39 Elementary Schools
06 Combined Elementary and Middle Schools
02 K-12 Schools
43 Middle Schools
07 Combined Middle and High Schools
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A Message from our President and CEO: Lydia Dobyns
The past few years have brought a steady stream of disruptions to America’s schools along with a growing clamor to examine what school is–or more importantly–what school should be in all of its dimensions. These calls to re-imagine schools, through the learner and educator experience, point to the power of an effective school model in leading transformation efforts.
For 25 years we have helped local communities create hundreds of successful schools by partnering with districts in more than 30 states. Each partnership shares a common vision: to create schools that provide a supportive and inclusive culture, meaningful and equitable instruction, purposeful assessment, and college and career ready outcomes for all students.
Each of the more than 200 schools that are members of New Tech Network benefit from our decades of experience driven by research-based best practices. The deep repository of resources and powerful professional development NTN offers serve to empower classroom educators, school administrators, and instructional coaches to work together to create relevant and rigorous learning for each student. Our network of tens of thousands of educators also provides essential peer-to-peer learning opportunities to address common challenges and share their learning.
Through several multi-year grants we are developing new resources and methodologies to support schools. Now entering our sixth year of learning alongside districts we are focused on strengthening district capacity to lead and sustain transformation and leverage network effects to expand and sustain deeper learning. We are in the third year of learning from continuous improvement activities to ensure students are on-track for high school graduation and postsecondary success. By leveraging data on student and educator experiences, we recently released a major revision of the NTN School Success Rubric, a developmental guide that allows elementary and secondary schools to reflect on their implementation of the New Tech Network Model and to move towards a more meaningful, equitable, and inclusive learning environment for their students.
This impact report is dedicated to all of the passionate educators who are engaged in a school transformation journey. Too often in the debate about America’s schools, the quintessential questions of how teachers teach and how students learn are lost. Our work together makes deeper learning possible for each student, paving the way for students to grapple with challenging curricula, gain critical skills and use their voices in ways that prepare them for life beyond school.
Onward,
90,000+ NTN graduates over the past 25 years
95,000+ Current Students
5,700+ Current Teachers
Partnering Across the Country
New Tech Network students persist in college at a rate of 82 percent compared to 74 percent nationally.1
New Tech Network high school students graduate at a rate of 95 percent compared to the national average high school graduation rate of 85 percent.1
New Tech Network Overview
New Tech Network (NTN) is a national nonprofit dedicated to systemic and equitable change in education. We center schools as the units of change, and teachers and school leaders as the agents of that change. These educators model a participatory change process for their students, demonstrating the benefits of shared leadership and collective action. Partnering with districts and working closely with their leadership teams make change scalable and sustainable. After 25 years of change making, we have learned what works and can adapt quickly.
New Tech Network schools — now over 200 strong — are committed to college and career ready outcomes, supportive and inclusive culture, meaningful and equitable instruction, and purposeful assessment. Like the strands of a rope, when woven together, they strengthen the whole. Teachers and school leaders operate in an environment built on a vision and collective action, where educators are the architects of the learning environment. The student experience is tied directly to deeper learning outcomes. Students gain skills and use their voice in ways that prepare them for life beyond school. Project-based learning in NTN schools allows students to engage with their learning in creative, culturally relevant ways, experience it in context, and share their learning with peers.
Teachers, administrators, and district leaders adopt this school model because it produces critical thinkers and problem-solvers, vital to the long-term health and wellbeing of our communities. Students embrace it because they feel a sense of belonging. They are challenged to learn in relevant, meaningful ways that shape the way they interact with the world.
When change is collectively held rather than siloed, and all stakeholders are engaged rather than alienated, schools and districts build their own capacity to sustain innovation and continuously improve.
New Tech Network’s whole school approach provides teachers, administrators, and district leaders with complementary yet distinct roles in implementation, and relies on shared leadership. NTN’s experienced support staff do much more than train stakeholders. They support professional educators to lead, adapt to student needs and strengths, and amplify those strengths while adjusting what is needed to address challenges.
The NTN Mission
New Tech Network supports change agents at the school and district levels by shifting the way educational change happens. We transform individual schools and support vibrant district learning communities by:
- Providing NTN’s structured, responsive, research-based whole school approach to help our district partners and their stakeholders transform both individual schools and groups of schools into equitable, supportive, and meaningful learning environments.
- Sharing field-leading knowledge, research, and resources to drive awareness and uptake of leading approaches to educational change that center on college and career ready outcomes, supportive and inclusive culture, meaningful and equitable instruction, and purposeful assessment.
- Connecting teachers, administrators, and district leaders as part of a supportive, committed, forward-looking network to learn, share knowledge, and work together to create change and solve entrenched challenges.
