School System Innovation Fund advances systemic, student-centered solutions

The challenge

The need for systemic, student-centered change could not be greater at this moment. The pandemic’s effect on education systems revealed a need to better prepare for uncertainty, meet diverse student needs, and marshal strong leadership on behalf of student interests. Durable systems change is notoriously hard, and long-standing policies and lack of effective change management strategies have been the primary barriers to past efforts at sustained systemic innovation. In particular, there is a need to prioritize school systems that are ready and willing to tackle the political and policy barriers that reinforce the status quo through areas such as data, accountability and assessment systems, HR and evaluation systems, labor contracts, and state and local funding formulas.

The approach

The School System Innovation Fund project — guided by Bree Dusseault and Lydia Rainey at the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE), based at ASU’s Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College — will identify school systems most ready to disrupt systemic inequity at its root and provide them with resources to design and implement innovative, durable solutions.

This project builds on an initial $9 million grant from the Walton Family Foundation to CRPE in 2022. That grant was designed to spur critically needed research on academic recovery and new practices to reimagine education in the wake of pandemic-era school disruptions. The $5 million School System Innovation Fund, which is also awarded by the Walton Family Foundation, supports the work of school systems to pilot and implement bold ideas designed to fundamentally transform students' learning experiences. The project involves  a design sprint phase to refine proof of concept, an implementation phase to prototype and scale solutions, and sustainability support. Grantees will be districts and charter 

management organizations  developing solutions that center on fundamentally improving the nature and quality of students’ learning experience, with an emphasis on (1) redesigning students’ time and learning experiences, and/or (2) leveraging community, industry, and parent assets in new ways.

In addition, the project will provide grantees with resources to design and implement solutions that overcome “status quo” thinking, including:

• site-based convenings that build idea exchange and accountability
• peer consultancies focused on real time challenges 
• individualized coaching to navigate the nonlinear nature of systems change
• technical assistance to dismantle concrete barriers in “obstacle” areas