The Assembly Line Has to Go: A Back to School Case for Rebuilding How Kids Learn
American schools still run on a design finished in 1906. The scores are falling, the kids are checking out, and the fixes that work are the ones we schedule last. Here is what I would change for the 2026 to 2027 year, and the evidence behind each one.
The short version: The American classroom is organized like a factory floor, with students batched by birth year, moved by a bell, credited by hours in a seat, and measured by a test that was never built to tell a parent whether their kid can think. That design is not a conspiracy, it is just old, and it is now producing the worst twelfth grade results the country has ever recorded. The fix is variation, real work, real mentors, and a lot more time outside the building.
Key takeaways
- The school day still runs on the Committee of Ten (1892) and the Carnegie Unit (1906), which defines a credit as time in a seat rather than demonstrated mastery.
- The Carnegie Foundation, which invented that unit, partnered with ETS in 2023 to replace it with competency based assessment.
- 45 percent of U.S. twelfth graders now score below NAEP Basic in math and 32 percent in reading, both the highest shares ever recorded.
- Roughly one in five students is chronically absent, up from 15 percent before the pandemic.
- Only 48 percent of U.S. high schools offer calculus and 49 percent offer computer science, so one size fits all was never one size.
- Field trips, service learning, mentorship, dual enrollment and career pathways carry the strongest evidence and get cut first.
- Seven programs a district can build this year, none requiring new law or a bond referendum, are in section 8.
- The design is 120 years old, and its own authors want it gone
- The results are in, and they are the worst on record
- One size fits all was never one size
- The test is the tail wagging the dog
- Get them out of the room
- The cheapest intervention nobody schedules
- Real life skills are not electives
- The build: seven partnerships that replace the assembly line
- The assembly line scorecard: score your own district
Every September I watch the same thing happen. A student walks into a building, gets sorted into a group of thirty people whose only shared trait is a birth year, sits through six or seven forty minute blocks in an order nobody chose for them, and is told the goal of the next nine months is to accumulate credits. Nobody in that building designed this. The teachers did not, the principal did not, and most superintendents inherited it the way you inherit a house with the plumbing already in the walls. But somebody did design it, and it is worth knowing who.
1. The design is 120 years old, and its own authors want it gone
In 1892 the National Education Association convened the Committee of Ten and standardized what an American high school should teach. Fourteen years later the Carnegie Foundation invented the Carnegie Unit, which defined a credit as a set number of hours sitting in a room with a teacher. It was an administrative convenience, built largely to sort out college admissions and faculty pensions, and it became the currency of American education. It still is. Think about what that means: the unit we use to certify that a young person has learned something measures time. Not mastery, not transfer, not whether they could do the thing again on a Tuesday in March without a review sheet.
Here is the part that should end the argument. The Carnegie Foundation now wants to replace it. In 2023 Carnegie partnered with ETS, the organization that built the standardized testing infrastructure, to develop competency based assessments, and ETS chief executive Amit Sevak described the goal as “a fundamental paradigm shift from time-based to skill-based units of learning.” When the two institutions that built seat time and standardized testing both say the model has outlived its usefulness, the question stops being whether to change and starts being who moves first.
What would actually break in your high school if a student could earn a credit by demonstrating mastery instead of logging hours? Name the real obstacle in the comments. I suspect it is the master schedule, not the pedagogy.
2. The results are in, and they are the worst on record
I am not one of those people who thinks American schools were better in 1985. I have spent fifteen years in this field and watched extraordinary teaching happen inside broken structures, and I wrote last year about the reckoning AI forced on education. This is the structural half of that argument. But the most recent Nation’s Report Card is not ambiguous.
Read the fourth number again, because it gets the least attention and explains the most. Chronic absenteeism, defined as missing ten percent or more of the school year, sat at fifteen percent of American students in 2019. It hit twenty eight percent in 2022, was still around twenty six percent the following year, and recent estimates put it somewhere in the high teens to low twenties with no state fully back to where it started. Roughly one in five American students is voting with their feet, and we keep filing that under attendance. It is not an attendance problem. When a fifth of your users stop showing up, you do not send them a truancy letter. You ask what you built.
