Supportive High Schools

In 1949, W. E. B. Du Bois said, “Of all the civil rights for which the world has struggled and fought for 5,000 years, the right to learn is undoubtedly the most fundamental.” He went on to describe a vision of equitable, democratic schools focused on deeper learning for all students. Although our commitment to develop a more perfect union aspires to enact a right to learn for all children, our society has constructed a system that is still largely based on a standardized, impersonal factory model adopted a century ago. This model incorporates deeply embedded inequalities that dare many of our youth to learn.¹

We dare them to learn in high schools where they have little opportunity to become well known by adults who can consider them as whole people or as developing intellects. We dare young people to learn when their needs for resources or personal advice require standing in line or waiting weeks to see a counselor with a caseload of 500 or more students. We dare too many of our young people to make it through huge warehouse institutions focused substantially on the control of behavior rather than the development of community.

There is a growing realization that many of our high schools are not designed to educate the next generation to face the challenges of our time. There is also a growing consensus that we know what works for educating students. In recent years, our understanding of the science of learning and development* has deepened considerably.² Young people grow and thrive in environments designed to support individualized development; where they have strong, supportive relationships; and where their social, emotional, physical, and cognitive needs are met.

Many teachers, principals, and district leaders, along with students and their families, understand that schools must change in fundamental ways, yet the inertia of existing systems is powerful. The good news is that models exist: a number of schools that have been extraordinarily effective and have helped other schools to replicate their success have important lessons to offer, based on the elements they hold in common.

This article, and the far more detailed report it’s drawn from, outlines the following 10 evidence-based features of effective redesigned high schools that help create the kind of education many of us want for all of our children: safe environments where exciting and rigorous academic work occurs and where all groups of students succeed academically, graduate at high levels, and go on to college and productive work.

1. Positive developmental relationships
2. Safe, inclusive school climate
3. Culturally responsive and sustaining teaching
4. Deeper learning curriculum
5. Student-centered pedagogy
6. Authentic assessment
7. Well-prepared and well-supported teachers
8. Authentic family engagement
9. Community connections and integrated student supports
10. Shared decision-making and leadership

While successful schools include all these elements, they enact each feature in distinctive ways. There are many initiatives underway to transform secondary schools so that students have opportunities for meaningful learning, personalized supports, and connections to their futures, including college and career pathway models that offer experiential learning; early college and other dual enrollment opportunities; community schools that organize supports and connect learning to community concerns; and strategies that support social and emotional development through restorative practices, service learning, and civic engagement. Schools need to create means for enacting their goals that respond to their local contexts and work for the students, parents, and faculty members of their communities.

Here, we introduce the 10 features of redesigned high schools, but we encourage readers to learn more by examining the full report at redesigninghighschool.org.

Feature 1: Positive Developmental Relationships

Positive relationships create the conditions that allow young people to develop their attention, focus, memory, and other neural processes essential to learning. Effective schools create structures that allow for the time and space needed to support positive developmental relationships between adults and young people, and among young people themselves.

These kinds of relationships are difficult to develop in high schools designed on the factory model, where students may see seven or eight teachers a day for 45 or 50 minutes at a time, and teachers see 150 students or more every day. This structure precludes teachers from getting to know each student well, which is made even more difficult when teachers work in isolation from one another with little time to plan together or share their knowledge about what students need. While teachers care deeply about their students, it is not possible to care effectively for all of their needs in this structure. As a result, a recent survey of US secondary school students found that less than 30 percent felt they were in a school that offered a caring environment.³

Over the past few decades, educational research has suggested that, all else being equal, small learning communities of 300–500 students—whether small schools or smaller units within large schools—tend to produce significantly better results for students, including better attendance, greater participation in extracurricular activities, stronger academic achievement, higher grades, fewer failed courses, fewer behavioral incidents, less violence and vandalism, lower dropout rates, and higher graduation rates.⁴

Yet it is important to recognize that “small” is not enough. The key is not overall school size but rather how schools create strong, developmental relationships and leverage a web of relationships to create a caring community that supports increased learning and a safety net to prevent students from falling through the cracks. Larger secondary schools have redesigned themselves into smaller learning communities to achieve similar results.

