第1章
Education's Revolutionary Force: How School Networks Transform Learning
What if the most powerful innovation in modern education wasn't a flashy technology, but rather how schools organize themselves? In the small border town of El Paso, teachers once trapped in scripted test-prep curricula now guide students through engaging projects that connect learning to real-world challenges. In rural Arkansas, a high school with limited resources achieves 92% graduation rates and 70% college enrollment. The secret behind these transformations isn't magic-it's networks. School networks have quietly become the most significant innovation in American education, creating coherent systems where teachers collaborate across buildings and states, sharing what works while receiving structured support. Better Together has been embraced by education leaders nationwide, with figures like Sal Khan calling it "essential reading" and districts using it as a blueprint for transformation. The book's influence extends beyond education circles-Silicon Valley innovators study its network principles, while community organizers apply its collaborative frameworks to social challenges. As education faces unprecedented complexity, the authors reveal how networks provide the structure, support and innovation engine to create schools that truly prepare students for an uncertain future.
第2章
The Platform Revolution Reshaping Education
Digital platforms have fundamentally transformed how we live, work, play, travel, and learn. The six largest firms by market capitalization-Apple, Alibaba, Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft-all operate platform businesses that enable value-creating interactions between producers and consumers. These platforms have unlocked new value by making connections easy and providing infrastructure for exchanges of goods, services, and social currency. From Amazon's marketplace connecting millions of sellers with buyers to Microsoft's Azure platform enabling cloud computing solutions, these companies have redefined how value is created and distributed in the digital age.
Unlike traditional businesses that face diminishing returns with growth, networks often improve as they expand-when Facebook gains a new member, everyone benefits from new connection possibilities. This network effect creates powerful competitive advantages and exponential growth potential. Well-managed platform communities produce significant value through social networks, demand aggregation, and application development. A Wharton study of 1,500 organizations found that network orchestrators like TripAdvisor and Uber yielded the highest growth, margins, and returns compared to asset builders, technology creators, and service providers. For example, Airbnb became the world's largest accommodation provider without owning any hotels, while Uber revolutionized transportation without owning vehicles.
Despite this platform revolution transforming most sectors, education has lagged behind. Learning platforms haven't kept pace with social media and marketplace platforms in investment, innovation, and user experience. Most K-12 deployments merely integrate technology into existing systems rather than transforming learning - adding smart boards to traditional lectures or putting worksheets online instead of reimagining education delivery. This gap exists because education differs fundamentally from consumer markets-it's compulsory, heavily regulated by patchwork policies, and represents a complex, relationship-based undertaking requiring sustained engagement and assessment.
The transformation of education requires reconceptualizing learning experiences matched with platform capabilities. Networks like New Tech Network demonstrate how this can work, providing shared goals, powerful tools, and professional learning opportunities that make implementation of complex innovations possible. Their approach recognizes that learning is activated by relationships and happens in community-something difficult to replicate through technology alone. Successful educational platforms must balance technological capability with human connection, combining adaptive learning algorithms with meaningful teacher-student interactions.
As platforms evolve, eight advances will transform learning: motivation through personalized experiences that improve persistence using AI-driven content adaptation; portability using technologies like Blockchain for comprehensive learner profiles that follow students across institutions; user interface breakthroughs including voice commands, gesture control, and augmented reality; social and emotional learning supports with biosensors to track engagement and stress levels; and assistive technology to aid students who learn differently through tools like text-to-speech and alternative input methods. These advances will enable teacher teams to create powerful learning sequences tailored to individual learners, finally bringing the platform revolution fully into education. Early adopters like Khan Academy and Coursera are already showing how AI-powered personalization and global reach can democratize access to quality education while maintaining high engagement levels.
