Teach For Armenia’s Project 2100

A child starting school today will likely live to see the year 2100.

That fact has been sitting with me for months. We are preparing children for a century none of us can see, and we are doing it inside a model of school designed during the Industrial Age, when compliance and memorization were the point.

The ground is already moving.

PISA results sharpened the point. Across the OECD, reading and mathematics scores fell to their lowest levels ever recorded, and one in five 15-year-olds is now a low performer in all three core subjects, up from one in six three years ago.

The steepest declines are in precisely the skills that matter most in an AI age: evaluating information and making connections across sources.

Armenia took part for the first time in this cycle, with some 7 000 students across 295 schools. The results present a picture many of us will recognize — and one that raises serious questions about the state of education.

Only 19% of Armenia’s 15 – year-olds reach at least the baseline level of proficiency in reading. The figure is 28% in mathematics and science.

So we are asking a question we cannot answer alone:

What kind of K-12 public education prepares today’s children to thrive in the year 2100?

Project 2100

Today I’m glad to share that our team is launching Project 2100, a series of conversations to co-create a vision for the future of learning.

Three things to know about it:

It’s a process, not a plan.

We are not rolling out a finished strategy.

Nobody already has the answer.

Not us, not the experts, not the technologists.

Everyone has a voice.

The people closest to the work should shape where it goes.

We’re beginning in the United States over the coming weeks, moving from the West Coast to the East.

We’ll be in San Francisco at the end of this month, then at UCLA, Las Vegas, New York, and Boston, before opening the conversation to global partners, ministries, and AI leaders.

Along the way, we’ll be sitting down with students, families, teacher-leaders, alumni, and school communities.

Armenia is where this work is rooted, and it’s a country small enough to move quickly and ambitious enough to lead.

But the question belongs to everyone.

The question is not whether education will change.

The question is whether we will help shape it.

If this is the work you’re thinking about too, I’d like to hear from you.

Come find me on the road.