What happens when the biggest problems in education—chronic absenteeism, failing grades, teacher burnout, and families leaving schools—aren’t actually the core issues at all?

In this episode of Teach Me, Teacher, I sit down with Jacob Adams, founder and executive director of Inner Spark Learning Lab, to explore what he calls the Disconnection Crisis in education.

For years, schools have chased outcomes—attendance rates, test scores, graduation numbers—while layering on interventions meant to fix them. But what if those outcomes are only symptoms of something deeper? Jacob argues that underneath many of the challenges educators face today is a growing sense of disconnection between students, families, educators, and the institutions meant to serve them.

Drawing from nearly a decade of work with more than 40,000 Black and Brown young people in South Central and East Los Angeles, Jacob shares how his organization has focused not on scaling fast, but on going deep—rethinking learning environments from inside existing schools. The work centers on a simple but powerful idea: if students don’t feel connected to their school, no intervention will stick.

Throughout the conversation, we dig into why so many well-intentioned reforms fall short, what educators often miss when trying to improve student outcomes, and how shifting the focus from “fixing students” to redesigning the learning environment can transform the culture of a school.

Jacob also challenges some of the dominant narratives in education reform, pushing us to ask whether we’re even asking the right questions in the first place. Instead of focusing solely on performance metrics, what might happen if we prioritized relevance, relationships, and student voice?

For educators feeling the strain of the current moment, this episode offers both a critique of the systems we work within and a hopeful look at what schools could become when connection moves to the center of the work.

If we want schools to truly work for students, families, and teachers, the real question might not be how we fix outcomes—but how we rebuild connection.

Listen in.