California’s Bold Bet on Student Thriving Through Secondary School Redesign

As economic and technological shifts accelerate and traditional factory-model schools fall short of preparing students for the world ahead, a movement is growing across California to reimagine secondary school. Secondary schools and community partners are courageously rethinking what learning can look like and designing schools where students have access to rigorous learning connected to the real world, strong personalized support, and the opportunity to develop and demonstrate needed durable skills including inquiry, collaboration, creativity, and the ability to contribute to community. 

Seeking to advance the movement, this past November the California Collaborative for Educational Excellence, California State Board of Education, and California Department of Education announced fourteen awardees of the California Secondary School Redesign Pilot Program, directing more than $9 million to nonprofit and district networks advancing innovative models of middle and high school redesign in nearly 70 school districts across the state. 

The fourteen grantees brought together by the Secondary School Redesign Pilot are already moving toward reimagined secondary schools that expand what, how, and even where students learn. While their models vary, exemplary schools across the Redesign Pilot share key design elements backed by decades of research. These redesigned schools ensure every student is known and supported through small learning communities, regular check-ins with a dedicated teacher, and courses where teachers stay with students over multiple years. Curricula are structured to develop deeper knowledge and skills through projects that engage students in meaningful issues and challenges, as well as pathways and internships that help to prepare them for careers. Systems are in place to produce equitable opportunities and outcomes through teaching that acknowledge and respond to the experience and cultures of students, school-based mental-health services, and supports for multilingual learners and students with disabilities. In these schools, students actively shape their learning and demonstrate mastery through tasks that reflect real world challenges, exhibitions, and long-term interdisciplinary final projects. School structures enable and maintain success through redesigned schedules, budgets, and staffing that embed collaborative planning time, coaching, and smaller pupil loads. By documenting what enables transformation and the barriers that remain, the Redesign Pilot aims to set California on a path to reimagine middle and high school for every student – not just some.

The UCLA Center for Community Schooling is also advancing the secondary school design movement through its Research–Practice–Policy Partnership (RP3) Consortium. With funding from the Youth Thriving Through Learning Fund, the consortium supports four hubs across Los Angeles and San Diego that bring together community schools—schools that leverage deep community ties to support students and families—with university researchers to collaboratively implement strategies for redesigning secondary education. In each hub, educators and researchers are documenting and refining high-leverage secondary redesign practices, from integrating student-led research into advanced coursework to reimagining class periods to intentionally foster belonging and relationships, strengthening districtwide community school strategies, and redesigning assessments through real-world internships. 

Our education system has the opportunity to provide every student with the skills, confidence, and adaptability they’ll need to thrive in a world we can’t yet fully imagine. Schools, districts, and communities can unite around a Portrait of a Graduate, a shared, community-created vision document that defines the skills, competencies, and mindsets their students need to thrive. In addition to the traditional measures of grades and test scores, students pursuing college might submit rigorous portfolios of community research, career passports, workplace artifacts from internships, multimedia capstones, or evidence of leadership and collaboration. Students pursuing trades, technical careers, or entrepreneurship would have career connected learning opportunities and clear pathways to success.

An increasing number of California schools are showing what it looks like to create a vision of student success that is richer and more aligned with what young people need to thrive in our future. Our larger educational systems—and our public imagination—must be ready to build on this momentum.

Jeffrey Yo, Ph.D., is a researcher at the UCLA Center for Community. His work focuses on community schooling, with particular emphasis on teacher retention, program evaluation, and secondary school redesign.

Leib Sutcher is an advisor to the Secondary School Redesign Pilot at the California Collaborative for Educational Excellence (via a professional services agreement). His work focuses on supporting networks engaged in high school redesign and helping the Pilot surface lessons, successes, and barriers that can inform statewide policy, practice, and momentum for lasting systems change.