Read the full transcript of Episode 74 of the NAIS New View EDU podcast, which features Diego Arambula, vice president for educational transformation at the Carnegie Foundation, joining host Morva McDonald. They take an in-depth look at how reliance on the Carnegie Unit has shaped education in this country, and why Diego believes a massive shift is needed to help unlock potential and expand educational access for the future.
Morva McDonald: In my role as the co-host of New View EDU, I have the privilege of stepping back, talking with folks who lead schools, and considering possible organizations and individuals who would offer us research based ways of thinking about our role as independent schools and independent school leaders. A long, long time ago, as a Doctoral Student at Stanford, I was lucky to have a research assistantship at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and over the yearsI have paid a lot of attention, actually, to Carnegie, the work that they’re doing, and the initiatives they’re leading—all of which are focused on to educational transformation. Carnegie’s mission is to catalyze transformational change in education so that every student has the opportunity to live a healthy, dignified, and fulfilling life.
Today, I’ve invited Diego Arambula, who is the vice president for educational transformation at Carnegie. As vice president, Diego leads ambitious, actionable strategies and builds partnerships with educators, policy makers, parents, employers and community based organizations to advance Carnegie’s really important mission. I’m looking forward to the conversation.
Good morning, Diego. Welcome to New View EDU. To get us started, it would just be great to hear a little bit about yourself and how you came to be at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
Diego Arambula: Thanks, Morva. It's so great to be here with you.
The story starts some decades ago. My parents, I sort of won the lottery on parents. My parents are just two wonderful humans who have dedicated their lives to trying to make our community a better place. I grew up here in Fresno, California and they just, we knew, my siblings and I all knew we needed to find some way to try and make positive change. I'd seen my parents do this through local elected office. So I went to college, majored in government and was like, that's it. And then got to DC and realized, DC is not full of my dad. It's full of other people who were not always there for the same reason.
So, I've always loved kids. I think they're just amazingly fun. Found my way into schools only to realize that schools themselves were, they had worked so well for me. They had transformed my dad's life. They had transformed my life. And yet once I got into schools and was teaching, I realized, oh no, this system's, at the time I thought broken, since then I've realized it's working perfectly to do exactly what we built it to do.
I couldn't leave two professions by the age of 25. And so instead of leaving my second profession, I decided, I've just got to find someone who's using education to actually work for young people. Found my way to a little charter school called Summit Prep. It's since turned into Summit Public Schools, where the founder said this isn't about the kids we're serving, it's about the systems we put around them. And what would it look like for us to empower educators and to create systems that actually ensure that every kid has a chance to thrive?
I fell in love with this idea of just reimagining what school could be. Got to do that as a classroom teacher, as a school leader. I moved back home because I've got two kids, and moved back to my hometown. Launched a nonprofit to try and unlock demand for these radically reimagined schools, and then joined a national nonprofit called Transcend to do this work with communities across the country. And through all of that work, all of it grounded in how to just create change, and positive change, and realizing that the change in education is the actual system itself, I didn't know that there was a boogeyman underneath all of this, Morva, that was this thing called the Carnegie Unit.
Because the things we were up against were all of these other problems that at their root had the Carnegie Unit in common. And a few years ago, I began to realize, oh wait a second, there's this credit hour thing. There's this Carnegie Unit thing. And so when I heard Tim Knowles, the president of the Carnegie foundation say, we've got to reimagine and move beyond the Carnegie Unit, I was sold.
And I said, great, how can I partner with you to do that work from the seat I was sitting in? And that began our conversations. And I eventually just came over and started at the Carnegie foundation for the advancement of teaching to continue this, what has been a lifelong journey of trying to help reimagine how schools can actually ensure that the brilliance and magic of all young people can get unlocked so every young person can thrive, so they can just have better lives, our communities can thrive, and our democracy can thrive.
Morva McDonald: Diego, that's a beautiful story, in part because I think it illuminates also just the way that a commitment or a passion about something can take somebody in a lot of different ways, right? A lot of different paths, but the commitment itself is the through line.
I'm really interested in kind of at the forefront of this conversation, trying to understand from you and kind of from the overall, Carnegie's perspective, how do you imagine schools to be? Like you're working toward something. You must have a vision of something about what you want to be happening in the context of schools or schooling. We can think about that differently.
