The challenges facing education today
The field of education is confronting several complex challenges at once: a long-standing achievement gap compounded by pandemic-era learning loss, learners disengaging from coursework that doesn’t feel worth showing up for, agentic AI reshaping what schools deploy and how, and mounting pressure to move beyond narrow disciplinary content toward the durable, transferable skills students need to navigate an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world (Reilly & Reeves, 2024). These aren’t four separate problems in need of four separate fixes. Across each, research points to the same underlying gap: learning experiences that fail to be authentic, relevant, and learner-centered enough to meet the moment.
Widening achievement gaps
National data have long documented persistent achievement gaps by race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status (McFarland et al., 2018), gaps that pandemic-era learning losses have since compounded (Fahle et al., 2025). A three-year, design-based research study found that courses high in authentic task principles align with learning sciences’ findings of how students actually learn and what deepens learning transfer, while courses low in authentic task principles consistently fell short on both (Reilly & Reeves, 2024).
Learner disengagement and chronic absenteeism
Only 37% of Gen Z K–12 students say they enjoy going to school every day, and enjoyment tracks closely with whether coursework feels interesting, relevant, and worth showing up for (Gallup & Walton Family Foundation, 2026). Among students who are chronically absent, 82% say they’re bored at school (Office for Education Policy, University of Arkansas, 2026) — a sign that attendance strategies focused on tracking and outreach address the absence, not the classroom experience students return to.
Sustaining engagement means redesigning that classroom experience itself. The same active learning design study revealed that the authentic task principles, in particular the learner-centered principles, were responsible for engaging learners with academic tasks in ways that sustained motivation and engagement (Reilly, 2020).
Agentic AI and the erosion of learner agency
Many of today’s AI-operated EdTech tools personalize the learner’s pace and path through the curriculum, adapting how quickly a student moves while largely addressing lower-level content standards. These systems are built by institutions with their own goals, so the learner is often the interface’s addressee without being the party whose purposes the system was actually designed to advance (Mishra & Henriksen, 2026). True personalization is different: it engages the learner’s agency, voice, choice, self-expression, creativity, and socio-cultural background — design principles that adaptive pacing alone cannot replicate, but authentic learning does.
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Competency-based education and 21st century skills
Nearly half of U.S. states have adopted competency-based education policies, and Graduate Profiles naming desired 21st century skills have proliferated — but naming a skill doesn’t mean a curriculum builds it. A design-based study developed an outcomes mapping protocol that verifies whether a learning design actually fosters the disciplinary standards and higher-order skills it claims to (Reilly & Reeves, 2023). The same design principles were validated by learners (Reilly, 2020) as creating the pedagogical conditions responsible for fostering both the content knowledge and the higher-order skills the study tracked.
Across each of these challenges, research points to the same underlying remedy: authentic, evidence-based learning design. Supporting educators in that work is where reDesignED starts.