From aspiration to architecture: Building education systems for human flourishing

In May 2026, Brookings and NCEE convened a roundtable to discuss how the educator workforce might be transformed to better support human flourishing. Participants represented a range of institutions that shape the teaching profession, including national and subnational education authorities, teacher organizations, universities, schools of education, NGOs, funders, and researchers. The roundtable discussion surfaced a central tension in our quest toward centering human flourishing: The demands placed on schools and teachers have grown steadily, largely for worthwhile reasons, but the schools and learning structures around educators have not kept pace. This results in a growing gap between what education systems aspire to do and what they can deliver.

This tension is significant, and not a recent development.

Since the landmark 1990 World Conference on Education for All in Jomtien, Thailand, the international community has produced successive, increasingly demanding frameworks for what formal education systems around the globe should accomplish. The Education for All movement put basic learning needs and access to schooling at the center of global education policy. The Millennium Development Goals sharpened the focus on primary school completion. The Sustainable Development Goals emphasized inclusive and equitable quality education and lifelong learning.

More recent work on human flourishing asks education systems to go further still by preparing young people not only for academic success, but also for meaning, relationships, ethical engagement, and life in an ever-changing world. That is a larger ambition, reflecting genuine progress in our collective understanding of what education can and should achieve. But each successive advance in ambition also places heavier demands on the educators and institutions responsible for it.

Evidence from the U.S. offers a stark illustration of this dynamic. Student learning has been in decline for more than a decade, leading some to declare the last decade an “education depression.” Teachers’ reports on classroom working conditions suggest that student behavior and attention spans have deteriorated most since the pandemic, a pattern researchers attribute to a mix of factors, including rising mental health needs and always-on digital devices. Recent pushback at commencement ceremonies when speakers praise AI’s promise reflects a broader mix of student frustrations, including growing anxiety among graduates that the skills and credentials they worked for may not retain their value in an AI-disrupted labor market, as well as emerging research that poorly governed AI can erode learning and trust in education.

Bridging the gap between hope and reality

If we are not careful, these aspirations may become liabilities that stymie meaningful reform. Language from these frameworks is often quickly adopted in policy documents and official statements across the globe, while the institutions themselves resist change. For example, teachers are now asked to live up to these ideals by cultivating student learning, fostering civic engagement, building meaningful relationships, and adapting to diverse learning needs. But in many places, their workload expectations and professional supports do not readily accommodate, leaving educators to adopt the terminology of new goals without the tools to achieve them.

The SPARKS country research conducted by the Brookings Institution illustrates the persistent gap between aspirational policy and the realities of classroom practice. Studies from India, Mexico, and Egypt highlight education systems in which national reforms have aimed to promote competency-based, student-centered, and multidisciplinary approaches to learning. In all three contexts, teachers were not resistant to change; they generally agreed with and supported the national reforms. However, they were constrained from implementing them by the broader educational ecosystem: administrative requirements that limited instructional time, professional development focused on compliance rather than reflective practice, assessment systems that reinforced established routines, and career structures that offered little acknowledgment of sustained, relational teaching. Thus, the architecture of the education ecosystem itself became a primary obstacle to reform.

NCEE’s comparative research on higher-performing education systems offers useful illustrations of what differently organized systems can look like. Some countries, like Estonia, have invested in restructuring how they attract and retain teachers by offering job shares, second-career pathways, and recruiting professionals into part-time teaching roles, especially in specialized subjects such as advanced STEM fields. Others, like Korea, have developed a strong pipeline for teaching that aligns teaching standards and preparation programs with classroom realities. And Ireland has recalibrated teaching and non-teaching duties for educators, expanding professional development for both teachers and school leaders to provide them with the time and instructional resources to do what they do best: work with students. Collectively, these reforms aim to enhance educators’ professional status and enable their success in the classroom.

Realizing the human flourishing agenda

Translating the aspirations of human flourishing into genuine system-level reform requires concrete institutional design, not just statements of values but changes in how schools operate. The NCEE’s Developing Agency framework identifies four areas that education systems should nurture in learners: core academic skills, habits of learning and well-being, the ability to navigate current challenges, and skills for engaging with their communities. The roundtable also engaged across these areas, highlighting where that structural redesign work is most urgently needed to enable teachers to meet these aspirations. Together, these represent a guidebook for education systems seeking to improve in substance rather than merely at the surface.

