Episode 74: Improving Access Through Innovation

Available May 6, 2025

How do we measure learning? It’s a question that plagues educators, as a rapidly changing landscape keeps us scrambling to catch up with evolving technologies, ever-expanding content, and the need to blend real-world experiences with tried and true curriculum. For over 100 years, part of our answer to the problem of measurement has been the Carnegie unit. And now, the Vice President for Educational Transformation at the Carnegie Foundation says that answer needs to change.

Guest: Diego Arambula

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “So we believe that to make this move towards 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?” (18:05)
• “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.” (27:55)
• “It's an invitation to say, we'd love to partner with independent systems who are moving really fast towards 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.” (32:07)

Related Episodes: 69, 65, 56, 53, 51, 46, 43, 36,29

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