The XQ Institute’s tagline, #RethinkHighSchool, describes the organization’s North Star — and represents a challenge to the education status quo.
XQ argues that the typical U.S. high school is mired in the past and needs to be updated and retooled to adapt to a rapidly changing world. Like early childhood, adolescence is a period of accelerated and significant brain development, and XQ believes that high schools can more effectively respond by providing a challenging curriculum that engages students and provides them with real-life skills.
The XQ Institute is an independent affiliate of Emerson Collective, the expansive but low-profile LLC giving vehicle of Laurene Powell Jobs. XQ burst onto the scene in 2015 when it announced a high school redesign competition — the XQ Super School Project — with a hefty, $50 million collective prize that was to go to five high school teams. XQ had clearly tapped an appetite for change: XQ received 1,500 school concepts, 722 first-round proposals and 320 full proposals. A year later, 10 teams — for a total of $100 million — were chosen as XQ Super Schools.
Since then, XQ has continued to work with schools, districts and entire states to apply the XQ design principles to high schools of many shapes and sizes — both traditional public and charter schools — in communities across the country.
XQ’s critical take on the high school status quo reflects its founders’ views regarding students’ preparedness for a new world of work. “The system was created for the work force we needed 100 years ago,” Powell Jobs told the New York Times when the XQ competition was announced. “… We’ve seen a lot of incremental changes over the last several years, but we’re saying, ‘Start from scratch.’”
In a recent interview, education expert and XQ Senior Advisor Michele Cahill added this: “Clearly, students need to master the fundamental literacies — math, compelling writing and reading, the sciences and history — but in addition, they need to master new kinds of skills that are going to be central to young people’s success, and to the success of the country. The XQ competition became a conversation with the country in which XQ was putting out a broader vision of student success.”
It’s hard to say how XQ’s work will unfold in the current education landscape as President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency hollow out the Department of Education, step up restrictions on how history is taught and attempt to undermine efforts to promote gender and racial equity in schools. But one thing is clear: The current moment offers many ways for education philanthropy to make a difference, and Emerson Collective — with its deep pockets and commitment to education — is in an excellent position to do so.
Laurene Powell Jobs: Silicon Valley’s Wealthiest Woman
After Apple cofounder Steve Jobs died in 2011, Laurene Powell Jobs inherited Walt Disney and Apple shares — a fortune now worth $10.7 billion, according to Bloomberg. Powell Jobs is known to be private and press shy, but for Silicon Valley’s wealthiest woman, remaining in the shadows isn’t easy.
San Francisco’s new mayor, Daniel Lurie, just tapped Powell Jobs to co-chair an initiative to revitalize San Francisco’s downtown. She also made Bay Area papers in recent years when she contributed to a controversial effort to create a new city in Northern California, helped purchase the site of the respected San Francisco Art Institute, which closed after 150 years of operation, and paid $70 million for a new home — the most expensive house in San Francisco history.
Powell Jobs has donated to her friend Kamala Harris’ campaigns since Harris first entered politics, and Semafor reported recently that Emerson Collective hosted a gathering of Democratic operatives to rethink the party’s media strategy in the wake of its 2024 defeat.
In the philanthropic world, Powell Jobs has taken on some high-profile roles, most notably as a member of the Ford Foundation’s board of trustees. But for the most part, though her giving is complex and clearly extensive, it’s also hard to track. Like its founder, Emerson Collective, established in 2011, keeps a low profile; its website is elegant but spare.
It’s no secret, however, that Powell Jobs cares a lot about education, as her philanthropy demonstrates. In 1997, she cofounded College Track, which helps low-income and first-generation students prepare for and graduate from college. Emerson, meanwhile, works to promote “a more equal and just America” by deploying its resources in the forms of philanthropy and venture capital.
Along with education, Emerson Collective has supported initiatives in the fields of immigration, gun violence and the media. Emerson is the majority owner of The Atlantic; it has also invested in Axios and supported Mother Jones and ProPublica. (As Mike Scutari reported, it backed California Sunday, but ultimately pulled its funding when the magazine won critical acclaim but lost money.) Powell Jobs also founded the Waverley Street Foundation, which focuses on climate and community solutions to environmental issues; IP’s Michael Kavate has reported on the foundation and personnel shifts there.