第3章
Powerful Learning: The Blend of Personal and Project-Based
At Katherine Smith Elementary in San Jose, fifth-grader Isabella proudly shares her persuasive essay about a classmate with cancer-a project combining academic rigor with real-world impact. Her work exemplifies how meaningful projects can transform traditional assignments into powerful learning experiences. Once focused primarily on test prep and standardized curricula, this school underwent a dramatic transformation through project-based learning after joining New Tech Network. Students now engage in structured yet flexible learning experiences where they set specific goals, work toward clear learning targets, produce high-quality products, and maintain detailed portfolios that demonstrate their academic and personal growth over time.
The most effective schools today masterfully blend personalized and project-based approaches, creating a dynamic learning environment that provides individualized skill development alongside challenging collaborative work. This combination proves especially vital in preparing students for a project-based world where most young people will navigate a series of gigs, freelance work, and entrepreneurial ventures rather than traditional linear careers. Summit Public Schools stands out as a prime example of this approach, offering a comprehensive learning platform that strategically sequences four distinct types of learning experiences: personalized playlists for content knowledge acquisition, structured projects for developing cognitive skills, dedicated mentorship programs for building habits of success, and hands-on expeditions for real-world application and experience.
Networks like New Tech Network, which originated with Napa New Technology High School in 1996, have been pioneers in revolutionizing education through integrated curriculum, project-based learning, and one-to-one computing initiatives. Having expanded to nearly 200 schools nationwide, the network focuses on providing design principles, intensive training, and ongoing coaching rather than directly operating schools. Their innovative model features double-block scheduling for integrated learning experiences, with projects carefully assessed not just for content mastery but for essential 21st-century skills including communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and personal agency.
The particular power of these approaches lies in their unwavering focus on student agency. While the standards movement meticulously detailed the "what" and "how" through learning objectives and teacher evaluations, it often overlooked the crucial "why," resulting in rigid, lockstep approaches that failed to develop genuine student ownership of learning. Networks like New Tech maintained their commitment to student agency as a cornerstone of education, systematically assessing it alongside knowledge acquisition, critical thinking, collaboration, and communication in every project undertaken.
Agency development encompasses multiple dimensions: cultivating a growth mindset, implementing effective learning strategies, and developing the capacity for independent reflection on actions and outcomes. Given the unprecedented complexity young people will face in their future careers and lives, they require robust "wayfinding" abilities, resilience, and a growth-oriented mindset. This recognition drives networks focused on deeper learning to foster student-centered cultures and leverage project-based learning methodologies to build student agency systematically from elementary through high school, preparing learners for success in an increasingly dynamic world.
第4章
Design Thinking: Reimagining School From the Ground Up
Design thinking has evolved from a specialized term into a structured approach for addressing complex challenges. It starts by imagining alternative futures through understanding and empathizing with users, followed by ideation, prototyping and testing in iterative development cycles, and finally implementation and evaluation. This human-centered approach integrates people's needs with technological possibilities and business requirements-making it perfectly suited for education's adaptive challenges.
At Design39 Campus in Poway Unified School District, design thinking infuses everything from the facility to culture and pedagogy. Principal Joe Erpelding keeps the school in a constant state of redesign, practicing empathy by valuing different perspectives and engaging teachers and parents in ongoing improvement dialogues. Teachers begin each day with design time, reflecting the school's commitment to design thinking as a core practice.
When teachers become design thinkers, they listen deeply to students through empathy interviews, which McKaig notes was "impactful on our work and also opened our eyes to the complexity of personalization." This approach transforms traditional project-based learning in profound ways. At High Tech High in San Diego, Director Kaleb Rashad explains that traditional project management is a sprint to a predetermined outcome, while design thinking starts with problem-finding through empathy research. It involves iteration, prototyping, and testing hypotheses "quickly and cheaply."
New Technology High School in Napa Valley incorporated design thinking into project-based learning, realizing it couldn't be treated as an add-on. Principal Riley Johnson led the school to focus on projects rather than courses as the core architecture, which changed pacing, student support, and communication of student success. The 2017-2018 school year launched with design thinking as a main focus, allowing 400 students to form cross-grade groups addressing real problems. One group of freshman girls developed solutions for cell phone distraction, another studied water usage in vineyards, and another created games to teach about mental illness that are now used by local health organizations.
