Looking Back At 10 Years of Innovation Schools

Ten years ago, three schools shared the Chestnut campus in Springfield, MA. All ranked at the very bottom of the state’s accountability system— even the one designated an honors academy. Today, however, the programming in the building has undergone a radical and successful transformation. That honors program is the most improved school in the state, and the other schools now in the building have designed purposes and goals. These additional schools include a culturally responsive dual language school and a wall-to-wall early college program where high school students earn college credits and associate degrees.

So, what changed?  The schools at the Chestnut campus are a part of the Springfield Empowerment Zone Partnership (SEZP), a groundbreaking collection of innovation schools. Since Empower Schools is turning 10, we’re taking a closer look at our work in SEZP and elsewhere to learn the key ingredients for innovative school success.

The SEZP is a results-oriented effort that oversees sixteen Springfield (MA) public schools. It’s a unique partnership between the Springfield Public Schools, the Springfield Education Association, and the Massachusetts Department of Elementary & Secondary Education. While SEZP schools are part of the Springfield Public School system, they operate under a unique set of conditions that put critical educational decisions in the hands of teachers and school leaders.

Since its inception in 2015, the SEZP has achieved remarkable results:

• • • From 2014 to 2022, the four-year graduation rate for SEZP high schools has risen from 44% to 86%.
    • When SEZP began, every student attended a school in the state’s bottom five percent of schools. Today, almost half of students are at schools above the tenth percentile, and almost a quarter are at schools above the twentieth percentile.
    • Although SEZP serves almost all students of color, in 2017, only 26% of SEZP teachers were people of color. Today, 48% of them are.

How did SEZP achieve these results? A relentless focus on improvement and, above all else, trust in educators to design and implement outstanding and customized school programs. SEZP puts the power of decision-making back into the hands of those closest to students: educators at the school level. In exchange for meeting ambitious but realistic performance targets, each SEZP school is empowered with broad flexibility over its educational program. Principals and teachers create each school’s calendar, schedule, curriculum, staffing plan, and budget.

Since our founding, Empower Schools has worked to support the development of innovative schools that center educator-led decision-making and accountability. After ten years of work seeking systemic solutions to our education system’s toughest challenges, we believe three key characteristics create the conditions for success: structural educator empowerment, sustainable community leadership, and a focus on results and continuous improvement. We help develop formal agreements between school districts and empowerment efforts to guarantee structural educator empowerment. While we believe these agreements must adjust to local circumstances, efforts in places as diverse as Springfield, Fort Worth, TX, and Denver, CO, all create defined systems that prioritize educator decision-making and school flexibility. 

These empowerment efforts must also ensure that innovation schools have sustainable community leadership. Sometimes, that means community and educational leaders come together in new organizations, such as the Wilmington Learning Collaborative. Sometimes, it means tapping an existing community partner, such as Texas Wesleyan University in Fort Worth. These partners bring local, diverse, and representative leaders to the decision-making table to engage communities and involve them in structural and meaningful decision-making places. 

Finally, innovative school efforts must constantly focus on results and continuous improvement. School districts define the standards that innovation schools must meet, and then the schools are responsible for using their flexibility to improve through strategic adaptation continuously. It’s clear that one size does not fit all and that each school community needs and deserves differentiated supports that match unique school contexts.

How Policy Change Happens

Throughout our organization’s history, we’ve taken two distinct yet cyclical approaches to partnerships at the district and state levels.

• • • Empowered Partnerships are sustainable partnerships that enable transformative district schools where educators have the flexibility and accountability to make decisions that are right for their students, community, and staff. By working with community champions to strategize, incubate, and launch formal agreements, we create enabling conditions that allow educators to customize their schools to meet student needs, unlocking transformational outcomes through fundamentally different structures. We work with the community to analyze the needs and create innovations that will bring the best results. 

• • • Policy and Thought Leadership is how we affect systemic change. We champion state-level policy change, host professional convenings, and provide support and advice to education leaders. We partner with education leaders and local champions to propose, interpret, leverage, and change education policy to catalyze structural shifts. 

The innovations supported by Empower Schools have profoundly impacted the communities they serve, creating a powerful feedback loop that enhances continual improvement and innovation. In Texas, efforts like Fort Worth’s Leadership Academy Network (LAN) are enabled by Senate Bill 1882, and we have seen other communities working to use that tool (or the Colorado law that facilitated the creation of the high-performing Luminary Learning Network (LLN) of innovation schools, for example) effectively. However, while the Texas policy has been in place since 2017, districts still underutilize 1882 Texas Partnerships. To address this challenge, we host learning convenings and provide resources to enable system-level leaders to understand the policy and advocate for their community. Resources like the 1882 toolkit we helped support help public officials leverage all their best options. 

This work’s impact goes beyond our partner innovation school classrooms, influencing state-level policies to support better and sustain educational progress. Our advocacy efforts have facilitated significant enhancements in educational delivery and outcomes by restructuring financial and structural frameworks at the state level. Our collective efforts have reached 1.5 million students, a testament to our strategies’ effectiveness and the hard work of our dedicated partners.

What’s Next For Innovation Schools

Our approach is proving effective, sustainable, and scalable, and we believe in the power of educator empowerment even more than we did 10 years ago. We are thrilled with the exciting performance evidence from strong innovation school partnerships like SEZP and LLN, as well as the longstanding research that shows teacher demand for empowering conditions. There is also a growing recognition that educator empowerment is critical to addressing many of the key issues facing American education – for example, there is clear student and family demand for new educational models, and in a world fairly concerned about teacher recruitment and retention, there is widespread teacher demand for increased voice in the work educators do every day.

To get us to where we can meet these demands, we need a fundamental shift that gives district educators flexibility in all key areas of school operations and provides structures that sustain schools that are working for students and communities.

There are schools across the country, some that we work with and some that we don’t, that are working hard to build those schools every day. We celebrate the continued progress in SEZP, LAN, LLN, Centers for Applied Science and Technology Schools, Purdue Polytechnic, and the Washtenaw Educational Options Consortium—and we also celebrate the potential of innovation schools in places like Wilmington, DE, and of innovation school policies in states like South Carolina, that may unlock the next set of creative and successful schools that we will spotlight in 2034.   

We believe deeply in the power of students, educators, and communities to work together and make positive changes. It’s been an honor to do the work for the last ten years, and we can’t wait for what’s next. When you join our movement at Empower Schools, we can work together to tackle the next decade of Innovation Schools, and Rural Innovation, and Early College and Career Pathways.