Documenting innovative schools through the Canopy Project (Barr Foundation)

The challenge

Schools are not just facing the need to recover from the pandemic—they must recover from a system of schooling that was poorly 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 schools 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 project is now stewarded by the Center on Reinventing Public Education and Transcend, and it is fueled by participation from hundreds of organizations and schools.

The approach

This grant, which originates from the Barr Foundation, is one of several funding sources that allow for the Canopy Project to continue updating data on innovative schools.

The Canopy crowdsourcing process is an effective method for surfacing a diverse set of schools, including those less well known, and capturing data from school leaders about their current school models. The project lead is Chelsea Waite, a senior researcher at CRPE, which is part of Arizona State University’s Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College.

 CRPE, in partnership with Transcend, will support two full cycles of crowdsourcing and data analysis in the 2023-24 and 2024-25 school years, including some key refinements to the process to improve transparency and accuracy.

This workstream involves:

• Convening and facilitating a diverse advisory group
• Clarifying nominator criteria
• Inviting Canopy nominations and updating school data
• Analyzing the dataset and publishing our results
• Qualitative documentation to complement the 2024 Canopy report

Additional funding for the Canopy Renewal project comes from two other grants that are channeled through Transcend and come from the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Overdeck Family Foundation.