Unlocking Student and Educator empowerment
The Promise of Effective Innovation School Policy
Empower Schools’ report on Innovation Schools focuses on state-level policies that create ways for district schools to have flexibility from district policies (and sometimes also state requirements).
We argue that state policy can nurture high-quality schools of this type by explicitly allowing,
encouraging, and even investing in these Innovation Schools. There are several benefits:
Innovation Schools allow for implementation of customized, school-specific designs. Avoiding the “one size fits all” mania that too often permeates education, Innovation Schools permit an individual school or cluster of schools to
implement the model that is right for their students, their educators, and their community.
Innovation Schools enhance educator buy-in and can improve teacher satisfaction, retention, and effectiveness and allow for reimagining of teacher roles. In an ecosystem where educator turnover is high, especially at schools serving the students furthest behind, Innovation Schools often stand out for their high satisfaction and retention.
Innovation Schools facilitate appropriate accountability. Allowing for flexibility and then consistently enforcing clear, holistic goals ensures that with increased power for schools comes increased responsibility.
Innovation Schools are more sustainable. Many educators and communities are reluctant to embrace opportunities for school innovation because they are skeptical that they can continue to implement and continuously improve novel designs even when they are showing strong results. Innovation School structures can and should include safeguards for schools that are succeeding.
The track record for similar efforts is impressive. Despite relatively few districts adopting a strategy of school-level
empowerment aligned with the Innovation Schools structure, many of the large-scale district success stories in the last two decades of American education have adopted variants of this strategy. Those districts include Chicago, Denver, New Orleans, Lawrence, and Camden.
The report looks in more depth at several states with varied characteristics to explore Innovation School implementation and make state-specific recommendations