Educating In The AI Era: The Urgent Need To Redesign Schools

Forbes

2 days ago

In these times of extreme polarization, one area of educational consensus between those on the left and the right is that American schools—particularly high schools—need to be redesigned to meet the age that we are in. The factory model inherited from 100 years ago was not designed to provide the kind of learning demanded by the modern economy or the relationships young people need to feel safe, cared for, and engaged.
Education leaders in red and blue states from Indiana, Kentucky, and Missouri to California, New York, and Washington are all seeking to develop and implement new graduate profiles, transform high school graduation requirements, develop assessment approaches that measure competencies rather than seat time, and support experiential learning that develops problem-solving, collaboration, and other durable skills.
These shifts reflect a growing realization that too many of our schools are not designed to educate the next generation to face the challenges of our time. In the wake of a global pandemic, it has become clear that most schools must be better able to personalize learning and create caring spaces for students to address the effects of trauma, meet their needs, and support their learning. And schools must do more than weather crises of health, safety, and climate crises; we need our young people prepared with the knowledge and skills to face the even greater challenges they will confront in the years to come.
One increasingly urgent stimulus is the rapid rise of AI, which is dramatically reshaping the employment landscape and necessitating changes in how we prepare students for future careers. A 2023 study by the McKinsey Global Institute estimated that by 2030 up to 30% of hours currently worked across the U.S. economy could be automated, with more routine jobs in food service, manufacturing, office support, and customer service becoming more fully automated, while nonroutine jobs in professions and STEM fields entail entirely new approaches to work.
Forrester Research in 2020 projected that AI and automation technologies could eliminate 29% of jobs by 2030 while also creating new jobs for 13% of the workforce. Another summary of recent studies concluded the following:
This transformation will demand a workforce with enhanced digital literacy, adaptability, and the ability to work alongside intelligent technologies. Industries that focus on developing and implementing AI solutions are expected to experience growth, creating new job opportunities in areas such as AI development, data analysis, and machine learning. To navigate the evolving job market and safeguard against potential displacement, individuals should prioritize continuous learning and upskilling. Emphasizing education in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields and cultivating skills that are uniquely human, such as creativity, critical thinking, and emotional intelligence, can enhance job security.
Increasingly, schools must ensure that students develop what the leadership at Google identified as 'learning ability'—the strongest predictor of success in that environment. This includes the ability of students to find, analyze, and use resources to answer questions and design solutions; apply knowledge using judgment; evaluate and improve their own work; and effectively deploy advanced problem-solving skills, literacies, and dispositions. Analysts note that the curriculum will need to emphasize and better integrate these kinds of skills and give much more focused attention to data literacy and technology use. Assessment must similarly evolve to evaluate more complex applications of knowledge to novel situations, rather than multiple choice questions designed to measure the recall of pieces of information. Instruction needs both to incorporate AI and teach how it can be used, and it needs to focus more explicitly on the development of learning ability.
In the midst of this rapid change, high schoolers in traditional settings are slogging through a curriculum that was initially defined by a small group of educators appointed by the National Education Association in 1892. The 'Committee of Ten' defined the expectations for taking courses in each subject area—long before interdisciplinary fields, computers, and big data existed­—that still define high school in most states today. These subjects are often taught abstractly and in siloes, without connections to real-world concerns. A recent Yale survey of more than 25,000 high school students found that 75% had largely negative feelings about their school experience, with the most frequent adjectives being 'stressed,' 'tired,' and 'bored.' In another nationwide survey, only 29% of middle and high school students reported that they attended school in a caring environment. One of the most telling indicators of student disengagement is the alarmingly high rate of chronic absenteeism in many schools.
Meanwhile, 70% of the public believe that more things about the educational system should change than stay the same. This is likely because the structure and function of schools have not evolved much over the past 100 years, even as the needs of students and the knowledge and skills demanded by the economy are dramatically different.
Too many of our young people experience the factory model still prevalent in our high schools, which were designed to put young people on a conveyor belt and move them from one overloaded teacher to the next, in 45-minute increments, to be stamped with separate, disconnected lessons 7 or 8 times per day, with a hallway locker as their only stable point of contact. In such schools, students have little opportunity to become well known over a sustained period of time by adults who can consider them as whole people or as developing intellects. Those who need additional resources or personal advice may need to wait weeks to see a counselor with a caseload of 500 students. These huge warehouse institutions typically focus more on the control of behavior than the development of community. While these factory model designs may have worked for the purposes they were asked to serve 100 years ago, they do not meet most of our young people's needs today.
There are redesigned high schools that engage and support students, connecting them to the world around them. Networks of schools associated with Big Picture Learning, Linked Learning Alliance, High Tech High, New Tech High, and Internationals Network high schools, among others, operate smaller schools as well as learning academies within big schools that offer engaging and challenging project-based learning that tackles real-world problems. They also feature internships in local workplaces and community organizations, as well as dual credit courses with local universities, while supporting students with advisory systems that ensure they are well known.
