Designing Education

In the second episode of season three, Patricia Balana, Managing Director of the GRAD Partnership, joins Dr. Robert Balfanz to discuss how and why nine organizations came together to form the GRAD Partnership. The coalition is a national initiative that partners with communities to implement high-quality student success systems so that schools are better equipped to address the sca

In the first episode of our third season, Dr. Saashya Rodrigo, Principal Researcher from the National Center for Learning Disabilities (NCLD), joins Dr. Balfanz to discuss the work NCLD is doing to ensure that students with disabilities feel a strong sense of agency, belonging, and connectedness and receive the support they need. She explains NCLD’s role as one of nine organizing

Season three of Designing Education, a podcast hosted by Robert Balfanz, director of the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University, is about to begin!This season’s series will focus on exploring student success systems, the next generation of early warning, on-track, and multi-tiered system of supports, which aim to integrate and increase the impact of existing studen

In Season 2, Episode 8, Sofia Russo, Principal of High School for Media and Communications located in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City joins Robert Balfanz for a conversation about what is possible when school leaders, teachers, students, families and community members are given opportunities to engage in school redesign. With just a little support and structure

In Season 2, episode 7 Graham Wood, Director of the Office of Graduate Success, at the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce joins Robert Balfanz for a conversation about how high school graduation requirements and the very design of high schools can be re-imagined so that all students graduate high school on a pathway to adult success.The great American high school of the 20t

Celebrating its one-year anniversary, the National Partnership for Student Success (NPSS), a partnership between the U.S. Department of Education, AmeriCorps, and the Johns Hopkins Everyone Graduates Center, was launched following a call to action from the Biden-Harris Administration for more Americans to serve as tutors, mentors, college/career advisors, student success coaches, a

In this episode, Robert Balfanz continues the conversation with New Hampshire’s Extended Learning Opportunity Network’s Kerrie Alley-Violette and Sean Peschel, two on-the-ground educators working to make “learning anywhere, anytime” real. At the time when the sources and locations of knowledge and training have multiplied exponentially, innovative efforts like New Hampshir

When teams of educators, students, and community members across the nation work to redesign high schools, one thing that repeatedly stands in the way is the school schedule and the need to meet seat time requirements. There is no better example of how the 20th Century designed high school no longer works in the 21st century than seat time. It is based in the idea that how much you

As a species, humans are smart, adaptive, and resilient. We all have the capacity to think, create, and contribute to society at a high level. What stands between this shared capacity and everyone realizing its full potential is the opportunity to learn. This is where human shortcomings come in … including greed, power, fear, racism, and othering. They play a role in the developm

The evidence is clear. Students need to attend school on a regular basis to succeed. If the purpose of school is to help students learn and development, then being there is important. Until quite recently, however, we did not regularly measure the extent to which the students enrolled in a school were attending on a regular basis. Until 2017 or so, the most common measure used to m