Introduction

The Ecosystems Working Group was composed of forty learner-centered practitioners, experts, systems thinkers, and young people—diverse across sectors, ideology, expertise, race, age, and geography. The group included educators, current and past superintendents, parents, community organizers, learners, researchers, and more. They brought with them lived experience and expertise from indigenous nations, liberation communities, entrepreneurial innovation, K–12 education, early childhood education, youth development, philanthropy, higher education, nonprofits, businesses, and homeschool cooperatives.

Over the course of eleven months of meeting and inventing together, they developed new understandings, frameworks, and resources. This guide is a synthesis of their work, which we hope inspired communities will leverage to boldly invent their own learner-centered ecosystems.

At its heart, this is the work of forming a new public education system designed to provide an equitable, learner-centered education for each and every child in the United States, inclusive of race, background, and circumstance.

This is a guide for those leaning in, striving for, and eager to invent a new system of education that can equitably and powerfully enable thriving learner-centered experiences for all children. It isn’t a guide to convince you this is the way to go; it is a guide for those who want to take on the challenge of inventing newly in service of this transformed vision.

Likewise, this guide is not designed to narrate what each unique community may hold dear, or how exactly they will get the work done. Instead, this is an exploration of the kinds of choices and considerations that communities might face as they begin to launch their own learner-centered ecosystems. It is a guide to help us all imagine an infrastructure designed to strengthen relationships, expand and grow networks, and bring transparency and access to the system such that it operates in ways that honor the uniqueness of every learner and embrace the diversity of communities. In such a system and future, our diversity and wide range of experiences and beliefs, our stories and hopes, become our greatest strength and the basis for our continued evolution.

As you read through the ideas, frameworks, and questions of the Ecosystems Working Group, keep in mind that each unique place will have to chart their own journey, explore their own landscape, and acknowledge their own history, hopes, and shared possibilities for the future. Looking forward, there are varied pathways to choose—and it is up to each of us to decide not only which direction to go but how we will proceed together. With love. In community. And with a shared stand for creating together equitable, community-based, learner-centered ecosystems where every child is known, loved, and encouraged to live a life of meaning, connection, and contribution.

We hope these findings will offer jumping-off places for vital conversations and efforts as we work together to invent this transformed public education system and make this world a better place for our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.

Bobbi Macdonald and the Education Reimagined Team