And so just share with us, what is that vision, which will help us ground what the opportunities are there and what the challenges are, as you refer to it, the boogeyman of lots of things, not just the Carnegie Unit. But help us understand what that vision is.
Diego Arambula: Yeah. And, and so different folks are going to have different language for this. Maybe the place I'll start is to say, we are very laser focused that there is not one new high school that everyone should be running. And, and it's, it's not like, you all, we found it. It's career connected learning. Everyone should just do that. And it's not just, it's competency based learning and, and by the way, I think both of those are really powerful models that recognize important pieces.
Rather, we continue to talk about it as the architecture. There is an existing architecture to school that is grounded in the Carnegie Unit. And that architecture is built around one critical choice that got made a hundred plus years ago, which is, we didn't know what was happening.
Millions of young people were flooding into cities. We had started this thing called the high school movement. So we now have this new school with hundreds of thousands, millions of kids in it, and no idea of any way to measure or know what was going on. The committee of 10 said, here's what they're going to learn. And the Carnegie Unit said, here's how we're going to know that that's getting learned. And it conflated time and learning. That then seeped into the architecture of school.
That single choice in creating an architecture, paired with the committee of 10, has essentially said, great, we now know the courses you need to study and the way we know you've studied those courses. That's what's got to get upended. So when you ask the question of what are we driving to, it's not really, everyone should be competency-based. And again, having worked at Summit, having seen this model in so many places, it is a powerful lever and an important move away from that conflation.
But we've got to move toward a new architecture that sets a broader set of goals. Yes, it's academics. It's also so many other skills, habits, and dispositions, to a new way to think about the learning experiences that young people are engaging in. Sometimes those happen in school buildings. Sometimes they happen outside of school buildings. Sometimes with a traditional teacher, sometimes with others. So just new conceptions of learning, and then new ways to both assess and signal that learning has happened such that we really can say, great, if we have a broader set of things we care about, and we've got a more expansive way of helping you engage in experiences to learn that, how do we signal both to you and others that you're making movement toward these broader goals?
That architecture is what we need to develop. We’re seeing lots of, you could then almost apply some of these examples I named, career connected learning, competency-based. To what extent are you broadening the goals? And at times I worry that some competency-based is just competency-based against yesteryear’s set of standards. And in that case, I'd say, yep. You are broadening the learning experiences, but you're keeping the goals the same. We've got to move toward a broader set of goals.
And so you can think about each of these new types that we talk about through a lens of that architecture. And we believe that new architecture is what most needs to be unearthed and developed. And we're excited about so many schools right now who are already trying to find ways, and again, maybe with their own language in moving toward this new architecture. We see some of these examples. It's just that too often, those live at the margins of our system and haven't yet found a way to penetrate the architecture of the mainstream school.
Morva McDonald: I think this is fascinating because I think the power that you're talking about of the institutional history, essentially, of schooling, right? And how it has dominated just actually our understanding of what it means to do education essentially is kind of at the heart, I believe, of the thing that you're talking about.
I'm also struck that it's challenging to rebuild an architecture like this, right? So I'm interested, like this is an interesting conversation. It's also to try to be hopeful, right? And also engage that the reality is that schools are actually quite hard to move and our understanding of what kids need to learn and how they learn has been really difficult to change over time and in a large way, on a large scale way.
So it would be great to hear from you, like where you think the most promising, let's start on the most promising part of this, right? Where’s the most promising change for you occurring?
Diego Arambula: I'll say I'm actually incredibly and deeply hopeful that we're at this moment. And I think at the core of your question, that's your question is, my gosh, changing the architecture seems so daunting. Shouldn't we actually tackle something else that feels more doable? I'll give you three reasons I think I'm so hopeful.
The first is, you're going to have to go back with me some years now to college. I took a class in college, in which I was studying about evolution and our wild inability as humans to understand just how big and long time is. And in that, we have this belief that evolution is, we just go from here to here in a straight line. And it's just a little bit of progress. And what we learned about is this term punctuated equilibrium.
