Every day, over 50 million K–12 students walk into schools across the United States. At the same time, billions of dollars are invested in learning environments designed to support their success. Yet one question remains surprisingly difficult to answer: Which design decisions actually make the greatest difference?
While test scores and curriculum often determine a school’s effectiveness, its physical design is equally important, shaping how well students and educators perform. For example, poor indoor air quality can increase absenteeism, while inadequate lighting diminishes concentration and cognitive performance. Excessive noise and cluttered spaces are also known to contribute to higher stress levels.
Yet, for all that we know about what good design can do in education, its exact impact on students and teachers has gone largely unmeasured. Research confirms that increased investment in school facilities broadly improves outcomes but stops short of exploring why.
Educators, architects, manufacturers, and school leaders all share a common objective, creating environments where students can thrive. But without consistent ways to measure outcomes, many decisions are still guided by assumptions rather than evidence. That’s where a growing coalition of education and design professionals is working to change the conversation.
The Need for Better Evidence
Part of the challenge in accurately measuring how educational environments affect student learning is that schools must do many things at once. And designers, administrators, and government officials all have different ideas about what a building’s design should prioritize. When designing these spaces, a few of the following questions arise:
- Is it more important for a classroom space to promote individual focus or peer collaboration?
- Should the space support wayfinding or lean more into school branding?
- Does a building’s security take precedence over its design?
- Is sustainability a core consideration in material procurement?
Without consensus, the field lacks clear, shared ways to connect design decisions with outcomes, which has slowed research and practice alike.
Another issue is access to shared tools. In a competitive industry, companies often focus on private measurement efforts over sharing knowledge. This siloed approach has made it difficult to fully understand how the built environment impacts learning performance.
CAUSE: A Coalition Built Around Shared Learning
To address this challenge, a growing coalition of educators, designers, researchers, and industry partners came together in 2024 to form the Coalition for the Advanced Understanding of School Environments (CAUSE).
Bringing together experts across education, architecture, engineering, and interior design, CAUSE is helping the industry better understand which design strategies have the greatest impact on students and educators through open-source evaluation tools and shared measurement practices.
CAUSE’s efforts are currently centered around four main objectives:
- Conduct research to better understand how school design influences the health and performance of students and teachers and identify metrics that can be easily measured.
- Collaborate with education and design stakeholders to establish consistent data collection protocols tailored specifically for K–12 facilities.
- Advance interdisciplinary collaborations among architecture firms, academic partners, school districts, and research organizations.
- Foster an open-source, open-science, and transparent approach to knowledge sharing within the industry.
The CAUSE User Guide : A Practical Framework for Post-Occupancy Evaluation
Developing reliable, accessible measurement tools is a central component of CAUSE’s work. As part of this effort, they have teamed up with the global flooring manufacturer Interface and other industry partners to release the CAUSE User Guide. This resource provides evidence-based strategies to help K–12 designers and stakeholders create healthier, more inclusive learning environments.
The guide introduces a structured approach to Post-Occupancy Evaluation (POE), a method for understanding how a building performs once it is occupied. Rather than focusing solely on design specifications, POEs assess how well a building supports its occupants’ day-to-day activities.
The User Guide breaks down POE into a step-by-step format for schools. It explains how to measure the effects of environmental factors such as lighting, acoustics, and perceived safety, along with more human-centered outcomes such as student engagement, sense of belonging, and self-regulation.
Notably, all tools in the guide are standardized and easy to use. Instead of relying on fragmented studies or proprietary techniques, CAUSE encourages a unified approach that schools everywhere can adopt. This consistency enables comparisons of outcomes, sharing of insights, and collective improvement of learning environments nationwide. The guide also prioritizes practicality. It is written for everyone involved in school design and operation, including administrators, facility managers, designers, researchers, and more.
Making Smarter Investments in Schools
Approximately $87 billion is spent annually on school facilities, supporting nearly 98,000 buildings. Yet, despite high costs, money is being allocated toward design decisions without clear evidence of what works. In practice, this results in schools that may look visually impressive but may not accurately support how students learn.
In many cases, school design improvements are made incrementally without a clear understanding of how those changes will affect student experience. The result is a patchwork approach to design, where outcomes vary, and success is difficult to replicate.
Why Collaboration Matters
Architecture, public health, interior design, product design, and community planning all play a role in how schools function, which makes cross-industry collaboration essential.
Historically, these fields have largely operated individually. Designers have focused on aesthetics and spatial functionality, educators on curriculum and student needs, and policymakers on funding and compliance. Each perspective brings significant value; however, there’s an opportunity to establish a shared framework to connect these efforts in ways that consistently improve outcomes.
Organizations like CAUSE are increasingly recognizing the need to work together, share data, and align around common goals. These initiatives create a common language and a set of tools that enable stakeholders to contribute to a more holistic understanding of the impact of design in education environments.
For Interface, this partnership reflects its longstanding commitment to design with purpose and without compromise. The flooring company has long emphasized durability, performance, and sustainability in its products, recognizing that these factors contribute to healthier, more effective learning environments. The company also understands that improving educational outcomes requires more than individual product innovation, but a collective effort to better understand how all elements of a space work together to support the students within it.
Turning Insight Into Action
CAUSE represents an important step forward in how school environments are understood and improved. By providing easy-to-implement measurement tools, CAUSE enables schools to gather student- and teacher-centered feedback and adjust accordingly.
With better data, schools can identify which environmental factors support students and which create barriers. Designers can then refine their approaches based on real-world outcomes rather than assumptions, and districts can allocate resources more effectively, with greater confidence that investments will lead to measurable improvements. Over time, this will create a cycle of continuous improvement, where each project builds on real-world insights and better supports student success.