How to Use School-Level Autonomy to Improve Schools? Design it with the People Most Affected By It
Empower Schools helped design and launch Lawrence Public Schools’ turnaround plan in 2013, prioritizing school-level decision-making.
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Empower Schools helped design and launch Lawrence Public Schools’ turnaround plan in 2013.
The plan prioritized school-level decision-making and produced promising early academic results.
Lawrence later worked with the Center for Public Research and Leadership to develop a School Autonomy Framework.
Principals, teachers, district staff, and union representatives helped design and refine the framework.
Lawrence’s experience demonstrates how autonomy, accountability, support, and educator voice can work together.
From Columbia Law School Center for Public Research and Leadership | Published June 04, 2024
Since 2020, the Center for Public Research and Leadership has worked with Lawrence Public Schools to develop a framework for guiding school improvement.
Lawrence Public Schools entered state receivership in 2011 after being identified as one of Massachusetts’ lowest-performing districts. The district subsequently moved away from a highly centralized management structure and adopted an approach called Open Architecture.
Under Open Architecture, the district establishes operational expectations, performance standards, and other ground rules while giving school leaders greater autonomy to determine how their schools will meet them.
After Lawrence demonstrated promising improvements in academic achievement and graduation rates, the district engaged CPRL to help develop a School Autonomy Framework. The framework was intended to clarify what successful autonomy looks like and help the district determine how to support individual schools.
Empower Schools’ work in Lawrence
Empower Schools supported the design and launch of Lawrence’s turnaround plan with a central belief that school leaders and educators should have greater authority to make decisions based on the needs of their students.
This approach moved decision-making closer to schools while maintaining clear expectations for student outcomes. One year into the turnaround, Lawrence recorded its highest math growth in district history and reversed a multiyear decline in English language arts.
School-level decision-making remains central to Empower Schools’ Innovation Schools work. Empower helps communities create the conditions, agreements, governance structures, and supports that allow educators to design and operate public schools around local student needs.
What Lawrence learned about co-design
Lawrence initially called its new framework the Earned Autonomy Framework. Some principals interpreted the name to mean that autonomy would be granted as a reward or withheld as a penalty. Others worried that the framework could be used to evaluate or remove school leaders.
After hearing those concerns, the district renamed it the School Autonomy Framework and repositioned it as a tool for identifying challenges, establishing priorities, and determining what support schools need.
Principals became co-designers and ambassadors for the framework. The district also established a School Autonomy Framework Management Committee co-led by principals and created pilot teams that could test and improve the framework during implementation.
The process incorporated perspectives from teachers, principals, district staff, and members of the teacher and paraprofessional unions. This helped the district build trust, strengthen the framework, and create greater ownership among the people responsible for using it.
What effective school-level autonomy requires
The Lawrence experience highlights several conditions that can help school-level autonomy succeed:
A clear purpose for granting schools greater decision-making authority
Meaningful educator and stakeholder involvement
Qualitative and quantitative data that reflect each school’s context
Accountability paired with differentiated support
Opportunities to test and improve the model
Clear alignment between school priorities and district goals
Autonomy is not simply the absence of district oversight. It requires defined responsibilities, transparent expectations, useful information, and systems that help educators make decisions based on the needs of their students.
Learn more
Read What Educators Want and Students Need for lessons from Empower Schools’ first decade of supporting Innovation Schools and Empowerment Zones.
Explore Leadership as a Practice to learn how distributed leadership, teacher agency, and school-level flexibility can create shared accountability.
Visit Innovation Schools to learn how Empower Schools helps communities create and sustain empowered public school models.
