In this episode, you’ll hear:

·         Why common attendance measures fall short and what attendance data schools need to be proactive

·         How actionable data can help identify students in need of support earlier

·         Lessons from Washoe County School District’s in-house approach to creating data tools that educators actually use

At a time when chronic absenteeism remains elevated and too many students are at risk of falling off track, this conversation highlights how better use of data can help schools respond earlier, more effectively, and with greater impact.

This episode explores what it truly takes to provide students with the career exposure, experiences, and real-world applications they need to make informed and prepared choices on the path to adult success.

In this episode, you’ll hear about:

• How PREP-KC builds career pathways from elementary school through postsecondary education
• What meaningful career exploration looks like at each stage—elementary, middle, and high school
• How education systems can keep pace with rapid labor market changes, including the rise of AI
• Key lessons, obstacles, and advice for communities looking to replicate and sustain this work

This conversation offers both practical insights and real optimism about what is possible when communities commit to long-term, student-centered career pathways.

Four years after the height of the pandemic, schools are still facing high rates of absenteeism, declining academic achievement, and growing well-being challenges. These needs are often too great for schools to address alone.

James shares how United Way of Northeast Florida is helping bring community partners and schools together to expand capacity, provide timely supports, and ensure that every student has the opportunity to thrive.

Listen now to hear how these partnerships are helping schools reimagine what it takes to support all young people on the path to success.

Each year, nearly 8 million high school juniors and seniors in the U.S. could be tapped as youth leaders, mentors, tutors, or success coaches. Imagine the impact if even a fraction took on these roles—millions more young people empowered to help their peers succeed, while building their own leadership, communication, and problem-solving skills.

In this episode, Yani Mason, Chief Executive Officer of Girls Inc. of Chicago speaks with Dr. Robert Balfanz about how near-peer supports are transforming communities, strengthening school connectedness, and driving both academic and personal growth. You’ll learn about best practices and how engaging in pro-social activities creates a ripple effect of empowerment.

Connections to help girls become the best versions of themselves and reach their fullest potential.

The discussion also explores how improved access to post-secondary outcomes data, leadership networks, and innovative partnerships can help schools provide timely, informative, and actionable post-secondary guidance that help put all their students on real pathways to success.

Don’t miss this insightful conversation about transforming high school post-secondary guidance into a powerful tool that supports all students.

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Links to Additional Resources: 

• Measurement for Mobility
• Carnegie Classifications
• KY Futuriti 
• OneGoal Quality Enrollment
• National Student Clearinghouse StudentTracker

This episode explores how the Mark Armijo Academy is helping students take ownership of their futures through internships and work-based learning. The conversation touches on the changing landscape of work, the decline of traditional career pathways, and the urgent need for schools to adapt by offering students meaningful exposure to modern opportunities.

This episode sets the tone for a season focused on innovative approaches to education, featuring leaders, thinkers, and practitioners from across the country who are working to create systems that truly support all learners on their path to adult success. 

Listen now and subscribe to the Designing Education Podcast for powerful conversations with education leaders across the country.

This conversation builds on our previous episode with Tim Knowles of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, diving deeper into how high schools can shift from credit based to learning based, from reactive to proactive student supports, co-creating new designs with educators, students and families. Tune in for a thought-provoking conversation on transforming high schools to better serve every student!

The discussion sheds light on a critical issue: the sharp decline in college enrollment among the Class of 2024. This cohort, shaped by a disrupted high school experience during the pandemic—virtual learning in ninth grade, increased absenteeism in tenth grade—now questions the relevance of traditional education.

Far from being a temporary setback, this trend signals concerns for the future. Educational attainment remains essential, with profound connections to health, civic engagement, and economic prosperity. This episode is a call to action for educators, leaders, families, and communities to collaborate in reimagining high schools and postsecondary transitions, ensuring students are equipped to thrive in today’s rapidly changing world.  

