community sensitizations better? How do we better collect data in super low-connectivity areas? How do we take that data so we can improve the software and the implementation model? Innovation is a messy game, and it’s filled with fits and starts, so every day there’s a whole bunch of challenges that come up and a whole bunch of solutions that make the model even better. We have to acknowledge that as much as we want to create standardization in systems, every place is different. Our model in Tanzania will look slightly different than our model in Malawi, and we have to allow for those bottom-up adjustments. It’s back to that relationship between the child and the content. That relationship probably doesn’t change all that much. There are slight adaptations as you go from language to language or from national curriculum to national curriculum, but those are pretty minor. There’s a lot of overlap in the instruction. It’s really the behavior of the adults surrounding the program that may look different in Tanzania. Just as an example, one of the districts that we’re launching in Tanzania is bigger than the entire country of Malawi, so the logistics of working in smaller and larger countries have to be considered. In terms of other differences, in Sierra Leone, we’re working in standards one through six and in a context that is post- civil war and Ebola and everything else. That means there are a lot of overage kids that are way behind in foundational skills. In Tanzania, we’re only working in standards one through three, because that’s been a more stable place. Malawi is in between, as we’re working in standards one through four. That comes from very different realities in terms of number of kids that have to be served with that same tablet and that same content.

TH: Is there anything you’d like to add that you haven’t already mentioned?

JW: I just want to hammer home the importance of philanthropic capital. The governments do not have the early-stage capital. The Big Aid organizations are not going to be early – that’s not their job. Nearly half of the world’s youth will be African by 2030 – half! Yet there’s not a single foundation that any of us can name that writes million dollar checks for primary schools in Africa. The disconnect between the size of the challenge and the amount of institutional capital focused on it is stunning. So I do think that when people say, “What can we do about this?” Providing capital has to be part of it. A big reason why the work in Malawi has advanced is because some of our supporters decided to make a big philanthropic bet. It wasn’t just, ”Let’s fund 10 schools and see what happens.” This was, “Let’s fund five hundred schools in a year and see what happens.” That made it a really different conversation, and we’re having success in finding other bold philanthropists that think about things the same way. But it’s not easy. There’s not a lot of institutions that focus on this. Under these conditions, I think part of the work is saying, “Hey, whatever you care about world, if it’s environment, if it’s economy, or if it’s global peace, foundational learning is directly tied to all of that, and we have to pay attention to the region that will have half of the world’s youth in a few years.”

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Posted in Educational change, Educational Policy, educational technology, equity, Malawi, Sierra Leone, Tanzania

Tagged education technology, Educational change, Educational Policy, Malawi, Sierra Leone, Tanzania

Bringing a Tablet-Based Foundational Learning Program to all the Primary Schools in Malawi: Joe Wolf and Kira Keane on the Evolution of Imagine Worldwide (Part 1)

Posted on August 20, 2025 by T Hatch | Leave a comment

What does it take to scale a tablet-based foundational learning program to all the primary schools in Malawi? In this 3-part interview, Joe Wolf and Kira Keane describe how Imagine Worldwide has approached that challenge and share some of what they have learned in the process. The tablet-based program at the center of Imagine Worldwide’s work, developed by software partner onebillion, serves as a supplement for regular instruction, with each child in a school spending a targeted 150 minutes per week working independently on problems related to reading and mathematics. Imagine Worldwide partnered with the Government of Malawi to rollout the program in 500 primary schools in 2023-24, with the ultimate goal of expanding to all 6000 primary schools in Malawi, serving 3.8 million learners in standards [grades] 1-4 annually. Joe Wolf is the Co-CEO and Co-Founder of Imagine Worldwide and Kira Keane is the Director of Communications. (Photos/graphics are from Imagine Worldwide unless otherwise noted.)

TH: Can you describe for us some of the key steps or phases you went through as you developed your work to test and then to scale-up this tablet-based program in Malawi?

Joe Wolf: The first phase of our work was all research oriented. We wanted to see if these learner-centric tablet models could work – were they really effective for children? – before asking under-resourced systems to spend time, energy, and capital on them. That meant we had a prolonged research phase that included nine randomized controlled trials. That was across different contexts, different languages, different implementation models, different countries – really exhaustively trying to prove that these solutions can, in fact, add significant value.

