Districts Don’t Need Another New Model. They Need Systems That Build Them.

By: Katie Martin and Devin Vodicka

All photos are courtesy of Learner-Centered Collaborative

In December 2025, the California Collaborative for Educational Excellence kicked off its Secondary School Redesign Pilot Program. As part of this work, Hidden Valley Middle School in Escondido was named a lead demonstration site for other participating schools and districts to learn from.

What makes Hidden Valley unique is its “school within a school”—a public microschool structure that doesn’t require a new building or charter to get off the ground. Half of all seventh graders, roughly a sixth of the school’s total enrollment, are randomly enrolled with the 4 teachers that make up the self-contained microschool built within the structure of the existing campus.

Principal Bryanna Norton and her team launched this microschool model in 2024 to counteract disengagement among students and teachers and rebuild a sense of belonging that a standard schedule had struggled to sustain. Importantly, what has been created is distinct from a program like AVID or GATE. Instead, this microschool is honoring what organizational theorist John Kotter calls a dual operating system, a smaller and more agile structure that runs alongside a larger institution to test new approaches, gather evidence, and feed what works back into the broader organization.

Hidden Valley’s microschool has its own schedule, staff, students, and learning model. It has a dedicated team of teachers who stay with the same students across multiple years inside stable “Packs.” It runs on a protected daily schedule built around two advisory periods that occur at the start and end of each day. Learning is centered around units that answer essential questions that matter in their community. And, students lead their own exhibitions and conferences where they receive and share feedback.

While a smaller program might share a theme or borrow a block of time from the master schedule, a public microschool is organized, staffed, and scheduled as a distinct unit, one that serves as an innovation lab for the school.

The early evidence of its impact shows out-of-school suspensions at Hidden Valley have fallen 60 percent and chronic absenteeism is down 12 percentage points. This is not just within the microschool. This is schoolwide, a nod to the intentional spread of practices that are first tested in the microschool and shared more broadly when they show promise.

Principal Bryanna Norton also reports gains on iReady assessments in both English language arts and math for students in the microschool, gains she credits to teachers better positioned to notice a student sliding and adjust before, not after, that student falls behind. These early success indicators helped Hidden Valley also secure funding from Getting Smart’s Learning Innovation Fund as part of the “Big Push for Small Schools” grant program.

For much of the past decade, educational innovation was measured largely by counting standout schools, an inventive charter here, a design-forward academy there, each one a proof point that something better was possible somewhere. Hidden Valley’s early success invites new thinking around how innovation can happen. Rather than producing more isolated examples, what if we focused more on building the capacity of public systems to produce and spread learner-centered models within their own communities?

That capacity-building is already taking shape elsewhere in California. A separate effort, backed by the Silicon Schools Fund and organized by Learner-Centered Collaborative, spent 2025-26 guiding five Southern California districts—Bonsall Unified, Laguna Beach Unified, San Diego Unified, San Marcos Unified and Vista Unified—through a microschool design process. Each is answering a different local problem.

In San Marcos Unified, Mission Hills High School is designing a daily Symposium pairing academic and career preparation with community connection, responding to low belonging and weak readiness scores. 

San Diego Unified is sketching two models. One at Innovation Middle School would group students into identity-based Houses tied to career clusters, backed by career-connected math, citywide fieldwork, and industry mentors. A companion microschool at Creative Performing Media Arts Middle School responds to a different set of student strengths, treating artists as entrepreneurs and positioning students as content creators who use digital media to connect with and influence their community.

Vista Unified’s Monte Vista Elementary is developing a model centered on strengths exploration, hands-on labs and an entrepreneurship capstone, feeding into the district’s existing pathway for grades five through eight.

Bonsall Unified is designing an elementary model built around interdisciplinary STEAAM challenges tied to real problems, with teachers shifting from direct instruction toward facilitation as students build competency-based portfolios.

None of this is happening in a policy vacuum. California has expanded the secondary school pilot program for 2026-27, continued its support for community schools, and made billions of dollars in flexible funding available for locally driven redesign, a sign that state appetite for this work is growing, not fading.

The question for district leaders, policymakers, and funders isn’t whether to invest in new models. It’s whether to invest in systems that are already primed to build and spread them.