We Believe
- Access to joyful, meaningful, and relevant educational experiences is a fundamental human right.
- Education shapes society and helps create critical thinkers, problem solvers, and informed citizens.
- Deeper learning approaches, such as project-based learning, are essential to equip all learners for the future.
- Although education systems generally aim for college and career readiness, they often don’t equip young people with the skills they need to succeed. Systems can, and must, transform so that all learners can thrive.
- A collaborative, whole school culture is critical to meaningful, sustainable change.
NTN Model Focus Areas
New Tech Network’s decades of experience guiding schools through comprehensive transformation is guided by these four Focus Areas. NTN developed the focus areas to align the work of whole school transformation and to help school communities understand the overarching goals that impact the work through all phases of our school development process.
COLLEGE & CAREER READY OUTCOMES
Prepare each student for postsecondary success with the knowledge, skills, and mindsets to be ready for college and career: Collaboration, Knowledge and Thinking, Written Communication, Oral Communication, and Agency.
MEANINGFUL & EQUITABLE INSTRUCTION
Center the instructional approach on authentic, complex thinking, and problem-solving. Based on our experience, high-quality, relevant project-based learning (PBL) is the best way for students to experience deep, contextual, and shared learning and acquire and demonstrate proficiency in college and career ready outcomes.
PURPOSEFUL ASSESSMENT
Cultivate shared, school-wide understandings of equitable, purposeful assessment and grading practices that inform teacher instruction, emphasize individual student growth, and demonstrate progress towards college and career readiness. These include performance assessments for students to demonstrate their learning in age-appropriate ways.
SUPPORTIVE & INCLUSIVE CULTURE
Foster a school-wide culture of belonging, care, community, and growth for adults and students. This type of culture helps ensure that students and teachers alike have ownership over the learning experience and school environment.
Our Whole School Approach is a Model for School Transformation
As educators, we know that effective change is inherent to our work. Addressing staff turnover, responding to state education initiatives, and implementing best instructional practices while creating enabling learning environments can feel overwhelming. Oftentimes in school systems, change processes are born as the vision of one dynamic leader who tries to tackle a major, but siloed component of schooling (academic achievement, professional development for staff, parent involvement and more). While well-intentioned, we’ve seen many such initiatives fail due to the change process being in conflict with other district initiatives or being tied to the specific success of that leader. In our more-than 25 years of school transformation, we have identified effective and sustainable ways to approach school redesign with a focus on equitable practices, improved outcomes, and lasting change.
A Whole School Approach to Transformation
We believe when transformation is adopted by a school, its stakeholders and its community, everyone is more engaged, and schools build their own unique capacity to sustain the innovation and continuously improve. Our vision of school transformation reflects a comprehensive, culturally relevant, and equitable approach to educational systemic change — involving culture, professional development, data analysis, instruction, and policies. We call this vision a Whole School Approach.
We define a whole school approach as the kind of transformation needed to ensure a learning environment where every component of the student experience is aligned to this work. Students experience this innovative way of learning in their classrooms, with their interactions with teachers, peers and school leadership, how they’re assessed in their learning, and college and career opportunities. The NTN Model aligns all components of schooling, empowers the entire system to lead a change process, invites the community in, and adapts to the needs and strengths of the learning community.
Whole school transformation for each and every student isn’t just our belief – research suggests9 that effective schools are those that embrace change at a comprehensive level, rather than the adoption of programs that focus on addressing single components of a school system.
Research also identifies10 that whole school change efforts are more likely to be effective than “tacked-on” or otherwise targeted programs. Strategies designed to affect all elements of a student’s learning typically result in higher levels of interactive instruction.
The decision to engage in systemic change can be challenging, and the work of school transformation is often hard. The work can be messy, non-linear and requires commitment and collaboration from all stakeholders. That’s why at NTN, we approach school transformation the same way we approach classroom instruction: as a developmental process. School and district leaders engage in the same types of inquiry, reflection, data analysis and collaboration during the school transformation process as their students will in their project-based learning classrooms. By its very design, our approach to school transformation enables schools and districts to grow, adapt and sustain over time. We do this by centering our model around four Focus Areas: college and career ready outcomes, supportive and inclusive culture, meaningful and equitable instruction, and purposeful assessment.
The Path to Whole School Transformation
The NTN redesign process begins with comprehensive planning resources and the NTN Model Commitments, which are designed to prepare schools for a successful implementation of the NTN Model. The NTN Model Commitments lay the foundation for the work of school transformation, and our planning resources ensure the district or school is ready to take the necessary steps towards powerful project-based learning, building adult culture, and aligning the district’s vision to learning outcomes.