Redesigned high schools typically offer significantly reduced pupil loads for teachers (usually in the range of 80–100 students per teacher) by rethinking their use of staff and time. This allows teachers to focus more on the individual needs of their students. One way that schools reduce pupil load and class size is by allocating more of their resources to hiring teachers rather than nonteaching staff and assigning more staff to be regularly engaged in classroom teaching rather than to roles outside the classroom. Most large traditional schools have a bigger administrative staff, and they often hire people to run special programs, such as dropout prevention and compensatory education, that exist to solve problems that arise because students are not getting enough personal attention in the classroom. These programs and positions rarely solve the core problems that are a result of depersonalized instruction, and they become less necessary when students feel that they can turn to their teachers for personal as well as academic support—and when resources are redirected to the classroom so teachers have few enough students that they can spend more time on each one.

Advisory structures are becoming more common in secondary schools as a strategy to promote strong relationships and ensure that no student falls through the cracks. Advisory groups place 15–20 students together with a faculty advisor several times a week for ongoing academic and personal counseling and support. Ideally, this advisor is also one of the students’ teachers or counselors, so advisory serves as an extension of an existing relationship. Many studies showing the positive impact of redesigned secondary schools note that advisories are a key strategy for personalization and improving student outcomes.⁵

Feature 2: Safe, Inclusive School Climate

Because fear and anxiety undermine cognitive capacity and short-circuit the learning process, students learn best under conditions of low threat and high support. Learning is also supported when students can connect what happens in school to their cultural contexts and experiences, when their teachers are responsive to their strengths and needs, and when their environment is “identity safe,”⁶ reinforcing their value and belonging.⁷

As the table below shows, creating such an environment can require transformations of traditional school practices.

Quite often, challenging student behaviors are a result of traumatic experiences inside or outside of school. One of the easiest ways schools can be trauma informed is by having consistent routines for checking in with students, which provide an opportunity for sharing concerns and help reduce stress and anxiety. Some schools hold their advisory periods first thing in the morning so advisors can check in with students individually or through a community circle to see if any events or concerns have emerged that need immediate attention. Breakfast may also be served as a morning routine, which builds community, destigmatizes free meals, and ensures that students start the day on an even keel, as hunger can also trigger distress.

The cornerstones of a safe, inclusive school climate include explicit teaching of empathy and a set of shared social-emotional skills for recognizing emotions, working with others, and resolving conflict peaceably.^† On occasions when norms may be violated, it is important to activate problem-solving strategies that avoid exclusionary discipline, such as suspensions, which disconnect students from school, increase alienation and dropout rates, and fail to teach strategies for conflict resolution or other solutions to challenges students may face.⁸

Restorative practices provide a more effective approach for building a positive school climate, creating greater safety, and improving student outcomes. The goal is to support students on a daily basis through community building, explicit teaching of conflict resolution and problem-solving skills, and methods that enable those who violate the norms of the community to repair harm and make amends.⁹ A recent large-scale study found that the more students experience these practices, the more their academic achievement and mental health improve and the less violence and misbehavior schools experience.¹⁰ The gains are experienced by all students and are greatest for Black students and those with disabilities, who are most often harmed by exclusionary discipline; thus, restorative practices hold promise for closing achievement gaps.

Feature 3: Culturally Responsive and Sustaining Teaching

An important part of creating an educational community in which young people can thrive and learn is ensuring that all students feel valued and seen for who they are. This work involves an explicit commitment to culturally responsive and sustaining teaching, which promotes respect for diversity and creates a context within which students’ experiences can be understood, appreciated, and connected to the curriculum.

