Aylon Samouha

It worked for the time.

Literacy rose, the middle class grew.

But today, our graduates aren't heading to assembly lines.

They're stepping into a world being reshaped by AI, where thriving depends on knowing who you are, discerning fact from fiction, knowing how to keep learning, creating, collaborating, and indeed coexisting with others.

That's why I believe our task isn't merely to improve schools.

It's to redesign them for a new purpose.

A purpose worthy of the 15,000 hours every young person spends in K-12 schooling.

A purpose that shapes our very democracy, because, as my mentor puts it, what happens in classrooms today is what will happen in society tomorrow.

But realizing this vision has never been easy.

For decades, we've been trapped between two extremes, top-down reforms that can ignore local realities or bottom-up efforts that often depend on heroic and exhausted educators.

But there's a third way, community-based design.

Community-based design takes the best of both approaches.

It brings together the wisdom of lived experience with the wisdom of research.

The assets of communities with the assets of proven tools and practices to make change that's both human and enduring.

It's the best of design thinking, R&D, and community participation applied to the life of a school.

That's how Brooklyn STEAM came to be.

It's also how Van Ness Elementary in Washington, D.C., redesigned school around a simple idea.

Kids learn best when they feel seen.

We brought together families, educators, district leaders to imagine school that truly centered the whole child, nurturing mind, body, and relationships while confronting the real trauma that many students carried into school.

So we integrated effective practices from other settings.