For too long, education has divided itself into two camps: the “instructional core” people who believe quality curriculum and good teachers are enough to improve learning and the “innovation” people who view a school’s design and a student’s experience as essential elements, writes Aylon Samouha, co-founder and CEO of Transcend, a national nonprofit that supports communities to create and spread learning environments, in an essay in The 74.
Over the years, visiting thousands of classrooms and talking with young people and their families, I kept seeing the same thing. Teachers were getting stronger. Curriculum was getting more aligned and rigorous. The field’s investment at the instructional core was raising the floor for millions of students. Yet the experience around all of it was still mired in century-old assumptions about how learning actually happens. Daily interactions and activities that build knowledge, skills, and identity had barely changed.
Young people can feel it. About 75% of elementary students say they love school. By high school, that number flips. Only one in four teenagers reports being truly engaged in learning. Students are simultaneously bored and overwhelmed.
Families are voting with their feet. Public school enrollment has fallen by nearly two million students since 2020, with homeschooling up 45% in some states and private school enrollment surging.
For the past decade, the Transcend organization has been helping design learning environments where strong instruction meets intentional experience design. The learning itself is engaging, relevant, relationship-rich and connected to who students are and who they’re becoming.
At Intrinsic Schools in Chicago, strong academic content lives inside a learning environment where the physical design of the building is responsive to the learning experience. Multiple teachers work with students across different learning modalities in a single large classroom, adjusting instruction in real time based on individual goals and needs.
On Choice Days, students build their own schedules, selecting academic supports like writing labs alongside enrichment they care about. Three times a year, students lead their own conferences with advisors and families. They reflect on their growth and map their path forward. The instructional core is rigorous. The experience is intentional.
Transcend is the home of the Gradient Learning program, which strengthens the instructional core by integrating high-quality instructional materials from leading curriculum providers, key life skills, real-time data and monitoring tools, with dedicated coaching. It has reached more than 250,000 students across 46 states.
That hard infrastructure operates inside a learning environment. If that environment hasn’t been intentionally shaped, even the strongest instructional elements hit a ceiling. The science of learning and development tells us why. The brain does not process content in isolation from context.
Learning is shaped by relationships — students feel safe and known, the work connects to something that matters to them, they have agency in the process. Belonging activates the neural architecture that makes deep learning possible. Students actively construct knowledge through experience, and no amount of well-sequenced information changes that fact.
AI, economic disruption and civic fracture are reshaping the world. School is one of the few institutions to help young people navigate it. But we won’t meet this moment through one-size-fits-all mandates handed down from above, nor by asking exhausted educators to innovate on nights and weekends.
The path forward is communities — students, families, educators, and learning experts — redesigning schools together. This redesign draws on research, proven models, and local wisdom to build learning environments where:
- rigor and meaning reinforce each other
- young people are held to high expectations and supported as whole human beings
- where the daily experience of learning is as intentional as the curriculum itself.
The false choice between rigorous instruction and innovation has held the field back long enough. Schools that figure this out will be the ones young people want to attend. Our field has all the pieces. It’s time to put them together.
The 74