Ask your child one question this week: name a single thing you learned in school last year that you have used since. Then ask what they would want to spend a whole day on. Post what they say. The answers are usually more useful than any survey a district will run.
3. One size fits all was never one size
The phrase implies every student is getting the same thing, and they are not. The standardization in American education is in the schedule, not the opportunity. Across roughly 26,200 American public high schools, the federal Civil Rights Data Collection found that only 48 percent offer calculus, 49 percent offer computer science, and 61 percent offer physics. In high schools where more than three quarters of students are Black or Latino, calculus is available in 35 percent of buildings; where fewer than a quarter are, it is 54 percent.
So a student can do everything right, follow every rule of the assembly line, and still graduate from a building that never offered the course that would have changed their trajectory. Then we hand them a transcript and a national test and tell them the comparison is fair. Course variation is not a luxury item. It is the clearest place where the system decides, in advance, what a child is allowed to become.
4. The test is the tail wagging the dog
I run a test prep company, so let me be precise about what I am and am not saying. I am not against assessment. Assessment done well is the most honest feedback loop a student ever gets. I am against a system where the assessment has quietly become the curriculum. The Council of the Great City Schools studied sixty six urban districts and found students take an average of 112 mandated standardized tests between pre-K and twelfth grade, with eighth graders spending about 25.3 hours a year on them, roughly 2.34 percent of the school year. That sounds small until you read the researchers’ own caveat: they did not measure test preparation time. The tests are not the cost. The months of instruction bent around them are.
The encouraging news is that the ground is moving, and it is moving here in the Northeast. New York voted to end the exam requirement for a high school diploma; beginning in the 2027 to 2028 school year the state shifts to a portrait of a graduate framework built on durable skills, with broader definitions of credit and a required career and technical education credit that can include financial literacy, and new transcripts and aligned assessments follow by 2029 to 2030. Connecticut has already written the door into statute: under C.G.S. 10-221a(f)(3), districts may award graduation credit through a demonstration of mastery against competency and performance standards, using multiple and flexible pathways.
Connecticut families should sit with that second one. The legal authority to move past seat time exists in this state right now. What is missing in most districts is not permission, it is will and a master schedule willing to bend. We did not need a new law. We needed someone to use the one we already have.
How many weeks of your year are shaped by an assessment you did not write and cannot see the results of in time to act on them? I would rather have that number from a hundred teachers than from any policy paper.
5. Get them out of the room
If you want to see how upside down our priorities are, look at what happens to field trips. Researchers ran a randomized controlled trial with 10,912 students and 489 teachers across 123 schools, assigning some groups a single school tour of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and others a spot on the waiting list. One trip, not a semester. Students who went showed measurable gains in critical thinking, historical empathy and tolerance, and the effects were largest for the students the system serves worst: rural students gained close to a third of a standard deviation in critical thinking, and students from high poverty schools and minority students gained roughly 18 percent of a standard deviation. Weeks later, without warning, 88 percent could still describe a specific painting they had seen.
Now compare that to what we actually do. Over half of American schools eliminated planned field trips in 2010 to 2011, and the Field Museum in Chicago went from more than 300,000 student visitors a year to under 200,000. It gets cheaper, too. A study of third grade classrooms in Frontiers in Psychology paired identical lessons taught indoors and outdoors over ten weeks, and after a lesson in nature, teacher redirects dropped by nearly half, from about one every three and a half minutes to one every six and a half. If a purchased curriculum delivered that, districts would buy it. A door delivers it.
Name one place within twenty minutes of your school that a class should be visiting every year and is not. A courthouse, a hospital, a machine shop, a marsh, a newsroom, a port. I will compile the list and publish it.
