Up Close: The Future of High School with Linda Darling-Hammond 

On May 11, 2026, researchers, educators, advocates, and state leaders gathered in Sacramento to discuss Getting Down to Facts III, a research initiative designed to inform the next decade of education policy in California. At the convening, Stuart Foundation President Sophie Fanelli sat down with State Board of Education President and Learning Policy Institute Founder and Chief Knowledge Officer Linda Darling-Hammond for a conversation about rethinking learning, engaging students, and expanding opportunity in high schools. Their conversation has been edited for length. You can watch the full recording here. We’ve also added links throughout for further reading. 

Sophie Fanelli: Over your career, you’ve studied a wide variety of education issues, including high school redesign, which has taken on a new sense of urgency. Why is high school redesign so important now, and what does it mean in practice for students, educators, and families? 

Linda Darling-Hammond: I’ve been worried about this since I started teaching in the 1970s in big factory-model high schools where kids were on the conveyor belt. I saw 30 students at a time, six times a day—180 kids in a day—and I cared desperately about them, but I could not care effectively for them in that system. 

This is not a new problem, but it’s especially important today: during the pandemic, we were reminded how important relational anchors are for students and how important it is that the work students do is purposeful, meaningful, and engaging. There was a study not long ago of 25,000 high school students; 75% had only negative adjectives to apply to their high school experience. The most common were bored, stressed, and tired. In California’s Healthy Kids survey, about 50% of students said they had an adult who knew them well in their high school, and about 50% felt a sense of belonging. Only ~22% felt they were doing anything important or meaningful in high school. 

So many pieces of the curriculum need to be rethought to get kids ready for a world that includes AI, rapidly changing jobs, and the need for civic engagement. In redesign work across California, our goal is to enable all of our high schools to be relationally supportive, purposeful, meaningful, civically engaged places that are also professionally organized for teachers to collaborate. 

Sophie: Thank you for the reminder that this is not a new problem, but it does have new urgency. Young people are very clear about what they want from school—and if we don’t meet them where they are, I think we’ll see that crisis of connection grow. 

California has just invested $10 million in a school redesign initiative. Can you talk about what that is, how it connects to prior investments, and how we make this set of investments coherent? 

Linda: This set of investments are all related, first to creating schools like community schools—we have 2,500 in the state now, and the 2027 budget trailer bill proposes expanding funding so that nearly two-thirds of our schools will be community schools that offer integrated student supports for health and mental health, relational and restorative practices, social-emotional learning, and that are places where kids are well known, families are connected, and learning is connected to the community.  Additionally, the governor’s career master plan looks at how we create college and career pathways, including the state’s more than 600 Linked Learning pathways, which prepare students with A-G coursework, college-preparatory classes, and industry-supported internships and experiential learning. 

In places across the state that are using these funds successfully, it’s enlivening and exciting to see students so engaged. Oakland, for example, has gone wall-to-wall with redesigning its high schools, with much-increased graduation rates, A-G completion rates, and achievement levels. At Fremont High School and Oakland High School, there are small learning communities: an architecture pathway, or a law and social justice pathway, for example. The traditional academics are applied to work they’re doing in the field: in an environmental science pathway, students are studying water quality at Lake Merritt and enacting proposals to improve it. They’re engaged in what matters to them and making learning functional and applied. You don’t see the problems of chronic absenteeism and disengagement in settings where students’ needs for relationships and for purposeful, meaningful learning are being met. 

One thing to note: there is big demand for this tiny $10 million pilot, which is supporting 14 redesign networks of districts and schools to stimulate and support redesign work. We had more than 50 applicants, which represented 20% of all districts in the state—all trying to apply for this pilot. This shows a shared sense that we’ve got to make high school a place that prepares kids for the future, and a place they want to go to every single day. In the schools that have done this kind of work, the disengagement we’ve worried about is generally much less likely to be present. Teachers and kids want to be there.  

Sophie: Your paper with University of Southern California Neuroscientist Mary Helen Immordino-Yang elevates that young people need to be engaged in their learning, that it needs to be hands on, that play matters, that rigor and relevance can work together. Can you talk about what the neuroscience tells us about adolescent learning? 

Linda: Mary Helen Immordino-Yang is taking MRIs of students and teachers and literally measuring what the brain is doing while they’re learning. One of the things we know from the emerging science of development is that we all learn through experiences and relationships. With strong relationships, not only do teachers know their students well, but also the way they teach and evaluate work is more profound, which has been measured with brain waves. This makes a real difference in teaching, learning, and assessment. 

