Opinion: When Innovation Meets Rigorous Instruction, Students Thrive

For too long, the education sector has divided itself into two camps: the “instructional core” people who believe quality curriculum and good teachers are enough to improve learning and the “innovation” people who view a school’s design and a student’s experience as essential elements in academic success.

In February, the organization I lead, Transcend, brought these two camps together when it became the new home for the Gradient Learning program. The program is a system for whole-student learning that integrates high-quality instructional materials from leading curriculum providers, key life skills, real-time data and monitoring tools, with dedicated coaching. It has reached more than 250,000 students across 46 states. 

Some may wonder: “Why would an organization known for school design and innovation become the home for one of the most comprehensive high-quality instructional materials platforms in the country?” But the fact that we found our way to each other shouldn’t be surprising. It should feel overdue. 

I spent the first chapter of my career in education certain I had figured out the equation: Great teachers. Rigorous materials. High expectations. If you gave students access to challenging content and put skilled educators in front of them, outcomes would follow. I trained teachers on that logic. I watched it work often enough to trust it.

It wasn’t wrong, but it wasn’t the whole story.

Over the years, visiting thousands of classrooms and talking with young people and their families, I kept seeing the same thing. Teachers were getting stronger. Curriculum was getting more aligned and rigorous. The field’s investment at the instructional core was raising the floor for millions of students. Yet, the experience around all of it was still mired in century-old assumptions about how learning actually happens. The daily interactions and activities through which young people build knowledge, skills, and identity had barely changed.

Young people can feel it. About 75% of elementary students say they love school. By high school, that number flips. Only one in four teenagers reports being truly engaged in learning, a crisis Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop lay bare in The Disengaged Teen. Students are simultaneously bored and overwhelmed. 

Families are voting with their feet, too. Public school enrollment has fallen by nearly two million students since 2020, with homeschooling up 45% in some states and private school enrollment surging. In New York City alone, enrollment sits 11% below pre-pandemic levels, and 41% of departing families cited a desire for more rigorous, engaging instruction.

This is what led me to co-found Transcend. For the past decade, we’ve been helping communities design learning environments where strong instruction meets intentional experience design, where the learning itself is engaging, relevant, relationship-rich and connected to who students are and who they’re becoming.

Consider what this looks like in practice. At Intrinsic Schools in Chicago, strong academic content lives inside a learning environment where even the physical design of the building is responsive to the learning experience. Multiple teachers work with students across different learning modalities in a single large classroom, adjusting instruction in real time based on individual goals and needs. 

On Choice Days, students build their own schedules, selecting academic supports like writing labs alongside enrichment they care about. Three times a year, students lead their own conferences with advisors and families, reflecting on their growth and mapping their path forward. The instructional core is rigorous. The experience is intentional.

At the same time, Gradient Learning’s movement to strengthen the instructional core has accomplished something that needed doing. I would never want us to stop investing there. When I visit schools with strong teaching and learning systems, I see students doing more meaningful work. The kind of work necessary for thriving in the world they are about to inherit.

That hard infrastructure, though, operates inside a learning environment. If that environment hasn’t been intentionally shaped, even the strongest instructional elements hit a ceiling. The science of learning and development tells us why. The brain does not process content in isolation from context. 

Learning is shaped by relationships, by whether students feel safe and known, by whether the work connects to something that matters to them, by whether they have agency in the process. Belonging activates the neural architecture that makes deep learning possible. Students actively construct knowledge through experience, and no amount of well-sequenced information changes that fact.

We take for granted everywhere, except school, that experience matters. When we choose a restaurant, book a hotel or pick a doctor, we want to know how it felt to be there. In education, we’ve largely measured only outcomes while leaving the daily experience of learning itself unexamined. That is a gap we must close.

Community-based design, which I discussed in a recent TED Talk, is how we close it. Students, families, educators, and learning experts must come together to rethink how we do school. 

This work builds the environment that strong instruction requires. The Gradient Learning program finding its home at Transcend is the bridge. Rigorous, aligned instructional materials now sit inside an organization designing the learning environments where those materials can do their best work.

AI, economic disruption and civic fracture are reshaping the world our students are entering. School is one of the few institutions positioned to help young people navigate all of it. But we won’t meet this moment through one-size-fits-all mandates handed down from above, nor by asking exhausted educators to innovate on nights and weekends. 

The path forward is a third way: communities redesigning schools together — drawing on research, proven models, and local wisdom to build learning environments where rigor and meaning reinforce each other, where young people are held to high expectations and supported as whole human beings, and where the daily experience of learning is as intentional as the curriculum itself.

The false choice between rigorous instruction and bold design has held the field back long enough. The schools that figure this out will be the ones young people actually want to attend. Our field has all the pieces. It’s time to put them together.