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A Look at What’s to Come for the League of Innovative Schools in 2018

Kimberly Smith

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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.

Authors

Kimberly Smith

Chief Innovation Officer

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Kimberly A. Smith is the co-lead and chief innovation officer of the Digital Promise Center for Learner Pathway Innovations. She works in partnerships with school systems across the country in creating and sustaining Unbounded Pathways—accelerated, future-forward, responsive, co-created, credentialed pathways that enable learners to design their futures to achieve agency, well-being and economic mobility. She is a co-creator of the Digital Promise’s Collaborative Innovation model, a co-research and design methodology centered in students and communities working in partnership with school systems, industry and post-secondary to build innovative pathway solutions. Prior, she was executive director of the League of Innovative Schools, Digital Promise’s flagship network of forward-thinking school systems leaders.

Prior to Digital Promise, Ms. Smith was chief learning and innovation officer with the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE), leading the innovation strategy for the global leader in youth entrepreneurship education and vice president of education at PBS where she directed the digital education strategy, including launching a national public broadcasting PreK-12 digital curriculum service in partnership with school districts. She also served as vice president of product development for Discovery Education where she led the creation of a portfolio of broadband services for K-12 schools, including Discovery Streaming and curriculum digital products. Ms. Smith began her career in education innovation at the Annenberg/Corporation for Public Broadcasting Project where she was on a team pioneering delivering college courses for credit at a distance through online and broadcast.

Ms. Smith is an Aspen-Pahara Institute fellow focused on building sustainable, values-aligned education leadership. She is co-founder of the National Charter Collaborative, a non-profit focused on supporting single-site charter leaders of color in creating quality schools. She has served on the boards and advisories including the Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO), the Arts and Technology Academy Public Charter School, Catalyst Exchange, Learner Centered Collaborative, Education Reimagined, and Beach House in Washington, DC. She received her M.B.A from Johns Hopkins University and her bachelor’s degree in Journalism from the University of Colorado at Boulder.

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