Effective educators proactively seek to create a school environment that is identity safe—where all students feel welcomed and included, where their identities and cultures are not a cause for exclusion but a strength to be valued and celebrated.¹¹ A growing body of research shows how educators can foster identity-safe environments that counteract societal stereotypes that may undermine students’ confidence and performance. Key actions include

• helping students learn to respect and care for one another by creating caring classroom environments in which empathy and social skills are purposefully taught and practiced;
• communicating affirmations of worth and competence to each student, along with publicly sharing these perceptions;
• promoting student responsibility for and belonging to the classroom community, and cooperation in learning and classroom tasks; and
• cultivating diversity as a resource for teaching through regular use of culturally diverse materials, ideas, and teaching activities, along with high expectations for all students.¹²

Tools that allow educators and students to learn what they have in common, like “Getting to Know You” surveys, have been shown to build empathy in relationships that, in turn, positively affect student achievement. In one study, researchers found that both students and teachers who learned that they shared commonalities with each other held more positive relationships, and students earned higher grades when teachers learned about their similarities with students. This was particularly true for teachers’ relationships with Black and Latino/a students, narrowing the achievement disparities for these student groups by over 60 percent.¹³

Culturally responsive and sustaining practices require teachers to learn about and from students and their communities through curriculum and instruction strategies that both surface and build on that knowledge.¹⁴ As educator Gloria Ladson-Billings notes, “All instruction is culturally responsive. The question is: To which culture is it currently oriented?”¹⁵ There is a large body of research showing that effective teachers of students of color form and maintain connections with students within their social contexts. They understand that adolescents are going through a critical period of identity development. They celebrate their students as individuals and seek to learn about their cultural contexts. They ask students to share who they are and what they know with the class in a variety of ways. They regularly incorporate instructional materials that provide various viewpoints from different cultures.¹⁶ Research shows that this approach improves students’ sense of belonging and improves educational outcomes.¹⁷

Feature 4: Deeper Learning Curriculum

We know from research in the learning sciences that students learn at different paces and in different ways that build on their prior experiences and connect to their interests, modes of processing and expression, and cultural contexts. An inquiry-oriented curriculum aimed at learning that transfers to other settings engages students and challenges them to understand concepts deeply, find and integrate information, assemble evidence, weigh ideas, and develop skills of analysis and expression.¹⁸

Schools that motivate and succeed with diverse learners demand intellectually challenging work, and they are focused on preparing all students to meet the skill and content demands of college and careers—what is now known as deeper learning. Curriculum focuses not just on content expertise but on other essential competencies as well, including critical thinking and problem-solving, collaboration, effective communication, self-directed learning, and academic mindsets. Students are typically asked to engage in inquiry in all classes, applying their learning to novel problems and tasks and producing significant pieces of analytic work, including research papers, projects, models, and designs, that are aimed at the mastery of facts as well as in-depth understanding.

Schools can demand this type of rigorous intellectual work from students only if they are willing to forgo the goal of superficial content coverage. In-depth study does not imply haphazard selection of a few interesting ideas to focus on. Instead, topics are judiciously selected to provide a framework for many related key ideas, so students come away with an understanding of the core concepts and modes of inquiry in the academic disciplines they are studying.

The traditional high school often takes a “shopping mall” approach,¹⁹ offering many electives for students to choose without guaranteeing serious mastery of essential skills for college, career, and life. Effective schools make deliberate choices about what is most essential and do those things well for all students. They also supplement their own core offerings with out-of-school experiences such as community service, internships, online courses, and courses at local colleges. These programs allow secondary schools to provide choices and give students the opportunity to understand the world in which they are growing up.

