In 2013, as part of his State of the Union Address, President Obama issued a challenge to redesign America’s high schools so that young people graduate with skills and abilities aligned with the needs of a global economy. In this year's State of the Union, the President called for a national effort to create more Next Generation High Schools – schools that incorporate key elements of redesign including personalized learning, expanded STEM initiatives, work-based education, and a renewed focus on opportunities for girls and under-represented minority students. well-paying fields. You can read more about these goals here.
The Big Idea
Teenagers have the best B.S. detectors on the planet. When we say we want them to love learning, to be curious, and to think critically, they don’t quite buy it. We actually believe ourselves when we say it. Why wouldn’t we want our young people to become innovative and ethical humans? But in our hearts, we know what they’ve been trying to tell us for a long time: American public high school has failed to keep up.
Once upon a time, public high school was a place of radical innovation. Free and accessible schooling was seen as a vital part of democracy that would guarantee equal opportunity for all. Industrialization transformed high school into a place to prepare the future workforce for new jobs in factories and large-scale farms.To ensure that everyone received fair and uniform instruction, we adopted the Carnegie Unit, which quantified learning based on the amount of time a student spends sitting in a classroom. The curriculum shifted to focus on rules, repetition and small, contained problems rather than large ones. Subjects were broken into time-based chunks signaled by a shrill bell. To prepare the teenagers of the early 20th century for factory life, we put them in a pre-factory. And that’s where we’ve kept our teenagers ever since.
In the last 100 years, as careers have moved from the industrial to the idea-driven; as global economies have risen and fallen; as women have strengthened the workforce; as the US has welcomed nearly 250 million new people; as we’ve gone from a Model-T to a Tesla and a switchboard to a smartphone… high school has stayed frozen in time. We want our students to think critically, but we make them memorize. We want intellectual curiosity, but we pad the schedule with easy courses. We want innovation, but we teach to a packet. We want self-reliance, but we force them to sit prisoner in the name of learning.
Our refusal to act is costing us. America is falling behind in the world. And every year, we’re losing more ground. But here’s the thing: we can fix this. But we have to scrap the blueprint. Revolutionize this dangerously broken system. And if we do — if we can completely transform the model for public high school — we think we can change a whole lot more. If we change high school, we can change the future workforce for a complex, competitive world. We can change the poverty rate and the inequity of incarceration. We can change the broken connection between schools and communities. We can change the very building blocks of American society. If we profoundly change high school, we can reach not just the 50 million kids enrolled in public school, but the hundreds of millions who will follow them, and the billions of people worldwide that they will impact.
It’s time to step up. It’s time to rethink the model itself and truly innovate. Let’s challenge the idea of bodies in seats and 500 page textbooks. Let’s teach to the subject, not to the bell. Let’s inspire a new kind of knowledge that’s agile, creative, and endlessly relevant. Let’s apply our astounding ingenuity to one of the largest public systems in the world. Let’s truly reimagine what a public high school should be, partnering with the brightest talent in the country. Let’s make a renewable system that works for today, and tomorrow. Let’s honor the beautiful promise the founders of public school made. Let’s make a brave leap forward. Millions of kids are depending on us to succeed; the least we can do is to try.
Let’s build our next-generation high schools.
In his 2015 State of the Union Address, President Obama called for a national effort to create more Next Generation High Schools — schools that incorporate key elements of redesign, including more personalized and active learning, access to real-world and hands-on learning like “making” experiences, deeper ties to post-secondary institutions, and a focus on expanding STEM opportunities for girls and other groups of students who are underrepresented in these fields.
Across the country, people have been hard at work designing and implementing new visions of what high school can be. So on November 10, we held the first-ever White House Summit on Next Generation High Schools. We invited hundreds of teachers, students, researchers, and innovators to share their experiences and collaborate to transform our high schools. Here’s what happens when you put 130 of the nation's finest education leaders in the same room.
The Process
Earlier this week, we hosted the first-ever Summit on Next Generation High Schools at The White House, bringing together teachers, administrators, students, philanthropists, edtech companies, and entrepreneurs to discuss big, bold ideas on how to profoundly change the current state of our nation’s public high school system. Attendees were invited to set aside the traditional schooling blueprint in order to make way for new, innovative educational models that puts the student first by empowering them through agile, creative, and endlessly relevant learning systems.
We had the privilege to hear from a diverse, highly credentialed and passionate set of experts in the space, in order to explore the myriad vantage points and shared purpose for redesigning the nation’s schools system. We received hundreds of commitments from over 80 organizations, schools, and companies, totaling over $375 million dollars.
The People
The inspiring speakers and their revolutionary proposals captivated us and pushed us to think harder about how to come together and collectively progress these and other extraordinary efforts already underway. Here is a round-up of the inspiring speakers we heard from, accompanied by 2-minute lightning talks recorded live from the White House.
The Plan
We’ve made tremendous progress over the past year, but we’re not done yet. It takes teachers working every day to inspire their students, administrators ensuring their teachers have tools and support they need, researchers breaking ground in learning science, industry and foundation leaders who are seeding exciting work in communities across the country, and the full spectrum of partners working to create a more equitable education system. Together, we can transform communities and build high schools that inspire new possibilities.