This school year, recovery is the name of the game in K-12 education. Although COVID-19 persists, schools have reopened and are focusing on getting students back on track.

But plenty of the challenges schools are tackling have long predated COVID. Indeed, schools are not just facing the need to recover from the pandemic — they must recover from a system of schooling that was never designed to provide high-quality learning opportunities for every student.

Fortunately, a diverse array of communities are working to reinvent schooling in pursuit of their visions for thriving young people and families. The learning environments they’re designing and redesigning don’t all look the same — in fact, far from it. But what they have in common is challenging key assumptions about schooling to create more equitable, joyful, and responsive learning environments that reflect community values and priorities.

Many of these learning environments are featured in the Canopy project, a nationwide effort lifting up knowledge from hundreds of organizations to build open data about schools that are innovating. Originally founded at the Christensen Institute, the Canopy is now stewarded by the Center on Reinventing Public Education and Transcend, and is fueled by participation from hundreds of organizations and schools.

The project’s existing dataset documents innovative practices in 232 schools, many of which had a track record of innovating even pre-pandemic. The rates at which schools report various unconventional practices clearly show that they are challenging a range of assumptions about what school is and should be.

Here are five of the big assumptions being challenged by Canopy innovators:

  1. Learning Must Happen on a School Campus
  2. Virtual Learning Is Subpar 
  3. Equity = ‘Achievement Gap’
  4. Academics Are Distinct From Social-Emotional Supports
  5. Passions Are For Electives (or Afterschool)

Studying schools like these is critical because a myopic focus on COVID recovery will fail to address the fundamental inequities and outdated assumptions that are baked into the K–12 system. As CRPE and Transcend guide the Canopy project forward, we hope these innovative learning environments can demonstrate what’s possible in a sector struggling with exhaustion, burnout, and a long road ahead to deliver on public education’s promise to every American student.

Read the full article about innovation in schools by Chelsea Waite at The 74.