The second phase was what we call “learning to scale:” What are the processes that need to be done repeatedly well to scale within these contexts? We purposely spread our work out across seven countries, with different implementation models, different implementation partners, different types of structures to really test what needs to be done repeatedly well so that these systems can adopt the work at scale. Then, only in the last three years, we’ve put the pedal down and said, “Okay, I think we’re ready to really think about scaling.” And we were only able to act on scaling thanks to the leadership of the government of Malawi, who saw the learning gains of our pilot programs and saw how this edtech intervention could support their national goals of improving foundational skills. At that point in 2022, we served around 6000 children, but we increased it to about 700,000 children by the beginning of 2025. That’s a 100x increase in the last two years, which I think is a testament to the scalability of the model, the execution of the team, and the leadership of our government partners.

A map of africa with a yellow circle

AI-generated content may be incorrect.

TH: What’s the third phase? Implementation?

JW: I would say it’s scale plus continuous improvement. Now, our research is less efficacy oriented and more implementation oriented. How do we make it better and better and better? To address that, we have four levers we focus on:

Access: How do we serve more and more children and make the solutions easier and easier to implement?
Cost-effectiveness: How do we bring down the recurring costs to be as low as possible? We’ve brought costs down around 75% in the last five years, and we think there’s still room to go. Our key inputs are all highly deflationary, so we’re getting better economies of scale as we grow. Right now, we’re at about seven dollars (USD) per child per year. We think we can get that under five dollars (USD) as we get better economies of scale.
Advocacy: How do we use data to improve the implementation model in the software so that the efficacy of the program continues to go up and up and up? It’s one of the beauties of technology that it can iterate and improve. You’re not building a building and putting in books and then five years later it’s deteriorated. We actually have the ability to use data to continuously improve through this flywheel of innovation.

“It’s one of the beauties of technology that it can iterate and improve. You’re not building a building and putting in books and then five years later it’s deteriorated. We actually have the ability to use data to continuously improve through this flywheel of innovation.“

Sustainability. How do we work with our government partners to build operational and financial sustainability? And how do we do it starting day one, where we’re building the “muscles” within the existing education system, as opposed to the classic approach of starting off outside the system and then trying to hand it off to the system. Too often, if you haven’t done a good job of building that internal muscle, and then things fall apart. So we’ve really taken the system strengthening approach, acknowledging that there are capacity and infrastructure gaps within the countries where we work and that there are key functions that need to be built that don’t currently exist within some of these systems. We’ve tried to give it time so that, by the end of the implementation phase, the system has already been doing the work for an extended period of time. That way, you don’t have this fall off as you try to hand-off everything to the system itself.

Kira Keane: I just want to underscore a couple of points that Joe made. For Imagine, this notion of the continuous improvement loop, it’s not like we did things, something went wrong and we’re like, “Oh, we have to fix this.” This was an intentional design element from the very beginning: How do we get continuous feedback to improve both the software itself and the implementation model? And the other point is that our key question is “How do we serve as many children as possible?” The need is so immense and the population growth will be so intense over the next 10-15 years so we really need to be focused on scale. That means working with our government partners to aim for generational impact, really looking at country-wide scale, and focusing on how we design for that.

“The need is so immense and the population growth will be so intense over the next 10-15, years so we really need to be focused on scale. That means working with our government partners to aim for generational impact, really looking at country-wide scale, and focusing on how we design for that.”

JW: I’ll add two more things to what Kira said. The ecosystem is exhausted by pilots – by small things that don’t scale, that don’t have evidence, that take a lot of time and resources. Scale from day one very much aligns with where the governments are. They have a big problem with the lack of foundational learning among their students, and they need big solutions. Little, tiny things are just distracting and take too much time and energy. The second thing is that we have positioned our organization to be temporary in nature, so our job is to put ourselves out of business as quickly as we possibly can. We don’t see these as “Imagine Worldwide” programs in Malawi or “Imagine Worldwide” in Sierra Leone. These are programs of the government in Malawi and of the government in Sierra Leone that we are helping to support. We’re helping to build capacity and infrastructure to build muscle within the systems. But as soon as the government is ready to maintain this on its own, we are more than pleased to step out of the way and to move on to the next challenge. I think that positioning is really important for the governments. It’s really important for the funders. It’s really important for us and our team. Too many times, an NGO establishes itself and 50 years later, the NGO is still there, doing the work. We need this work to be sustainable within existing systems. Part of that is a commitment for us to get out of the way. We have to believe in sovereignty and the power of governments to run themselves, while also acknowledging that the use of technology in a place like Malawi is new, and so there is going to be a period of time where we have to build some functions that do not currently exist.

TH: That certainly resonates with my experiences in the US where we’ve seen multiple improvement efforts collide in schools in ways that can actually undermine their capacity for improvement. What made Malawi a good context for you to work on scale-up?