Despite its complexity, Rashad argues this approach prepares students for a world of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity by developing "Entrepreneurs, Producers, Innovators and Change Makers." At Napa New Tech, Principal Johnson believes combining project-based learning with design thinking prepares students for the "gig economy" by teaching them to prototype early, gather feedback, and iterate toward solutions-exactly the skills needed for an unpredictable future.
第5章
Connected Teaching: The Power of Co-Creation
Teaching is evolving beyond traditional instruction into broader learning models that combine face-to-face, hands-on, and online activities. Platform networks share an approach to learning, common tools, and professional learning communities-a pedagogy, a platform, and a professional learning network. This combination enables co-creation, where teachers build on each other's work rather than reinventing the wheel in isolation. Modern platforms like Google Classroom, Canvas, and Microsoft Teams have accelerated this shift by providing integrated spaces for resource sharing, collaboration, and community building.
Alex Hernandez argues that great networks share common expectations for teaching and learning while making significant organizational investments. Networks need intellectual coherence where teachers "row in the same direction" rather than closing doors and figuring things out individually. Successful networks develop carefully-sequenced curricula, record exemplary instruction videos, curate thought-provoking materials, create assessments that set high bars, and train teachers on specific classroom techniques. For example, Achievement First's network provides detailed unit plans, student work exemplars, and coaching protocols that help teachers maintain consistently high standards across multiple campuses.
New Tech Network created Professional Learning @ NTN (PL@NTN) to support educator growth through in-person and online experiences with a badging system. The platform enables co-creation through project design, where teachers review, adopt, and adapt projects from the Echo library. Teachers benefit from workshops, online learning opportunities, and network connections with other schools facing similar challenges. The badging program offers microcredentials in 23 skill areas specific to the New Tech model, providing exemplars and structuring professional development. These badges cover areas such as project-based learning design, technology integration, assessment practices, and cultural competency.
A particularly powerful practice in New Tech schools is co-facilitation, where two teachers collaborate to design and teach integrated, cross-discipline projects that better reflect how content works in the real world. For instance, an English and History teacher might collaborate on a project exploring the Civil Rights movement through literature and historical documents. These team-taught courses create benefits including more authentic project design, immediate iteration, flexible student grouping, better differentiation, modeling of collaboration, improved student behavior, stronger school culture, and greater sustainability for teachers. Teachers report higher job satisfaction and professional growth through these partnerships.
Place-based education emerges as another exciting form of co-creation that leverages geography for authentic, meaningful learning. Teton Science Schools offer design principles for place-based education: local to global context, learner-centered approaches, inquiry-based methods, design thinking, community as classroom, and interdisciplinary approaches. For example, students might study local watershed ecology while contributing to real environmental conservation efforts. Larry Rosenstock of High Tech High sees "place as palette," encouraging teachers to co-construct projects that benefit local communities. One successful project involved students creating a field guide to local marine life that is now used by area schools and environmental organizations.
These connected teaching approaches transform the traditional isolation of teaching into a collaborative profession where ideas flow freely, teachers learn continuously, and students benefit from the collective wisdom of an entire network rather than the limited perspective of a single instructor. The impact extends beyond individual classrooms to create learning ecosystems where best practices are shared, refined, and implemented across diverse educational settings. This networked approach has proven particularly valuable during remote learning transitions, allowing teachers to quickly adapt and share effective strategies for online and hybrid instruction.
第6章
Building Learning Organizations Through Networks
The Singapore American School transformation demonstrates how organizational learning can drive educational innovation. Superintendent Chip Kimball allocated half a percent of the budget for research and development, enabling 100 staff members to visit 100 schools in eight countries. This investment catalyzed a shift from content-focused, teacher-led instruction to skills-based, student-centered learning.
Professional learning communities (PLCs) became central to the transformation, focusing on collective teacher learning through inquiry cycles that address what students should know, how to assess learning, and how to support struggling or advanced students. PLCs drive curriculum consistency and encourage teacher teams to take collective responsibility for student learning.