Strong academic learning depends on teachers who develop deep content and pedagogical expertise over the course of their careers, not just at the point of preparation. The preservice preparatory phase should be just the foundation for teachers’ growth, which extends well into their careers as they engage in professional learning alongside colleagues. Too often, though, in-service professional development offerings morph into costly, perfunctory exercises that do little to enhance teachers’ skills. Teach for All’s global research across more than 60 countries similarly finds that technical solutions alone are insufficient. Genuine teacher growth depends on developing collective leadership by strengthening educators’ mindsets, collaborative relationships, and sense of agency within the broader education ecosystem. Recent data from the OECD’s TALIS survey show a correlation between teachers’ pedagogical knowledge and student outcomes. Teachers with higher pedagogical knowledge also reported lower stress and more class time on actual teaching and learning. And teachers working in a supportive environment improve more over time than those in less supportive environments. But this kind of sustained development requires time for planning, professional inquiry, and collaboration. The combined evidence suggests that the architecture of the working day is not merely a logistical detail. For systems that want teachers to build the kind of expertise that flourishing requires, it is a central design question.

Cultivating habits of well-being in students requires that the profession itself be organized around those habits for teachers. Education International’s 2024 Global Status of Teachers report, which surveyed union leaders in 121 countries, found that excessive working hours, poor career progression, and insufficient attention to teacher well-being are primary drivers of global teacher attrition. It also found that in countries where teacher status is high, student achievement tends to be higher and attrition lower. Corroborating evidence from American teachers shows they consistently report working as many or more hours and in settings that are less flexible than other similarly educated professionals, according to RAND’s annual State of the American Teacher survey. Many teachers also reported difficulty maintaining work-life balance, which contributes to teachers’ feelings of burnout; meanwhile, fewer than half of teachers said their districts were making efforts to provide compensating supports. Roundtable participants also raised the emotional toll of teaching directly: Teachers are expected to manage students’ well-being without adequate institutional support for their own. Systems cannot credibly pursue learners’ flourishing while leaving the conditions for teachers’ flourishing to chance. In every single country identified as an NCEE Rapid Riser, significant investments in teacher training, professional development, and capacity building were central to raising teacher quality. Treating teacher well-being as a structural commitment rather than a private concern is one of the most direct architectural shifts the agenda requires.

Systems that want to sustain the teaching profession need to rethink how career advancement works. In most school systems, the only formal path to advancement is to leave the classroom, due to flat career paths and compensation structures that increase incrementally over time. Thus, many ambitious, high-performing educators are drawn away from the profession systematically at the point when their expertise is most valuable. Participants in the roundtable shared that in the United States and elsewhere, structural and budgetary pressures contribute to the erosion of the profession’s prestige and appeal for young people. NCEE’s comparative work on high performers around the globe identifies other models, such as in Shanghai and Korea, where experienced teachers can take on mentoring and system-level roles while still teaching students. Such models have been experimented with in the U.S., and have promising evidence behind them, but struggle to scale. Experienced teachers choosing to stay and thrive in classrooms are a powerful signal that teaching can be a long-term profession, not just a temporary job.

Education systems that value community and collective responsibility need accountability structures that reflect these values. Many systems evaluate teachers as individuals responsible for one group of students, even though they expect teachers to collaborate with and support colleagues, areas that are hard to measure through individual accountability. Thus, accountability structures intended to encourage and reward teachers’ efforts can implicitly discourage desirable collaboration. NCEE’s research points to systems in which curriculum goals are set across grades and teacher evaluations include contributions to colleagues and the wider school community. The Brookings SPARKS Research Policy Collaborative, which brings together teachers, policymakers, and researchers to use local evidence, is one example of teacher participation in reform that is often discussed but rarely achieved. Yet the roundtable experts identified this as one of the harder design problems, where existing models still need refinement to better meet these aspirations.

The time for action is now

This discussion is taking place at a time of tectonic changes in technology. As AI gets better at answering academic questions, teacher roles must also simultaneously shift toward designing complex learning experiences that drive student achievement. To realize this, educators need support with organizational structures that reflect the modern reshaping of knowledge professions. Effective AI integration should be co-designed with teachers, responsive to their professional judgment, and implemented in ways that reduce rather than increase workload.

The roundtable did not produce a simple consensus. Participants raised genuine questions about declining professional status, the impact of artificial intelligence on teaching and student development, the challenges of scaling changes in teacher preparation, and how to connect broad educational goals to accountability systems recognized by governments and funders. Those are live tensions. But they are also arguments for urgency, not delay. The longer education systems delay the structural changes needed, the wider the gap grows between the stated goals of education and what teachers can actually do.