6. The cheapest intervention nobody schedules
Ask an adult who made the difference in their life and almost nobody names a curriculum. They name a person. MENTOR’s research is blunt about the gap: roughly 40 percent of young people grow up without ever having a mentor, 67 percent can remember a stretch when they needed one and did not have one, and 75 percent of American adults who did have a mentor say it was a major contributor to their success. We have known this for thirty years and it still sits outside the school day, funded by whichever nonprofit can raise for it, treated as enrichment rather than infrastructure. A structured mentorship period is not exotic. It is a block on a schedule and a background check. Every high school in America has adults in its community who would give an hour a month to a sixteen year old if somebody organized it, and we already organize buses, lunch waves and test proctors.
7. Real life skills are not electives
The tired objection to career and technical education is that it tracks kids away from college. The evidence says something close to the opposite.
- In Connecticut’s technical high schools, male students were about 10 percentage points more likely to graduate than comparable peers, and those in construction and manufacturing clusters showed roughly 32 percent higher average quarterly earnings.
- In Massachusetts, CTE concentrators who did not enroll in college earned about $6,000 more per year by age 25 than similar peers who also skipped college.
- Each additional CTE course cuts dropout likelihood by roughly 1.2 percent, with the biggest effect in eleventh and twelfth grade.
- Students concentrating in health science, IT and education clusters were more likely to enroll in college, not less.
Then there is money. As of this month 30 states guarantee a standalone personal finance course before a student can graduate, Connecticut among them. That is real progress from five years ago, and it still leaves twenty states where a young adult can earn a diploma having solved for x several thousand times without ever seeing an amortization schedule, a pay stub, or the arithmetic of a credit card minimum payment. Meanwhile the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 found employers expect 39 percent of workers’ core skills to change by 2030, and the five they rank highest are analytical thinking, named essential by about seven in ten companies, then resilience and adaptability, leadership and social influence, creative thinking, and motivation and self awareness. Look at that list, then look at a bubble sheet. Not one of the five is measurable by the instrument we have organized the American school year around.
8. The build: seven partnerships that replace the assembly line
Not a ten year plan. Seven programs a single district can stand up this year, with the phone calls to make and the evidence behind each.
Everything below shares one idea. A school does not have to be the only place learning happens, and it does not have to buy the things it needs. Almost every resource on this list already exists within fifteen miles of your building, is owned by somebody who would say yes, and has never been asked.
The Employer Corps: twelve companies on a standing calendar
Stop treating business partnership as an annual career day with a folding table. Recruit twelve local employers into a signed, calendared commitment for the school year, each with a defined role. Not sponsorship. Labor.
The tiered ask, so no company has to start at the deep end:
- Tier 1, four hours a year. Host a site tour for one class. A hospital sterile processing department, a water treatment plant, a machine shop floor, a bank’s fraud operations desk.
- Tier 2, one project. Hand a class a real brief with a real deadline and show up to judge it. A marketing agency needs a campaign concept. A land trust needs a trail usage study. A restaurant group needs a food cost model. Students present, the client critiques, and the grade reflects both.
- Tier 3, an instructor of record. A CPA co-teaches personal finance for one semester. A nurse practitioner co-teaches health careers. A contractor co-teaches construction math. The district provides a certified teacher of record and the partner provides the reality.
- Tier 4, a paid youth apprenticeship. The CareerWise Colorado structure is the proven template: a three year apprenticeship starting junior year, roughly two days a week on site in year one, three days by year two and three, at a training wage, with the diploma and the credential earned together.
The evidence for the far end of that ladder is strong. Male students in Connecticut’s technical high schools were about 10 percentage points more likely to graduate, and those in construction and manufacturing clusters showed roughly 32 percent higher average quarterly earnings. In Massachusetts, CTE concentrators who did not enroll in college earned about $6,000 more per year by age 25 than similar peers.
Twelve courses your catalog does not have, and no new hires
Only 48 percent of American high schools offer calculus and 49 percent offer computer science. Adding variation looks impossible on a staffing budget. It is not, because four mechanisms let you add courses without adding lines.
