There is something about the start of a new school year that still moves me.

Even after all these years as a teacher, superintendent, and now director of NCEED, I still feel the energy of fall. The mornings begin to shift. The air changes. Yellow buses return to neighborhood streets. Children walk into buildings with new backpacks, new shoes, new schedules, and, whether they admit it or not, new hopes. Teachers return to colleagues, classrooms, lesson plans, and the sacred work of beginning again.

Fall always carries that mix of beauty and pressure. It is a season of color, but also of change. Leaves turn. Trees shed what they no longer need. Roots prepare for what is coming next. Schools do something similar.

For students and teachers, fall is exciting. Students reunite with friends and favorite teachers. Teachers reconnect with colleagues and welcome new ones. Schools are full of movement: fall sports, new programs, new supplies, refreshed classrooms, repaired buildings, and the optimism that comes with a clean beginning.

As a teacher and leader in the field, I know the beginning of the school year is also a time of nervous transition. Behind the smiles and balloons are months of planning. New teachers must be supported. New leaders must find their footing. New curricula, schedules, programs, transportation routes, staffing plans, buildings, renovations, and technologies all have to work at once. Every school opening looks smooth only because many people have worked very hard to make it so.

Those experiences shape how I understand change.

Educators often complain about change, and sometimes for good reason. Schools have lived through wave after wave of reforms, initiatives, acronyms, mandates, pilots, frameworks, assessments, platforms, and programs. Teachers joke about the “flavor of the month” because they have seen enough change come and go to be skeptical. But I have also seen change save lives, open doors, and expand what children are allowed to imagine for themselves.

The history of public education is a history of struggle, resistance, innovation, and transformation. We cannot talk about equity without remembering the legal and policy changes that reshaped the educational landscape for millions of children and families. Brown v. Board of Education declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act, particularly Title I, directed federal resources to districts serving large numbers of children from low-income families. The Education for All Handicapped Children Act, later renamed IDEA, helped secure the right of students with disabilities to be educated in the least restrictive environment. No Child Left Behind required schools to report results by student groups so that averages could no longer hide disparities. Title IX expanded opportunities for women and girls and addressed sex-based discrimination in education.

These changes were not perfect, and none of them eliminated inequity on their own. But each one changed what schools were responsible for seeing, naming, and addressing.

The expansion of early childhood education is another example. Head Start began in 1965 as part of the War on Poverty, and since then prekindergarten programs have grown across the country. Here in Maryland, the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future continues that work by expanding access to publicly funded full-day programs for three- and four-year-olds, strengthening Judy Centers and Patty Centers, and advancing a mixed-delivery system that includes public schools, private providers, and community settings. That matters because transformation does not begin in high school, or middle school, or even kindergarten. It begins with the earliest experiences children have with language, care, play, belonging, and learning.

Over the course of my career, I have watched schools adopt and adapt an extraordinary range of programs intended to improve student learning and well-being. We have seen writing workshops, language immersion, project-based learning, and countless other tools and approaches. We have seen the expansion of STEM, STEAM, career and technical education, dual enrollment, parent engagement models, community partnerships, arts schools, virtual schools, alternative schools, and new school choice options.

We have also seen schools embrace whole-child approaches, anti-bullying programs, social and emotional learning, Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports, restorative practices, community schools, mental health supports, nutrition programs, counseling services, and wraparound health services. In recent years, many districts have expanded programs for English learners, newcomer students, refugees, students experiencing trauma, and students with complex academic, social, and developmental needs.

Today, Maryland and many other states are revising schedules, curricula, interventions, and professional learning to improve literacy instruction aligned with the Science of Reading. At the same time, schools continue to strengthen Multi-Tiered Systems of Supports to address students’ academic, behavioral, and social-emotional needs.

It is a lot.

And for those who work inside schools, the pace of change can feel exhausting.

That is why Bill Caritj’s Numbers That Matter article this month is so important. His article reminds us that change is not the same as improvement. Schools can adopt new programs without changing classroom practice. They can create professional learning communities that never reach instruction. They can purchase materials, schedule trainings, and launch initiatives without building the readiness, leadership, resources, support, fidelity, adaptation, and sustainability needed for real implementation.

That distinction matters deeply for NCEED.

We are interested in transformation that reaches students, especially students who have been underserved, underestimated, or structurally denied access to opportunity.

Implementation science gives us a way to study that difference. It asks hard but necessary questions. What makes a reform succeed in one setting and fail in another? What conditions help educators adopt new practices? What barriers prevent implementation from reaching the students it was designed to serve? What must be adapted for local context, and what must remain intact for a practice to be effective? How do we know whether an initiative is not only adopted, but sustained?

These are not technical questions only. They are equity questions.

A program that works only in well-resourced schools is not an equity solution. A reform that depends on heroic teachers working beyond exhaustion is not sustainable. A strategy that improves averages while leaving gaps untouched is not transformation. At NCEED, our work must help schools and systems move beyond announcing change to understanding how change becomes real, equitable, and lasting.

NCEED’s new Assistant Director, Dr. Jomo Mutegi’s article in this issue offers a powerful image for that work. He writes about Biosphere 2, where trees grew quickly in a protected environment but developed structural weaknesses because there was no wind. In the natural world, wind pushes and pulls against trees. That stress helps them develop stronger trunks and deeper capacity to stand.

That image feels especially right for fall.

As leaves change and branches become more visible, we are reminded that growth is not only about what blooms. It is also about what strengthens beneath the surface. Trees do not become strong because the world never pushes against them. They become strong because their environment provides both challenges and the conditions necessary for growth.

Schools are no different.

Children do not need manufactured hardship. Too many already face more adversity than any child should. But they do need learning environments that help them develop knowledge, agency, judgment, resilience, confidence, and the ability to act on the world around them. Educators need the same kind of environment. They need support, but not insulation from hard truths. They need resources, but also honest inquiry. They need encouragement, but also the time and structure to examine what is working and what is not.

As Dr. Mutegi reminds us, transformation is not simply about helping young people survive difficult circumstances. It is about helping them develop the capacity to understand the world they inherit and the confidence and commitment to transform it.

That is the heart of NCEED’s work.

The beginning of the school year reminds us that schools are among the few institutions in American life that are expected to begin again, publicly and collectively, every fall. Each year, educators return with new strategies, new programs, new lessons, new plans, and renewed hope. Some changes will take root. Some will need to be pruned. Some will require more time, more care, more resources, and more honesty before they bear fruit.

Our role at NCEED is to study that process with humility and urgency. We must ask better questions. We must listen closely to educators, students, families, and communities. We must examine evidence without ignoring lived experience. We must help distinguish motion from progress, activity from impact, and reform from transformation.

This September, as the school year begins and the season turns, I am thinking about trees, teachers, children, and change. I am thinking about what it takes to stand. I am thinking about what must be planted now so that children can flourish later.

And I am reminded that transformation is not a single program, policy, or moment. It is the disciplined, hopeful, and often difficult work of creating the conditions for every child to grow.