New View EDU Episode 74: Improving Access Through Innovation

Available May 6, 2025

Find New View EDU on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and many other podcast apps.

How do we measure learning? It’s a question that challenges educators, as a rapidly changing landscape keeps everyone scrambling to catch up with evolving technologies, ever-expanding content, and the need to blend real-world experiences with tried-and-true curriculum. For over 100 years, part of the answer to that question has been the Carnegie Unit, a measurement that represents time spent learning a subject. And now, the vice president for educational transformation at the Carnegie Foundation says that answer needs to change.

Diego Arambula joins host Morva McDonald for an in-depth look at how reliance on the Carnegie Unit has shaped education in this country, and why he believes a massive shift is needed to help unlock potential and expand educational access for the future. It’s the architecture of schooling that needs an overhaul, he says, pointing to the idea that hours spent in class are currently equated to “learning.” Diego asks educators to examine things that aren’t being measured in credit hours: leadership and exploration outside of school hours, social-emotional competencies, and the development of skills, habits, and dispositions that allow real learning to take place.

Rebuilding the architecture that underpins school sounds like a daunting task, but Diego says he believes we’re at the precipice of unlocking it. He says we’re in a place of “punctuated equilibrium” in the evolution of education systems—that we have been moving slowly but are now at the moment where extreme change can happen very quickly. He shares his optimism for the possibilities inherent in allowing our outdated systems to change, and says the symptoms of the problem, like chronic absenteeism, teacher burnout and turnover, and complaints from the business sector that graduates are unprepared for the workforce, are actually expressions of the demand for something better. That demand, Diego says, will lead schools through this period of instability into a more equitable and exciting model.

Diego shares the Carnegie Foundation’s plans for a new research and development agenda, studying schools across the country that are trying to create scalable, replicable change. That work will examine every aspect of education transformation, from sustained leadership practices to community partnerships, professional development, curricular drivers, and evaluation practices. However, he says, one key challenge in pushing reform in K-12 schools is the need to bring higher education on board. The pressure of college admission, Diego notes, is a core aspect of the current high-stress K-12 environment and the supposed “need” for a measurement like the Carnegie Unit in the first place. Because higher ed is a key driver of economic mobility and opportunity, Diego worries that the inability to uncouple credit hours from learning is a threat to reform. He encourages higher ed leaders to partner with K-12 leaders to reshape expectations so the systems can evolve together.

The reality, Diego says, is that no matter how different Americans and American schools may seem from one another, we share a common underlying architecture and a common frustration. He calls it the “somewhat silent American consensus: that we want the same thing for our kids, and that right now we’re not getting it, and that it’s possible.” He believes that with hard work, community partnerships, and a national collaboration around the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead, we can recreate school so that students love it, teachers love it, learners are challenged to reach their greatest potential, and everyone can thrive.

Key Questions

Some of the key questions Morva and Diego explore in this episode include:

  • What’s holding us back from education reform on a large scale? How did we get here, and how do we get out?
  • What are some of the innovations in education that are working well for students and teachers? How do we bring those innovations from the fringes to the mainstream?
  • What is the Carnegie Foundation doing to help advance solutions? How are the goals and realities different for public schools, charter schools, and independent school settings? What are the similarities and points of connection?

Episode Highlights

  • “There is an existing architecture to school that is grounded in the Carnegie Unit. And that architecture is built around one critical choice that got made 100-plus years ago. … So we now have this new school with hundreds of thousands, millions of kids in it, and no idea of any way to measure or know what was going on. The committee of 10 said, here's what they're going to learn. And the Carnegie Unit said, here's how we're going to know that that's getting learned. And it conflated time and learning. That then seeped into the architecture of school.” (6:40)
  • “So we believe that to make this move toward this new architecture, there's going to need to be a set of scalable tools to support this work. And often, there's a way for an independent school to solve a problem that directly meets the needs of their students today, but is not replicable unless you have student-to-teacher ratios of one to 10, or unless you've got this kind of funding or unless, or unless, or unless. And what might it look like to not live in a world of scarcity, but rather to live into this world of abundance, but to think about it through a lens of, huh, and what would it look like to share this?” (18:05)
  • “Counselors are pushing that because they see what universities are asking for. And universities, in an ever-growing effort to get students who are truly prepared, ask for more. And right now, the only way to ask for more is to ask for more time. Because the Carnegie Unit has conflated time and learning, the only way for a student to be more prepared for college is to spend more time earning more credits. And if we can't unlock those two, we're going to continue to put more pressure on young people.” (27:55)
  • “It's an invitation to say, we'd love to partner with independent systems who are moving really fast toward some of these to say, can we be learning in these places about efforts to do this kind of work? And if any of that learning can then roll up so that the shared learning Carnegie is bringing is from public systems, from independent systems, in red states and blue states, in big cities and in rural areas, we just think that will continue to let us speak into what at the end of the day is a somewhat silent American consensus: that we want the same thing for our kids, and that right now we're not getting it, and that it's possible.” (32:07)

Resource List

Full Transcript

  • Read the full transcript here.

Related Episodes

About Our Guest

Diego Arambula is vice president for educational transformation at the Carnegie Foundation. He leads ambitious, actionable strategies and builds partnerships with educators, policy makers, parents, employers, and community-based organizations to advance Carnegie’s mission. 

Previously, Diego served as a managing partner with Transcend. There, he worked with teachers, principals, and superintendents across the country to explore how to best reimagine learning environments to prepare all children to thrive. Additionally, he served as the founder and executive director of GO Public Schools Fresno, an education advocacy nonprofit focused on unlocking demand for radically re-envisioned school models. Diego began his career in education at Summit Public Schools, a leading network of charter public schools headquartered in Redwood City, CA. While there, he served as classroom teacher, a founding principal, and the chief growth and innovation officer.

Diego also exercises his passion for transformational change in education through his positions on multiple boards. In 2020, he was appointed to an eight-year term as trustee for the California State University System, and he serves as chair of the education policy committee. He also serves as board chair of Summit Public Schools and the Central Valley Community Foundation. He received his bachelor’s (A.B.) in government from Harvard University and a master’s in education from Stanford University.