December 20, 2017 | By Kimberly Smith
In a year when public education faced many challenges, superintendents and district leaders in the League of Innovative Schools persisted in creating cutting-edge, transformative educational opportunities for their students. In 2017, we welcomed 13 new districts to the League. Working with 11 districts, we launched the Competency-based Education Toolkit. We began our work on data interoperability and published a network impact report. And we convened two powerful League meetings in Mentor, Ohio and South San Francisco.
As we look ahead to 2018, we are honored to continue working with 93 League districts in 33 states, representing close to 4,000 schools, to help them tackle their biggest challenges and scale their successes in order to create excellent, equitable learning opportunities for all students.
Over the past few months, we’ve partnered with researchers and district leaders to surface the most pressing challenges that schools face in advancing innovation, excellence, and equity. At our fall convening, we piloted a tool to guide League district leaders in identifying challenges and their root causes, with the goal of creating a challenge map that will inform our work in 2018. Additionally, we are conducting interviews with superintendents and district leaders and exploring available research to build our understanding of the current landscape.
Our vision for 2018 and beyond is: Galvanize our networks to design, validate, champion, and scale effective, innovative learning opportunities to advance equity and excellence for every learner.
From promoting gender equity in STEM, to providing high-quality teacher professional learning opportunities, to supporting a diverse and changing student population, there is no shortage of challenges facing public educators. We thank you for your interest in the League of Innovative Schools and your work to advance promising innovation in public education, and we look forward to inviting you to collaborate on surfacing and solving these challenges in the New Year.