The Human Advancement Initiative

Powered by Rosie Riveters

Not symposiums on why change matters. Direct dialogue with decision makers about the specific changes available.

The Problem

For over a decade, Rosie Riveters has built hands-on programs to solve a problem classroom teachers brought to us: they lacked room, within standards and testing constraints, for students to build confidence as critical thinkers. A system built for the industrial age is not meeting the needs of today’s workforce. AI makes this acute.

The answer isn’t upskilling kids in AI. It’s doubling down on what decades of research show about how kids learn. We don’t need more automation-shaped learners. We need thinkers who know what they want to do with these tools.

Why Now

AI is forcing decisions in every state about what to measure, what to require, and what to cut. Those decisions are being made fast, under pressure, and largely without a clear read of what the research supports. The evidence is not ambiguous. Decades of learning science establish how children actually build reasoning and confidence. International and state-level reform efforts have already tested what happens when systems trade breadth for depth, and what separates the attempts that worked from the ones that failed.

The Initiative changes that. It produces the analysis, convenes the people who decide, and puts the findings on the record.

What We Do

The Initiative is an instrument, not a position paper. It works state by state to identify where an education system has the most room to trade volume for depth without lowering standards, and delivers that finding to the people with authority to act on it.

• Audit — examine standards, assessments, and accountability against the research to find real points of leverage.
• Convene — bring findings to superintendents, state board members, principals, teachers, and industry.
• Synthesize — their responses become a published report.
• Reconvene — bring decision makers back together on implementation.

We do not tell states what to do. We bring the research, ask better questions, and put the answers on the record.

What Grounds This

Two things, and the Initiative requires both.

The research. Learning science on cognitive demand, productive struggle, and how young children build transferable reasoning. The documented record of curricular reform: what other states and countries have changed, what it cost, and what it produced. We hold this to the standard of the rooms it enters, including the counter evidence.

The practice. Since 2016, Rosie Riveters has reached more than 60,000 participants across hundreds of schools, working in classrooms under the same constraints teachers face and collecting outcome data on exactly the capacities at stake. That programming is delivered in partnership with schools, districts, community organizations, and industry across the country.

Research alone produces reports. Practice alone produces anecdotes. The Initiative brings both into rooms where system decisions get made.

We start hyper-local because that’s what makes it effective. The model is built to travel to all 50 states.

Get Involved

The decisions shaping education are being made right now. Help us make sure they’re made well. Join us in building schools where curiosity, confidence, and critical thinking are what we measure and what we protect.