Feature 5: Student-Centered Pedagogy

Student-centered pedagogy begins with structures that allow teachers to know students and their learning strategies well; takes place in a safe, inclusive school and classroom culture; values students’ identities and cultures; and enacts an authentic curriculum that is meaningful to students. All of these elements help create the essential conditions for a young person to learn. A student-centered pedagogy goes one step further and recognizes that each student is a unique individual who learns in their own way and who needs individualized support to meet their full potential. Psychologist Robert Glaser calls this kind of teaching an adaptive pedagogy in which “modes of teaching are adjusted to individuals—their backgrounds, talents, interests, and the nature of past performance.”²⁰

Universal Design for Learning is a framework for designing pedagogy based on this scientific understanding of how people learn. To create a learning environment in which all students can access meaningful learning, teachers start by considering different modes of engagement. How will the teacher motivate student interest and facilitate productive strategies and self-assessment that enable self-regulation? Then teachers can offer multiple paths of representation, so students can understand new information, improve their language skills, and construct meaning and generate new understandings. And finally, teachers provide a range of opportunities for student action and expression, including physical actions using tools and different response methods; communication options; and supports for executive functions such as goal setting, planning, information processing, and monitoring progress. In each of these areas, teachers must offer multiple means for students to engage so that young people with different backgrounds, experiences, and histories with school can all access the curriculum.²¹

Educators who have worked to implement a student-centered pedagogy understand that it is very challenging to do so unless the school is already redesigned to support this kind of learning. If a teacher has a pupil load of 150 students or more, it will be more difficult to provide individualized scaffolds or ask students to do multiple revisions of a piece of work based on feedback. If a school’s culture is not safe and inclusive, students will be less able to focus on the in-depth thinking and effort that challenging work requires. If teachers do not have time for collaboration and professional development, they may not know how to adjust their instruction to meet students’ needs. The 10 features described in this article do not operate in isolation but rather build on one another to create environments in which all young people can thrive.

Feature 6: Authentic Assessment

Effective schools have clear and meaningful expectations for students that relate to what they need to learn for a healthy and productive life. Over the past two decades, an increasing number of schools, districts, and states have adopted what is known as a graduate profile, which answers the question, “What do we want students to know and be able to do by the time they graduate?”

Once a school is clear about that, the next question is, “How will we know if we are succeeding?” This is best answered by looking at student work as the concrete representation of progress toward the standards. Students have frequent opportunities to engage in serious conversations about their work and to share, reflect upon, and receive feedback on their progress.

These conversations about the quality of student work best occur in the framework of a well-crafted performance assessment system that more fully reflects what students should learn and be able to do.²² Performance assessments—widely used around the world and increasingly sought in the United States—allow students to demonstrate their knowledge by directly exhibiting a skill, reporting on an investigation, producing a product, or performing an activity. By measuring students’ abilities to apply knowledge to solve pertinent problems, such assessments encourage and support more rigorous and relevant teaching and learning. Research shows that students who regularly engage in such assessments do as well on traditional standardized tests and better on tests of analytic and performance ability than other similar students; they are also better prepared for college.²³

Performance assessment systems are based on common, schoolwide standards; they are integrated into daily classroom practice; and they provide models, demonstrations, and exhibitions of the kind of work that will be expected of students. Generally, these systems include

• portfolios of student work that demonstrate in-depth study through research papers, scientific experiments, mathematical models, literary critiques and analyses, arts performances, and so on;
• rubrics that embody the set of standards against which students’ products and performance are judged;
• oral presentations (exhibitions) by students to a committee of teachers, peers, and others in the school to test for in-depth understanding and assess the students’ readiness for graduation; and
• opportunities for students to revise their work and improve in order to demonstrate their learning and meet the standards.

