Unlocking Student and Educator Empowerment
The Promise of Effective Innovation School Policy
Explore a national report on state-level Innovation School policies, including policy recommendations and a state-by-state analysis of how well current laws create enabling conditions for school-level innovation.
Executive Summary
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.
We review state Innovation School policies and make the following recommendations for such policies:
Eligibility. All district-run schools should be eligible to become Innovation Schools (including both existing and newly
Incentives. States should encourage the use of their innovation policies through financial incentives and accountability
pauses or other policy incentives.
Application. States should require school applications to explain (a) how they hope to innovate, (b) which district or state policies they need to be waived beyond any floor set by the state, (c) the student outcomes they commit to achieving as a result, and (d) information about how the applicant engaged community stakeholders such as families and teachers when developing the plan.
Scope. States should require that Innovation Schools have a meaningful core of autonomies that continue as long as they are Innovation Schools. In addition, states should permit districts to request maximal potential flexibility from district policy without limitations, except where such autonomy would be limited by federal law.
Approval. States should require school board approval for a new school launch; for an existing school, states should require either school board approval or, in some cases, approval with support of 66% of staff, 66% of families, and the State Education Agency.
Protection. States should (1) require non-profit governance (which can include governance by an institution of higher education or a municipal government), (2) provide in policy for binding arbitration, and (3) create a statutory right for the parties to sue for enforcement of innovation agreements.
.Accountability and Renewal. Innovation agreements should auto-renew if a defined percentage of the goals in the proposal are met (e.g., 80% including core academic goals) and the agreement is not canceled for other good reason (e.g., illegal actions by the non-profit governing body). If the goals are not met, the right answer is often to revoke the innovation status or select a different nonprofit partner. States should permit renewal of Innovation Schools that have not met goals with approval of the school board after a public hearing and support from a majority of employees in the building, however, for the rare cases where a school that has not met its goals but is showing meaningful improvement (and has won the support of its community).
The report looks in more depth at several states with varied characteristics to explore Innovation School implementation and make state-specific recommendations