XQ debuts with billboards and a TV special
The XQ Institute operates independently from Emerson Collective, but the organizations are closely aligned. Russlynn Ali, the CEO of XQ and its cofounder along with Powell Jobs, is also managing director of the Education Fund at Emerson. Ali was assistant secretary for civil rights in President Barack Obama’s Education Department. She also served on the College Track board, so she already knew Powell Jobs when she joined Emerson Collective right after she left the Obama administration. “Laurene and I have been, as she’s often said, spiritual partners around this work for a long time,” Ali said.
The XQ Institute hit some rocky patches in its early days, in particular after it co-produced a splashy, star-studded TV special that aimed to raise the organization’s visibility but was widely panned. Critics argued that the considerable resources XQ spent on the TV special and on full-page ads and billboards advertising the high school challenge could have been used in more effective ways.
The episode isn’t directly comparable to Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million attempt to reform Newark’s schools in 2011, which received far more attention — and derision. But like that foray, it conjures up a time circa 10 to 15 years ago, when Silicon Valley’s biggest winners were making much more showy philanthropic overtures in K-12. Zuckerberg and Chan have since slashed their education commitments, while XQ has remained in the space, although in a less publicly demonstrative way.
Ali points out that XQ was trying something that hadn’t been attempted before. “We wanted to challenge the country to defy expectations,” she said. “We wanted to break through what was otherwise an incredibly tense, often unproductive conversation about education and have a bigger conversation about whole-school transformation. And we wanted to do it with the participation of communities—including young people, who are almost never at the table. When we got started, there was no off-the-shelf blueprint for how to transform high schools. We’ve had to invent and innovate every step of the way.”
The TV special and advertising campaign raised awareness, according to Ali. “The TV kickoff energized a lot of people. We saw a tremendous response to our original open call for high school designs — bigger than we had anticipated. We had 10,000 people from 49 states join school design teams. Like most big, philanthropic gestures, it also took some criticism.”
A look inside an XQ Super School: Crosstown High School, Memphis
Criticism aside, at least one XQ school might not exist if its cofounder hadn’t seen a billboard promoting the XQ Super School challenge. After she saw the billboard, Memphis, Tennessee parent Ginger Spickler organized the team that formulated the plan for Crosstown High, with input from teachers, parents, business leaders, community members and over 200 students. The public charter school was selected as an XQ school and opened in 2018 in a landmark Memphis building that also houses businesses, health facilities and community organizations.
From the start, the Crosstown team was determined that the high school reflect the Memphis population, and it recruited students from middle schools across the city. About 60% of its students qualify for free and reduced lunch, 65% identify as students of color, 30% are white, and another 15% identify as Latino or other, according to Erin Johnson, Crosstown’s director of academics.
As an XQ Super School, Crosstown High received $2 million a year for five years from XQ. “The financial support was foundational, but it wasn’t just financial support, I want to name that,” Johnson said. “It’s been partnership support, it’s been product support, it’s been academic support. Their framework for designing schools is something that we lean into. Post those five years, we’re continuing to partner with them in a variety of ways.”
Crosstown frequently hosts representatives of other schools who want to learn more about its model, and XQ convenes frequent gatherings. “There was just one in December called the XQ Exchange, in D.C.,” Johnson said. “It was a mixture of school leaders, policy leaders, test creators, curriculum designers, and so bringing all of those people together in one space has been really helpful for us.”
Crosstown High uses a project-based approach that emphasizes hands-on learning experiences. Project-based learning requires students to be engaged, active learners, and Johnson acknowledges that it can be challenging for students and teachers alike, particularly at first.
“We bring in 140 ninth graders each year and they come from around 45 different middle schools,” she said. “Most students who come here have never had a project-based learning experience, and some of the teachers joining us haven’t either, and our students have a variety of needs and assets. So it’s definitely challenging, but what’s beautiful to see, and why I love high school so much, is that you get to grow with the students, and you see them grow so much from ninth through 12th grade. Our juniors and seniors, they get it. But that transition is hard for some students if they’re used to just working on a [worksheet] packet, or having a more lecture-style education experience.”
Crosstown High was the subject of a 2024 documentary, “The First Class,” by filmmaker Lee Hirsch; Powell Jobs and Russlynn Ali were executive producers. The film doesn’t gloss over the challenges Johnson described, or how difficult it is to create a learning environment that supports such a diverse body of students.
Despite the challenges, Crosstown has a low rate of staff turnover (11 of the high school’s original staff members still work at the school) and actively works to reduce student absenteeism — currently a problem in schools around the country. In 2022, 80% of Crosstown graduates went to college, and 71% of low-income graduates went to college, far exceeding district, state and national rates.