Unlike century-old schools operating under the industrial model of schooling designed to prepare the majority of students for rote work, these redesigned high schools are developed based on a large and growing body of research from the fields of neuroscience, psychology, and other developmental and learning sciences. This contemporary science of learning and development confirms that young people grow and thrive in environments designed to support individualized development and inquiry-based, hands-on learning, where they have strong, supportive relationships, and where their social, emotional, physical, and cognitive needs are met.
Over the past 30 years, thousands of redesigned secondary schools have demonstrated that it is possible to enable much greater levels of success for young people, including those who have been historically left out and pushed out of opportunities to learn.
To highlight just one example, take the case of Life Academy of Health and Bioscience in Oakland, CA, which serves 446 students in grades 6–12. In this school, 99% of students are students of color, 96% come from low-income families, and 30% are English learners. Life Academy is one of more than 600 college- and career-ready pathways that have been launched in California through the Linked Learning Alliance. These academies offer college and career preparation in high-demand industries, partnering with business and community organizations. Unlike the old 'voc-ed' tracks designed for students who were not college-bound, these pathways prepare students for both college and career options in an untracked setting where all students get the benefit of a challenging, applied curriculum and work-based learning opportunities.
Opened in fall 2001, Life Academy was designed based on research about effective small learning communities and was originally housed within a large comprehensive high school. Most of Oakland's high schools—large and small—now offer Linked Learning academies in different fields, and all of them are also community schools that offer a full suite of health care, social services, and expanded learning opportunities to their students.
Life Academy's mission is to create equitable opportunities for students who come from underserved communities in Oakland. Through transformative learning experiences focused on health, medicine, and bioscience, students are engaged in inquiry-based learning and inspired to acquire the skills, knowledge, and habits necessary to succeed in college and careers in the medical field. These skills are developed in part through the school's multiple performance-based exhibitions, in which students present and defend their individual and collaborative projects and research papers to faculty, industry partners, family members, and other students.
All students select one of the school's three career pathways—medicine, health, or biotechnology—and take courses and complete an internship aligned with that pathway. To support these internships, the school has developed deep relationships with industry partners, including Oakland Children's Hospital, Youth Bridge programs at Alta Bates and Summit hospitals, and Highland Hospital. Besides the internships, hallmarks of the school include an emphasis on personalization, cross-disciplinary projects and collaborative group work, integration of multiple forms of technology into coursework and work-based learning, public demonstration of mastery, and a college preparatory curriculum, as well as access to dual credit that leads to certifications in health careers.
The school had a 91% graduation rate in 2021–22, and 96% of its students had completed the coursework for state university admissions, well above district and state averages. The school has typically placed 100% of its students in 2- or 4-year colleges. It has had the highest acceptance rate at the University of California and California State University of any high school in Oakland, with students going to schools such as UC Berkeley and UCLA, as well as Stanford, University of San Francisco, and Smith College.
When asked what high school experiences have contributed to their college readiness, more than 90% of Life Academy students list close relationships with teachers and advisors. More than 90% also list features of their deeper learning experiences, including workplace internships, opportunities to explain their thinking, testing or trying out ideas to see if they work, evaluating themselves on their class work, participating in peer reviews of their work, and having to revise their work until it meets standards of proficiency. These practices are part of a performance-based, mastery-oriented, relationship-supported approach to learning that can create success for all students.
To ensure that all students have access to the kinds of powerful learning found at schools like Life Academy, policymakers must redesign the structures that shape U.S. education. This includes shifting accountability systems away from narrow test-based measures toward assessments that reflect real-world performance and deeper learning. States and districts should establish clear graduate profiles that define the skills and competencies students need for success in school, college, and career—and then align curriculum, instruction, assessment, and professional development to support these outcomes. Resources must be directed toward building small, personalized learning environments where strong relationships, high expectations, and integrated academic and career pathways are the norm, not the exception.
At the same time, federal and state policy should create the conditions that enable these needed shifts by investing in the redesign of outdated school models and scaling up evidence-based approaches that support equitable student access and success. This includes funding for evidence-based approaches to redesign, support for college and career pathways, and incentives for partnerships between K–12 schools, higher education, and industry. Most critically, systems must center student voice and well-being in their designs, recognizing that belonging, relevance, and purpose are foundational to learning and to citizenship.
The transformation of high schools is not just an educational imperative: It is a civic and economic necessity. In the post-pandemic era, we have seen clearly what does not work for the country's students—and what does. This moment is uniquely positioned for an informed and systemic shift to support the research-based approaches that work in education and the students who need them in our rapidly changing world.