Getting Smart Podcast How Can Policy Transform Education for the Future? | Jon Alfuth & Julianna Charles Brown
Oct 24, 2025
Jon Alfuth, Senior Director of State Policy at KnowledgeWorks, and Julianna Charles Brown, Senior Director of Systems Transformation, delve into the potential of transformative education policies. They discuss how state frameworks can reshape learning into personalized and competency-based systems. The duo emphasizes the importance of a shared vision, like a Portrait of a Graduate, and highlight successful initiatives in Montana and Washington. Listeners will gain insights into flexible learning pathways and the crucial alignment of policy with practical classroom applications.
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Futures Work Drives Student-Centered Design
- KnowledgeWorks uses futurists to forecast education needs and design student-centered, competency-based models.
- Transferable skills prepare students for rapidly changing futures by enabling skill portability across contexts.
Education Should Match Changing Trajectories
- Schools must expand personalized, real-life learning and workforce exploration to reflect changing postsecondary trajectories.
- From 2019–2024 fewer students go directly to four-year colleges while career entry has doubled, demanding new structures.
Shared Vision Reorients The Whole System
- A shared vision like a Portrait of a Graduate reorients systems from credits to transferable competencies.
- Aligning goals forces reconsideration of curriculum, assessment, scheduling, and more across the system.