Posts by Mason Pashia
What Will It Look Like If Investment in Learner Wallets Pays Off?
What if a 12-year-old's sketching habit, a 19-year-old's gap year travels, and a 45-year-old's volunteer coordination all counted as verifiable learning? In a new piece for Getting Smart, Mason Pashia explores three fictional case studies — Leo, Jamie, and Elena — that bring the Gates Foundation's LearnKit framework to life, showing what learner-owned digital records could actually look like in practice. For education leaders thinking about the future of credentialing, data sovereignty, and lifelong opportunity, this is a must-read vision of the infrastructure we need to build now.
The Abundant City: Building a Coherent Public Education System
What if the crisis in urban public education is not a resource problem but a design problem? In this thought-provoking piece, Mason Pashia examines the history of mayoral control, the promise and peril of city-school mergers, and what an abundance mindset could mean for governance, financing, and who gets to learn. For education leaders navigating declining enrollment, strained budgets, and a public losing faith in the institutional model, this is both a diagnostic and a call to reimagine.
Knowledge is No Longer Enough: Why Experience and Wisdom are Education’s New Priorities
Explore the power of experience-based learning in cultivating wisdom in the next generation amid information overload.
Making Work-Based Learning Work: Georgia’s Novel Approach to WBL Data
Georgia’s work-based learning uses O*NET skill evaluations at scale—building credible, portable evidence for digital credentials and hiring.
Democracy in Miniature: Youth Agency and Junior Republics | A Conversation with Jennifer Light
Youth agency meets embodied learning: what Junior Republics and movement-based instruction can teach today’s schools.
How to Leverage CTE for Durable, Personalized Pathways
The rise and spread of CTE is an education success story. With 98% of school districts offering some kind of CTE programs and over 11.2 million students enrolled across the country, these programs are exposing learners to new careers, skills and possibilities at a remarkable scale. States…
What Could BG Be? | A Conversation with Sam Ford and Sangita Shresthova
Exploring civic imagination and consensus building to shape the future of communities with experts from USC and Inu Engine.
How Can Indigenous Futurism Help Drive Innovation? | A Conversation with Kelly Berry
Exploring Indigenous education, leadership, and futurism with Kelly Berry: reclaiming narratives, revitalizing culture, and innovating for the future.
Can Space and Ecosystem Design Transform How We Learn? | Danish Kurani
"Architect Danish Kurani shares 7 design principles to transform learning spaces, fostering equity, creativity, and wellness in schools and communities."
Why Schools Should Leverage Their Local Chamber of Commerce: Building Economic Opportunity Through Local Partnerships
Unlock real-world opportunities for students by partnering with local chambers of commerce to build economic mobility and career pathways.