Today, AI tools are being adopted at twice the speed of the early Internet. Everyone in education is talking about how quickly we need to transform learning to prepare students for an AI-powered economy. But there’s an elephant in the room: the interventions we implement in schools often take years to transform learning and improve academic outcomes for students. That’s why it’s more critical than ever that we find faster, more reliable ways to ensure students are actually thriving in school.
There’s a surprisingly simple way to do this: ask students! We know that students with great experiences in school are more likely to show up, less likely to engage in problematic behaviors, and more likely to learn. High-quality student experiences — and simple, fast-cycle tools to measure them — offer a practical path forward. As AI automates routine tasks that once guaranteed middle-class jobs, the abilities young people need to thrive have fundamentally shifted. Success requires creativity, critical thinking, and collaborative problem-solving, all uniquely human capacities that engaged, self-directed students develop.
Our organizations have developed new research to understand the relationship between the quality of students’ experiences in school and these important mindsets, skills, and academic outcomes. At Transcend, a national nonprofit that helps communities innovate learning so it’s more relevant and engaging for all students, we use the Leaps Student Voice Survey to gather evidence from over 70,000 students annually about the quality of their learning experiences. And at NewSchools, we invest in the creation of new public schools designed with a deep focus on student experiences with the goal of equipping students with a strong academic foundation and essential skills needed for success in school and life. Every semester since 2016, NewSchools has surveyed students attending our portfolio schools to understand their experience alongside academic and social emotional data, based on our Expanded Definition of Student Success framework.
Importantly, both surveys have found a correlation between experiences and academic achievement. Students reporting higher scores on Transcend’s Leaps survey have GPAs that are almost 15% higher and test scores that are 27% higher on state standardized high school end-of-course algebra and geometry exams. Similarly, fourth and fifth grade students in NewSchools portfolio schools who experience high levels of belonging (i.e., establish strong bonds with their teachers, actively participate in classroom activities, and feel supported and accepted by both adults and peers) achieve more than double the reading growth of their peers — the equivalent of more than four additional months of literacy instruction. For high school freshmen who demonstrate strong enthusiasm for learning and active participation in the classroom, they achieve 3 times the gains in math and reading compared to their peers. Overall, NewSchools found that combining growth mindset, rigorous expectations, and school safety can turbocharge student learning.
Students reporting higher Leaps scores also have 17% fewer disciplinary incidents, 34% fewer in-school suspensions, and a 25% lower chronic absenteeism rate. NewSchools’ SY23-24 data showed that a 10% increase in favorable campus climate is correlated with a 5% increase in 9th grade attendance.
This relationship between positive student experiences and key outcomes across academics, attendance, and student behavior has significant implications for how we pursue data-driven improvement. Student experiences can help us quickly understand what’s working in schools and help educators drive improved academics, attendance, and student outcomes. It can take months or years for interventions by a school or district to show up on standardized assessment scores. Why wait that long when student experience data can provide us with more immediate feedback that is likely to predict those long-term outcomes?
A growing number of schools are using this approach to build the human capabilities that remain irreplaceable in an AI world. In Massachusetts, one middle school used the Leaps Survey as part of piloting a new hands-on, personalized learning model that cut chronic absenteeism in half, from 28 percent to 12 percent and falling this year to less than 10 percent, academic data is also starting to show improvement, and the district has now expanded the pilot to more schools. University High School, a Memphis based school in the NewSchools portfolio, leverages surveys to incorporate student voice in decision-making. Students don’t just experience school—they co-design it, building the creative problem-solving skills that distinguish human intelligence from artificial intelligence. Ninth graders had a 95% attendance rate and 71% reported a strong sense of belonging in the 2023-2024 school year.
In today’s challenging education climate, we are confronting significant learning loss, troubling absenteeism rates, and disengaged adults. At the same time, there’s a stark mismatch: students are graduating from industrial-age schools designed for compliance and memorization into an AI-powered world that rewards curiosity, creativity, and the ability to ask questions no algorithm can answer. As we look for opportunities to prepare all students for this fast-changing world, we are motivated to scale practices that center student experiences.
Funders have a choice: keep waiting for test scores years down the line, or start using responsive tools that tell us how students are experiencing school right now. That choice comes with two implications for K–12 philanthropy:
- Broaden measures of efficacy. Invite grantees to share student experience data alongside data on student academic outcomes, especially for large-scale interventions that could take years to create measurable impact at scale. Funders with a policy lens could encourage states and legislators to include experience data in a more expansive approach to understanding school quality.
- Invest in new and improved tools for measuring student experience, including tools that utilize AI. Emerging technologies — including AI-enabled video and audio analysis, digital trace data, and sensor-based observation—make it possible to gather continuous insights into student engagement. These tools offer a more granular, real-time understanding of student experience and classroom environment than surveys alone. Funders should prioritize R&D grants to develop and test such technologies responsibly while ensuring student privacy.
All of us who work and invest in our education system care passionately about student outcomes because we want all children to enjoy rich, choice-, and purpose-filled lives. The skills and experiences students need to thrive are rapidly evolving as AI transforms work and society, but we can adapt our approaches just as quickly — if we use listening tools that assess progress in real-time and help us pivot toward stronger outcomes. Student experience data gives us the responsive feedback loop we need to build the learning environments our students deserve. Why wait to understand how students are feeling in schools? Let’s start asking them now.