With one in four of our nation's students attending rural schools, it's crucial that these often-overlooked communities are included in national improvement efforts.  Taylor will share how the Collaborative is helping empower these schools by connecting them through local intermediary organizations, fostering dynamic learning communities that not only strengthen student success in rural areas but also generate innovative solutions with the potential to reshape education across the country. 

Krys is joined by Megan Hougard, Chief of College and Career Success for Chicago Public Schools (CPS).  She plays a vital role in developing the district’s high school strategy. Her work ensures that CPS students have the necessary support to succeed beyond high school. Megan’s vision includes multiple postsecondary pathways, enabling students from every Chicago neighborhood to pursue careers aligned with their passions. 

In this fourth episode of our third season, Krys and Megan will engage in a conversation about building school communities where students feel connected every day and explore how educators can create pathways to success that are inclusive and impactful.  Join us for an insightful discussion that promises to inspire and inform educators and leaders alike. 

Talent Development Secondary is one of nine partnering organizations that works with the GRAD Partnership. The coalition is a national initiative that partners with communities to implement high-quality student success systems so that schools are better equipped to address the scale and scope of post-pandemic student needs and graduate all students ready for the future. The GRAD Partnership works directly with schools, districts, and local community organizations to create the conditions needed to bring the use of evidence-based student success systems from a new practice to common practice. 

This season’s series will focus on exploring student success systems, the next generation of early warning, on-track, and multi-tiered system of supports, which aim to integrate and increase the impact of existing student support efforts. Dr. Balfanz will host education leaders and practitioners to discuss what it will take to design our schools so they are places everyone wants to be, and all students are put on a pathway to adult success. 

Whether you’re a researcher, education advocate, teacher, school leader, district leader, or education reformer, we hope you’ll join us!  And if you like the podcast, help us spread the word by using the hashtag #DesigningEducation on social media. 

In Season Two’s sixth episode, Cindy Marten, the U.S. Deputy Secretary of Education, joins Robert Balfanz for a conversation about how local innovation, K-12 and higher education collaboration, NPSS, and federal education policy all have key roles to play in enabling design of an education system that works for all students.

 At the time when the sources and locations of knowledge and training have multiplied exponentially, innovative efforts like New Hampshire’s ELO Network help break seat time requirements, drawing on the realization that learning is not determined by the amount of time a student spends in a classroom, but rather occurs both in school and through experiences outside of schools. What Kerrie and Sean’s groundbreaking work shows is that challenging seat time is being done—and thus that it can be done. 

A hundred years later, the standards and accountability of credit students needed to graduate remains largely the same, and this essentially leaves no flexibility in a student's schedule for any form of experiential or out-of-school learning. At the time when the sources and location of knowledge and training have multiplied exponentially, it is the innovative efforts like New Hampshire's Extended Learning Opportunity Network that helps to break the gridlock of seat time requirements.

In this episode, Robert Balfanz is joined by Kerrie Alley-Violette, ELO coordinator of the Sanborn Regional High School and president of the ELO Network, and Sean Peschel, ELO coordinator at Oyster River High School and vice president of the ELO Network to discuss the innovative work happening in New Hampshire.

In today’s episode Bob Balfanz is joined by Michael Wotorson, director of the Schott Foundation for Public Education’s National Opportunity to Learn Network, who has been at the forefront of efforts to organize and support community-driven efforts to push schools towards opportunity to learn for all. 

Positive relationships enable trust, which enables cooperation, and collective and engaged effort. They also serve as a buffer to the impacts of trauma and life's challenges. It is becoming more and more recognized that positive supportive relationships with adults are essential to school success. The pandemic drove home how important supportive relationships in schools between adults and students were to the wellbeing of all. Yet, middle and high schools have not been designed to support and enable strong adult-student relationships. Teachers often see 120 to 150 students a day, students interact with six to 10 or more adults every day for short periods of highly scripted time, which leaves little time or opportunity for students and teachers to get to know each other. As a result, everyone tends to interact with each other based on their role in the school. Thus, only about half of high school students report there is an adult at school who knows and cares about them as a person, with only about one third of students from historically underserved populations saying this. Those that said they had a supportive adult at school reported half the mental health challenges during the pandemic as those who did not. We can see that relationships really matter. They are not nice. They are necessary. So how do we close the relationship gap in schools? Tune in as we dig deep into this question. 