And actually the evolution does happen in little slow bits, but the evolution when we look backwards from then until now, often happens in these moments of extreme change. And then the little bits of evolution get us to where we are. So there are moments. 1906 was one of them. We went from, you know, the vast majority of American young people were not in high schools, to all of a sudden they were. And within a decade, they were in high schools with this thing called the Carnegie Unit and the credit hour determining, and that happened in about a decade.
I believe we're in another moment and this might just be hopeful, optimistic, Diego and Tim at the Carnegie Foundation, but I believe it. And I'm sure that you are hearing this, too, that I began this work 20 years ago, trying to think about how do we reimagine and when we were doing it then, we were…I don't know the expression, spitting into the wind? It just did, it felt like we were fighting against everyone else's urge to try and do the existing set of school a little bit better.
And I hear so many people, teachers, parents, community members, system leaders, state leaders, recognizing something big has to change. So one, I, this idea of punctuated equilibrium gives me hope. Two, we are seeing tremendous demand. So that's the community leaders, the parents, the students, the teachers. You can think about chronic absenteeism as an expression of demand for something oddly different. You can think about our dwindling teacher pipeline as an expression of demand for radically reimagined schools. You can think about business leaders saying we don't have the talent we need as an expression of demand. So, so many groups are coalescing.
And then the third is we now actually have the tools. I mean, when, again, to ground for a second in my Summit experience, when we were trying to create models to give students personalized opportunities, we literally were doing this in Google Sheets. We were exporting from Khan Academy, and Khan Academy had eight or 10 people working there, every single night, uploading that into a Google sheet. And then we had someone color coding. And just the explosion of tools, supports, with AI on the horizon. We're seeing existing tools today. We believe more will exist that are going to empower this.
So it's that punctuated equilibrium, the deep demand and the actual ability to move there that, that, leaves me very hopeful. And then all of that we're seeing in actual schools. So there are schools today that are doing some really amazing things. You can point to them, you can go to them, when you go to them, they just feel different and their outcomes are different. And what we haven't yet seen, but I believe those first three things are going to get us to, is that little school that sits at the edge might actually be in 10 years’ time, the norm. Of just, that's what schools should feel like, that those are the outcomes that young people will get.
So I'm hopeful. But if you could see my, I have a Believe sticker from Ted Lasso on the back of my computer. I acknowledge that I think—
Morva McDonald: —I mean, I'm hopeful too. I'm generally hopeful too and I understand like, the...There's a long time perspective, I think, in education that there are these innovations on the margins, on the periphery, right? That will influence arguably the broader system. That is a strategy education has used. That's part of the strategy of charter schools to start with, right?
So, you know, what I hear you saying is like, there's a will for change, right? There's a demand for change. I appreciated the highlighting of the various stakeholders who are demanding change. I think that's really, that's a critical part of the phenomenon. And it sounds like the question is, there are individual schools that have the capacity, right, to move that will and that demand and make that kind of change. And then there's systems change, right, there's broad change, which I really think that you're after and talking about.
Talk to us a little bit about the challenges of thinking about this kind of change in terms of learning. And I sometimes want to talk about learning more than I want to talk about schooling, because as you know, kids spend a lot of time outside of school. They do a lot of learning outside of school. And maybe part of this redesign is we have to think about that.
But talk to me about kind of the challenges you see in that system. And you're talking to an independent school audience. And so what is the connection of that system to an independent school audience that arguably has more autonomy than a public school setting?
Diego Arambula: Yeah. So maybe I'll bucket this answer into two parts here. The first is, I may actually go in the reverse of the way you asked the questions. The first is, I think that independent schools, and for a second, I know that charter schools are public schools, but operate without some of the same constraints. So in what ways might schools that have some more flexibility support this broader move, is the first part of the question I'll tackle, which is one I adore.
We need these schools to exist as amazing choices for families who deserve those choices. I'm a dad to two teenage kids, and one who's in high school right now. And I believe that families want and need those choices. And I think there's an imperative for folks who sit outside of some of those constraints to think about how am I meeting the needs of the students I'm serving? And are there ways I can support students everywhere?
