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From filmstrips to flipped classrooms, the arc of educational technology often tends to reinforce the usual ways of doing school. While tools like AI hold great promise, their effectiveness depends on both the structures of schooling — how we organize time, roles and relationships — and the systems that undergird those structures: the policies, assumptions and routines that determine what school looks like.

What might seem like a scheduling tweak is actually a structural foundation for transformation. When the same educators share the same students during the same blocks of time, they can move beyond coverage to connection, beyond sorting to support. Dynamic student grouping is an instructional move grounded in the belief that students deserve not just one educator, but a team of educators who know them, coordinate around them and respond to their needs.

If we want to scale promising staffing models and other student-centered innovations, we can’t keep relying on software tools designed for the past. In a new report published in collaboration with Common Group and Siegel Family Endowment, we explore the need to rethink outdated administrative software.

Jennie Clausen, a parent of three kids at Hermosa Vista Elementary School in Mesa, Ariz., was once strongly opposed to the school’s move to team-based staffing models. Now, she’s a proud self-proclaimed “teaming convert.”

“School Rethink 2.0” gathers insights and advice from nearly a dozen leaders, entrepreneurs and practitioners including Brent Maddin, executive director of ASU’s Next Education Workforce™.