Feature 7: Well-Prepared and Well-Supported Teachers

Redesigned high schools invest deeply in training and supporting their teachers and in providing them with time and opportunities to create a coherent set of practices and become experts at their craft. Teachers with these opportunities are more effective and likely to stay for the long run, with a payoff in student achievement.²⁴

There are three key areas in which teachers must be experts: (1) their subject matter and curriculum, (2) the needs of diverse learners and the learning process, and (3) teaching itself. In addition, teachers must develop skills such as adaptive expertise, inquiry and reflection, and curriculum design, which allow them to listen to and observe what is happening in the classroom and make adjustments to lessons and units to ensure that their students are learning. To accomplish this, teachers must possess and develop dispositions including empathy, social-emotional capacity, cultural competence, and a commitment to equity.²⁵

Effective schools and districts do not leave teacher hiring to chance. They devote resources and attention to recruiting well-trained educators, often by establishing professional development school partnerships with local teacher education programs. Teachers who enter with comprehensive preparation are half as likely to leave teaching after the first year than those who enter without preparation. Grow Your Own pathway programs, including paraprofessional pathways and teacher residencies, can support local community members to become effective teachers and provide opportunities for seamless support for new educators, starting during their student teaching and continuing with intensive coaching and mentoring during their initial years in the classroom.^‡ These programs, especially when combined with adequate financial supports, can make entering teaching more affordable and reduce attrition while developing a highly skilled teaching force.

Feature 8: Authentic Family Engagement

Educators’ most important partners, aside from students themselves, are students’ families and caregivers. Research shows that authentic family engagement can improve attendance rates, create a more positive school climate, and increase academic achievement.²⁶ Schools that have been redesigned to build connections between educators, students, and families enable educators to better support young people and tailor their teaching to individual needs. This process begins with prioritizing regular, positive communication with families—a simple step that goes a long way to building trust and making families feel welcome.

Parents or caregivers fluent in languages other than English often report that they want to support their students’ learning but cannot communicate with teachers who do not speak their language. Effective schools serving students who speak a home language other than English build language capacity by prioritizing hiring staff who speak families’ native languages or, for languages with smaller populations, setting aside funding to pay for phone-based interpretation services that teachers can access when needed.

Effective schools serving students from low-income families respond with flexibility, offering meetings at flexible times and in varying ways. When they host meetings at school, schools welcome parents and caregivers with food and childcare—and if the school is not near where families live or work, educators offer to come to locations that are convenient for families, such as places of worship or community centers. They use multiple means of communication as well: telephone, email, web postings and chats, and text messages.

Planned home visits are a research-based approach to building positive teacher-family relationships at the secondary level. Not only do home visits build trust and engage families, but they also help teachers learn about families’ goals for their children and provide an important learning experience for teachers who do not come from the same communities as their students. When families are uncomfortable having a visit in their home, the visit can be arranged in another community-based location, such as a library, recreation center, or coffee shop.

Feature 9: Community Connections and Integrated Student Supports

More than half of public school students now live in low-income households, and these young people are living with the consequences of long-term disinvestment not only in our public schools but also in the social safety net. Through trusting relationships and well-coordinated support, schools can ensure that students receive the health, social service, and learning opportunities they need to be successful.

Building strong community relationships can take years. Retaining teachers and principals matters a great deal, as does recruiting educators from the community and actively seeking out leaders and organizations with whom to partner. Teachers and school leaders who come from the community are well positioned to build the necessary connections, and parents or extended family members of students can also be key bridge-builders in this process. Educators who come from other communities or backgrounds need to listen and learn with humility. Schools can then become places for the community to celebrate its strengths, through both cultural programs and partnerships with local community initiatives.

The community schools framework was developed to describe schools that serve as community hubs and partner with community organizations to educate the whole child. The framework builds on a synthesis of more than 140 studies that found that effective community schools that boost attendance, achievement, and attainment are guided by four key pillars: integrated student supports, family and community engagement, collaborative leadership and practices, and expanded learning time and opportunities.²⁷ Since the publication of the original research, two more dimensions have been added to communicate the ways that school climate and instruction should reinforce the goals of student support: rigorous community-connected classroom instruction and a culture of belonging, safety, and care. These six pillars are shown in the figure below along with other essential features and practices of community schools.

These elements can take different forms across community schools because each school designs its program to meet the needs of its students and families, using the community’s assets as a starting point. In effective community schools, families, students, community leaders, and school staff collaborate on a comprehensive needs assessment, on design and planning of the program, and on its implementation.

