Over the past five years, the Canopy Project has documented innovations in K-12 education, uncovering how schools are addressing systemic challenges and envisioning the future of learning. This report highlights the progress and persistence of these trailblazing schools and offers actionable recommendations for sustaining and spreading innovation.
Key Findings
- Solving Urgent Challenges: Canopy schools are tackling learning loss, chronic absenteeism, mental health crises, and systemic inequities with bold, student-centered approaches. Many of these schools prioritize welcoming and culturally affirming learning communities that support students beyond academics, where students learn in active ways that connect to the real world, and where learning is flexible and responsive to student and family preferences.
- Consistency Amid Evolution: Since Canopy began in 2019, schools’ designs have been remarkably consistent from year to year. Some school leaders said the pandemic only increased their conviction in the value of their unconventional designs. The new practices schools have adopted focus on student well-being and equity, deeper learning, and postsecondary pathways — though adoption rates have changed over time.
- Shifting and Emerging Practices: The use of blended learning surged during the pandemic but may now be receding — or changing, according to school leaders interviewed. Canopy schools are eager to leverage artificial intelligence (AI), but only a few are advanced early adopters. Leaders also want to partner more deeply with students and families.
- Fragile Foundations: Canopy schools face sustainability threats like inadequate funding, staffing shortages, and restrictive policy barriers, which underscores how launching new or redesigned schools is necessary, but not sufficient, for durable and systemic change.
- Policymakers can support innovation-friendly policies and funding streams.
- Funders can support new school designs and prioritize sustainability.
- Researchers can document and disseminate insights and bridge data silos.
Recommendations
To improve student experiences and outcomes on a large scale and in schools beyond the Canopy project, policymakers, funders, and researchers must play critical roles in strengthening the conditions for innovation in schools.
The report demonstrates that reimagining learning environments in sustainable, school-wide ways is achievable in any school, anywhere in the country. This transformation is already underway, and students are reaping the benefits. However, for school innovation to endure and expand, policymakers, funders, and researchers must support the conditions necessary.
supplementAL RESOURCE: CHANGES IN SCHOOL PRACTICES OVER TIME
Click below for extended analyses and interactive visualizations to support the findings presented in this report.
The Canopy is a collaborative project involving hundreds of organizations, stewarded by CRPE and Transcend. Learn more at canopyschools.org.
