About the Project

The Canopy is a collaborative effort to surface a diverse set of innovative learning environments, and document the designs they are implementing.

Most young people currently experience school as inequitable, irrelevant, and insufficient to prepare them for lives of meaning, purpose, and success. Is it possible to transform inequitable and rigid education systems into equitable and student-centered ones that create extraordinary learning experiences for all young people?

A diverse array of communities are building these types of transformative learning environments. The models they’re designing and redesigning don’t all look the same. But they all set aside old assumptions about what “school” must be in order to adapt to students’ strengths and needs, create joyful and rigorous learning experiences, and reflect the values and priorities of their communities. Many of these learning environments are designed by and with historically marginalized communities that are impacted by systemic inequities in K–12 and beyond.

But where are these innovative learning environments, and what impact are they making? Whether you’re a local school leader or national supporter of education, it can be hard to find schools to learn from, especially outside of your own network.

The Canopy project is designed to address this challenge by building collective knowledge about a diverse set of innovative learning environments. Launched by the Christensen Institute in 2018, the project is a collaborative effort involving hundreds of organizations and schools, stewarded by Transcend and the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE). Together we will update Canopy data annually in order to spark connections between learning communities and spot trends in practice. Read about our approach to collecting data in our summary of Canopy methodology.

Canopy Project Core Values

An excellent and effective public education has always been a privilege, not a norm, thanks to systems originally wired for inequity. The most urgent reason to support K–12 innovation is to create systems that nurture the potential and brilliance of students who have been historically excluded from opportunity. When we design relevant, rigorous, and caring learning environments that minimize harm and support these students to thrive, all of American society will benefit. We call these learning environments “equitable and student-centered.”
There are a thousand different pathways to building more equitable and student-centered learning environments. Innovation arises from the ingenuity and expertise of resilient communities as well as education experts; from the savvy of veteran educators as well as the energy of fresh faces; from the wisdom of ancient cultures as well as what new technologies enable. Innovations evolve with the help of many ideas, recognized and unrecognized, and they take time to mature.
As innovations mature, they should show evidence of improving experiences and outcomes for students whose needs they’re designed to meet. But those students and the communities around them deserve a leading role in defining what impact should look like and developing measures that matter. Innovations shouldn’t be dismissed just because they don’t, or don’t yet, show impact on traditional or dominant measures.
A more inclusive sector is one that supports innovators with many perspectives, values the historical and cultural context of an innovation, and seeks to credit early and original ideas wherever possible. Raising awareness about the diversity of approaches to redesigning “school” will energize the sector and lead to more promising ideas.