EdRedesign Lab Launches New Show About Fixing the American Dream

The EdRedesign Lab at Harvard Graduate School of Education, in partnership with production company Fire-Works, has announced the launch of DREAM ON, a YouTube show dedicated to optimistic explainers about how to improve social and economic mobility in America. The show premieres on May 5, 2026.

Hosted by Vox Video co-founder Joe Posner and co-produced by Emmy-winner James Watson, DREAM ON explores how best to fix the American Dream — with the probability of children out-earning their parents plummeting from 90% to just 50% in recent decades. With a focus on "place-based" success stories, the show seeks to bring proven and scalable solutions to a national online audience.

A New Model for a New Era of News

DREAM ON arrives at a critical inflection point in the American media landscape. With trust in traditional mass media at historic lows, the show utilizes "creator journalism" — a style that combines rigorous, editorially independent journalism with the community-building power of social video platforms such as YouTube.

“Every YouTube show is also a community, and we want to be the community for everyone who still believes our country should be ‘the land of opportunity,’” said Posner. “We know there are millions of Americans working every day to make sure a kid’s future is not decided by the income of their parents. We want to celebrate their wins with the same zeal that most media outlets reserve only for sports and celebrities.”

“All of us who built Vox Video definitively showed that substance is viral. But what I see missing is somewhere to find the stories of real, pragmatic, evidence-driven progress amidst what feels like a never-ending media desert of despair and doomerism.”

A National Network of 100+ Communities

This project is powered by an unprecedented collaboration between researchers, practitioners, journalists, and community members. The EdRedesign Lab connects DREAM ON to both cutting-edge research and over 100 communities in 40 states — all working on systems and partnerships to increase social and economic mobility in their local areas. These communities are red, blue, purple — urban, rural, and suburban — and represent the full spectrum of America. Through close collaboration with these communities and others, each episode of the show will feature a field-tested fix for the American Dream with evidence to support its effectiveness.

Data-Driven Stories with Real-World Results

The channel’s premiere episode travels to San Antonio to explore the profound impact of Communities In Schools (CIS). Recently, the subject of a landmark Harvard-Cornell research paper, CIS was revealed to be one of the most effective programs ever studied for raising the lifetime earnings of low-income students.

Future episodes will include:

• Spartanburg, South Carolina: A neighborhood transformation that drove an 84% drop in violent crime.
• Dallas: Inside the R&D lab that helped cut child poverty in Dallas by nearly one-third in seven years.

Bringing Solutions to Online Audiences

Launching with support from The EdRedesign Lab and The Hearthland Foundation, DREAM ON seeks to grow into an enduring platform for solutions journalism on social video sites such as YouTube, spreading the word about proven fixes to people who want to be changemakers.

"We believe communities across the country hold many of the answers to restoring the American Dream. The hope, innovation, and civic renewal in communities like Spartanburg, Dallas, and San Antonio reflect a growing movement of community-led solutions to tackle issues of intergenerational poverty, educational attainment, and economic mobility,” says Rob Watson, executive director of EdRedesign and lecturer at Harvard Graduate School of Education. “These are the kinds of stories that deserve a national audience on platforms like YouTube, where a growing majority of young to middle-aged Americans consume their news. We hope that DREAM ON will shape critical conversations and decision-making about policy, practice, and systems change in the years to come.