Feature 10: Shared Decision-Making and Leadership

Redesigning a school to reflect the features of successful schools requires the buy-in of the entire school community. Ongoing success of a redesigned school also depends on staff, students, and family members all understanding and supporting the community’s vision. This requires shared decision-making and leadership.

Research indicates that teacher participation in school decision-making is associated with greater retention for teachers and improved academic achievement for students.²⁸ There is also evidence that involvement of families and community members along with faculty also strengthens school climate and outcomes.²⁹ Authentic shared decision-making and leadership at the school level models the collaborative work that effective teachers expect from their students and enables schools to make significant improvements in their practices with the full endorsement and engagement of all members of the school community. Moreover, at a moment in history when authoritarianism is on the rise, it is important for schools to model effective democratic processes so young people grow up understanding the value of democracy, even when it is challenging to implement.

The first key element of an effective shared governance system is the development of communitywide norms and values that guide the work of teachers, parents, and students in making decisions. Shared norms and values, when enacted in the context of collaborative decision-making, are the foundation for relational trust, which studies have found is essential for school improvement. A set of studies on 200 Chicago schools over a period of seven years found, for example, that collaborative structures and activities were key to nurturing relational trust among teachers as well as between educators, parents, and community members.³⁰ As a part of this research, scholars found that partnerships among teachers, parents, and community members were important in providing the social resources needed to improve school conditions that influence student learning, including the learning climate and ambitious instruction. Chicago schools that were strong in these essential supports were at least 10 times more likely than schools weak in such supports to show substantial gains in both reading and math.

Principals at effective schools are committed to enabling everyone to uphold the community’s values and goals, but they do not try to take on this role alone; they reach out to others with expertise who can take the lead in many areas of the school’s functioning. They follow the advice of community organizer Marshall Ganz, who says that leadership is “accepting responsibility to create conditions that enable others to achieve shared purpose in the face of uncertainty.”³¹ A principal who knows how to enable others to lead can create the space for teachers, parents, and students to create a common vision for where the school is going, and teachers can then make decisions that lead to student success. The ownership that results from this kind of shared governance is critical if innovations are to last.

Over the past 30 years, thousands of redesigned secondary schools have demonstrated that it is possible to enable much greater levels of success for young people, including those who have been historically left out and pushed out of opportunities to learn. Expanding these opportunities will require redesigning systems at the district, state, and federal levels as well to move beyond the limitations of the factory model. Creating systems that support the learning of all students will take clarity of vision and purpose, along with consistent action to create mutually reinforcing elements that strengthen opportunities for relationships; provide environments of safety and belonging; support authentic and meaningful curriculum and assessment; explicitly develop social, emotional, and cognitive skills; facilitate family and student engagement and voice; and integrate community supports, making them readily available to remove obstacles to learning.

Linda Darling-Hammond, a former teacher and teacher educator, is the president of the Learning Policy Institute (LPI), the Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education Emeritus at Stanford University, and a member of the National Academy of Education and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Matt Alexander, a former teacher and principal with the San Francisco public schools, is an elected member of the San Francisco Board of Education and a community organizer at Faith in Action Bay Area. Laura E. Hernández, a former teacher, is a senior researcher at LPI, where she coleads the Whole Child Education team. This article is adapted from their 2024 LPI report, Redesigning High Schools: 10 Features for Success, which is available at redesigninghighschool.org.

*For details on the science of learning and development, see “Liberatory Education” in the Summer 2021 issue of American Educator at go.aft.org/lpw and “All Children Thriving” in the Fall 2021 issue of American Educator at go.aft.org/h9e. (return to article)

^†Some educators are hesitant to teach values or feel that their job is just to focus on academics. But it is impossible for all students to learn to their full potential if schools allow oppressive or harmful behaviors to flourish on campus. If schools do not have active means to build a calm, inclusive, and consistent culture, hurtful behaviors, including bullying—within the school and through social media—can take hold. (return to article)

^‡To learn about one such program in Philadelphia, see “Recruiting the Talent Within” from the Winter 2022–23 issue of American Educator: go.aft.org/i2k. (return to article)

Endnotes

1. This article is adapted with permission from L. Darling-Hammond, M. Alexander, and L. Hernández, Redesigning High Schools: 10 Features for Success (Washington, DC: Learning Policy Institute, 2024), redesigninghighschool.org.