The mechanisms: a virtual course consortium shared across three or four neighboring districts, so one teacher of Mandarin or organic chemistry serves all of them. Dual enrollment sections taught on your campus by an adjunct from the community college. Employer taught electives under a teacher of record from Build One. And self paced mastery pathways for students who can move faster than the calendar.
The twelve courses I would add first, chosen because they map to work that exists and to skills employers actually name:
- Applied statistics and data literacy, using your own town’s public data
- Personal finance, taxes, insurance and the arithmetic of debt
- Entrepreneurship with a real profit and loss statement, not a poster
- AI literacy and prompt design, taught as a research and verification course rather than a software tutorial. Connecticut families can read our guide to teens, AI chatbots and the new state safeguards for the guardrail side of this
- Health careers with a stackable credential such as CNA, EMT or phlebotomy
- Construction math, blueprint reading and estimating
- Logistics, supply chain and operations
- Environmental monitoring of a specific local watershed, with data submitted to the land trust
- Journalism that produces an actual published newsroom, on deadline
- Local government and civics taught by attending real municipal meetings
- Sports analytics, for the students who will read a regression if it is about basketball
- Skilled trades survey, rotating through electrical, plumbing, HVAC and welding with partner instructors
Now put that list of twelve next to the five skills employers ranked highest in the World Economic Forum survey: analytical thinking, resilience, leadership, creative thinking, self awareness. It is the same list. We just never scheduled it.
The seamless handoff: make senior year the first year of college
The gap between the last day of high school and the first day of college is where an enormous number of capable students quietly fall out. We treat those as two separate institutions with two separate standards and then act surprised when the transition breaks people.
The fix is not aspirational. It is contractual, and it is already the fastest growing thing in American education. Dual enrollment served roughly 76,000 students in 2003. By 2022 to 2023 it was 2.5 million, about 21 percent of all community college enrollment.
What the outcomes look like. Of students who took dual enrollment courses, 81 percent enrolled in a postsecondary institution within a year of high school, and 50 percent completed a credential within four years, against 44 percent of comparable non participants. The Early College model, tested by random lottery across ten schools and about 2,500 students, is stronger still: at four years past graduation roughly one in five Early College students had a bachelor’s degree versus about one in ten in the control group, and within six years they were nearly three times as likely to hold an associate degree or certificate.
What I would put in writing this year:
- A signed articulation agreement with the nearest community college and one in state four year institution, guaranteeing that a defined block of 12 to 30 credits transfers. Not “may transfer.” Transfers.
- Vertical alignment of the junior year English and math syllabi to the first year college syllabi at those partners. Have the two departments sit in one room in October and compare the actual assignments. It is an uncomfortable meeting and it is the highest value meeting of the year.
- A college level research and writing course in which students produce a genuine cited paper, get a real revision cycle, and learn what a source is. This is now the single biggest gap I see in students arriving on campus.
- An explicit end to the senior victory lap. Second semester senior year becomes the capstone, the apprenticeship or the college coursework, and nothing else.
- A summer bridge with the partner college for any student who wants it, before the first tuition dollar is spent. Testing still matters inside this model, and our breakdown of the ACT versus the SAT for 2026 to 2027 covers how to place it.
New York is building exactly this direction into state policy, ending the exam graduation requirement beginning in 2027 to 2028 in favor of a portrait of a graduate with a required CTE credit. The districts that align now will look prepared. The ones that wait will look caught out.
The Community Ledger: service that is curricular, not logged
Most schools already require community service hours. Most of it is worthless, because we designed it as a compliance box rather than as instruction, and students learn exactly what we designed.
Done properly, service learning is one of the better documented academic interventions we have. A meta analysis of 62 studies covering 11,837 students found positive effects across every domain measured, and the largest effect was on academic achievement, at 0.43, ahead of social skills, attitudes toward school, self concept and civic engagement.
