America intends its education system to be the cornerstone in our nation’s success — the mutual success of each of us individually and all of us collectively. Most Americans recognize the system as integral to the enduring idea of every generation doing better. We expect it to be attuned to what the future requires. To maximize nature and nurture. To activate in all young people the agency that creates choices, so they thrive throughout life.

Trying to move the American education system closer to that intention has been the focus of so many of us for so many years. And yet we still have a system where a young person’s race, household income, and ZIP code remain among the best predictors of their socioeconomic fate. Where the likelihood of someone earning more than their parents has dropped by nearly half over the past two generations. 

Economic mobility, academic performance, workforce readiness, civic engagement, personal agency—pick your metric: too many students graduate unable to secure meaningful work or direct their own futures toward a meaningful life. Precisely when the demands of the future — economic, technological, civic — ask more from education, not less. 

We face a strategic dilemma. Traditional improvement strategies are too slow to close these gaps at the pace students need. But pure disruption — abandoning existing systems to build something new from scratch — means writing off the 50 million young people in schools today.

To meet this challenge, we need a fundamentally different approach—one that refuses the false choice between improving the system we have and designing the one we need. We must pursue both, with clarity and urgency.

The Logic of the Split Screen Strategy

We’re not alone in confronting this reality. Across every sector, leading organizations are wrestling with the same tension: how to deliver results today while building the systems the future demands. 

A year before McKinsey published Dual Transformation—its call for businesses to strengthen the core while simultaneously creating new engines of value—TNTP was already putting that theory into practice. 

Our split-screen strategy, Better + Bolder, is built for this moment — when economic uncertainty, technological disruption, and a changing workplace require both stability and bold reimagining. 

For nearly thirty years, TNTP has helped define what’s possible in public education, shaping national policy, advising state and district leaders, and partnering with schools to turn ideas into measurable outcomes. We’ve built a reputation for marrying insight with execution—research that reframes debates, policy frameworks that enable action, and classroom tools that deliver results.

Better + Bolder is the next evolution of that influence. For us, Better operates inside the system. It works with the structures, policies, and stakeholders that exist today. Success here is measured in changed practices, shifted mindsets, improved student outcomes within current school populations. This work builds trust, demonstrates impact, and reveals exactly where existing structures help or hinder what students need — insights that directly inform our Bolder work.

Bolder operates outside current constraints. It asks, “what would we build if we weren’t bound by compliance, seat time, or inherited structures?” This work requires different partnerships (including families, civic leaders, non-traditional educators), different timelines (longer runway for R&D), and different success metrics (proof of concept, not scale). It creates the models and evidence that fuel a movement for fundamental redesign.

Both are critical. Students in schools today can’t wait for the perfect system to emerge. But they also can’t afford incremental improvements to a system that’s fundamentally misaligned with their futures. Better keeps us accountable to urgency. Bolder keeps us focused on transformation.

There is real discipline involved in leading a split-screen strategy. Better requires asking at every turn, whether a decision will make transformation easier or harder later. Improvement should loosen the system’s constraints—not deepen them—so the shift to Bolder is accelerated, not obstructed. At the same time, there are equal risks on the Bolder side: ideas can easily drift beyond the reach of the system they’re meant to transform.

Navigating the tension between urgency and reinvention can’t be left to instinct. It requires explicit structure—our solution was to develop dual theories of action. 

The first theory of action — our TOA — will build on what we know works: changing policies, practices, and pedagogy in classrooms, districts and states across the country to ensure young people enter adulthood prepared for mobility and agency.

The other is a theory of different action — our TODA — which represents a fundamental shift in how we create change. It will be designed to support our goal – 50 million young people on a path to economic security and individual agency. Rather than convincing existing systems to change, we’ll build a national movement of educators, families, and civic leaders to co-create the schools America needs to transform at scale. We’ll prototype solutions with communities, prove what’s possible, and create pressure from the grassroots up and the grasstops down to redesign the system itself.

A Model Built to be Shared

One organization operating this way creates proof points; dozens create a movement. That’s why we’re actively urging leaders to adopt a split-screen approach—not as a theory, but as the mindset this moment demands.

The approach isn’t proprietary — it’s portable. Any district, state, nonprofit, or funder can adopt Better + Bolder principles to navigate this moment. The question isn’t whether your organization should operate on two timelines — it’s how.

The core principles are straightforward:

Define your Better work clearly. What can you strengthen, improve, or scale within the current system that will materially improve outcomes for students now? This isn’t about small tweaks — it’s about meaningful transformation of what exists.

Define your Bolder work with equal clarity. What needs to be fundamentally reimagined? What would you build if you weren’t constrained by existing structures, policies, or assumptions? This isn’t about abandoning reality — it’s about creating proof points for what’s possible.

Protect both. Create separate teams, funding streams, and success metrics. Better work will face pressure to be more transformational. Bolder work will face pressure to be more “realistic.” Both pressures will kill the strategy if you let them.

Develop two Theories of Action—one that delivers results within today’s paradigm, and one that builds the new paradigm the future requires. The Better framework must be just as strategic as the Bolder, capitalizing on the learning and innovation potential of the current moment.

Learn across timelines. Your Better work will reveal what’s most broken in the current system. Your Bolder work will generate insights about what students actually need. Let each inform the other without collapsing into a muddled middle.

Build for the handoff. Eventually, your Bolder prototypes will need pathways to scale. That only happens if your current infrastructure is prepared to adopt fundamentally new approaches – in our case, coherent learning experiences that include mobility factors, new career pathways curricula, real world projects powered by AI. It’s important to design for that convergence from the start.

TNTP will model this approach and share what we learn. But we’re not waiting for perfection before inviting others in. The sector needs multiple organizations testing dual strategies, sharing lessons, and creating the momentum that makes systemic transformation possible.

We offer this approach as an invitation: to try it, adapt it, lead with it.