And the way that I think independent schools and charter schools who might have more flexibility can do that is to think about how they are creating solutions that might be scalable. So we believe that to make this move toward this new architecture, there's going to need to be a set of scalable tools to support this work. And often, there's a way for an independent school to solve a problem that directly meets the needs of their students today, but is not replicable unless you have student to teacher ratios of one to 10, or unless you've got this kind of funding or unless, or unless, or unless. And what might it look like to not live in a world of scarcity, but rather to live into this world of abundance, but to think about it through a lens of, huh, and what would it look like to share this?
An example of this is while I was at Transcend, the role I was in just before coming here to Carnegie, there was an amazing partnership that Transcend supported, thinking about how to build agency for the youngest learners, kindergartners, first graders, second graders. I loved this idea of how are we already building agentic young people at that young age. And the relationship was between Lindsay Unified, right? Far ahead in the public school district space in competency-based learning, but a primarily farmworking rural community, with Red Bridge, a private school in San Francisco. And it was unbelievable for those two to learn from each other, with each other, to build what might some of these tools look like that work in this space.
So I think there are huge opportunities to both meet the needs of young people, to unlock in new ways, but to also think about how might this scale as a tool, as a solution, as a support.
Morva McDonald: I think having been a head of school at an independent school in Seattle, that a question that I often ask myself as a leader there is, what is my public purpose as an independent school? And how do I really answer that authentically? Not symbolically, but in an authentic way. And I think there's something in here about what you're talking about that gives the kernel of the idea of what that could be potentially, right? Which I think is super interesting and worth contemplating, right?
Not just how do you do good work in a single institution, but how do you allow that work to be shared and thought about and learned from and complicated, made complex, right? In a transition to other systems.
Diego Arambula: And I would hope, and I would imagine, I get the benefit of talking to teachers all the time. I used to be a teacher. I used to be a school leader.
I would hope that the next sentence I'm about to say is true. And I would imagine it is because of how many I talk to. It doesn't matter the model of school you're in, whether you're in the large comprehensive district run high school down the street, whether you're in a charter high school or whether you're in an independent high school, you care about kids and you care about the communities you live in. And as such, you want to meet the needs of the kids right in front of you.
And yet, if we could expand that to say, I care about those students and my community too. And so if the work I'm doing can be of service and it takes us not seeing an either/or world of scarcity, but rather saying how might. And again, that's where I don't want an independent school who can potentially have one to 10 to say, let's just go to one to 30, because that's what the district has to do, but rather to say, how might some of the things we do translate and what might a partnership look like or what might it look like for us?
So that's the first part of the answer. The second is way more down in the weeds, but I think really important, which is this change management— And it really is systems change and change management— is hard. Carnegie is a small little team. We are not going to be the change management driver across the country. What we believe we can do is build out, and so we're working now to build out a national R&D agenda, a future of high school network of systems who are trying this work, in which we can apply the national R&D agenda.
What questions are we asking about how this change happens? What's enabling it? What's holding it back? What are those forces that, when turned right, are driving toward the change that we need to see at scale? That help this work root, sustain and scale? And it's the application of that national R&D agenda in these spaces, as well as elsewhere, to help us understand what those forces are. And that's where we think we can then lean on, great, once we've gained those learnings, how do we share those more broadly to enable more people to move more quickly toward this new way of learning.
Morva McDonald: Can you spend a little bit of time clarifying, kind of making more specific what the R&D agenda is?
Diego Arambula: So it's going to launch in, I hope, a couple of months. Myself included, many people make the mistake of thinking about R and D as research. Absolutely that, that's the whole R of R and D. But the D is critical too, which is there is development work. And so.
What we've done is bring together an expert work group of all of the stakeholders, as well as some really serious researchers in the field to think about what are the critical questions we need to study? What are those catalyzing forces that undergird that are, what are our hypotheses today? So we've been unearthing, OK, great. So we know there's something about sustained leadership, right? That there is a hypothesis that there's more for us to learn and uncover when folks are moving, sustained leadership is a critical part.
And we're seeing some places where even when superintendents change, the leadership maintains. So, OK, what are they doing? How are we? So as an example on the research side, we're thinking about what are those catalyzing forces? Sustained leadership, what's the curriculum? What's the professional development? Things like that.
