Return to What?

Originally drafted in 2021 during the pandemic as part of a Harvard fellowship application.

Five years ago, during the height of the pandemic, I wrote an essay asking a question that still lingers in my mind today: “Return to what?”

At the time, I was advising the executive leadership of the nation’s largest county office of education as schools wrestled with reopening amid debates about safety, learning loss, and technology. But underneath the national conversation about masks, remote instruction, and public health was a more uncomfortable reality: too many students were being asked to return to systems that had never fully worked for them in the first place.

That realization was not new to me.

I attended a Los Angeles public high school built for roughly 1,500 students but serving more than 5,000. Many classrooms were staffed by emergency substitute teachers. Later, as a founding teacher in post-Katrina New Orleans, I experienced both the transformative power of excellent instruction and the limitations of reform efforts when approaches like project-based learning or integrated curriculum were still treated as exceptions rather than part of the mainstream design of schooling.

Over time, through work in classrooms, state leadership roles, and national consulting partnerships with districts, nonprofits, and state agencies, I began to notice the same pattern emerging across very different contexts: systems struggle to improve when policy, practice, research, and direct experience operate disconnected from one another.

I also watched dedicated educators burn enormous energy trying to create meaningful, real-world learning experiences for students, only to run up against the structural realities of our current model of schooling: standardized testing systems that narrow priorities, siloed curriculum disconnected from authentic application, and schools that too often operate as fortresses where even communities, employers, nonprofits, and local institutions remain locked outside the work of learning.

Over time, I came to believe that sustainable transformation in education requires two things to coexist simultaneously.

First, we must remain uncompromising about what students need most: strong instruction, excellent educators, meaningful relationships, relevant learning experiences, high-quality curriculum, and clear pathways to opportunity. Systems too often drift away from these fundamentals in pursuit of initiatives that create motion without coherence.

Second, the people closest to challenges must play a meaningful role in shaping solutions. Families, students, educators, employers, local postsecondary institutions, and communities are not obstacles to implementation; they are essential to designing systems that help students endure rapid change.

These beliefs continue to shape my work today.

Across the country, education leaders are navigating extraordinary pressure: workforce transformation driven by artificial intelligence, declining trust in institutions, persistent inequities in opportunity, and growing uncertainty about what students need to thrive in a rapidly changing economy. At the same time, schools are increasingly being asked to solve problems far beyond the classroom while managing finite capacity and fractured public consensus.

This moment requires more than incremental improvement.

It requires education systems that are coherent, responsive, and genuinely connected to the realities students will inherit. It requires leadership capable of bridging instruction, policy, workforce readiness, community voice, and implementation.

The most promising systems I have encountered share several characteristics. They remain deeply focused on the instructional core while building broader ecosystems of support around students. They create durable partnerships among schools, employers, higher education institutions, and communities. They balance rigor with relevance. And they recognize that transformation is not achieved through isolated programs, but through sustained alignment across systems.

At the same time, not every problem in education is solved through reinvention or redesign.

In many cases, redesign is unrealistic — at least overnight, or even across the span of a single student’s educational journey. Some challenges require deeper coherence, stronger execution, and sustained trust. Education does not simply need more change. It needs more disciplined problem-solving about what actually improves outcomes for young people.

I do not believe education’s challenges are unsolvable. But I do believe we often underestimate how difficult coherent transformation truly is.

The work ahead is not simply about redesigning schools. It is about rebuilding trust, expanding opportunity, and helping young people develop the knowledge, adaptability, and sense of purpose necessary to navigate a future we cannot fully predict.

Five years later, I still return to the same question: not whether students should return to school, but whether we are willing to build systems genuinely worthy of them.