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Digital Promise and QuantHub Partner to Bring Digital Fluency to K–12 Career Pathways
Digital Promise and QuantHub have partnered to help K–12 schools prepare students for an increasingly technology-enabled workforce by bringing digital fluency into career-connected learning. Through the multi-year partnership, the organizations are working to integrate AI, data science, and cybersecurity skills into K–12 career pathways, helping students develop the practical knowledge needed to understand, evaluate, and apply emerging technologies across different careers and real-world situations.
Digital Promise and QuantHub recently hosted the LinkedIn Live conversation, Digital Fluency: Boosting K–12 Pathways With Future-Ready Skills, where they addressed these challenges and discussed what digital fluency should look like in K–12 education. The discussion brought together Kimberly Smith, Chief Innovation Officer at Digital Promise; Joshua Jones, CEO of QuantHub; and moderator Dr. Veronique Brown, K–12 Outreach Manager at QuantHub. Together, they explored how technology is reshaping careers, the skills students need to navigate those changes, and how schools can build stronger connections between classroom learning and the workforce.
Throughout the conversation, one message emerged repeatedly: preparing students for a changing workforce cannot fall on individual teachers or school districts alone. Schools need curriculum, professional development, industry connections, credentials, work-based learning, and implementation support working together. That need is precisely where the Digital Promise and QuantHub partnership comes into focus—combining QuantHub’s ability to develop and deliver AI and data curriculum with Digital Promise’s experience working alongside school systems, communities, researchers, employers, and other education partners.
Digital Fluency Goes Beyond Learning to Use AI
During the LinkedIn Live, Smith described digital fluency as broader than simply understanding artificial intelligence. Digital Promise’s work centers on three increasingly interconnected areas: AI, data science, and cybersecurity. Fluency means moving beyond basic awareness toward knowing how and when to use technology to create, analyze, solve problems, and make informed decisions. As Smith explained through a language-learning comparison, literacy enables someone to understand a language, while fluency enables them to create with it.
That distinction matters because technology is no longer isolated to traditionally technical careers. A restaurant manager may use AI to manage inventory and supply. Agriculture and utility workers may use drones and data to monitor crops or infrastructure. Healthcare professionals need to understand how to protect sensitive information. These examples illustrate why the partnership is focused on integrating digital fluency across career pathways, rather than treating AI or data science as subjects reserved for students planning to become programmers or data scientists.
That need is already shaping K–12 education. As explored in QuantHub’s research on the role of data science and AI curriculum in K–12 education, students increasingly need opportunities to develop AI and data skills before they make decisions about college, credentials, or careers. Building digital fluency into existing pathways can help schools make these skills accessible to more students while connecting technology education directly to the fields in which students may eventually work.
Why the Digital Promise and QuantHub Partnership Matters
Neither organization approaches this challenge from exactly the same direction—and that is part of the partnership’s strength. QuantHub brings a platform and curriculum model built around modular AI and data learning, teacher support, credentials, and career-connected opportunities. Digital Promise brings extensive experience working across education ecosystems, including school districts, postsecondary institutions, industry, communities, and its national network of innovative school systems. Together, the organizations can address not only what students need to learn, but also how schools can realistically implement it.
Jones highlighted that connection during the event, explaining that curriculum alone does not solve the challenge. Successful implementation also requires understanding local standards, employers, educators, parents, communities, and the different structures operating across states and districts. Smith similarly emphasized the importance of leadership mindset, continuous improvement, community involvement, and giving districts opportunities to learn from what other school systems have already accomplished.
The partnership is therefore designed around more than distributing new learning materials. Digital Promise and QuantHub are working to integrate practical AI, data science, and cybersecurity skills into career pathways while helping schools connect those competencies to credentials and workforce opportunities. By bringing together curriculum development, school-system expertise, career-connected learning, and implementation support, the partnership is intended to create approaches that can be adapted to different communities and expanded to more K–12 learners.
Why the Digital Promise and QuantHub Partnership Matters
Neither organization approaches this challenge from exactly the same direction—and that is part of the partnership’s strength. QuantHub brings a platform and curriculum model built around modular AI and data learning, teacher support, credentials, and career-connected opportunities. Digital Promise brings extensive experience working across education ecosystems, including school districts, postsecondary institutions, industry, communities, and its national network of innovative school systems. Together, the organizations can address not only what students need to learn, but also how schools can realistically implement it.
Jones highlighted that connection during the event, explaining that curriculum alone does not solve the challenge. Successful implementation also requires understanding local standards, employers, educators, parents, communities, and the different structures operating across states and districts. Smith similarly emphasized the importance of leadership mindset, continuous improvement, community involvement, and giving districts opportunities to learn from what other school systems have already accomplished.
The partnership is therefore designed around more than distributing new learning materials. Digital Promise and QuantHub are working to integrate practical AI, data science, and cybersecurity skills into career pathways while helping schools connect those competencies to credentials and workforce opportunities. By bringing together curriculum development, school-system expertise, career-connected learning, and implementation support, the partnership is intended to create approaches that can be adapted to different communities and expanded to more K–12 learners.
Preparing Students for Change—Not Just the Technology of Today
Perhaps one of the most important points raised during the conversation was that technology-specific knowledge alone will not prepare students for the future. Smith emphasized the importance of durable skills such as critical thinking, collaboration, communication, and opportunity recognition. Jones connected those abilities with digital agility, arguing that as AI makes it easier to generate an answer or piece of content, greater value shifts toward knowing what questions to ask, how to evaluate an output, and how to recognize when something is wrong.
That changes the role technology can play in education. Instead of simply teaching students to operate a particular platform, schools can help them learn to work alongside rapidly evolving technologies while continuing to develop human judgment and domain expertise. As Jones summarized during the discussion, work itself is not disappearing, but the shape of work is changing. Preparing students for that environment means combining digital fluency with transferable skills they can carry from one technology, workplace, and career opportunity to another.
For Digital Promise and QuantHub, accomplishing that goal will require collaboration and a willingness to move faster. Their partnership represents a commitment to helping schools connect classroom learning with the technological realities students will encounter after graduation—while giving educators the curriculum, training, pathways, and support needed to make that transition possible.
Explore QuantHub K–12 Education to discover resources, curriculum, professional development, credentials, and career-connected opportunities available to help K–12 classrooms prepare students for a technology-enabled future.