New Tech Network developed the Learning Organization Framework to help schools shift from initial implementation to continuous improvement. The framework guides short-term inquiry cycles and builds collective capacity. At its center is a specific focus for improvement, surrounded by a cyclical process of data collection, analysis, strategy development, and implementation. Unlike most professional development providers that reinforce individual capacity building, NTN focuses on collective capacity-helping schools learn together, collaborate effectively, and become highly adaptive systems.
Carnegie Foundation President Anthony Bryk advocates for "networked improvement communities" (NICs) that apply improvement science principles to education challenges. These communities follow six core principles: make work problem-specific and user-centered; address variation in performance; see the system producing current outcomes; measure what matters; anchor improvement in disciplined inquiry; and accelerate improvements through networks. Districts like Fresno Unified and Menomonie Area have successfully used improvement science to address problems like chronic absenteeism and disciplinary biases.
To accelerate impact beyond linear growth, New Tech Network developed "NT Teams," a lighter-touch implementation strategy that provides teacher teams with access to the Echo platform and project library with less intensive training. This flexible starting point complements whole-school implementations to support district-wide transformation. Another promising approach involves networks of teacher-led microschools, like those spreading across Denver, which provide personalized learning with strong community connections.
The promise of networks is that the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts, accelerating improvement and reducing risks far beyond what isolated schools could achieve. Strong networks build connections through shared values and infrastructure, invest in shifting structures as they evolve, make the network do the work through co-creation, let connections flow to value, use variation as strength, promote equity and diversity, and keep plans flexible.
第7章
Choosing the Right Network Structure for Maximum Impact
School networks come in various forms, each with distinct advantages and challenges for scaling educational innovation. Managed networks like charter management organizations have grown to over 2,800 schools, with more than 50 high-quality networks sharing learning models and supports. Examples include Harmony's 54 STEM-focused Texas schools, IDEA's 61 blended schools, and DSST's 11 Denver schools. These vertically integrated networks function like enterprise systems with common processes and metrics, delivering consistent quality but at higher cost.
Platform networks offer a different approach. Summit Public Schools operates both as a managed network of innovative West Coast schools and a platform network (Summit Learning) supporting over 330 school teams. New Tech Network similarly offers a project-based learning model with platform and professional learning. These networks provide design, tools, and implementation support without directly operating schools, allowing for more flexible adoption.
Design networks are voluntary associations focused on shared principles with support services. Examples include Big Picture Learning (52 US and 39 international schools focused on internships), Edvisions (37 student-centered schools), and EL Education (152 schools with curriculum focus). These networks offer lower-cost scaling but with more variable implementation quality.
Principles networks like Future Ready Schools (3,100+ districts) share common educational philosophies but with minimal implementation requirements, allowing for quick, inexpensive scaling but highly variable implementation. Portfolio networks like Chicago International Charter School operate diverse school models that share supervision and backend support systems.
Each network type offers distinct advantages and challenges. Managed networks deliver consistent quality but are expensive to build and can stifle innovation. Design and principles networks offer low-cost scaling but variable implementation. Platform networks are becoming the most attractive scaling option, with curriculum providers increasingly moving resources online to become more like platform networks.
The authors recommend that teachers identify and visit network schools of interest; teacher leaders start or join professional learning communities; school leaders explore design networks for coherent learning models; successful school leaders consider multi-campus expansion; superintendents partner with platform networks for struggling schools; curriculum directors consider curriculum networks with online resources; and providers use networks to scale tools with high-fidelity implementation.
As personalized learning advances, sophisticated platforms and large-scale informatics will likely be developed by networks committed to shared learning models and assessment systems-making network selection an increasingly important strategic decision for educational leaders.
第8章
Leading and Governing Networks for Educational Transformation
Effective leadership in network-based education requires shifting from compliance-oriented management to agreement crafting that respects professional autonomy while maintaining coherent direction. Superintendent Kathy Gomez of Evergreen Elementary School District in San Jose emphasizes that organizational shifts are often more cultural than technical, requiring vulnerability, trust-building, and parent engagement. She notes that sustained leadership is key as it takes time for changes to become institutionalized.
