California’s investment in secondary school redesign is a down payment on our students’ futures

Just down the street from where Disney’s Imagineers dream up new worlds in Anaheim, the Secondary School Redesign Pilot teams recently gathered with an equally audacious ambition: to reimagine middle and high school for every young Californian. The energy in the room — 14 teams representing urban and rural communities, districts, community organizations, and school systems across the state — felt like the beginning of a movement.

California is making a down payment on a simple idea: Middle and high schools need an overhaul to meet the needs and interests of today’s young people. The $10 million investment in the new redesign pilot has the potential to link previously disconnected redesign efforts into a coherent learning and practice network that fosters statewide transformation. 

Across California, districts and community partners have already been redesigning learning to be engaging and connected to young people’s lives. Research going back decades and reaffirmed recently — and young people themselves — tells us that students thrive when they are deeply known by educators, when they tackle work that is meaningful, and when their learning connects to their communities and futures. 

California is making a down payment on a simple idea: Middle and high schools need an overhaul to meet the needs and interests of today’s young people.

In a class at Fremont High School in Oakland, students huddle around a workbench, taking measurements, making calculations, and using advanced carpentry techniques to build park benches for a neighborhood park nearby. They talk about who would use them: a jogger mid-run, a grandmother watching pigeons, a father with a stroller.

This kind of authentic learning starts with deliberate redesign: braiding California’s community schools initiative and Linked Learning pathways to drive meaningful engagement and academic gains, in part by creating a coherent, integrated approach that attends to students’ health and well-being, gives them a say in their learning, and includes classes that are hands-on and relevant to students’ lives and future careers.

Statewide, our schools stand at an inflection point brought on by the pandemic, the AI revolution, and a generation of students demanding relevance. The surge in post-pandemic absenteeism signals the disruption in young people’s sense of connection to school. Artificial intelligence is creating demand for an education system as adaptive as the tools students now access, reshaping the workplace, and automating the entry-level jobs that once gave young people their start.

While AI is quickly rewriting the rules of education and work, the skills that matter are still distinctly human: creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, empathy. Yet many students still experience education designed to train factory workers in the early 1900s, and a Gallup survey found that only half of middle and high school students say that school helps them do what they do best every day.

California has already made significant investments in school transformation, with nearly $5 billion in state funding for community schools, dual enrollment and college and career pathways over the past decade laying the foundation for a new era of education.

Launched last year as part of the 2025-26 budget, the state’s Secondary School Redesign Pilot builds wisely on these efforts with a relatively modest $10 million that attempts to connect, align and scale them. The demand is clear: 56 networks across the state applied for 14 available grants. 

The 14 teams participating in the pilot demonstrate different approaches and a shared commitment to redesigning schools so every student is known, engaged and prepared to thrive.

The Linked Learning Alliance is partnering with six districts, from San Bernardino to Sacramento, to connect rigorous academics with career pathways and real-world work, so students build durable skills while earning college credit and industry certifications.

Big Picture Learning places every student at San Diego Met High School and partner sites in a multiyear advisory with the same teacher, and coordinates community internships for authentic, hands-on learning.

And CORE Districts — a collaborative of California’s largest urban school systems — are building infrastructure to spread lessons across their network, from Long Beach to Oakland and beyond. 

California deserves enormous credit for its progress toward transforming schools into places where all young people are deeply known, actively engaged, and prepared to thrive in their communities and careers.

The work of the pilot teams, supported by the state infrastructure, provides the catalyst for redesigned learning throughout the state and demonstrates the power of strategic and research-based investments. They’re showing us what’s possible for students and for public education more broadly. Our job now is to make the possible inevitable.

California has made a down payment on that future. Let’s see it through.

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Peter Ross, Ph.D., is the managing director of the Youth Thriving Through Learning Fund, a collaborative initiative designed to build on unprecedented state investments in public education and related systems while reimagining the learning experience for California’s diverse majority of youth.

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