The Opportunity

Many high schools in California are relics of the past, designed for an industrial era and never intended to serve all students well. Yet innovation has sprouted in pockets across the state, with authentic and engaging instruction, attention to multilingual and other diverse learners, connections to college and career opportunities, strong community partnerships, an awareness of how AI is transforming the skills required to thrive in today’s and tomorrow’s workforce, and other practices that create the kinds of experiences that we know help young people learn and thrive. 

This moment has captured wide interest: high schools are eager to evolve, colleges and universities are rethinking preparation and admission, and employers are signaling the need for something different as they adapt to the ubiquity of AI. We share a vested interest in learning environments that equip young people with the durable, deeper learning skills that will be needed to thrive in this rapidly changing world. The state’s unprecedented investments—more than $5 billion in community schools, dual enrollment, and Golden State Pathways—plus a new secondary school redesign pilot, have accelerated this momentum. There is now a once-in-a-generation opportunity to spread deep, authentic, equitable learning to all young people across California.

What We’re Working On

The Youth Thriving Through Learning (YTL) Fund was built for this moment: to provide philanthropic support to research, document, translate, and share learnings so the state and public education systems can enact effective, equitable, and widespread policy. Bringing together a collaborative of 11 funders in new and nimble ways, our unique role is to create the connective tissue to quilt and weave efforts across the field, aligning strengths so that the sum of our work is greater than the individual parts. We work to strengthen the connections between research, practice, and systems so that promising ideas can be implemented, sustained, and responsibly scaled in ways that better serve young people. The YTL Fund is focused on: 

• Sustaining and strengthening momentum for secondary school redesign to spread innovation across the state.
• Advancing more meaningful approaches to assessing learning to better signal and measure progress towards the skills and knowledge students need in today’s world. 
• Supporting the evolution of college admission practices to incorporate more authentic evidence of student learning and more complete measures of students’ assets.
• Understanding how artificial intelligence is reshaping learning, work, and well-being and supporting educators, schools, and cross-sector partners to adapt in ways that strengthen human skills—creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, and empathy—across education and workforce pathways.

Progress

As part of its broader effort to reimagine the high school experience for California’s adolescents, the YTL fund has: 

• Supported alignment and coherence among community schools, pathways, dual enrollment, and school redesign efforts statewide. 
• Convened a working group of grantees crafting a collective path towards sustained high school transformation. 
• Hosted a summit of researchers, policymakers, and practitioners and facilitated site visits to exemplary high schools that included policymakers, field leaders, and partners across the ecosystem.
• Commissioned research studies on high school redesign to inform and support policy and practice. 
• Invested in research and pilots exploring how innovative assessments and portfolios of student work can be incorporated into college admissions processes. 

The YTL Fund hopes to continue this momentum to support the alignment of philanthropy, state and local public education systems, practitioners, and community members to create a California where all students thrive in secondary schools, in college and careers, and in life.