And still, school doors continue opening on time and the work to educate our nation’s students marches on. An opportunity is being missed—an opportunity for transformation, innovation, and the creation of school systems that are globally competitive, future-forward, and enable all students to thrive in an increasingly complex world.
In 2025, Digital Promise and the Alliance for Learning Innovation invited school district and charter network leaders from across the country to join a national advisory committee to imagine:
What if every school system in the country had the capacity to create, implement, and scale new tools, technologies, and innovations—strengthening our national competitiveness and benefiting students, families, and the country?
From the work emerged a national action agenda, Competitive Advantage: An Action Agenda for How School Systems Can Advance Learning Through R&D. In December, more than 100 school district and charter network leaders went to Washington, D.C., to elevate the urgency and opportunity to fund R&D led by school systems—supporting their capacity to innovate and ensuring their students have what they need to succeed.
The takeaway from the action agenda? We can either choose to remain in a static state and continue to underserve our children’s futures by deprioritizing investment in R&D, or we can embody the essence of American ingenuity by enabling school districts to employ R&D to spur and scale practical and cutting edge innovations.
The quiet truth is, school districts are already practicing R&D on teaching and learning strategies and solutions informally in their day-to-day work. Examples include:
Without the capacity, support, and resources to scale what works, school districts’ efforts to innovate are invisible, self-contained, and only impact a few. We need to incentivize these types of efforts and support school districts in creating more innovative solutions to drive sustainable impact.
Superintendents, district leaders, and staff attend workshops and keynotes at the League of Innovative Schools’ 2025 Policy to Action Summit in Washington, D.C. They participated in more than 60 meetings with congressional offices to elevate how to support schools and communities to meet the evolving needs of their students.
The focus of the action agenda is simple: education needs to move at the pace of students and society—accelerated, agile, actionable. Only then will we unleash the pace, scale, and impact of education innovation to drive a global competitive advantage. In order to do so, we must work to create the conditions where:
When school systems across the country are incentivized and supported to drive innovation through evidence and continuous improvement, only then will we experience the paradigm shift our students need to thrive. The call-to-action to policymakers, state leaders, local leaders, funders, researchers, and advocacy organizations is to:
The agenda itself includes more than 35 actions on how to create the necessary conditions, build local capacity, and sustain what works. The spectrum of actions provides a wealth of flexibility and options on ways to advocate for and create policies and practices that advance school systems-led R&D.
With a concerted effort at the federal and state level to support the policies and practices outlined in the national agenda, school districts across the country can be the innovation engines that ensure students and our country are equipped for a future that is rapidly evolving–and full of opportunity.
The District Education R&D Advisory Committee—supported by a partnership between Digital Promise and the Alliance for Learning Innovation—brings together district and charter leaders from across the country. Together, these leaders designed a first-of-its-kind roadmap for education research and development (R&D) that reflects local priorities and drives evidence-based solutions.
