Getting Smart

By Borton Gusky For years I shouted out, “Make the Learning Real!” What I didn’t understand is how to make the learning real for students by connecting to careers. In this article I’ll highlight four organizations that I’ve had some connection to in the past three years –  Connect the Work by Educators Cooperative, the Consortium for Public Education, the Neighborhood Learning Alliance, and the Pittsburgh Technology Council. While each project is different, they all have had success making

When students have meaningful work to share, families get a clearer picture of what learning looks like beyond grades and test scores. By Ryan Sprott and Taya Tselolikhina A report card can tell a family what a student earned. It can’t always show what that student cares about, how they think or what they can do with what they’ve learned. That’s an important missing piece. A student explaining how they solved a problem, reflecting on a question they pursued or sharing something they created ca

By Bruno V. Manno Students and parents want to explore more than one path after high school. School accountability systems haven’t caught up. More students and families are asking about post-high-school career pathways that don’t start with a four-year degree. But most schools still measure mainly who graduates and who goes on to college. School counselors see that gap up close. A new national survey of 600 counselors by Britebound and the American School Counselor Association found that 90 perc

LearnKit is a proposed framework and infrastructure designed to give learners greater control over the information that describes what they know, what they can do, and how they learn. Today, learning data is fragmented across institutions, applications, credentials, employers, and other systems, making it difficult for individuals to access and use their own information. LearnKit envisions a trusted and interoperable ecosystem in which academic records, skills and competencies, goals, interests,

By Barrie Olson My son, Asher, is 11. Last week he asked me what started World War I. I didn’t answer right away. “An archduke was assassinated” is true, but it’s also the kind of answer that closes a conversation instead of opening one. It skips the tangle of alliances that turned one act of violence into a continental war, the nationalism and imperial rivalries building for decades, and the decisions by leaders who each thought backing down was riskier than escalatin

By Courtney Parker Lopez, Mother Over the past month, as students across Texas headed back to school, more than 85,000 families began a school year unlike any before it by using the state’s new education savings account program for the first time. Their choices have already become part of a familiar debate over school choice — who benefits, who loses, and what it means for public schools.  I’m one of those families. Here is what the numbers don’t show.  Homeschooling my middle daughter was nev

In a previous blog, I named how as humans we tend to default to scarcity thinking. This is mostly a survival instinct. We hoard, protect turf, box out, exclude, and create arbitrary limiting functions. In education, this shows up everywhere: in lottery schools, in college admissions panic, in fights over ESA funding that pit public schools against families. Education leaders are duking it out over a limited pool of resources—often from a place of wanting to serve learners, but in the process, cr

By: Getting Smart Staff For the previous three years, Getting Smart has hosted regional New Pathways events sponsored by Britebound across the country, with the latest taking place in the great city of Chicago. District and school leaders, educators, intermediaries, funders, and workforce organizations gathered to better understand how Chicago was preparing students for life and the workforce, with a focus on two specific strands: entrepreneurship and the arts. The convening was hosted

By: Jane Shore Imagine two students working on the same group project. The first student knows every fact about the subject. She remembers every date, understands every concept, finishes her section early, and scores a 96% on the test. During the project, she mostly works alone because everyone else is slowing her down. The second student knows slightly fewer facts. His understanding of the subject is still emerging. But when the group gets stuck, he asks the question that helps everyone see the

By: Nikki Stancampiano and Reem Al-Adhami Today, Reem Al-Adhami is studying aerospace engineering and has now spent three summers with Power Up Your Potential, a work-based learning program at the PAST Foundation in Columbus, Ohio. After first joining the program as a student, she returned as a peer advisor, helping create for other young people the kind of experience that had shaped her own path. That is not the Reem her father remembers from just a few years ago. Reem had always been

Not all experiences result in impactful and valuable learning. So what makes the difference? The degree to which it is personally meaningful, authentic, and situated. By Chris Unger I have taught a doctoral course on “The Power of Experiential Learning” for several years, to educators who have spent 10, 20, even 30 years in schools. Most arrive expecting to sharpen a familiar idea. Many leave saying some version of: I thought I knew what experiential learning was, but I really didn&#

This blog is the fourth in series called Beyond the Course Catalog: What Makes Dual Enrollment Actually Work, a four-part blog series from Getting Smart in partnership with Britebound focused on what separates a strong dual enrollment model from the rest. Read the first post in the series. Read the second post in the series. Read the third post in the series. We want to close this series where it started, with a young person standing in front of a course catalog trying to figure ou

By: Simone Ravaioli It was Tyson Yunkaporta who recently introduced me to the uniquely generative idea of creolization, in a panel discussion on, well, inclusive recognition systems: how do we build recognition that actually includes all learners, and all learning? He describes borders as “places of increase of relations” rather than walls, dynamic zones where systems meet, make kin, and transform one another, not sites where one side quietly absorbs the other. I strongly believe that Reco

This blog is the third in series called Beyond the Course Catalog: What Makes Dual Enrollment Actually Work, a four-part blog series from Getting Smart in partnership with Britebound focused on what separates a strong dual enrollment model from the rest. Read the first post in the series. Read the second post in the series. College level coursework does not become easier just because a student is still in high school. If anything, the stakes are higher. A struggling grade in a dual e

By: AJ Gutierrez Since 2021, U.S. public schools have lost about 1.18 million students. Projections indicate that enrollment will further decline by 2.7 million students by 2031.  To better serve students, schools have an opportunity to better understand their aspirations, interests, and relationships and use those insights to connect them with the opportunities and supports that can help them thrive. Advanced coursework offers a particularly clear example of what becomes possible when s

By Merita Irby and Karen Pittman  Our “Steward Stories” series captures lessons learned from interviews with leaders of mature, purpose-built ecosystem intermediaries. An ecosystem steward is a boundary-spanning leader who goes beyond traditional out-of-school time (OST) system building to weave together the diverse people, places, and possibilities that shape a young person’s daily life. Rather than managing a single isolated network, stewards collaborate across K-12 schools, youth developme

This blog is the second in series called Beyond the Course Catalog: What Makes Dual Enrollment Actually Work, a four-part blog series from Getting Smart in partnership with Britebound focused on what separates a strong dual enrollment model from the rest. Read the first post in the series. The Broken Promise on the Transcript A high school transcript is supposed to be a kind of promise. The credits on it are supposed to mean something, to count toward whatever comes next. But we heard a v

The field of school transformation is rich with thoughtful, purpose-specific design frameworks. Organizations and school systems across the country have spent years building powerful approaches to redesigning schools, and partners are right to value the specific models they have chosen and invested in. In practice, this often shows up less as disagreement than as translation. Leaders spend valuable time helping partners realize they are often describing similar ideas with a different language

This blog is the first in series called Beyond the Course Catalog: What Makes Dual Enrollment Actually Work, a four-part blog series from Getting Smart in partnership with Britebound focused on what separates a strong dual enrollment model from the rest. Intentional, Coherent Design & Equitable Access There is a particular kind of confusion that shows up in a high school counselor’s office every spring. A student sits across the desk with a course catalog open to a page

Many public schools face funding pressure right now. Contributing factors include a predicted 30-year trend of declining population of school-age children, completion of ESSER fund spending in spring of 2026, increasing competition from school options funded through vouchers, state tax credit scholarships, career scholarship accounts, ESA, and other mechanisms to allow funding to directly go to a student (rather than funding going to a school who spends it on the student). The launch of the fede