The same analysis names what separates programs that work from programs that do not. Programs using all four recommended practices produced an average effect of 0.35. Programs using none produced 0.17. The four practices are: link the service to the academic curriculum, give students real voice in choosing and planning it, involve the community partner as an actual partner, and build in structured reflection. Hours logged on a form does none of the four.
What real projects look like, each tied to a course and a partner who needs the work done:
- The statistics class builds the food pantry’s demand forecast and inventory system
- The computer science class runs a standing tech help desk at the senior center
- The environmental science class does the land trust’s annual trail and invasive species survey
- The Spanish class translates the town’s ballot materials, permit forms and school notices, reviewed by a certified translator
- The history class builds a recorded oral history archive with the library and the veterans post
- The engineering class designs and builds adaptive equipment for the special education program down the hall
- The art class designs the signage and wayfinding for the town park
- The business class does the bookkeeping cleanup for three small nonprofits
Then publish a Community Ledger every June: the partner, the deliverable, the hours, and what the partner says it was worth. It becomes the most persuasive document your district produces, and it is the document that recruits next year’s Employer Corps.
The Field Trip Consortium: solve the cost by pooling districts
The evidence here is the strongest in this entire piece and it is the first line districts cut. A randomized trial of 10,912 students across 123 schools found that one art museum trip produced measurable gains in critical thinking, historical empathy and tolerance, with the largest effects for rural students and students from high poverty schools. Weeks later, 88 percent could still describe a specific work they had seen.
Meanwhile over half of American schools eliminated planned trips in 2010 to 2011, and the Field Museum in Chicago went from more than 300,000 student visitors a year to under 200,000.
The obstacle is never educational. It is buses, chaperones, liability and grant writing capacity. All four are fixed by scale, and no single district has scale. Three or four do.
The consortium mechanics: neighboring districts sign one shared charter bus contract at volume pricing, share a single part time grant writer, and negotiate one master group rate and liability rider with each partner venue. Build a two year anchor rotation so every student hits the same set of experiences by graduation rather than depending on whether they drew the ambitious teacher.
Anchor partners worth a standing annual date, and every region in America has a version of each:
- An art museum and a science center
- A teaching hospital, ideally the simulation lab
- A working manufacturer or machine shop
- The county courthouse, on a day with a real docket
- A land trust, marsh, watershed or state forest
- A university research lab, which will host for free because recruiting is their job
- A water treatment or waste to energy plant, the single most underrated trip in America
- A port, rail yard or regional airport operations center
- A regional theater, including the technical and load in side of it
- A working farm or aquaculture operation
- A local newsroom or radio station
- The state capitol while the legislature is actually in session
Then offer the Employer Corps a per student sponsorship line. A company that will not write a check for “the schools” will absolutely fund the sixty seats on the bus that comes to its own facility.
Mentorship as infrastructure, not enrichment
40 percent of young people grow up without ever having a mentor. 67 percent can name a stretch when they needed one and did not have one. And 75 percent of American adults who did have one say it was a major contributor to their success. We have known this for three decades and it still lives outside the school day, funded by whoever can raise for it.
How to make it structural: one hour a month on the master schedule, matched by student interest rather than by need, so it never becomes a program kids get assigned to as a label. Recruit from two pools nobody uses: the Employer Corps you just built, and your own alumni database, which every district has and no district mines. Batch all background checks into one August window so the logistics stop being an excuse.
Then give the mentor a job. Unstructured mentoring drifts. Attach it to something concrete: the capstone, the apprenticeship application, the college essay, the first resume, the mock interview, the FAFSA. This is the same logic behind executive function and study skills coaching, which works for the same reason. An adult with a task shows up. An adult told to “connect” does not.
The outdoor block, the capstone, and the audit nobody wants
Three structural changes that cost close to nothing and change the feel of a building.
