Watch the full discussion from this year’s Reagan Institute Summit on Education.

Carnegie President Tim Knowles joined Maria Flynn (CEO, Jobs for the Future), Secretary Jacob Oliva (Arkansas Department of Education), Theo Wold (Palantir Technologies), and Nirvi Shah (Hechinger) for a candid conversation on the future of high school. One shared conclusion: the traditional boundaries between high school, college, and work are rapidly dissolving.

To prepare students for what lies ahead, education must move beyond seat time and toward demonstrated competency and every pathway, whether to higher education, training, or careers, must cultivate the skills that technology cannot replace.

Schools are rethinking what students should know by the time they graduate, emphasizing tangible, employable skills, rather than test scores and GPAs.

In a few short weeks, Aldine Independent School District in Texas will welcome a new cohort of ninth graders to the HEAL high school programs — one of the biggest career-technical education experiments underway in the state and just one of many that the Houston-area district is implementing to ensure its graduates are equipped with real-world skills.

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The R&D Agenda outlines knowledge-building and tool-making priorities to drive a national shift from seat time to real-world, competency-based high school learning.

STANFORD, Calif. – The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching today released a national research and development agenda (R&D Agenda) aimed at supporting the transformation of the American high school from time-based to competency-based models, to better prepare students for civil society and the modern economy. 

The agenda, “A National Call to Action: A Research and Development Agenda for High School Transformation,” identifies eight interconnected research priorities to guide efforts to modernize high school education beyond the century-old Carnegie Unit system. The research priorities are undergirded by two foundational and cross-cutting areas for investigation: Aligned Public Policy and AI/Infrastructure.

“American education is at a crossroads. While we hurtle toward an AI-driven economy that demands skills like creativity, critical thinking, and adaptability, our high schools are trapped in an outdated architecture preparing students for a world that no longer exists,” said Dr. Timothy Knowles, President of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. “This agenda is about building knowledge and tools to accelerate the transformation of the American high school – schools marked by much more ambitious goals for students; engaging, rigorous and experiential learning experiences, and; more powerful signaling systems to inform and accelerate student learning.”

The R&D Agenda is designed to address the urgent challenges high schools face today. Since the pandemic, chronic absenteeism has soared, student disengagement has accelerated, and educator burnout has reached crisis levels. Meanwhile, employers seek skills not reflected in traditional diplomas, four-year college enrollment is dropping, and economic security remains elusive for most Americans.   

The R&D Agenda is also designed to chart a path to the future. It calls for building knowledge about public policies that lead to improved student outcomes.  It calls for research on the development of the digital (AI), physical and social infrastructures required to deepen academic knowledge and skill development. And it outlines specific, actionable priorities to accelerate high school transformation:

• Create shared vision and decision-making across communities for transforming high school
• Establish a supportive learning culture and positive relationships for student and educator connection, purpose and agency
• Reimagine the role and working conditions of teachers and leaders to empower educators to accelerate the development of academic and durable skills
• Reimagine the high school canon, ensuring student learning experiences are grounded in science and are reliably engaging, rigorous and experiential, moving beyond seat time
• Create learning ecosystems, tools and structures spanning high school, postsecondary and career, to significantly advance student opportunity beyond graduation
• Increase access to credible, accelerative credentials through high school
• Build valid and reliable assessments of academic and skill development, capture evidence of learning from a wide variety of contexts, in and out of school, and provide useful insights to students, educators and families
• Create tools and methods for educators to engage with families to advance student learning and success, in and beyond high school

From today through 2035, the Carnegie Foundation will work with research partners, practitioners and policy makers across the nation, to generate evidence and synthesize findings across three domains: 

• Discovery Research that explores current practices, identifies promising innovations, and maps the landscape of what exists across different contexts and communities.
• Development Research that focuses on creating, testing and refining tools, practices and systems through iterative cycles of design and implementation in real-world settings.
• Impact Research that evaluates whether policies, programs and practices achieve intended outcomes, for whom and under what conditions.

“Transforming American high schools requires more than school-level proof points —it demands unprecedented collaboration across districts, states, researchers, and communities,” said Dr. Brooke Stafford-Brizard, senior vice president for innovation & impact at the Carnegie Foundation. “This R&D Agenda provides the coherent framework we need to align toward collective impact. Only by working together with a deep and expansive bench of collaborators can we ensure that high school transformation doesn’t just happen in pockets of innovation, but takes root, sustains, and scales nationwide to benefit every student.”

Further, the R&D Agenda anchors Carnegie’s Future of High School Network, launched in partnership with XQ Institute, which brings together some of the nation’s most innovative school systems to test and refine competency-based models in real-world settings.  

