"Leaning into a school redesign process that centers learners by design is an opportunity to evolve our systems, structures, and practices that give us the best chance to fulfill the promises we make to each of our learners at every stage of their learning journeys. Whether you are just starting to think about school redesign or are in the middle of redesigning your structures, this Playbook offers you tangible examples and tools to help you take your next steps."
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Why School Redesign, and Why Now?
For more than a century, our schools have been shaped by an industrial-era design, sorting and ranking students and standardizing offerings in service of efficiency and compliance. While this model has succeeded at what it was built for in many ways, it has not succeeded for all learners and is insufficient for today’s world. Engagement levels are alarmingly low, with fewer than half of K-12 students surveyed by Gallup reporting that they feel prepared for the future. Employers echo this concern, pointing to gaps in collaboration, adaptability, and critical thinking skills among young people entering the workforce.
At the same time, society is shifting at an unprecedented pace. Artificial intelligence, digital tools, and global interconnectedness are redefining the skills required to thrive in life, work, and citizenship. Learners need more than memorizing academic content: they need strong relationships, social-emotional awareness, critical thinking, problem-solving, and the ability to adapt to and utilize emerging technologies.
Many educators around the country are building this into their daily lessons, creating engaging projects and supporting learners as whole humans. However, the systems and structures within our schools are often not designed for this type of learning, with schedules that require learners to bounce from one discrete content area to another or where their learning is disconnected from the world around them.
This is why school redesign is urgent. It is not about marginal tweaks or layering innovations onto outdated systems. It is about reimagining the very purpose and design of school, aligning it to the science of learning, human development, and the realities of our modern world. In short, it is about creating schools where every learner can know who they are, thrive in community, and engage meaningfully with the world.
School Design is one layer of a rich Learner-Centered Ecosystem that starts with identifying clear academic and whole-learner outcomes that will support learners in navigating post-secondary life. In order to develop those outcomes, learning experiences must be authentic, personalized, competency-based, and grounded in a learner-centered community and environment where there is a sense of belonging and strong relationships are built. The school structures we create from there can either empower or stifle this learning model.
School Redesign, supported by systems-level enabling conditions and a learner-centered culture, is about catalyzing this learner-centered paradigm through intentional redesign of school structures such as schedules, use of space and programming so that every learner can know who they are, thrive in community and actively engage in the world as their best selves.
Learn more about each layer of a Learner-Centered Ecosystem here.
Why Leaders Are Choosing Redesign
In a recent Learning Policy Institute and Learner-Centered Collaborative webinar series on School Redesign, leaders shared how the pandemic made the urgent need for learner-centered approaches visible. Week after week, they spoke about moving from crisis-response to purposeful redesign—shifting from compliance-based, school-centered models to ecosystems that honor the whole learner. As one principal reflected:
Across the country, education leaders are redesigning their schools not because it is easy but because it is necessary.
1. Students’ needs and engagement demand it.
In examining engagement across the San Marcos Unified School District, TK-12, Dr. Andy Johnsen realized that middle school was the place where learners were becoming disproportionately disengaged. Redesigning school was a means to meet middle school students where they were in their development and to make school more engaging for them, knowing that each school site would need something different. That autonomy was integral to a sustained redesign effort.
Andy Johnsen School Redesign Clip (intro).mp42. Educators want to reignite their passion for teaching
Dr. Laura Philyaw, former Assistant Superintendent of Escondido Unified School District (CA) and current Assistant Superintendent of Educational Services at National School District (CA) saw that educators were working harder than ever but that student engagement and the overall student experience was not improving. She and her leadership team realized that trying something different was necessary, and in the process they needed to hear from students and educators directly in order to inform the redesign process.
Laura Philyaw School Redesign Clip.mp43. Leaders see gaps between aspirations and current structures.
In 2013, Dr. Devin Vodicka was the superintendent of Vista Unified School District. During that time, one school in particular had a very poor reputation in the community. Devin realized they needed to look at school redesign to reimagine what was possible and do what was best for learners and learning. The founding principal of this reimagined school, Eric Chagala, came in to support educators in a redesign process to move away from failing intervention programs (that were actually causing more challenges than solutions) to focus on creating a school where learners could thrive.
Read more about the VIDA Redesign story here.
Eric Chagala School Redesign Clip.mp4Similarly, as a parent and school leader, Dr. Tyler Thigpen realized there was a discrepancy between the competencies and skills he wanted his own children to develop through their K-12 journey and the daily experiences they had in school. He wanted to shift from a teacher-centric approach that yielded compliance to a school experience that helped learners develop agency and positively impacted the entire school community. This was the start of creating The Forest School.
Tyler Thigpen School Redesign Clip.mp44. Leaders are compelled to move from isolated innovation to systemic transformation.
School redesign takes a systemic approach to ensure meaningful transformation that doesn’t just live in one classroom, or even one school if operating within a larger district. At Escondido Union School District, Superintendent Dr. Luis Ibarra has led the district to develop a five-year plan to redesign all schools in the district using a cohort-based strategy. Each year, from 2023-2026, a new cohort of four schools kicks off their school redesign journey by creating an action plan.
Escondido Clip (Intro Page).mp4By 2027, all schools will be at different phases of their redesign implementation journey and learning from each other along the way. This initiative, taken on as a way to transform the district and bring to life their Framework for the Future, has resulted in meaningful change across the district at a pace and scale that honors each learning community’s self-assessed readiness for change. Learn more about Hidden Valley, a middle school that has gone through the school redesign process in Escondido USD.
School Redesign and Community Schools:
A Shared Vision
California’s Community Schools Initiative and learner-centered school redesign share a common goal: creating schools where every young person is known, supported, and empowered to thrive. Both approaches emphasize the whole learner, the importance of strong relationships, and deep connections between schools and communities.
The five school design structures—small learning communities, distributed leadership, teacher collaboration, performance assessment, and real-world learning—directly align with the four community school pillars of integrated student supports, collaborative leadership, extended learning opportunities, and family/community engagement.
For example, small learning communities foster belonging and provide wraparound supports, while performance assessments create meaningful ways for learners to demonstrate growth in partnership with families and community audiences. Similarly, real-world learning expands educational opportunities through internships and community projects, directly echoing the extended learning vision of community schools.
By centering on a clear identity rooted in local values, schools can weave these design elements together in ways that both honor their community and advance the broader goals of California’s Community Schools. The result is a coherent, learner-centered model that transforms the learning experience itself, ensuring that schools are not just places of service delivery but hubs of innovation, belonging, and possibility.
A Call to Action
Redesigning schools is not about abandoning what works, but about evolving toward what learners need now and in the future. It is about courageously asking: Are we preparing learners for the tests of life or just a life of tests?
This Playbook offers tools, examples, and frameworks to help communities reimagine education, together, creating schools where every learner flourishes. Read more about this Playbook here.
You can start by exploring the Design Structures pages to see specific examples of how schools are bringing those structures to life in their learning environments. Alternatively, you can explore individual schools where all five structures are taking shape by visiting our School Profile pages.
Once you’ve explored “what” these learner-centered structures look like in practice, it’s time to understand “how” leaders and their communities got started and kept the momentum going. Head over to the How to Redesign section of this Playbook to gather those insights.
Leaning into a school redesign process that centers learners by design is an opportunity to evolve our systems, structures, and practices that give us the best chance to fulfill the promises we make to each of our learners at every stage of their learning journeys. Whether you are just starting to think about school redesign or are in the middle of redesigning your structures, this Playbook offers you tangible examples and tools to help you take your next steps.
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