One lesson outside per week, every grade, on the schedule. Not a reward for good behavior. An instructional practice. In paired lessons across ten weeks, teacher redirects in the following indoor period fell by nearly half after an outdoor lesson, from about one every three and a half minutes to one every six and a half. If a purchased curriculum delivered that, districts would buy it. A door delivers it.
A senior capstone defended in front of outside adults. An internship, a research project with an external advisor, a business plan, a community problem with a real client from Build Four. Judged by a panel that includes people who are not their teachers, because the moment a student presents to a stranger the work changes.
Audit test preparation time, not test time. Ask every department for the number of instructional days spent preparing for state assessments, then publish the total. The Council of the Great City Schools measured 25.3 hours of actual testing in eighth grade and explicitly declined to measure preparation. Your district can measure it, and the conversation changes the moment the number is public.
Not one of those seven requires a bond referendum, a waiver, or a change in state law. Six of the seven require phone calls that nobody has made. The seventh requires a principal willing to publish a number.
Which tier would you actually sign up for, and has a school ever asked you? If you run a business, a lab, a practice or a nonprofit and you would host a class, judge a project, co-teach a semester or take an apprentice, say so in the comments with your industry and your town. I will make sure it gets in front of the right district.
9. The assembly line scorecard
Ten questions. Score your own district and share the number.
Give your school one point for every honest yes. Then post your score in the comments with your state, or share this with your board. I want to see the spread.
- Can a student earn credit by demonstrating mastery instead of logging seat time?
- Can you name ten local employers with a defined, calendared role in your school year?
- Is there a signed articulation agreement guaranteeing that specific college credits transfer?
- Does your high school offer calculus, physics, and computer science?
- Did every grade take at least two purposeful field trips last year, and does a two year anchor rotation exist?
- Is community service tied to a course, a real client and structured reflection, or is it hours on a form?
- Is there a structured mentorship program with community adults on the master schedule?
- Do seniors complete a capstone defended in front of adults who are not their teachers?
- Does every graduate take personal finance, and is second semester senior year real work?
- Could your principal tell you, in days, how much instructional time goes to state test preparation?
Cite this piece
Journalists, board members and fellow educators: here are the figures used above with their sources, so you can lift them cleanly.
- 45% of U.S. twelfth graders scored below NAEP Basic in mathematics and 32% below Basic in reading, both the highest shares ever recorded. NAEP 2024, released 2025.
- 38% of eighth graders scored below Basic in science, the highest since 2009. NAEP 2024.
- Chronic absenteeism rose from 15% of K-12 students in 2019 to 28% in 2022, and remained near 26% in 2022-23. American Enterprise Institute analysis.
- Only 48% of U.S. public high schools offer calculus, 49% computer science, and 61% physics. Civil Rights Data Collection, 2020-21.
- Students take an average of 112 mandated standardized tests from pre-K through grade 12; eighth graders spend 25.3 hours a year testing. Council of the Great City Schools.
- A single art museum field trip produced measurable gains in critical thinking, historical empathy and tolerance across 10,912 students in 123 schools, with the largest effects for rural and high poverty students. Greene, Kisida and Bowen.
- After an outdoor lesson, teacher redirects fell by nearly half in the following indoor class period. Kuo, Browning and Penner, Frontiers in Psychology.
- 40% of young people grow up without ever having a mentor; 75% of adults who had one call it a major contributor to their success. MENTOR.
- Connecticut technical high school male students were 10 percentage points more likely to graduate; Massachusetts CTE concentrators who skipped college earned about $6,000 more per year by age 25. EdResearch for Action.
- Dual enrollment grew from about 76,000 high school students in 2003 to 2.5 million in 2022-23, now 21% of community college enrollment; 81% of participants enrolled in college within a year and 50% completed a credential within four years, against 44% of non-participants. Community College Research Center.
- In a lottery-based study of about 2,500 students, roughly 1 in 5 Early College students held a bachelor’s degree four years after graduation versus about 1 in 10 controls, and they were nearly three times as likely to earn an associate degree or certificate within six years. American Institutes for Research.
