Dear Friends and Colleagues,
One hundred sixty-five years ago this month, The Times of London published the first newspaper weather forecast. It was the work of Robert FitzRoy—a retired admiral who had once captained Charles Darwin's Beagle and had spent years watching ships go down in storms that nobody saw coming.
FitzRoy placed observing stations in ports around the British coast, gave each community a barometer and instructions for reading it, and asked collaborators to telegraph their measurements to London every morning. When a gale looked likely, harbors would raise cones and drums to warn ship captains, and a forecast ran in the morning paper.
The signals saved lives and provoked controversy. After FitzRoy died in 1865, a government committee judged his methods unscientific, and the warnings came down. The fishermen, shipowners and insurers who had come to rely on them objected. The people who had spent years making decisions in the dark refused to go back. The signals were restored.
As another school year begins, I can't help but think about why we still expect American educators to work in the dark. Teachers, district leaders and state officials across the country make consequential decisions — what to teach, what technology to buy, what a diploma should require — with scant evidence to guide them.
A year ago, the Carnegie Foundation published a National R&D Agenda grounded in a simple conviction: Moving American high schools from time-based to competency-based learning demands new knowledge and new tools. Just as the science of reading has accelerated literacy outcomes in states nationwide, we need to build a science for high school transformation.
As part of this effort, we recently issued a request for information across the field, asking what work is underway and where the essential gaps and opportunities lie. The response was extraordinary — literally hundreds of research organizations, universities and scholars wrote back with insights that point concretely to the evidence we need to accelerate outcomes for young people. Their responses are shaping how we think about key national knowledge-building efforts, and we've begun work with a growing list of national and regional partners, researchers and educators to test and build evidence that sustains and scales high school transformation. The work includes understanding how best to integrate durable skills into high-quality instruction; building more robust, actionable assessments; developing credible methods for counting out-of-school learning toward graduation; and capturing learning across school, work and community to inform student learning records.
Of course, like FitzRoy's network up and down the British coast, none of this happens without close collaborators, working together in the pursuit of a greater good. I am enormously grateful to our partners who are committed to building the tools and evidence that makes transformation of American secondary schooling actionable, lasting and effective.
In partnership,
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