On the development side, we then went to the folks most in the work and said, what things need to be developed to unlock and drive this? And then we're trying to identify who are the partners trying to meet that demand for those development opportunities. And so those two pieces we're going to try and bring together to say, folks are saying we need new ways to assess like this. Then when we have those new ways to assess, we've got to think about how are we using sustained leadership and professional development and embedding that in curriculum and how do those levers turn in ways that sustain and scale this work?
Morva McDonald: That's really helpful. That's so deeply in the, I think of this as like, what's the policy in an institution? What's the actual practice that takes place that's functioning? And how do we illuminate that so that other people can see it and make sense of it and use it? Which I think is really exciting and telling.
I'm kind of interested in this just, you know, one of the things that sometimes we hear particularly from heads of school and high schools and independent schools is the pressure that they feel, right, in helping kids meet the criteria for college, entrance to college, right? What that looks like and that whole system, the alignment of those systems and even if you want to be innovative in certain ways, right? That system makes that more difficult.
Just talk to me about that relationship and how you're seeing that and where the Carnegie Unit in your change and innovation gets inside of that problem, which is also a driving force. You've now got your head in your hands, so I'm thinking maybe this is a bad question.
Diego Arambula: Yep. I know. No, I'll say, I am deeply hopeful and optimistic just as a general starting position in life. You've hit on one that is so critical, and we absolutely need the post-secondary sector to step up to the bat on. Full stop.
And I'm, I, that is one where, we're seeing small signs of it, but you may have noticed in my demand piece earlier, post-secondary is not one of the—
Morva McDonald: —Wasn't in there. That's right.
Diego Arambula: I, I will ground my, the challenge here. I think your listeners know better than I do the pressure that college admissions places on students and families. Like I said, I've got a high schooler myself. She's in ninth grade. She's at our local comprehensive district high school. It's a block away.
And even with parents like us who are saying, here are the paths, we're talking early and often, we are trying as best we can to relieve all of these pressures, it's in the water of high school, that she's like, well, but I should take APHUG freshman year.
We talked her through everything and I said, sweetie, you've never shown an interest in this field of study. And I used to be a history and government teacher. So, you know, I was excited to nurture and cultivate this and, and I said, why do you think you should take APHUG instead of another elective course? And she said, well, everyone else is doing it. And I just don't want to fall behind.
And you realize that counselors are pushing this, and counselors are pushing that because they see what universities are asking for. And universities, in an ever-growing effort to get students who are truly prepared, ask for more. And right now, the only way to ask for more is to ask for more time. Because the Carnegie Unit has conflated time and learning, the only way for a student to be more prepared for college is to spend more time earning more credits.
And if we can't unlock those two, we're going to continue to put more pressure on young people. And it's, I mean, this system, that system does not work for so many reasons. It's not great for kids, who feel tremendous pressure. It's oddly not even good for universities, who continue to try and up the rigor by asking for more, when in reality what they really should be doing is just saying, I want the existing work you're already doing just to be more rigorous. I want better insights into what you actually know and can do.
And it's a...That piece of this puzzle is going to need to be interrupted. We might be in a moment, higher ed. I thought this six months ago. I think this, especially now, higher ed is in, I think potentially just the most delicate and tenuous position it's been in since its inception in the country. And personally, and as a foundation, we're worried because it plays such a critical role in driving economic mobility and opportunity. And yet we need them in this moment to both meet that moment, and everything else, but also to reimagine how might they engage with high schools in ways that unlock this opportunity? Because it's not working for them either.
Morva McDonald: Help me think about, let's go back a little bit to independent schools and flexibility and autonomy, right? And let's imagine that you were giving advice maybe to a group of independent schools or particular independent schools and they had listened to you today and really took to heart, which I think a lot of independent schools, or many independent schools do, is kind of disentangling, right, seat time from learning.
You know, many of the schools, Independent schools are engaged with Challenge Success, right? Really reframing what's the experience in high school, right, for kids? What does it feel like for them?
What's your advice to a school or a set of independent schools who want to engage in this kind of work, in this process, not just as isolated islands, but as part of a broader initiative and trend to try to make, actually, schooling better for all kids?
Diego Arambula: I love that question. Having never worked in an independent school, take every bit that I'm about to say with that grain of salt.
