Explore this Q&A with Chong-Hao Fu, CEO of Leading Educators, a national non-profit that partners with school systems to scale excellent teaching and build future models of learning. In this conversation, he shares a vision for confronting the intersecting crises of student disengagement, teacher burnout, and educational misalignment — and why AI makes redesigning the teaching role both more urgent and more possible than ever before.
How would you characterize the core challenges facing education right now?
Education in our country is facing three interconnected challenges: a crisis of student disengagement, a crisis of misalignment between work and school, and a crisis in the teaching profession.
Students are experiencing school as disconnected from their lives, operating in what Winthrop and Anderson describe as “passenger mode.” Chronic absenteeism is not an anomaly but a predictable outcome of a system misaligned with how students learn and what they see as relevant.
There is growing recognition that academic mastery alone, while essential, is no longer sufficient. Durable skills such as communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and self-direction account for 8 of the 10 most in-demand competencies in today’s job postings but are not measured as part of the traditional educational outcomes. As routine cognitive tasks become easier to automate, students must develop capabilities that are deeply human, such as ethical reasoning, empathy, creativity, and the ability to navigate ambiguity. These are not “soft” skills; they are what prepare learners for the future.
Meanwhile, the status of teaching has reached a near 50-year low in prestige, interest, and satisfaction based on Kraft and Lyon’s 2022 analysis. More than ever, teachers are struggling with burnout and working conditions that do not match the complexity of the work. In short, we are asking educators to deliver in an era of rapid change with a playbook made for a previous era filled with disconnected professional development and incoherent policies.
The system of education as we know it is being asked to simultaneously respond to these three massive challenges all at once and in short order.
What does Leading Educators believe the path forward looks like for reimagining the teacher role in the face of these challenges?
At Leading Educators, we see an opportunity to confront these challenges in a coherent, unified manner that creates new models for learning. We believe the first step is to modernize our content to ensure that young people are prepared for the workplace now and tomorrow and then re-imagine the educator’s role in alignment with that vision.
We know that academic mastery is crucial. After all, we can’t support students in thinking critically without the essential skills and knowledge of the world. Therefore, the first step is to narrow down the standards, keeping what matters most while embedding future-ready skills across core content.
For example, at Leading Educators, we’re working with educators to modernize mathematics, focusing on how students make sense of problems, construct arguments, model with math, and critically use tools, including AI. This means more real-world learning experiences that answer the perennial student question: What is math for?
At the same time, this approach invites us to reimagine who counts as an educator, bringing in community members who use math in their daily work. A broader team, supported by responsible AI, could deliver learning that fosters both academic mastery and durable skills. This sequencing matters. When schools lead with tools, they risk optimizing a misaligned system. When they lead with learning, technology becomes a means rather than an end.
How do you know the Leading Educators’ approach works?
Our approach is grounded in more than a decade of evidence. Across 21 of our school district partnerships, students experienced gains equal to an average of nine additional months of learning. But we didn’t just measure outcomes, we studied which specific combinations of conditions consistently produce them. This research has met the highest evidence standards, including an ESSA Tier 1 study accepted by the What Works Clearinghouse. We know this works. Now we have to scale it.
Schools we work with are already experimenting with models that emphasize experiential, real-world, and community-connected learning, creating opportunities for authentic work, meaningful application, collaboration, and learner agency. Research consistently shows these experiences deepen engagement, particularly for historically marginalized students.
But they also introduce new demands, including flexible schedules, interdisciplinary planning, external expertise, and assessment systems that capture learning beyond standardized tests. Leading Educators has the unique ability to ensure coherent implementation so that the reimagined educator role and technology can work together to overcome persistent barriers to impact at scale.
How does the rise of AI factor into this moment of opportunity for education?
AI accelerates the urgency of each of the three crises: student disengagement, teacher disconnection and learning relevance. The early responses to AI — restricting access or “AI-proofing” assignments — misdiagnose the problem by focusing on control rather than redesign.
AI-driven large language models didn’t create the challenges, but they’ve made them impossible to ignore. Tasks that once served as assessments for learning can now be completed instantly, with little learning at all. AI has exposed the hollowness of low-purpose tasks faster than systems can adapt. When assignments feel disconnected from meaning, students will outsource them.
While AI can increasingly support student feedback, real-time assessment, and personalized tutoring, we believe that the value of teachers in terms of relationship, motivation, and social-emotional guidance is irreplaceable. Over time, the division of labor between educators and technology will continue to shift, requiring that we also redesign our models for learning.
To be sure, this will require critical policy safeguards to ensure that students are safe and that their data is protected. This will also require that school systems have the space to test and iterate new approaches with the deep engagement of families and educators. It will take a collective effort to ensure that we minimize the harms and maximize the learning opportunities created by AI in a rapidly changing world.
How might AI help school systems get more out of student assessment?
Traditional assessment remains the most persistent barrier to scaling innovative models. Capturing durable skills, synthesizing portfolio work, and translating learning beyond school walls into recognized credentials are daunting challenges. AI offers promise here, not as a replacement for professional judgment, but as enabling infrastructure.
Healthcare offers a useful parallel: AI hasn’t replaced physicians, but it has reshaped workflows by supporting diagnostics, spotting patterns, and reducing administrative burden so clinicians can focus on judgment and relationships. Those gains required the intentional redesign of roles, not just the passive adoption of tools.
Similarly, in education, we can use AI to reshape workflows by supporting assessment, coordination, and personalization. This opens up the possibilities for a revitalized teaching profession that supports the thriving of every learner.
What do you hope we stand to gain if these efforts succeed?
Engaged learners. Inspired teachers. Future-ready schools.
If we commit to system design that clarifies roles, aligns resources, and fosters real coherence, we can help meaningful improvements take root and endure. That’s how we’ll help students master rigorous content and apply it to meaningful problems. That’s how we’ll give teachers the time, the tools, and the conditions to build the human relationships that make learning possible. And that’s how we’ll build a nationwide education system that’s not just adapted to our modern world, but is adaptable to the future we can’t yet imagine.
