We’ve heard from high school students in myriad ways that high schools are not serving them well. Whether looking at data from Beacon Research, Transcend, or Gallup, high schoolers share that school is typically boring, irrelevant, and does not grow the skills or knowledge they need for today’s—nevertheless tomorrow’s—world. As one of our April 2025 Insights posts shared, 80% of students and parents polled “believe that their high school needs to change—and of those, roughly a third say that major changes (as opposed to minor tweaks) are required.”
These student perspective data, in combination with quantitative student outcome data such as National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results that show stagnant or worsening high school outcomes, all point to how essential it is to alter what students learn and how they engage in that learning.
We are pleased to announce the launch of the Momentum Schools Initiative (MSI), which focuses on cultivating powerful and impactful classroom learning experiences. MSI is new multi-year partnership with Springpoint and a cohort of four schools ready to go deeper with Transformative Learning Experience units (TLEs). TLEs are rigorous, hands-on, 6-8 week project-based multidisciplinary units that catalyze student engagement through learning that is relevant and useful beyond high school. They come to life through teaching moves that center students’ identities and foster equity by ensuring that all students in a class do the heavy thinking necessary to achieve at high levels. Through MSI, we look to build on our investment and learning from TLEs to date, where students, teachers, and leaders who use TLEs report powerful outcomes.
Introducing the Momentum Schools Initiative
Through institutes, site visits, and sustained coaching, MSI aims to equip school-based coaches to better support teachers as they create classrooms where students engage in challenging, meaningful work that builds skill and agency. Simultaneously, school and district leaders align work to make this vision deeply rooted and sustained across the whole school. The goal of MSI is to build lasting capacity in school-based instructional coaches and in school leaders, so that over time the practices that support deeper learning can take root and spread. We are excited about the potential of these teacher-led pilots to build belief and excitement in new approaches that grow momentum and expand to clusters of classrooms while instructional leaders align coaching, vision, and student voice to support and scale the new practices.
We are eager to learn alongside Springpoint and the MSI schools as we continue to grow our understanding of how to support highly effective and coherent transformation processes at the high school and system level, all in service of excellent student learning experiences. Our collective efforts are more critical now than ever and our students deserve it and more.
