The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Ednovate, and field partners have launched Systems Transformation. This research project explores how school systems keep their work coherent as they grow. It is one of seven projects in Carnegie's Research & Development Consortium for High School Transformation.
Ednovate is in its second year as a member of the Carnegie Foundation and XQ Institute's Future of High School Network. The network brings together 24 school systems serving approximately 90,000 students across urban, suburban, and rural communities. Together, they are helping to help build a new model for American high schools.
During the first year, Ednovate leaders worked with educators across the country on school schedules, professional development, classroom instruction, and the overall student experience. The network also connected Ednovate with research and experts who helped inform our approach to student wellness and college readiness.
Our Year 2 Focus
This year, Ednovate will focus on the Systems Transformation project, one of the Carnegie projects that grew out of the network's first year.
The project will study how systems sustain coherence as promising high school innovations move from individual schools to systemwide scale. It’s led by the University of California, San Diego, and will run in six school systems:
Aldine Independent School District
New York City Public Schools
Eastern Hancock Schools and Indiana Microschool Collaborative
Ednovate
Liberty Public Schools
Purdue Polytechnic High School
The project will trace how leaders, educators, and partners align policy, assessment, professional learning, and implementation so that transformation can take root and spread. The work is expected to produce a practical framework to ensure coherence. It will also lay the foundation for an evidence base for practitioners and policymakers committed to spreading innovation.
Ednovate’s Director of Mental Health & Wellness Kristine Rezny, LCSW, M.Ed., PPSC, shares what our network will bring to this project: “At Ednovate, we believe transforming education means redefining student success beyond academics alone. Through our Wellness Indicator, we are elevating students’ social-emotional well-being as a measurable component of school success. Our partnership with the Carnegie Foundation offers an opportunity to share this work nationally, demonstrating how student voice, reflection, and whole-child development can shape more equitable, meaningful educational experiences for all young people.”
This Year’s Projects
The network’s projects grew out of a field-wide effort to identify the most consequential questions standing between today's time-based system and a future organized around rigorous learning, meaningful experiences, and trustworthy evidence of what students know and can do.
Each project focuses on schools and systems that are building promising approaches, where stronger evidence and shared tools can help those approaches take hold, last, and scale. Participating educators and students will serve as co-designers, helping shape the questions, tools, protocols, and findings.
"We know a great deal about how high school transformation starts, and remarkably little about how it sustains. This project will help practitioners and policymakers understand how to create the coherence required for high school transformation to move beyond isolated bright spots and become durable, systemwide practice," said Brooke Stafford-Brizard, Senior Vice President for Innovation and Impact, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
About the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
The mission of the Carnegie Foundation is to catalyze transformational change in education so that every student has the opportunity to live a healthy, dignified, and fulfilling life. Enacted by an act of Congress in 1906, the Carnegie Foundation has a rich history of driving transformational change in the education sector. Its achievements include the establishment of TIAA-CREF and the creation of the Educational Testing Service, the GRE, Pell Grants, and the Carnegie Classifications for Higher Education.
For more information, visit www.carnegiefoundation.org.