- Across 62 studies and 11,837 students, service learning produced its largest effect on academic achievement (0.43); programs using all four recommended practices averaged 0.35 versus 0.17 for programs using none. Celio, Durlak and Dymnicki.
- 30 states, including Connecticut, now guarantee a standalone personal finance course for graduation. Next Gen Personal Finance, September 2026.
- Employers expect 39% of workers’ core skills to change by 2030; analytical thinking is named essential by about 7 in 10 companies. World Economic Forum, Future of Jobs Report 2025.
The part where I ask you to argue with me
I have been wrong about things in this field before and I have said so in this space. So here is the open question, and I mean it as a question.
Every objection I hear to the changes above comes down to one of three things: liability, scheduling, or the belief that parents will not tolerate a transcript that looks unfamiliar to a college admissions office. I think the first two are solvable and the third is already dissolving, because New York is dissolving it on a public timeline.
If you think I am wrong, I would rather hear it than not. Specifically:
- Superintendents and principals: what is the real reason mastery based credit has not happened in your building? Not the diplomatic reason. The real one.
- Teachers: if I gave you back the instructional days currently spent on test preparation, what would you do with them?
- Parents: would you accept a transcript that showed demonstrated competencies instead of letter grades, if your child’s college list stayed the same?
- Students: what is the one thing school should have taught you and did not?
- Employers: when you hire a twenty two year old, what do you find missing that a high school could have built?
Leave it in the comments, or share this with the person in your district who could actually move one of these seven things. That is the only reason to write something like this.
The assembly line was a reasonable answer to a 1906 question. It is a terrible answer to a 2026 one. My kids, your kids, and the students I sit across the table from every week deserve a school that was designed for them rather than one they were sorted into.
Let’s build that one.
Working through this with your own student?
ConnectPrep works with families nationwide on test prep, academic tutoring and college admissions counseling, including the part nobody puts on a syllabus: figuring out what a student is actually built for, and how to show it on an application. If you want a straight conversation about your child’s path, we are happy to have it.
Jeremy M. Fine is the founder of ConnectPrep, a national test prep, tutoring and college admissions firm headquartered in Westport, Connecticut. He holds a BA from Washington University in St. Louis and an MPA from the University of Pittsburgh, and has spent more than fifteen years in education services.
Sources
- National Assessment Governing Board, “Nation’s Report Card Shows Declines in 8th-Grade Science and 12th-Grade Math and Reading” (2025).
- American Enterprise Institute, “The Latest Chronic Absenteeism Numbers.”
- Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and ETS, partnership announcement (2023).
- U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights, Civil Rights Data Collection, 2020-21 student access and enrollment.
- Council of the Great City Schools, “Student Testing in America’s Great City Schools.”
- K-12 Dive, “New York to replace graduation exam, implement graduate portrait framework.”
- Connecticut State Department of Education, Guidelines for Implementing Mastery-Based Learning (C.G.S. 10-221a(f)(3)).
- Greene, Kisida and Bowen, “The Educational Value of Field Trips,” Education Next.
- Kuo, Browning and Penner, “Do Lessons in Nature Boost Subsequent Classroom Engagement?” Frontiers in Psychology.
- MENTOR: The National Mentoring Partnership, Mentoring Impact.
- EdResearch for Action, “Evidence-Based Approaches to Designing Effective Career and Technical Education Programs.”
- Community College Research Center, “The Postsecondary Outcomes of High School Dual Enrollment Students.”
- American Institutes for Research, “The Lasting Benefits of Early College High Schools.”
- Celio, Durlak and Dymnicki, “A Meta-Analysis of the Impact of Service-Learning on Students,” Journal of Experiential Education.
- CareerWise USA, modern youth apprenticeship program structure.
- Next Gen Personal Finance, Live U.S. Dashboard.
- World Economic Forum, Future of Jobs Report 2025, Skills Outlook.