Over time, we expect the R&D agenda will focus national resources and effort, and ensure the American high school becomes a much more powerful engine of opportunity for all.

Carnegie Foundation launches “Future of High School Network” with 24 innovative school systems across the country.

STANFORD, CA — June 18, 2025 — Today, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching announced the launch of the Future of High School Network (FHS Network), a new initiative designed to catalyze learning, knowledge and impact to support a ‘new architecture’ for high school nationwide. The FHS Network brings together 24 school systems serving approximately 90,000 students, all committed to creating high schools that prepare students for success beyond graduation.

“For more than a century, the Carnegie Unit has defined the structure of American high schools with the conflation of seat time and learning,” said Dr. Timothy Knowles, President of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. “Today, we’re partnering with a fearless group of forward-leaning school systems across the country to imagine and instantiate education without the constraints of the Carnegie Unit. The Future of High School Network is about understanding and growing new models for the American high school—that set ambitious goals for students, offer meaningful, rigorous and engaging learning experiences, and use improved tools to measure and accelerate student progress.”

This effort is supported by leading national institutions, including the XQ Institute, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Walton Family Foundation, Youth Thriving Through Learning Fund, and Carnegie Corporation of New York as well as partners at the Educational Testing Service (ETS). Together, the network members will work to modernize current outdated systems and scale competency-based high school models designed to accelerate student engagement, achievement and success in postsecondary education and work.

The Network will also serve as a test bed to inform the Carnegie Foundation’s forthcoming National Research and Development Agenda—a comprehensive effort to define the research and development priorities needed to advance effective high school transformation across the country. Ongoing insights from participating systems will help identify the conditions necessary for innovative models to take root, sustain and scale in high schools nationwide.

“Too many high schools were built for a world that no longer exists,” said Diego Arambula, Vice President for Educational Transformation, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.“ This Network, in tandem with our National Research and Development Agenda, will focus on building and refining what comes next, together with communities, educators, and most importantly, students.”

The inaugural network represents leaders from public school districts and charter school networks across urban, suburban, and rural regions of the country:

• Akron Public Schools – Akron, OH
• Aldine Independent School District – Houston, TX
• Building 21 Network – Multiple locations (Philadelphia, PA)
• Cañon City Schools – Cañon City, CO
• California Area Schools – Coal Center, PA
• CAST Schools – Multiple locations (San Antonio, TX)
• Concord Community Schools – Elkhart, IN
• Crosstown High School – Memphis, TN
• Ednovate – Multiple locations (Los Angeles, CA)
• Eastern Hancock Schools – Charlottesville, IN
• Grand Rapids Museum High School – Grand Rapids, MI
• Henrico County Public Schools – Henrico, VA

Summit Public Schools – Multiple locations (Seattle, WA)

Liberty Public Schools – Liberty, MO

Mooresville Graded School District – Mooresville, NC

New York City Public Schools – New York, NY

Northeast Academy for Aerospace and Advanced Technologies – Elizabeth City, NC

Northern Cass School District – Hunter, ND

Piper Unified School District – Kansas City, KS

Portage School of Leaders – South Bend, IN

Purdue Polytechnic High Schools – Indianapolis, IN

Roanoke County Public Schools – Roanoke, VA

Rural Alliance Zone – Multiple locations (Randolph County, IN)

Springfield Empowerment Zone – Springfield, MA

This session at SXSW EDU 2025, presented by the Walton Family Foundation, brought together Jamie Jutila, Sarah Navarro, Babak Mostaghimi, and Brooke Stafford-Brizard to discuss the future of high school education.

As the 21st century continued to reshape the world, the conversation emphasized the urgent need for high schools to evolve. Panelists explored how collaborations between educators and edtech innovators, the development of networks of innovative schools, and the expansion of competency-based instruction were transforming the student experience. The session highlighted the countless possibilities for a more relevant and engaging high school education and showcased the efforts of changemakers leading this transformation.

Attendees gained insights into how changemakers were driving targeted efforts to rethink traditional education models, ensuring that high school students—regardless of background—were better prepared for success in college, career, and beyond.

Rousemary Vega gets emotional when she walks down Augusta Boulevard in Humboldt Park. It’s hard for the mother of five to see the former Lafayette Elementary School with its signs now touting the Chicago High School for the Arts.

“They closed Lafayette School and gave it to another school. Do you know how fucked up that is?” she asks. “Me and my children have to walk past it every day. And now that building is not open to the community. They have great programs in there that the community cannot benefit from. How unfair is that?”

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