Over the past five years, a group of six states have been working with the Everyone Graduate Center at Johns Hopkins University on the Cross State High School Redesign Collaborative initiative. Many of these states are using the comprehensive school improvement provisions from the Federal Every Student Succeeds Act to organize the work. Dr. Sonja Robertson, Executive Director of School Improvement for the Mississippi Department of Education, has been part of this effort from the very beginning and joins Bob Balfanz to discuss the many things we’ve learned from this cross-collaborative effort. 

We often say it takes a village to raise a child. We don't, however, organize our schools that way. The assumption is that everything the school needs is provided by teachers and staff, with little coordination or communication with out-of-school activities that students and families engage with after-school or on weekends. In many ways this puts too big a burden on schools and leaves too many community assets underutilized. 

The result is students don't get the full set of supports and experiences they need, school staff are exhausted doing the best they can without all the resources they need, and community organizations are often frustrated that they could be doing more, but don't have a clear way to do so. 

In eastern Missouri, a dedicated nonprofit partner with a listening ear helps coordinate a community-school ecosystem, offering large numbers of young people an integrated support framework rather than relying on ineffectual shift work. 

When we think about designing education to meet the needs of the 21st century and provide everyone a robust pathway to adult success, we typically draw on two sources: the adults involved in the current education system and our own experiences. Education is the one field where just about everybody considers themselves experts, because we all have a deep lived experience of going to school. However, relying on these can result in an education system that is much less dynamic than the world around it, and one that doesn’t even ask the students and families that are experiencing it firsthand. Yet they are the most informed observers of where new designs are needed, what they might be, and the challenges we need to address. This is particularly true for the communities and students for whom the current education system works the least: communities and students who live in areas where residential segregation, structural racism, and disinvestment have produced concentrated poverty in underfunded school systems.

It is at the intersection of place, history, and student voice that Dr. Lofton is doing an inventive work to ask those whom nobody has asked and connect their knowledge and insights with a growing coalition of community groups and policy makers to redesign the most broken aspects of our education system.

One of the unique features of education in the United States is how decentralized and localized the decision-making is. This has the ability to be a source of creativity and flexibility, which are necessary for innovation, but can also be a source of stagnation since roles are constantly shifting. 

This constant shift has given rise to another uniquely American institution: the local education intermediary. With long histories in their communities, these organizations often support the development of new approaches and ideas. In this podcast, Ms. Jimenez discusses ways that one such organization has supported the efforts of a large urban school district to develop a college-going culture and help young people develop viable plans for postsecondary success for nearly forty years.

Those designing education systems that work for all students need to resist the temptation to latch onto silver bullets. Context and circumstances always matter, even when educational strategies and practices are evidence-based. In addition, the more we seek to design education systems that work for all, the more we will find ourselves on the knowledge frontier: needing to figure things out in real time, rather than just trying to implement proven practices with fidelity. Using improvement science and a continuous improvement approach can help schools navigate these challenges and avoid potential pitfalls.

It has become a common refrain during the last year and a half that we should not return to the pre-pandemic “normal,” but use the disruption to create a better education system moving forward. One big and bold idea from JFF involves reimagining the last two years of high school and first two years of college. 

In this episode, Dr. Balfanz is joined by Educational Resource Strategies Chief Executive Officer Dr. Karen Hawley Miles and Senior Manager Eddie Branchaud to discuss credit recovery and the challenges that schools face as they help students get back on track. 

Hear about what Karen and Eddie have discovered as they look closely at the strategies schools across the country are using to help students catch up and thrive.