2. P. Cantor et al., “Malleability, Plasticity, and Individuality: How Children Learn and Develop in Context,” Applied Developmental Science 23, no. 4 (2018): 307–37; L. Darling-Hammond et al., “Implications for Educational Practice of the Science of Learning and Development,” Applied Developmental Science 24, no. 2 (2019): 97–140; and D. Osher et al., “Drivers of Human Development: How Relationships and Context Shape Learning and Development,” Applied Developmental Science 24, no. 1 (2018): 6–36.

3. J. Durlak et al., “The Impact of Enhancing Students’ Social and Emotional Learning: A Meta-Analysis of School-Based Universal Interventions,” Child Development 82, no. 1 (2011): 405–32.

4. L. Darling-Hammond, P. Ross, and M. Milliken, “High School Size, Organization, and Content: What Matters for Student Success?,” Brookings Papers on Education Policy 2006 (2006): 163–203.

5. Darling-Hammond, Ross, and Milliken, “High School Size”; and R. Felner et al., “Creating Small Learning Communities: Lessons from the Project on High-Performing Learning Communities About ‘What Works’ in Creating Productive, Developmentally Enhancing, Learning Contexts,” Educational Psychologist 42, no. 4 (2007): 209–21.

6. D. Steele and B. Cohn-Vargas, Identity Safe Classrooms: Places to Belong and Learn (Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press, 2013).

7. R. Berkowitz et al., “A Research Synthesis of the Associations Between Socioeconomic Background, Inequality, School Climate, and Academic Achievement,” Review of Educational Research 87, no. 2 (2016): 459.

8. M. Leung-Gagné et al., Pushed Out: Trends and Disparities in Out-of-School Suspension (Washington, DC: Learning Policy Institute, 2022), learningpolicyinstitute.org/product/crdc-school-suspension-report.

9. D. Losen, ed., Closing the School Discipline Gap: Equitable Remedies for Excessive Exclusion (New York: Teachers College Press, 2015); T. Fronius et al., Restorative Justice in U.S. Schools: An Updated Research Review (San Francisco: WestEd, 2019), wested.org/resource/restorative-justice-in-u-s-schools-an-updated-research-review; and A. Gregory et al., “The Promise of Restorative Practices to Transform Teacher-Student Relationships and Achieve Equity in School Discipline,” Journal of Educational and Psychological Consultation 26, no. 4 (2016): 325–53.

10. S. Darling-Hammond, Fostering Belonging, Transforming Schools: The Impact of Restorative Practices (Washington, DC: Learning Policy Institute, 2023), learningpolicyinstitute.org/product/impact-restorative-practices-report.

11. I. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist (New York: One World, 2019); and Steele and Cohn-Vargas, Identity Safe Classrooms.

12. Adapted from Steele and Cohn-Vargas, Identity Safe Classrooms.

13. H. Gehlbach et al., “Creating Birds of Similar Feathers: Leveraging Similarity to Improve Teacher-Student Relationships and Academic Achievement,” Journal of Educational Psychology 108, no 3 (2016): 342.

14. H. Alim, D. Paris, and C. Wong, “Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy: A Critical Framework for Centering Communities,” in Handbook of the Cultural Foundations of Learning, ed. N. Nasir et al. (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2020), 261–76.

15. G. Ladson-Billings, The Dreamkeepers: Successful Teachers of African American Children, 2nd ed. (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2009).

