ImBlaze/BPL Joins National Effort to Transform the American High School

Partnership Standards for Real World Learning — one of seven research and development projects launched by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching

The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and ImBlaze by Big Picture Learning alongside partners have launched the Partnership Standards for Real World Learning project, a research and development initiative focused on defining high-quality school-community-employer partnerships. It is one of seven projects launching under Carnegie’s Research & Development Consortium for High School Transformation.

The Partnership Standards for Real World Learning project will examine what it takes to build and sustain high-quality partnerships between high schools and the communities and industries around them. The project will study what separates rigorous partnerships from episodic or otherwise weak ones, what adults inside and outside schools need to co-facilitate learning well, and how systems can make access to rigorous partnerships equitable rather than selective. This project convenes schools, employers, and community partners across five systems to co-author High-Quality Partnership Standards — written with those partners rather than for them — and to co-design a process that other communities can run themselves.

Ask any internship coordinator what holds a program together and they will tell you it is relationships, built one conversation at a time. Big Picture Learning brings ImBlaze and thirty years of practice to this work so those relationships can be named, supported, and sustained. Coordinators and mentors will co-author the standards. Strong partnerships mean more students get out into the real world.

The research and development projects grew out of Carnegie’s Research & Development Agenda for High School Transformation, a field-wide effort to identify and address the most consequential questions standing between today’s time-based system and a future organized around rigorous learning, meaningful experiences and trustworthy evidence of what students know and can do. The work is informed by Carnegie’s Future of High School Network, launched in June 2025 with 24 innovative school systems that serve approximately 90,000 students across urban, suburban and rural communities.

After a year of learning with network members, the Carnegie Foundation organized seven projects focused on schools and systems that are building promising approaches — and where stronger evidence and shared tools will enable those approaches to take hold, sustain and scale. Participating educators and students will serve as co-designers of the work, helping to shape the questions, tools, protocols and findings.

“Real-world learning should be more than a one-off experience available to a fortunate few. This project will work with schools, communities and employers to define what strong partnerships require and how they can deliver rigorous learning experiences at meaningful scale,” said Brooke Stafford-Brizard, Senior Vice President for Innovation and Impact, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

The project is led by MDRC, with MDRC and ConnectED (the National Center for College and Career) serving as the research partner, Big Picture Learning (the ImBlaze platform) as the technology partner, and will run in 5 school systems: Akron Public Schools, Building21, Cañon City Schools, The Portage School of Leaders, and Springfield Empowerment Zone Partnership.

For more information, visit www.carnegiefoundation.org. 

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About the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching

The mission of the Carnegie Foundation is to catalyze transformational change in education so that every student has the opportunity to live a healthy, dignified and fulfilling life. Enacted by an act of Congress in 1906, the Carnegie Foundation has a rich history of driving transformational change in the education sector, including the establishment of TIAA-CREF and the creation of the Educational Testing Service, the GRE, Pell Grants and the Carnegie Classifications for Higher Education.

About Big Picture Learning and ImBlaze

Big Picture Learning is a nonprofit that has spent over thirty years designing schools around one belief: all students can and should live lives of their own design. Students spend real time in the community doing work they chose, beside adults who take them seriously. Big Picture Learning also builds ImBlaze, the internship management platform schools use to run real world learning programs.