JW: The work in Malawi actually predates the partnership with Imagine. There was a program called “Unlocking Talent,” with the software developer onebillion that became our partner. The onebillion CEO went to Malawi, I think, 15 years ago, fell in love with the country, and developed the product. The first product they developed was in Chichewa, in Malawi. In other words, this was not developed in the West and then adapted to the context. This actually was developed within the Malawian context. We became a research partner to look at impact and to help do the RCT work. That has now evolved into a much more scalable model that we call the BeFIT Program. It’s serving standards [grades] one through four, whereas the first program was only standard two.

A person holding a tablet

AI-generated content may be incorrect. — Key elements of the BeFIT program in Malawi

There have been a whole bunch of iterations along the way to develop our general approach, but it basically evolved by thinking about what it would take to actually scale the program much more cost effectively to many more students in more systems. If you look at the other places that we worked, you’ll see that we started with finding local partners, mostly local NGOs, some local social-oriented businesses, and then turned over a lot of the functions to those local partners to see what worked in different contexts. From that, we have built a series of centralized functions that we’re now drawing on in our country partnerships, as opposed to having it be completely decentralized. We learned a lot from the initial more decentralized exploration, but we’re now in the process of creating more standardization. Part of scaling depends on acknowledging that you can’t have fifty different bespoke operations. You need to have systems and standards and data systems. When you have 6000 children in Malawi, using a total of 1000 devices, you can do some things by hand; but now we’re trying to serve millions of children in Malawi, with hundreds of thousands of tablets. We now need data driven systems in order to be able to manage that equipment in the field.

TH: Let’s follow the arc of that evolution in Malawi. What are some of the steps that were crucial to your learning and to the development of the model?

JW: In Malawi, we took seven or eight years to do the research and to get the right level of government buy-in to understand what was working. That included learning things like what’s the infrastructure for the typical school in Malawi? Just to give you the context, that means more than 100 children per teacher and inadequate levels of teacher training. There’s very rarely basic infrastructure in place, so no electricity and certainly no internet connectivity. That’s the reality of the average class in Malawi. So as you think about the components of our model that have emerged the first was what you would call the infrastructure component. We put solar power into all of our schools, addressing questions like:

Where do solar panels go?
How does the solar electricity feed a bank of lithium batteries?
How do the tablets get stored and secured overnight so that they’re charged and they’re safe?
How does all that equipment get distributed to children in a really efficient manner, so that you’re getting as much asset utilization as possible and as much learning time as possible?

In the end, our research consistently shows that the number of minutes each student uses the content is directly correlated to the level of learning. So we’re addressing these 101 things that need to be done in terms of the infrastructure and operations to maximize that time on task. And that has to take into account that the school day and the school periods are very short in Malawi and you have a lot of children in the classroom. So even just getting kids in and out of a classroom is a lot harder than in many other contexts.

A group of children raising their hands

AI-generated content may be incorrect. — A classroom in Malawi

TH: You just described those complexities really effectively, but for those of us who aren’t familiar with the context, can you go into it even more deeply? What does it really take to get a program like this up and running at scale?

JW: I think that in addition to a foundational learning organization, we are, in a lot of ways, also a supply chain logistics company. Learning gains are still our north star, but the reality is you’re talking about a phase one of BeFIT that involved launching the program in five hundred schools in five months across half of the country of Malawi, including very rural districts. So we have to deal with the logistics of getting five hundred secure storage cabinets into those schools. We have to deal with the logistics of getting 100,000 tablets distributed across those 500 schools and of getting the solar equipment put into 500 schools. That’s a significant operational lift, and you have to approach that with a level of rigor in terms of those key functions, if you’re going to be able to scale, and you’re going to be able to do that on time. And we had to do that on budget in the middle of a huge macro-economic meltdown in terms of currency and raw materials. In the grand scheme of things, once the equipment is in place, kids can get learning very, very quickly. There’s not a huge lift in terms of adult training. There’s not a huge lift in terms of the role of the adult in the model itself; the content has been built to be autonomous, meaning the child can be self-directed. The tablets themselves have been built to be very robust. A lot of enhancements have been made to make the tablet durable. There’s a long battery life so it can be used throughout the day. Every part of the tablet has been built with screws so that a component can be swapped out if something breaks. So every part of the context has been taken into account in order to get that equipment into the field and utilized. This is one of the big learnings: you have to start with the context in mind, and you have to start with the learning objectives in mind. You then make a series of software decisions, and then you make a series of hardware decisions. Too often in education, it goes the other direction, where people buy stuff, but then they haven’t really thought about what’s going to go on the stuff? What’s the training required? What are the charging and security components of it? What is our learning objective at the end of the day? You have to start with learning, move into the context, and think about all the infrastructure decisions that need to be made in order to make that learning possible in that context.

