Publications
2025 Publications
The Future of School Accountability Isn’t More Testing
Only 29% of school leaders say accountability data helps them improve student outcomes, and half say testing makes it harder to innovate (as featured on The74).
Making Room for What Matters
Across the country, school leaders are reimagining how students learn—designing models that are more engaging, effective, and connected to the world students are entering. But many say that today’s state accountability systems, while important for transparency and rigor, can make it harder to innovate.
Beyond Test Scores: 186 Innovative Educators on How to Know a School Is Good
Respondents to Canopy project point to student presentations & portfolios, school culture and attendance among indicators of real quality (as featured in The74).
2024 Publications
Promising progress, fragile foundations
Reimagining learning environments in school-wide, enduring ways is possible anywhere in the country, in any kind of school. Indeed, it is underway—and students are benefiting. But to sustain and spread this progress, policymakers, funders, and researchers must prioritize conditions for school innovation.
Five years of Canopy: Report guide
Use this guide to explore the highlights, key findings, and recommendations from the 2024 Canopy report.
189 innovative school leaders: Teacher staffing, AI, mental health top ed issues
Latest Canopy Project survey identifies educators’ leading concerns — and what some cutting-edge schools are doing to address them (as featured in The74).
A future beyond test scores alone
A future beyond test scores alone: Innovative schools need support to measure other learning outcomes.
2023 Publications
Evaluating the impact of innovative schools
Learn about the outcomes schools are prioritizing, and the impact they’re having on young people.
Dreaming and designing the future of schools
Read key findings from schools pursuing equitable, student-centered learning in 2023.
Unconventional public schools and the systems they navigate
Learn how central offices and external partners can help—and hinder—public school innovation efforts.
How inclusive schools meet the needs of bilingual students and English learners
Learn how schools are designing learning environments that leverage students’ linguistic assets.
Educational justice and holistic student support
Students learn about and practice social justice. Teachers design instruction and curriculum to support students who have been marginalized by using culturally relevant materials and developing students’ independence as learners.
Postsecondary pathways and the world outside school
Students participate in career- related learning, such as internships or apprenticeships, and the school encourages and guides them through career exploration. Students can often begin earning college credit in high school through early-college models, and can receive credit for learning experiences outside traditional classrooms.
Deeper learning for mastery
Students show their skills and knowledge through performance assessments rather than traditional tests. Instead of earning credit for learning by finishing a time-based course and getting a passing grade, they earn credit by demonstrating that they’ve mastered specific skills or content.
Individualized and blended learning
Students move through learning activities at their own pace, advance when they’re ready, and follow an individual learning path rather than progressing at the same pace as the entire class. Many pursue their studies partly through online learning and partly in-person.
Schools that deliver what parents say they want
Changing the DNA of how schools educate students is hard, long-term work. A diverse set of 251 schools are showing what that work looks like (as featured in The74).
2022 Publications
How 6 schools have reimagined education to support underserved students
Education leaders share their strategies, including a microschool for indigenous students and partnership with an early learning center for pregnant and parenting students (District Administration, Micah Ward).
Trends in education innovation from 161 school leaders
What it looks like to embrace the strengths, passions and needs of each student, particularly those who have been historically underserved.
Innovation in action: How creative schools are designing a more equitable education sector
A new Canopy project report shows how innovative schools are designing more equitable education systems.
Innovations from 161 Canopy schools to aid marginalized students
From a Lakota-focused microschool to service opportunities for kids with disabilities, examples from Canopy of how innovators are focusing on the needs of marginalized students (as featured in The74).
2021 Publications
Not just recovery, but reinvention
Three Lessons from Schools Where COVID Innovations Offer New Solutions
Innovation during 2020–21 and how to nurture it post-pandemic
Among the lessons from COVID-19 in the K–12 sector, one is this: we can never again say that schools haven’t changed in a hundred years.
2020 vs. 2021: Notable trends in innovative school practice nationwide
Our latest Canopy project analysis reveals takeaways about innovative school models using updated data from January 2021.
2020 Publications
Takeaways from COVID-era learning models at 144 innovative schools around the country
New analysis shares trends in COVID-era learning models at 144 innovative schools around the country.
New data reveals a unique picture of school innovation in a challenging year
New Canopy data highlights updated information from 130 innovative schools about how they are starting the 2020-21 school year.
Making sense of school innovation: Five categories of practice revealed
The Canopy dataset suggests five distinct categories of innovative practice in schools.
A revealing look at innovation in urban and suburban schools
Canopy data shows urban and suburban schools report innovative practices at different frequencies.
A revealing look at innovation in rural schools
Canopy data suggests rural schools prioritize flexibility and student supports, but other practices may be less common.
Why diversity is essential to school innovation
What works for some doesn’t work for all, and what’s working for those on the margins could be completely unknown.
Spotlight on project-based learning: Seeing the forest and the trees
While project-based learning can be traced back to centuries-old theory, research shows how it is linked to a variety of efforts for change in innovative schools.
2019 Publications
A peek into 2020
Analysis of Canopy data leads to three questions that education stakeholders should keep top of mind in 2020.
Stop ignoring the innovation that happens in traditional public schools
Schools across the country are leading change from within. Why don’t we know more about them?
What does it really mean to be competency-based?
What does a competency-based school look like? Even with a clear definition, data shows that practice varies widely on the ground.
3 school innovation insights that challenge common assumptions
Canopy data on school models, sourced from 173 schools that verified their information, reveals insights that may otherwise have gone unnoticed by the field.
Why we need diverse data to know what works in education
By focusing on what works for students on average, education research risks mistaking important anomalies for noise in the data.
6 education innovation trends you may not know about, from 173 diverse schools you may never have heard of
Discover big-picture school innovation trends from data that surfaces patterns and blind spots where the field may not be paying attention.
Standardizing school innovation data
This report urges school innovation funders, intermediaries, and researchers to help enable interoperability between datasets that are currently siloed.
How to build better collective data on school innovation in 5 simple steps
By reimagining where data comes from and how it’s structured, the Canopy shows promise in highlighting insights that could be surfaced if the field captured data in a consistent way.
Our picture of school innovation is incomplete. Can it be fixed?
Missing the diversity of innovative school practices also means missing models that have the potential to transform the learning experience and drive better outcomes for students.
School innovation knowledge is trapped in an echo chamber. We can break out of it
The inability to paint a more complete portrait of school innovation nationwide shackles how promising practices evolve and spread.
A view from the Canopy: Building collective knowledge on school innovation
This initial stage of the Canopy demonstrates how a process designed to advance collective knowledge has the potential to unveil a more diverse, complete picture of K-12 school innovation.
The walled garden effect: Why sharing doesn’t always create shared progress in education
The walls around our data ‘gardens’ make it impossible to get the bigger picture for how schools are shifting towards student-centered models.
Why word of mouth on school innovation is holding us back
Word of mouth is a common way to discover schools that are innovating, but there are a few important shortcomings to that strategy.