About

The Canopy Project is a collaborative effort to ‘see the forest’ of innovative schools.

Communities nationwide are reimagining the purpose, structure, and experiences of school to create environments that are engaging, effective, and empowering for all students. They are responsive to the strengths, aspirations, and needs of their students and communities benefitting all learners, especially those furthest from opportunity.

But where are these innovative learning environments, and how are they reimagining school? 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 builds collective knowledge about innovative schools from all across the country. Launched by the Christensen Institute in 2018, the project is a collaborative effort involving hundreds of organizations and schools, stewarded by the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) and Transcend. Every year, we collect nominations of innovative learning environments, gather details about each learning environment through a school leader survey, and share information publicly in a school database and research reports. Read about our approach to collecting data in our summary of Canopy methodology.