“You have to start with learning, move into the context, and think about all the infrastructure decisions that need to be made in order to make that learning possible in that context.”

KK: I think it’s also important to flag that in working on the logistics we included the government from day one. That means things like using the delivery trucks the government already had. Trying to manage that coordination may have been a little slower or less efficient in some ways, but too often people design an implementation model, put a bow on it, and then hand it to the government without including them from inception.

Next Week: Building the Capacity to Improve and Sustain Foundational Learning Through Government and Local Partnerships in Malawi: Joe Wolf and Kira Keane on the Evolution of Imagine Worldwide (Part 2)

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Posted in early childhood education, education reform, Educational change, educational technology, Interviews, Malawi

Tagged Africa, education, education reform, Educational change, educational technology, Malawi, technology, travel

Still Worth It? Scanning the Post-COVID Challenges and Possibilities for Access to Colleges and Careers in the US (Part 1)

Posted on July 16, 2025 by T Hatch | Leave a comment

How have the pathways into higher education and the workforce changed in the US since the school closures of the COVID-19 pandemic? In the first part of this two-part post, RJ Wicks scans recent news and research to summarize some of the current conditions students in the US face as they try to find their way into adulthood. The second post explores some of the “micro-innovations” that educators are developing to help eliminate some of the barriers that limit access to learning opportunities and good jobs after high school. 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 the emergence of tutoring programs after the school closures: Tutoring takes off and Predictable challenges and possibilities for effective tutoring at scale.

“A college degree is the surest ticket to the middle class.”
—President Barack Obama, 2015

Despite the continuing hope that college can be a gateway to economic mobility, the COVID-19 pandemic contributed to the already considerable challenges that many students face in getting into college and finding their way into the workforce. Illustrating the depths of the problem around the world, OECD’s analysis of survey responses from 690,000 15- and 16-year-old students from more than 80 countries concluded that “students are now expressing very high levels of career uncertainty and confusion. Job expectations have changed little since 2000 and bear little relationship to actual patterns of labour market demand.”

“[S]tudents are now expressing very high levels of career uncertainty and confusion. Job expectations have changed little since 2000 and bear little relationship to actual patterns of labour market demand.”

The report, comparing survey results from each of the PISA assessments shows that almost 40% of the students participating in the survey in 2022 are “career uncertain,” up from about 12% in 2000. In addition, almost 50% of all participates agreed or strongly agreed with the statement that “school has done little to prepare me for adult life” and almost 25% agreeing that “school has been a waste of time.”

Concerns reported by 15-16 year-old students on the 2022 PISA assessment
The State of Global Teenage Career Preparation, *OECD*

In the US, concerns about getting in to the workforce combine with challenges that can limit access to college and other post-secondary options. Although recent enrollments in college in the US have begun to increase again, students’ opportunities remain restricted by growing financial barriers, expanding inequities, and a lack of alignment between what students learn in school and what the workforce demands. Additionally, a lack of career pathways for students who may not pursue traditional four-year degrees, limited information about the existing possibilities, and lack of personalized support make it particularly difficult for first-generation college students and other historically disadvantaged groups to navigate both conventional and new post-secondary opportunities. Addressing any of these challenges is likely to get even more difficult in a context where some now question the value of a college education and where the current US administration has attacked many institutions of higher education and the funding streams that support them.

Enrollment dropped—especially at community colleges—though enrollment rates appear to be rising again
Between 2019 and 2021, undergraduate enrollment in the US fell by nearly 1 million students, the largest two-year decrease in more than 50 years. As Doug Shapiro, from National Student Clearinghouse explained in 2022, “enrollment in undergraduate and graduate programs has been trending downward since around 2012, but the pandemic turbocharged the declines at the undergrad level.”

In community colleges, in particular, 90% of those responding to a national survey reported enrollment declines in the first year of the pandemic, with 50% reporting declines of more than 10%. Those declines at community colleges continued, amounting to about a 13% enrollment drop over the course of the pandemic. By 2022, entry into two-year colleges was more than 20% lower than it was before the pandemic, with larger drops in Black- and Hispanic-majority colleges. In contrast, entry into four-year colleges declined by about 6%.