16. Ladson-Billings, The Dreamkeepers; M. Pledger, “Cultivating Culturally Responsive Reform: The Intersectionality of Backgrounds and Beliefs on Culturally Responsive Teaching Behavior,” doctoral dissertation, University of California, San Diego, 2018; J. Stronge, Qualities of Effective Teachers, 3rd ed. (Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 2018), files.ascd.org/staticfiles/ascd/pdf/siteASCD/publications/books/QualitiesOfEffectiveTeachers3rdEd_Stronge_0318.pdf; and D. Paris, “Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy: A Needed Change in Stance, Terminology, and Practice,” Educational Researcher 41, no. 3 (2012): 93–97.

17. J. Powell and S. Menendian, “The Problem of Othering: Towards Inclusiveness and Belonging,” Othering & Belonging 1 (2016): 14–39; M. Brown, “Educating All Students: Creating Culturally Responsive Teachers, Classrooms, and Schools,” Intervention in School and Clinic 43, no. 1 (2007): 57–62; and T. Dee and E. Penner, “The Causal Effects of Cultural Relevance: Evidence from an Ethnic Studies Curriculum,” American Educational Research Journal 54, no. 1 (2017): 127–66.

18. National Research Council, How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School: Expanded Edition (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2000); and National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, How People Learn II: Learners, Contexts, and Cultures (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2018).

19. A. Powell, E. Farrar, and D. Cohen, The Shopping Mall High School: Winners and Losers in the Educational Marketplace (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1985).

20. R. Glaser, “Testing and Assessment: O Tempora! O Mores!,” paper presented at 31st Horace Mann Lecture, University of Pittsburgh, October 1990.

21. CAST, “Until Learning Has No Limits,” cast.org.

22. L. Darling-Hammond and F. Adamson, Beyond the Bubble Test: How Performance Assessments Support 21st Century Learning (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2014).

23. Darling-Hammond and Adamson, Beyond the Bubble.

24. A. Podolsky et al., Solving the Teacher Shortage: How to Attract and Retain Excellent Educators (Washington, DC: Learning Policy Institute, 2016), learningpolicyinstitute.org/product/solving-teacher-shortage.

25. L. Darling-Hammond et al., Educator Learning to Enact the Science of Learning and Development (Washington, DC: Learning Policy Institute, 2022), learningpolicyinstitute.org/product/educator-learning-sold-report.

26. A. Henderson and K. Mapp, A New Wave of Evidence: The Impact of School, Family, and Community Connections on Student Achievement: Annual Synthesis 2002 (Austin, TX: National Center for Family and Community Connections with Schools, Southwest Educational Development Laboratory, 2002), https://sedl.org/connections/resources/evidence.pdf.

27. J. Oakes, A. Maier, and J. Daniel, Community Schools: An Evidence-Based Strategy for Equitable School Improvement (Washington, DC: Learning Policy Institute, 2017), learningpolicyinstitute.org/sites/default/files/product-files/Community_Schools_Evidence_Based_Strategy_BRIEF.pdf.

28. P. Hallinger and R. Heck, “Collaborative Leadership and School Improvement: Understanding the Impact on School Capacity and Student Learning,” School Leadership and Management 30, no. 2 (2010): 95–110; and K. Leithwood et al., Successful School Leadership: What It Is and How It Influences Pupil Learning (London: National College for School Leadership, Department for Education and Skills).

29. For a review, see A. Maier et al., Community Schools as an Effective School Improvement Strategy: A Review of the Evidence (Washington, DC: Learning Policy Institute, 2017), learningpolicyinstitute.org/product/community-schools-effective-school-improvement-report.

30. A. Bryk et al., Organizing Schools for Improvement: Lessons from Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).

31. M. Ganz, “Leading Change: Leadership, Organization, and Social Movements,” in Handbook of Leadership Theory and Practice, ed. N. Nohria and R. Khurana (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Press, 2010).

[Photos by Allison Shelley / The Verbatim Agency for EDUimages]