About the Authors

Linda Darling-Hammond is President of the Learning Policy Institute and the Charles E. Ducommun Professor Emeritus at Stanford University, where she launched the School Redesign Network and the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education. She is a former President of the American Educational Research Association and a member of the National Academy of Education and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. A former teacher and teacher educator, she has centered her research and policy work on teaching quality, school reform, and educational equity. Among her more than 600 publications are several award-winning books on redesigning schools and teaching, including The Right to Learn: A Blueprint for Creating Schools That Work; The Flat World and Education: How America’s Commitment to Equity Will Determine Our Future; Empowered Educators: How High-Performing Systems Shape Teaching Quality; and Preparing Teachers for Deeper Learning.

Matt Alexander has more than 20 years of experience as a teacher and principal in San Francisco public schools and is now an elected member of the San Francisco Board of Education. He has a track record of leading innovation, facilitating democratic decision-making, and organizing for systems change, including in the early 2000s cofounding June Jordan School for Equity. He now works as a community organizer at Faith in Action Bay Area. On the San Francisco Board of Education, Matt has led efforts to expand Lesson Study as a professional development practice, worked with immigrant families to write a comprehensive translation and interpretation policy, and coauthored the Student Success Fund ballot measure, which passed in 2022 and generates up to $60 million per year to support community schools in San Francisco.

Laura E. Hernández is a Senior Researcher at the Learning Policy Institute and coleads the Whole Child Education team. She specializes in designing and conducting qualitative research on whole child approaches and the systems and structures that enable them. Her work is informed by her 9 years of classroom teaching as well as her interdisciplinary research training focused on education policies and the factors that affect their equitable and democratic implementation. To date, her work has examined the systems, factors, and processes surrounding a range of reforms, including community schools, deeper learning school design, and relationship-centered schooling initiatives. Hernández holds a PhD in Education Policy from the University of California, Berkeley; an MST from Pace University in New York City; and a BA in Political Science from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the many educators who have worked with passion and purpose to create new designs for high schools that can support all of their students well—often against the odds and with little support. The work of some of these educators is memorialized in the vignettes represented in this volume. Thousands of others have done similar work across the country. Special recognition goes to leaders like Ann Cook, Deborah Meier, and Ted Sizer, who have created new models for schooling and mentored the leaders who developed many others.

We also thank our colleagues at the Learning Policy Institute (LPI); the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education (SCOPE); and the National Center for Restructuring Education, Schools, and Teaching, who have documented many of these schools and whose work is cited throughout. We thank Pam Cantor and her colleagues at Turnaround for Children (now the Center for Whole-Child Education) who worked with the LPI team to create the Design Principles for Schools: Putting the Science of Learning and Development Into Action, which are a key foundation for this work. Finally, we thank members of the LPI Communications team for their invaluable support in designing, editing, and disseminating this report.

This research was supported by the Stuart Foundation. Core operating support for LPI is provided by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, Heising-Simons Foundation, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Raikes Foundation, Sandler Foundation, Skyline Foundation, and MacKenzie Scott. We are grateful to them for their generous support. The ideas voiced here are those of the authors and not those of our funders.

External Reviewers

This report benefited from the insights and expertise of two external reviewers: Jacqueline Ancess, Co-Director, National Center for Restructuring Education, Schools, and Teaching at Teachers College, Columbia University; and Ash Vasudeva, Senior Vice President for Strategic Initiatives, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. We thank them for the care and attention they gave this report.

 

Suggested citation: Darling-Hammond, L., Alexander, M., & Hernández, L. E. (2024). Redesigning high schools: 10 features for success. Learning Policy Institute. https://doi.org/10.54300/533.285

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.

End Notes