“We really focus, though, on supporting students with their own postsecondary goals, and in the last couple years, we’ve seen more students going to trade school and more students taking a gap year,” Johnson said. “We try to come alongside students and help them think about the right next step for them, not just what they think they’re supposed to do because they’ve heard about college all the time. Last year, for example, we had about 10 or 11% that opted into trade school; that has shifted because we’ve started a dual enrollment program with a local welding school. So we’re seeing students get some experience in high school, and that’s helping them with their postsecondary planning.”
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Rhode Island’s XQ partnership
In addition to supporting and “redesigning” individual schools, XQ’s remit extends to ed policy projects on the statewide level — an important focus in light of diminishing federal leadership on K-12. In Rhode Island, for example, the education commissioner, Angélica Infante-Green, had been in the job only a short time when she learned that the state’s high schools were failing a significant number of students.
The Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE) had asked XQ to do an Educational Outcomes Audit and Analysis, and the analysis, presented in 2020, was grim. Even though a majority of the state’s students said they wanted to go to college, only 6 out of 10 were taking the courses that would make them college eligible. Boys were less likely to take the necessary courses than girls, Black and Latino students were less likely to take the qualifying courses than white and Asian students, low-income students and English language learners were less likely to take them then were their peers, and students with disabilities were the least likely of all. Meanwhile, only one-third of students were taking the courses required to complete a RIDE-approved career and technical education (CTE) program.
In response to the findings, RIDE set out to update Rhode Island’s graduation requirements. “It started us on this whole trajectory of, how do we fix this — not just for some schools, but for all schools?” Infante-Green said. “How do we ensure that all our kids have the coursework to be able to go to college, to succeed? That’s where the partnership with XQ was so impactful.”
XQ worked with the department as RIDE representatives crisscrossed the state in a community engagement effort that included parents, teachers, students, labor unions, community leaders and others.
“When we had those conversations, we literally had teachers in tears when they realized how their school wasn’t serving kids the way that they thought they were,” recalled Steve Osborn, RIDE’s state strategy and student opportunity officer. “We heard from many students and families. This was something that the XQ team pushed us on: ‘Let’s have kids and parents in every single conversation we have.’ It really opened schools up to have much deeper, much more thoughtful conversations.”
In 2022, the state adopted revised graduation requirements; Osborn calls them “the most meaningful graduation requirements in the history of Rhode Island.”
Infante-Green and Osborn are particularly proud of the equity provisions that RIDE has implemented based on the feedback they received from the public. They learned, for example, that more than 1 in 3 of the state’s students takes care of a family member for part or most of the day.
“At one school, for example, a good number of kids were late every single day because the bus wouldn’t pick up their younger brothers and sisters unless someone was there with them,” Osborn said. “Mom worked, dad worked. The students were going to school after the bus picked up their younger brother or sister, and they were marked tardy. Of course, that sets students back academically.”
Based on those findings, RIDE now requires high schools to develop supports for caregiving students, including more flexible school schedules; it is also exploring the possibility of offering community service hours for caregiving work. “We’re the first state to define caregiving youth and the first state to give supports to caregiving youth,” Osborn said.
Rhode Island is XQ’s first state-wide partnership, and Infante-Green doubts RIDE could have accomplished as much without that collaboration. “They bring in the tools, they bring in the facilitation, they helped us bring the voices in,” she said. “They helped us get information and data, they helped us find and create a plan for how we were going to move forward. They help us think big.”
“We must engage every lever for change”
Since its founding, XQ’s footprint has grown from 10 original Super Schools in 2015 to a total of 137 classrooms, schools and systems in eight states and Washington, D.C., and on the island nation of Barbados.
Russlynn Ali and her team emphasize that every XQ school is different. The organization has developed learner outcomes and design principles, and offers a deep library of resources and tools that provide a clear blueprint for schools to follow. But it expects each institution to adapt that blueprint to meet the qualities and needs of its community, and each of its many school partners has done so in its own way.
“We’ve learned a lot along the way,” Ali said. “For example, the importance of the connection between the community and the school, and the challenges that can arise when that connection is weakened for some reason. Some of the original XQ Super Schools were deeply affected by the pandemic. But students must be close to the decision-making process. We’ve also learned that every level of leadership matters — classroom, school, district and, importantly, state leadership. For high school transformation to take root, we must engage every lever for change.”