We also know that adolescence is a time when the brain is just exploding again. A lot of people talk about the first years of life, but adolescence is also a very significant moment for brain development. Part of that is the development of transcendent thinking—the ability to understand the bigger implications of things, which has beneficial effects: it reduces the extent to which students are traumatized by negative events because they have a different perspective, and they feel more empowered and have more control. They also begin to understand the ways in which they can act on the world, and how what they’re learning makes a difference. When we build schools that offer opportunities for relational experiences, deeper learning, and deeper thinking, we’re really feeding adolescent development in ways that allow whole adults to emerge with purpose, meaning, and care for their community. 

Sophie: I’m hearing a symmetry between what adolescents need in school and what teachers need as well. Can you talk about the role of teachers in redesigned schools? 

Linda: I used to say that if I ever got really good at teaching high school, I’d be teaching like a preschool teacher, because they know everything about their students and exactly where they are across all dimensions of development, and how to support them. 

In California, if you want to see one of the models built on that thinking, go to RFK Community School in Los Angeles, where there are multiple small schools within a big building. A group of four teachers—math, social studies, English language arts, science—will share 100 to 120 kids. A counselor is attached, sometimes a special educator. Teachers have time built into their schedules to collaborate, both around their discipline and around the grade-level students they share in their team. They talk about how to best support students and they do interdisciplinary curriculum planning so that when you’re studying revolutions in history, you’re also studying the literature and the scientific investigations from those time periods. 

What researchers have found about these kinds of designs is that graduation rates are better, achievement is better, kids feel more attached, and chronic absenteeism is lower when you build these kinds of settings—designed not to select and sort, but to develop human talent. 

Sophie: UCLA has an incredible teacher education program where candidates can intern at the UCLA Community School. How do we connect teacher preparation programs with redesigned schools more broadly?  

Linda: The program at UCLA is wonderful, and there’s great work being done at Berkeley and other programs across the state as well. UCLA has taken advantage of the teacher residency grants, which allow you to pay teachers while they’re getting prepared, and to pair them with mentors for a full year of clinical practice connected to coursework. And they’ve placed those residents in schools doing extraordinary work. What we find is that teachers who go through residencies rate their programs most highly, go into and stay in teaching at higher rates, and pass the teacher performance assessment at higher rates without disparities. It’s giving them a solid entry point and helping reduce the churn. 

There are also high school pathways now focused specifically on teacher preparation—the teaching academies in the Golden State Pathways. We can imagine students in a teaching pathway mentoring, tutoring, and interning—maybe in an early childhood program. They could come out with a child development permit and start working right away, then stack credentials over time and come into the teaching force. We also need to make the path through college and career much more efficient. With dual credit, kids could graduate with a full year of college under their belt and enter a career or credential program immediately. 

Sophie: Surveys of parents and voters across political lines show broad support for school to be relevant, engaging, and preparing students for college and career. We have building blocks in place—community schools, Golden State Pathways, dual enrollment. What’s the biggest barrier to moving from pockets of innovation to a systemwide focus? 

Linda: The factory model and all of the policies around it represent decades—a geological layer—of regulation for a system that was constructed in the early 1900s built on a seat-time, transmission-curriculum model. We now have to build a system based on competencies, on how kids can demonstrate what they’ve learned, how they can combine areas of learning and apply them to real problems. That is not in the current design, and we’re going to have to be very deliberate about rolling back the things that are barriers.  

And we’ll have to invent things: there is a career passport under construction right now as part of the career master plan, which will capture competencies acquired through jobs, internship experiences, and courses, and package that into a platform that can inform employers and higher education institutions. There are lots of ways to think about transcripts and platforms for understanding and communicating competencies, not just tied to Carnegie units, seat time, and credits. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, which invented the Carnegie unit, is now trying to get rid of it. 

Many states are involved in this work, and California partners with several others trying to figure out how to invent the new system that will really allow kids to develop the flexible, deep thinking and research skills that are going to serve them as the economy changes. 

Sophie Fanelli: I’m so impressed by the leadership you’ve shown in pushing for these reforms. We can’t wait. When you talk to young people and adolescents—and we do a lot of that at the foundation—they’re ready for this today. I understand it’s going to be very hard. It’s hard to transform a system that’s 100 years old, anchored in old models and frankly, old mindsets about what young people are capable of and what they should have access to. It’s exciting to see so much alignment and so much momentum for this work.