The best way to manage innovation is through a connected series of projects launched in phases and managed by emerging leaders. Project plans should include clear goals, timelines, staffing estimates, budgets, and dependencies. Assigning project management to emerging leaders effectively distributes leadership, manages change, and develops talent. This project-based leadership approach aligns perfectly with the project-based learning happening in classrooms.
For professional learning, microcredentials offer a promising approach to personalized, competency-based development. Kettle Moraine Superintendent Patricia DeKlotz notes they give teachers the same personalized learning experience they should provide students. Rather than requiring universal compliance, DeKlotz encouraged development of literacy microcredentials, with 80% of teachers earning them and qualifying for extra pay.
On the governance side, districts face growing competition from charter, private, and homeschool options. They can respond by functioning as enterprise districts (sharing common goals and learning models), using shared decision-making approaches (splitting authority between central office and schools), or adopting portfolio strategies (acting more as authorizers than operators). Cities like Denver keep district innovation and charter schools on equal footing regarding funding, enrollment, and accountability, leveraging the capabilities of school networks to create diverse options for families.
Alex Hernandez from the Charter School Growth Fund suggests districts can learn three key lessons from charter networks: define what excellence looks like and align the entire organization to that vision; make strategic investments in infrastructure (whether built in-house or borrowed); and consider shifting from operating schools to authorizing high-quality networks, especially for large districts where alignment around a concrete vision becomes challenging.
For platform-based school services, quality of service is critical to success. Effective service includes both proactive outreach and responsive support. Good providers monitor customer data for insights, maintain personal relationships rather than impersonal ticketing systems, and adapt to changing curriculum requirements and technological advancements. Schools should focus as much on finding adaptable partners for their journey as on current product features.
第9章
Creating a Nation Proud of Its Public Schools
The authors envision a future where students tackle serious challenges and create positive community impacts, making themselves, families, and communities proud. Though personalized learning presents adaptive challenges rather than straightforward technical ones, networks provide low-risk entry points, implementation support, and contribution opportunities. The New Tech Network aims to foster a nation proud of its public schools-an aim they see as not just possible but critical for equity and economic development.
School visits provide powerful inspiration and professional development. Seth Andrew of Democracy Prep found visiting 30 different schools more valuable than formal education. Joseph Erpelding credits visiting 30 schools as crucial preparation for leading Design39. The Kauffman Foundation's KC Great Schools initiative brings diverse stakeholders to visit high-performing schools in different cities, creating a collaborative vision of what's possible rather than directly funding providers.
Innovation intermediaries provide the crucial layer between schools and new learning models, offering design support, technical assistance, professional development, talent development, grants, incubation, ecosystem coordination, and feedback loops. These organizations create productive ecosystems where innovations are more likely to emerge, receive support, and scale.
Many superintendents function as chief advocates for their districts, building and spending political capital to support change. Winton Woods' Anthony Smith implemented New Tech Network's project-based learning district-wide for 3,800 diverse students. Cross County's Carolyn Wilson created career education access for rural students through New Tech Network. El Paso's Juan Cabrera shifted from test preparation to active learning with an updated graduate profile. Denver's Tom Boasberg developed a comprehensive plan with innovation and charter networks operating on a level playing field.
Diffusion theory suggests innovations spread from innovators to early adopters to majority users, but education's complex context makes progress more episodic. Seven factors influence innovation adoption: relative advantage, compatibility, complexity, triability, observability, adaptability, and scalability. Personalized learning has high advantages but also high complexity and limited observability. School networks effectively bundle innovations, reducing complexity while boosting adaptability and scalability.
The authors conclude that powerful project-based learning, scaled through networks of like-minded schools working together, can transform education. They believe this approach can create "a nation proud of its public schools"-a vision that seems increasingly possible as networks demonstrate their ability to create coherent, high-quality learning experiences even in the most challenging circumstances.