Once a school and district are ready to make that commitment, it adopts the NTN School Success Rubric, a developmental rubric organized around the four Focus Areas. The NTN School Success Rubric is intended to help both elementary and secondary school teachers and leaders reflect on their implementation of the NTN Model and move towards a more meaningful, equitable, and inclusive learning environment for all students.
As schools progress in their practice around the elements of the NTN School Success Rubric, the focus shifts from implementation to sustainability — and that’s our goal. At NTN, we work to help school systems build and maintain their own capacity to create the equitable, deeper learning environments that are right for their community. We understand how staff turnover, funding shifts, enrollment changes and other challenges affect a school system, and we’ve designed our model to support schools to adapt to their local context so they can sustain and grow to help students ultimately thrive. We join fellow educators in a shared vision to work together to advance deeper learning approaches so that students participate in joyful, meaningful, and relevant educational experiences — leading to improved learning outcomes and college and career readiness for each and every student.
Developmental Phases of the NTN School Success Rubric
The Benefits of New Tech Network
Partnering with New Tech Network enables school leaders and educators to create high-quality, equitable, supportive, and meaningful learning opportunities for each and every student. Benefits include access to:
- A structured, responsive, research-based, and effective whole school approach designed to meet your needs and provide ongoing, comprehensive support from a team of experienced professionals. This is centered on developing an instructional approach and aligned school culture in order to disrupt inequities and close opportunity gaps through deeper learning practices.
- Extensive support and collaboration for schools and teachers as they engage learners, create relevant, meaningful PBL content, and support the social and emotional needs of each student.
- A way to work with existing resources to change all aspects of schooling, including approaches to teaching and learning, leadership, culture, and supports — now and over time.
- NTN’s robust coaching and training solutions and tools, including leading PBL tools, instructional, cultural, and assessment practices, and Echo, NTN’s learning management system.
- Relevant expertise and information that can be easily re-applied to your unique context, including comprehensive, customized, evidence-based solutions to meet your unique context and needs no matter where you are on your transformation journey.
- Deep partnership that encompasses both launch and long-term, sustaining support to achieve ongoing improvement and lasting change.
- The NTN network of peers and education professionals, including the opportunity to connect directly with other, similar schools to access unfiltered relevant information and advice, build relationships, and gain peer-to-peer learning.
An Inside Look at NTN Schools
Mobilizing for Change: Handy Middle School
Bay City, Michigan
"Joining New Tech Network provides us an opportunity to reframe many things about the school, not just project-based learning."
- Chief Academic Officer Patrick Malley
"Joining New Tech Network provides us an opportunity to reframe many things about the school, not just project-based learning."
- Chief Academic Officer Patrick Malley
Creating Future Ready Learners: Frisco ISD
Frisco, Texas
"We realized pretty quickly we couldn’t do it by ourselves, and we needed additional support."
- Managing Director of Strategic Initiatives Amanda Ziaer
"We realized pretty quickly we couldn’t do it by ourselves, and we needed additional support."
- Managing Director of Strategic Initiatives Amanda Ziaer
A Culture of Community Support: Owensboro Innovation Academy
Owensboro, Kentucky
"We rely heavily on the NTN systems and protocols,” she shared. “You learn things you can tweak, and do things differently to be successful. It’s like a playbook.”
- OIA Principal Beth Benjamin
"We rely heavily on the NTN systems and protocols,” she shared. “You learn things you can tweak, and do things differently to be successful. It’s like a playbook.”
- OIA Principal Beth Benjamin
25 Years of Impact
400+
Schools Supported
1,000+
Graduating Classes
20,000+
Educators Trained
The Positive Impact of Interdisciplinary Learning
Interdisciplinary courses are a key component of the New Tech Network Model. Interdisciplinary courses use learning from different subjects and disciplines to explore a theme or an issue, meet a challenge, solve a problem or complete a final project. We work with schools to support implementation of authentic and interdisciplinary project- and problem-based learning.
Research conducted at an NTN school within a school documented the positive impact of interdisciplinary courses on the learning environment and academic outcomes. NTN students consistently out-performed their main campus peers on high school graduation rates.
| New Tech Network Graduation Rate | Main Campus Graduation Rate | |
|---|---|---|
| 2015 | 99% | 81% |
| 2016 | 100% | 86% |
| 2017 | 99% | 94% |
| 2018 | 100% | 76% |
| 2019 | 99% | 96% |
| 2020 | 100% | 96% |
| 2021 | 95% | 90% |
Learning to work effectively in groups prepares students for college and the world of work
“Sometimes I have a tunnel vision and it expands that. I started to like group work. I always liked to take leadership roles and now I can take on other roles. I try to fill in what qualities are needed in the groups.”
Student, NTN Partner School
Interdisciplinary classes enable student agency and autonomy
“In a business project, I was with my friend and we had a really good hook, and it worked on the first try but not in the second. We had to learn how to adapt by crunching the numbers [data gathered in the project].”
