The Destination: A Future-Ready Learning Ecosystem

The destination – a Future-Ready Learning Ecosystem – lets go of a rigid system designed around standardized schooling, to make way for one centered on agentic learning. It’s built by re-architecting three foundational assumptions: what we learn, how and where we learn, and how we support learning.

At its core, the new system is a publicly-funded menu of learning experiences – in and beyond school – that are relevant, flexible, mastery-based, and learner-driven. Public funding is flexible, portable, and weighted to learner needs, following them to the learning experiences they choose – including school buildings as well as community- and career-connected spaces. Learners and their families, with support from a multi-modal AI and human-driven guidance system, navigate flexible pathways with supported autonomy. Providers are held to account for positive results by informed families and communities through dramatically transformed accountability systems.

Imagine a system truly designed to ensure each child thrives.

Instead of designing for a mythical “average” learner, this system is built for each and every learner. The new system holds as a core design principle that every learner is known, seen, and loved. Learning experiences are highly relationship- interest-driven, and aligned to the future-ready competencies young people need to thrive in life, career, and democracy. Effective learning designs grounded in the Science of Learning and Development for multilingual learners, neurodiverse learners, learners with disabilities, and gifted youth are woven into the fabric of every pathway. Real-time accountability systems are in place to ensure that every learner is being well-prepared to thrive in their future.

Imagine a system where progress is based on mastery, not seat time.

Learning and the crediting of that learning can occur anytime, anywhere, no longer restricted to a single building or an outdated agrarian calendar. When a learner needs extra help, they receive real-time support from expert adults and interactive AI agents. When they excel, they can accelerate. All progress is captured in a secure learner record, where the data is owned by the learner and their family.

Imagine a system oriented toward both individual and community success.

This is not an isolated, screen-centric, hyper-individualized future. It is the opposite. By using technology to customize for interest and pace, learners and educators have more time for developing deep knowledge, human skills, connection, and purpose in an AI-infused world. Learners solve real, community-based challenges together and interact with a rich and diverse variety of trained learning facilitators – from expert educators to near-peer and community mentors.

This new approach is designed to connect with a healthy, updated public infrastructure. Public buildings, including schools, become flexible learning spaces. Schools exist both as bundled sets of learning experiences, and as part of modular, self-constructed pathways. As learners mature, strong infrastructure – including safe transit options – enables them to move between places of learning like a lab, a classroom, an apprenticeship, and a service project.