Designing Education

In Season 4, Episode 6 of the Designing Education Podcast , Dr. Robert Balfanz speaks with Dr. J.T. Stark, Data Analytics Coordinator for the Washoe County School District in Nevada, about how schools can move from collecting data to using it in powerful, practical ways. Too often, schools have access to data that is not organized to support real-time insight, leaving educators without what they n...

We’re excited to share our new episode of Design Education , featuring an engaging conversation between Dr. Robert Balfanz and Doug Elmer, Vice President of PREP-KC, a Missouri-based nonprofit expanding access to meaningful career pathways for students across the Kansas City region. This episode explores what it truly takes to provide students with the career exposure, experiences, and real-world...

In this episode, James Ellout, Vice President of Community Impact at United Way of Northeast Florida joins Dr. Robert Balfanz to talk about how community organizations can partner with schools to increase student success. 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 ar...

Girls in our nation’s urban areas—and in communities across the county—face significant challenges on the path to academic achievement and adult success. That’s why the work of Girls Inc. of Chicago is so inspiring. Since 1865, Girls Inc. has  harnessed the power of youth helping youth , and they are redefining what support can look like. Each year, nearly 8 million high school juniors and seniors...

What does it really take to help all students plan for what’s next after high school? In this episode of Designing Education, Dr. Robert Balfanz speaks with Andy Schmitz, senior managing director of system impact at OneGoal , a national nonprofit dedicated to helping students navigate their postsecondary journeys. The discussion also explores how improved access to post-secondary outcomes data, le...

Season 4 of the Designing Education Podcast kicks off with Shawn Morris, Executive Director of the Mark Armijo Academy located in the South Valley of Albuquerque, New Mexico.  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 tr...

In the season finale of Designing Education and our yearlong exploration of student success systems, we sit down with Paolo DeMaria, president and CEO of the National Association of State Boards of Education (NASBE), to explore how we can transform our nation’s high schools to meet the needs and opportunities of the 21st century and how student success systems can play a key role in this transform...

In episode seven of Designing Education , Tim Knowles, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching , joins Dr. Robert Balfanz for a thought-provoking discussion about the evolving role of American high schools. This episode examines the urgent need to redesign high school education to meet the demands of today’s world, focusing on preparing students for modern opportunitie...

In episode six, we welcome Jenny Scala, Managing Director at the American Institutes for Research . Jenny shares insights into how student success systems can help schools break down silos in student support, making it easier to use resources efficiently and deliver integrated, timely support for every student. We explore the inner workings of these systems, examining how they help schools identif...

In this episode, we welcome Taylor McCabe-Juhnke, Executive Director of the Rural Schools Collaborative , to discuss the work they are doing to bring student success systems to rural schools across the nation.  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...

In this special episode of Designing Education , we're thrilled to welcome Krys Payne as our guest host. Krys is the Executive Director of the UChicago Network for College Success (NCS) and brings nearly 30 years of experience in education to her role. At NCS, Krys leads a team dedicated to equipping educators with evidence-based practices and research to positively impact key indicators that...

In the third episode of season three, Tara Madden, Chief Program Officer of Talent Development Secondary , joins Dr. Robert Balfanz to discuss the four essential components of a student success system: a focus on building relationships; holistic data and predictive indicators; a response system informed by students, teachers, and families; and a shared set of student-centered mindsets among adults...

In the second episode of season three, Patricia Balana, Managing Director of the GRAD Partnership , joins Dr. Robert Balfanz to discuss how and why nine organizations came together to form 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...

In the first episode of our third season, Dr. Saashya Rodrigo, Principal Researcher from the National Center for Learning Disabilities (NCLD), joins Dr. Balfanz to discuss the work NCLD is doing to ensure that students with disabilities feel a strong sense of agency, belonging, and connectedness and receive the support they need.  She explains NCLD’s role as one of nine organizing partners of the...

Season three of Designing Education , a podcast hosted by Robert Balfanz, director of the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University, is about to begin! 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 effort...

In Season 2, Episode 8, Sofia Russo, Principal of High School for Media and Communications located in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City joins Robert Balfanz for a conversation about what is possible when school leaders, teachers, students, families and community members are given opportunities to engage in school redesign. With just a little support and structure, Media and Comm...

In Season 2,  episode 7  Graham Wood, Director of the Office of Graduate Success, at the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce joins Robert Balfanz for a conversation about how high school graduation requirements and the very design of high schools can be re-imagined so that all students graduate high school on a pathway to adult success. The great American high school of the 20th century ena...

Celebrating its one-year anniversary, the National Partnership for Student Success (NPSS), a partnership between the U.S. Department of Education, AmeriCorps, and the Johns Hopkins Everyone Graduates Center, was launched following a call to action from the Biden-Harris Administration for more Americans to serve as tutors, mentors, college/career advisors, student success coaches, and integrated st...

In this episode, Robert Balfanz continues the conversation with New Hampshire’s Extended Learning Opportunity Network ’s Kerrie Alley-Violette and Sean Peschel, two on-the-ground educators working to make “learning anywhere, anytime” real.    At the time when the sources and locations of knowledge and training have multiplied exponentially, innovative efforts like New Hampshire’s ELO Network help...

When teams of educators, students, and community members across the nation work to redesign high schools, one thing that repeatedly stands in the way is the school schedule and the need to meet seat time requirements. There is no better example of how the 20th Century designed high school no longer works in the 21st century than seat time. It is based in the idea that how much you learn is determi...

As a species, humans are smart, adaptive, and resilient.  We all have the capacity to think, create, and contribute to society at a high level.  What stands between this shared capacity and everyone realizing its full potential is the opportunity to learn.  This is where human shortcomings come in … including greed, power, fear, racism, and othering.  They play a role in the development of schools...

The evidence is clear. Students need to attend school on a regular basis to succeed.  If the purpose of school is to help students learn and development, then being there is important.  Until quite recently, however, we did not regularly measure the extent to which the students enrolled in a school were attending on a regular basis.  Until 2017 or so, the most common measure used to measure a scho...

As we kick off season two of the Designing Education podcast during National Mentoring Month, Bob Balfanz is joined by Tim Wills , Chief Impact Officer for MENTOR , the leading organization in the nation working to scale high-quality mentoring in and out of school. Positive relationships enable trust, which enables cooperation, and collective and engaged effort. They also serve as a buffer to the...

Traditionally, schools have been designed around a set of standard practices and expectations. When students do not fully benefit from these practices or conform to the expectations, schools either add on supports or establish consequences to try to modify behaviors and outcomes. Over the past 15 years, researchers, school officials, and school teams have developed an approach that pools the knowl...

The public high school is a uniquely American invention, and our public high schools have played a powerful role in the development of our nation. The challenge is that in today’s world, a high school diploma alone is not enough to usher young people immediately into a middle-class, life-supporting existence. Further, public high schools must take all who walk in the door, regardless of prior moti...