Student, NTN Partner School
Trust and respect are shared among staff and students
“If you are going to be successful [as a teacher], you have to give the students the responsibility to learn, a productive struggle. I’m going to give away my power in the room and let the students learn. Leadership models the same thing.”
Administrator, NTN Partner School
NTN's School Design Studio Resources
References
- Bergeron, L. (2019, February). Reconsidering research paradigms: using Texas End of Course performance to evaluate innovation in EPISD. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Southwest Educational Research Association, San Antonio, TX.
- Bergeron, L. and Bogdan, C. (2019a). End of course outcomes in Texas. Internal Report. New Tech Network, Napa, CA.
- Bergeron, L. and Bogdan, C. (2019b). Critical thinking and end of course findings: An exploration of practical significance and statistical significance. Internal Report. New Tech Network, Napa, CA.
- Bergeron, L., Boesche-Taylor, B., Gehrke, A., Dugan-Knight, M., Kamdar, S., Vorse Wilka, J., and Gittens, C. (2019, March). A multifaceted examination of deeper learning in PBL elementary schools: school culture, critical thinking, and access to opportunity. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness, Washington, DC.
- David, R., Teddlie, C., & Reynolds, D. (2000). The international handbook of school effectiveness research. Psychology Press.
- Gordon, M. and Bergeron, L. (2018, November). Using Different Data Sources to Address the Same Research Questions: Evaluating the Effectiveness of New Curriculum on Student Outcomes. Presentation at the California Education Research Association annual meeting, Anaheim, CA.
- Hinnant-Crawford, B. (2020). New Tech Network Comparative Analysis: Academic Outcomes in Texas Addendum. Cullowhee, NC: Western Carolina University.
- Hopkins, D., Stringfield, S., Harris, A., Stoll, L., & Mackay, T. (2014). School and system improvement: a narrative state-of-the-art review, School Effectiveness and School Improvement, 25:2, 257-281, DOI: 10.1080/09243453.2014.885452
- Lynch, S. J., Peters Burton, E., Behrend, T., House, A., Ford, M., Spillane, N., Matray, S., Han, E., Means, B. (2018). Understanding Inclusive STEM High Schools as Opportunity Structures for Underrepresented Students: Critical Components. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 55, 712, 748.
- Peters-Burton, E. & Holincheck, N. (2022). Integrated Courses School Blueprint. Fairfax, VA, George Mason University.
- Rickles, J., Zeiser, K., Yang, R., O’Day, J., Garet, M.S.(2019) Promoting Deeper Learning in High School:Evidence of Opportunities and Outcomes. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 41 (2).https://doi.org/10.3102/0162373719837949
- Slavin, R. E. (2007). Comprehensive school reform. 21st century education: A reference handbook. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
- Stocks, E., Odell, M., and Culclasure, B. (2019, April). The Effect of the New Tech Network Design on Students’ Academic Achievement and Workforce Skills. Paper presentation at the annual conference of the American Educational Research Association, Toronto, Canada.
- Teddlie, C., & Stringfield, S. (2007). A history of school effectiveness and improvement research in the USA focusing on the past quarter century. International handbook of school effectiveness and improvement, 131-166.
Citations
Total number of schools reflects Network schools and College Access Network schools
School-level information on student enrollment, demographics, and graduation rates is sourced from the schools and publicly available sources such as the U.S. Department of Education databases. College outcomes are sourced from National Student Clearinghouse (NSC). Comparison data is sourced from NSC (https://nscresearchcenter.org tag/persistence/) and NCES (https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/).
Rickles, Zeiser, Yang, O’Day, & Garet, 2019
Stocks, Odell, and Culclasure, 2019
Gordon and Bergeron, 2018; Stocks, Odell, and Culclasure, 2019
Bergeron, 2019; Gordon and Bergeron, 2018; Lynch et al., 2018; Bergeron, 2019; Bergeron and Bogdan, 2019a; Stocks, Odell, and Culclasure, 2019; Hinnant- Crawford, 2020
Bergeron and Bogdan, 2019b; Bergeron, et al, 2019
Bergeron, Boesche-Taylor, Gehrke, Dugan-Knight, Kamdar, Vorse Wilka, and Gittens, 2019
Hopkins, Stringfield, Harris, Stoll & Mackay, 2014; Slavin, 2007; Teddlie & Reynolds, 2000
Teddlie & Stringfield, 2007
Peters-Burton. & Holincheck, 2022
Photography
Special thanks to:
- Owensboro Innovation Academy
- Frisco Independent School District
- Handy Middle School
- Winton Woods North Campus, Design by SHP © 2021 JH Photography
- Dan Vermillion, Vermillion Photo