The Vision in Practice

These principles are not abstract. They come to life in the daily lives of learners and educators. To make this vision concrete, let’s look at this ecosystem from three distinct perspectives: the foundation of a young child, the journey of an adolescent, and the new, empowered role of educators who support learners.

The Foundational Years (Ages 4-12)

For younger children, the system prioritizes safety, belonging, self-regulation, foundational knowledge and skills including core literacy and numeracy, and learner-led exploration – solving for the unique needs of this developmental stage. Families can access full-day, year-round, publicly available learning environments (including schools), all of which are designed to support both individual growth and the common good. But they are not monolithic.

• Instead of a single, one-size-fits-all traditional school model, learners can access multiple options including more flexible, modular, partial and full-day learning environments.
• Instead of one uniform curriculum for every child, families can exercise agency in “stacking” different certified models, including a wide range of school- and community-based learning environments.
• Instead of narrowing focus early, learners explore a broad perspective of the world, building a foundational love of learning alongside core skills and knowledge.

Imagine an 8-year-old. He’s not just “in 3rd grade,” moving from one subject to the next each hour. He is embedded in a tight-knit tribe of learners who are spending part of their week  immersed in the soil of a community garden. After exploring local data on food insecurity together, their primary educator challenged them to identify new solutions. The group debated ideas, and decided to plant a “salsa garden” to share with a local food bank.

Within this project, our 8-year-old is pursuing a specific question that sparks his interest: How might we design a salsa garden that uses the least amount of water? While the cohort practices foundational math (by measuring plots and plant spacing) and persuasive writing (to raise funds for the project), he teams up with his main project partner to research drought-resistant cilantro varieties and design a simple drip-irrigation system. In addition to math and language arts, he is building durable skills as a self-directed learner and a collaborative problem-solver – all while deepening his understanding of the role he wants to play in his community.

This 8-year-old’s cohort is led by a primary educator, and the project is run by an AmeriCorps member teamed with a master gardener from the neighborhood. All the while, AI-enabled digital infrastructure is powering the experience in the background. The technology makes rigorous, interest-driven, real-world learning experiences a reality – not just through a few great field trips, but as the structure for most learning. It captures his work on the project through authentic assessment, and seamlessly links it to a progress monitoring system that this learner, his family, and his entire ‘village’ of educators and mentors can access – all of whom are tracking and supporting his progress toward his learning goals.

The goal at this stage is to build a rock-solid foundation of knowledge and skills – including core literacy and numeracy – while steering a greater share of learners’ time to establishing a solid sense of identity and belonging, practicing metacognition about learning goals and progress, engaging in decision-making and collaboration, and – just as importantly – cultivating a foundational love of learning and exploring his contributions to the broader community.

Adolescence to Launch (Ages 13-20+)

From adolescence into early adulthood, the system is designed to maximize agency, purpose-finding, real-world connection, and successful launch into adulthood. The rigid architecture of the “factory” disappears, replaced by a flexible, high-traction series of experiences.

• Instead of rigid Carnegie Units based on seat time, learners move at their own pace, demonstrating mastery of skills and content through new assessment approaches.
• Instead of only discrete, siloed subjects, learners engage in integrated, real-world projects and work experiences that require them to build and transfer knowledge and skills from multiple disciplines.
• Instead of a single textbook or standardized curriculum, learners access a universe of high-quality, personalized learning experiences, both human and digital, made possible by AI and emerging technologies.
• Instead of abstract letter grades, learners build and own their own mastery-based transcript and a rich, life-long portfolio of validated evidence that shows what they know and can do.
• Instead of a future that is disconnected from friends and community, learners feel a real sense of belonging, and engage by design in collaborative and community-oriented learning experiences.

Imagine a 16-year-old. She’s not just “in 11th grade.” She is exploring an engineering pathway, which includes a credit-bearing internship with the city’s public works department. Through this experience, she has joined a team tasked with a real-life challenge: design a sustainable water reclamation system for a new community park. Her internship supervisor, a municipal engineer, has helped her identify a personal quest: model the system’s potential environmental and financial impacts, and then co-present her analysis to city council. This isn’t a hypothetical assignment; it’s a real deliverable. To succeed, she must master principles of physics, biology, and data science. At the same time, she is building essential skills in project management, collaboration, and public speaking, and investigating what her own purpose and strengths might be.

She is guided by her primary educator who knows her deeply and helps her build core knowledge, advised by her internship supervisor who guides real-world application, and coached by a near-peer mentor in the community. The experience is augmented by an AI-enabled digital infrastructure layer that makes complex, personalized, applied learning a reality all learners can access. A digital platform captures her proposal and public presentation as proof of her mastery. This evidence is seamlessly linked to her mastery-based transcript – a secure, portable record that she and her family own, and that her team of educators, advisors, and postsecondary counselors can access and understand.

This is the rich evidence that colleges and employers now demand. Graduation isn’t a cliff at age 18; it’s a seamless onramp to multiple pathways based on her learning journey and her goals for the future – whether that’s college, a technical field, national service, or entrepreneurship.

The Educator’s Experience

For educators, this new system is designed to engender the same human experiences that it expects them to build with and for learners. It tackles head-on the long-entrenched challenges of educator burn-out with better sustainability, more creative agency, and more joy in the human aspects of teaching. In this system, adults are guides and learning designers who are focused on fostering rich relationships and supporting learner-led pathways.

• Instead of being isolated deliverers of a rote curriculum, they partner with technology to build active and engaging learning experiences.
• Instead of being the “sage on the stage,” they invest deeply in cultivating learner agency by facilitating inquiry, coaching for competency, and empowering learners to navigate their own growth.
• Instead of being constrained by traditional time and tasks, they are freed by smart technology use to focus on relationships with learners, collaboration, and effective instructional design
• Instead of a one-size-fits-all career ladder, there are multiple, flexible pathways for adult participation, training, and credentialing in a diverse learning ecosystem.

Imagine the full range of adults and near-peers engaged in supporting learners on their pathway through childhood, adolescence, and beyond. They might be a master facilitator for projects, a coach focused on building specific skills, a competency-assessor helping to recognize mastery progress, a worksite supervisor with visibility into each young person’s broader portfolio, or a community mentor. Crucially, educators are no longer disconnected islands. They work in flexible and collaborative pods where they co-design, co-teach, and support one another, making the profession sustainable, dynamic, collaborative, and, as it should be, deeply respected.