Sparking some hope that the enrollment declines are only temporary, more recent figures show that enrollments have begun to rise again. Fall enrollments in 2024 grew by almost 5% in comparison to fall 2023 and slightly exceeded fall enrollments in 2019 before the pandemic began. Enrollment gains were particularly strong in associate programs (up 6.3 percent), bachelor’s programs (up 2.9 percent), master’s programs (up 3.3 percent), and doctoral programs (up 2.0 percent).

College is unaffordable for most low-income students

The recent rise in college enrollments provides some hope that more students will take advantage of post-secondary education, but access to college remains limited by substantial financial barriers, particularly for students from historically disadvantaged communities. The average federal student loan debt in the U.S. is approximately $37,850, contributing to a national student loan debt total exceeding $1.6 trillion. This substantial debt burden influences life choices, with one-third of borrowers indicating it has impacted their ability to continue education, and 14% reporting it has affected decisions such as starting a family. Such financial constraints force many students to forgo higher education or work excessive hours, diminishing their focus on academic and career readiness.

Beyond tuition, textbooks, transportation, housing, and emergency expenses often make higher education inaccessible, even with financial aid. The National College Attainment Network (NCAN) defines an institution as affordable if its total cost —including tuition, fees, and $300 for emergency expenses — can be covered by the sum of grants, loans, Federal Work Study, a proxy for expected family contribution (EFC), and estimated summer wages. When the cost exceeds these combined resources, there is an “affordability gap.”

According to the National College Attainment Network (NCAN) Affordability Report:

Only 12 states had affordable public four-year institutions in 2024.
In only 10 states were more than 50% of public BA programs affordable (AK, AR, FL, IL, ME, NM, OK, WA, WV, and WY)
On average, community colleges were unaffordable in 28 states, and four states had no affordable community colleges (HI, NH, RI, and UT)
All community colleges were affordable in only three states (IN, ME, VT) and at least 75% of community colleges were affordable in only ten states.

Equity gaps continue to shape enrollment and completion of higher education

Students from higher-income families remain significantly more likely to attend college. Reflecting the challenges for those from lower-income backgrounds, as the Institute for Higher Education Policy puts it: “Students with unmet need take out more loans, work more hours, face higher degrees of food and housing insecurity, and are at greater risk of forgoing higher education or leaving school without a credential.”

“Students with unmet need take out more loans, work more hours, face higher degrees of food and housing insecurity, and are at greater risk of forgoing higher education or leaving school without a credential.”

Furthermore, students from the lowest-income backgrounds would need to contribute almost 150% of their household income to cover the full-time cost of a four-year college, even after accounting for grant and scholarship aid. As one illustration of the disproportionate financial burden on low-income families, the share of household income required to pay for college increases dramatically from the highest- to the lowest-income households.

Illustrating the depth of the equity issues, first-generation college students, English learners, and students with disabilities face barriers that make it much more likely that they will drop out before getting a degree. Nationally, 89 percent of low-income first-generation students leave college within six years without a degree. More than a quarter leave after their first year — four times the dropout rate of higher-income second-generation students. Furthermore, the six-year graduation rate of students with disabilities at four-year colleges is 49.5%, compared to roughly 68% for students without disabilities.

Students are unprepared for college and careers

Contributing to the enrollment challenges, high school curricula often fail to align with postsecondary expectations, resulting in high rates of remedial courses particularly for students of color:

According to New America and the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study (NPSAS) 2020 Undergraduate data (NPSAS:20), 40% of students attending a public 2-year college and one-quarter of students from public 4-year colleges took a remedial course at some point.
Students of color and low-income students continue to be placed into remedial courses at higher rates than their more advantaged peers, and almost half of Black and Latinx students attending public 2-year colleges, and 30% at 4-year institutions have enrolled in at least one remedial course.

The focus on four-year college degrees also overlooks the value of Career and Technical Education (CTE) and other pathways that align with workforce needs.

More than 30 million U.S. jobs paying an average of $55,000 a year don’t require a bachelor’s degree. Despite this, as of 2018, only about 8% of high school students were enrolled in CTE programs.

Black and Hispanic learners also tend to be overrepresented in service-oriented professions such as health sciences or education and training; these professions tend to have lower wages, in contrast to higher wage STEM fields where they are underrepresented.

Next Week: 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)

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Posted in College Readiness, education reform, Educational Policy

Tagged college, College Readiness, education, Educational change, Educational Policy, higher education, news, scholarships

Tag Archives: Educational change

Celebrating Extraordinary Educators from Africa’s Aspire Fellowship Programme

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

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