So the first part is, to whatever extent possible, thinking about the work you're doing, both through how do I meet my current students' needs, and is there someone in the public system who I might partner with, such that we can see how these learnings and opportunities might translate over?
So I think those direct relationships and supports would be unbelievable. And the more of those Red Bridge, Lindsay kind of examples we could see, the better. And I would imagine it would both fill people's souls, and it would challenge people, because there were things that Red Bridge was learning from Lindsay as well around, what's this look like to do this exact agentic work with language learners? Oh my gosh, isn't this so cool to think about it when they've got this family structure at home. So there were learnings in both directions that improved their models.
The second might be an invitation, which is, as Carnegie launches this national R&D agenda, and we're launching a future of high school network, a lot of the learning we're going to be doing is in those places, but we believe this learning is happening everywhere. And so it's an invitation to say, we'd love to partner with independent systems who are moving really fast toward some of these to say, can we be learning in these places about efforts to do this kind of work? And if any of that learning can then roll up so that the shared learning Carnegie is bringing is from public systems, from independent systems, in red states and blue states, in big cities and in rural areas, we just think that will continue to let us speak into what at the end of the day is a somewhat silent American consensus that we want the same thing for our kids, and that right now we're not getting it, and that it's possible.
And so I believe that if independent schools could take the learnings they're gathering and feed those into this national R&D, that we will all be stronger for it.
Morva McDonald: That's really helpful. I really appreciate it. I myself, having been a public school teacher and have a lot of public school background and in my DNA, I think this idea that in the end, we all are actually caring about the same kind of thing, right? When you interface with a teacher, regardless of where that teacher is, they're focused in, right, on what's good for kids and they're trying to make their lives better and their family's lives better and move that forward.
And I just think that's a good reminder because we can often get very separated in these ideas and maybe part of the work right now is to really think about that cross collaboration as a powerful tool to make change. So I just, I think that's an interesting idea and a good reminder to us.
Just to close out, given your kind of expertise and brilliance and kind of overall view, let's say you fast forwarded 10 years on your evolution trajectory. What do you hope will be different about the high school experience in the US? What's at the core of that?
Diego Arambula: Yeah, so let me talk about it first from students, and then I'll talk about it from a system level. Well, maybe I'll go students, teachers, system.
I hope in five to 10 years, the norm is that students love school. They just truly like, wake up and are excited about, I get to go do this thing today. I hope they love school. I hope they feel deeply challenged by school and that whenever they walk out, they feel ready for whatever their next challenge is. Be that going to college, going into the workforce, whatever it is. So I hope they like, love it, and that they actually have the outcomes.
I also hope that same thing for teachers. I really hope that teachers, teaching is the most fun job to date that I've, well, maybe, I was a camp counselor, that's a really fun job, but teaching was like a very close second. And for far too many teachers in far too many places, it doesn't feel that way today. I want it to feel like the most important job, and a really tremendously fun job. I want it to feel like a challenging job, and I want them to feel successful.
I believe for both of those things to be true, we need to take some of the school examples we already have at the margins and find these systemic solutions about how to scale those. Because when you go to those examples, Morva, kids love being there, kids are learning tremendously against a broader set of goals, and teachers will never leave. Cause they're like, I have found my place. And we just need that in the mainstream.
So that's, in five to 10 years, I'm deeply hopeful that the traditional American high school will be a place where students are challenged, students are loved, students love being there, teachers love being there. We are beating people away with sticks to say, we can't take any more teachers. And I just think our communities are going to be wildly different places when we've unlocked that potential in young people.
Morva McDonald: Diego, that's a beautiful vision. And I actually don't think an impossible one, given the work and given what we know as educators is possible. And I just, I really appreciate, I just appreciate this conversation. And I really appreciate thinking for us as independent school folks, what is our connection, our contribution, right? We have a lot to contribute, and we need to find the ways, right, to make that contribution available and accessible.
And like you said, we also have a lot to learn, right, and those relationships with other institutions that are not necessarily in our particular field of education in this way can help us learn that. So thank you so much for today. Thanks for the conversation. It's greatly appreciated.
Diego Arambula: It was so fun to be here and I'm so grateful for the opportunity.
Morva McDonald: Thanks, Diego.