Learning 2025: Beyond the Standard Reform Movement
School Administrator, March 2022

School administrators have faced repeated calls to fix U.S. public schools since 1983 when President Ronald Reagan’s administration issued “A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform.”

The report warned our schools’ mediocre performance threatened the nation’s capacity to compete in world commerce, science and technological innovation. It spurred reform initiatives at every level. Whole-school reforms, such as the Coalition of Essential Schools and charter schools, emerged. The National Center on Education and the Economy designed a standards-based reform plan followed by many states. Congress in 2001 passed the No Child Left Behind Act, giving rise to high-stakes tests.

Now AASA has issued a new American imperative outlined by its Learning 2025: National Commission on Student-Centered, Equity-Focused Education. The commission identifies objectives we’ve seen before, such as making learning more personal, relevant, engaging and holistic.

But administrators among the 115 school districts in the Learning 2025 network say this initiative differs from previous movements. Rather than a plan dictated from on high, they say, it outlines a collective journey shared by participating districts toward a set of objectives.

“Instead of being top down, it’s bottom up,” says Morcease Beasley, superintendent of Clayton County Public Schools in Jonesboro, Ga. “It is not what they expect us to do. It is what we expect ourselves to do.”

Spreading Practices

The initiative is highlighting bright spots across the nation, which will help spread best practices and collaborative problem solving that will make education stronger, says Steve Webb, Learning 2025 commission member and former superintendent of Vancouver Public Schools in Washington.

“Leaders who have joined the Learning 2025 Network are enthusiastic about sharing how they are moving along the continuum toward becoming more learner-centered, equity-driven and future-focused,” he says in an e-mail. “These leaders recognize the power of learning networks to create lasting and sustainable change for the better.”

Jeannie Stone, who served until mid-December as superintendent of Richardson Independent School District near Dallas, says Learning 2025 has a more positive focus on what’s possible in education. School leaders and teachers don’t want to hear about putting kids and the nation at risk or leaving children behind, she says. Learning 2025 views change through the educator’s lens, empowering administrators to find new school and learning designs.

“It’s really about a supportive culture,” she says.

A Deep Dive

While superintendents participating in Learning 2025 may differ on details of school system redesign, they all agree it must be dramatic.

Administrators in the relatively affluent Naperville Community Unit School District near Chicago, for example, are taking what they consider “a deep dive” into how they organize the system and the school day for 16,500 students, says superintendent Dan Bridges, who has led the district for a decade.

“Our narrative this year is centered on being bold,” he says. “We have to rethink our system and what we are doing.”

— BILL GRAVES