In their article “A Democratic Vision for Public Schools,” Kent McGuire and Matt Wilka have done a service by calling us to reinvigorate the public purpose of American education by revisiting the education social contract. Their diagnosis that three decades of efficiency-first reform narrowed curricula and produced short-term score gains but failed to sustain long-term academic progress is important. We are now seeing a crisis of chronic absenteeism and declining youth mental health that cannot be ignored. Their recognition that we are living between paradigms, with the old framework no longer fitting our current reality and a new one struggling to emerge, is the right place to start.

But the way forward requires more than reinvigorating the public purpose of education. It requires revisiting the education social contract and renegotiating the social contract that underlies education—who holds power, who earns trust, who gets to make consequential decisions—and, in parallel, redesigning the system to fairly deliver on that new contract. Fairness here is not a downstream outcome of this renegotiation but a core design principle that must shape how power, resources, and opportunity are distributed from the start. These are distinct but related tasks, and conflating or trying to do only one of them at a time may be one reason reform has stalled. What we cannot afford right now is to continue mistaking schooling for learning and efficiency for fairness.

My organization, LearnerStudio, exists to build a fair, coherent, positive, future-ready learning system, focusing on human flourishing in the age of artificial intelligence. Over the past three years, we have supported emerging tools and models, listened to families and learners, and worked with education innovators building what we believe is the emergent third horizon of the system, designed not for industrial-era efficiency, nor for incremental improvements inside that old box, but to support all learners as individuals, in careers, and for democracy in this modern era. What follows is an attempt to identify and revisit the education social contract we need to define and to sketch the system design it requires.

Read the full article about revisiting the education social contract by Kim Smith at Stanford Social Innovation Review.