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.
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