Making Room for What Matters - Innovative School Leaders Want Accountability, but With a Lighter Footprint

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by James

This report examines how leaders of Canopy’s innovative schools experience current state accountability practices and what accountability reforms they want for the future. Drawing on surveys from 186 innovative school leaders and follow-up interviews, it analyzes mixed effects of state testing on innovation, including gaps revealed versus limits in capturing school quality. Findings show limited usefulness for improving outcomes and concerns that accountability makes piloting new approaches and personalized learning harder.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages23

Reading Time58 min

AccessFree to download

Introduction

About the Canopy project

About the schools we studied this year

What do we mean by "state accountability"?

Key Findings

Making Room for What Matters: Innovative School Leaders Want Accountability, but With a Lighter Footprint Chelsea Waite, David Nitkin, and Janette Avelar October 2025 Introduction In the U. S., public education is at a crossroads. Artificial intelligence is reshaping the opportunities young people will have for work and social connection; basic math and literacy skills have been declining for a decade; and too many students and families find school increasingly irrelevant. Recent efforts to dismantle federal education infrastructure signal dissatisfaction, and accountability for student outcomes is now up for debate. Some argue that accountability must be strengthened; others increasingly question whether holding schools accountable for test scores makes sense at all. Since 2022, in our annual scan of innovative schools—the Canopy project—accountability has regularly come up as one of the key policy factors that affects schools’ ability to design and implement new learning models that will better serve students. As we have written before, Canopy schools are innovating to solve urgent problems by increasing student agency and improving achievement. They are changing how students learn and how teachers teach, responding to community priorities, and preparing students to thrive in an uncertain, AI-driven future. These innovations don’t appear to come at the expense of performance on traditional student learning outcomes; exploratory research has found that on average, Canopy schools perform similarly to other comparable schools on traditional measures, and many also self-report promising results in areas that traditional metrics don’t capture. This report informs state and national discussions about the future of accountability policy by answering two questions: (1) How are leaders of Canopy schools affected by current state accountability practices? And (2) What accountability policies do they hope to see in the future? We answer these questions using data from Canopy’s annual survey of 186 innovative school leaders (see more below), as well as interviews with eight of those leaders. About the Canopy project: Canopy is co-led by CRPE and Transcend. It’s a national scan to understand where and how schools—district, charter, and independent—are creating more engaging, effective, and empowering learning environments. The project is focused on schoolwide approaches, not just classroom-level experiments. To be in the Canopy project, schools are first nominated by organizations with expertise in school transformation. Leaders of the nominated schools are invited to complete a survey; responses populate Canopy’s free public database with profiles for each school, available at www. [CanopySchools.org](CanopySchools.org). About the schools we studied this year: Leaders from 186 schools responded to the 2025 Canopy school survey out of 883 nominated schools that were invited to participate. Of the schools that responded, 147 were public district schools (44%) or charter schools (35%) . Responding schools serve widely varying student populations; 66% served high school grades, 52% served middle school grades, and 43% served elementary grades. We asked public district and charter schools about their experiences with state accountability; we did not ask independent schools these questions. While participating schools hail from 41 states, our sample size was insufficient to disaggregate state-level trends. 2 MAKING ROOM FOR WHAT MATTERS: INNOVATIVE SCHOOL LEADERS WANT ACCOUNTABILITY, BUT WITH A LIGHTER FOOTPRINT What do we mean by “state accountability”? States design and administer accountability systems for their schools, including by defining performance expectations, procuring and administering standardized achievement tests, and in some cases, intervening in underperforming schools. All states are bound by federal requirements embedded in the federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), including annual testing in Eng

FAQs

What questions does the report aim to answer?

It asks how Canopy school leaders are affected by current state accountability practices, and what accountability policies they hope to see in the future.

What are the report’s main findings about innovation?

State accountability has mixed effects: it can reveal performance gaps and focus attention, but it often fails to capture school quality and provides little useful information for improving student outcomes.

Do Canopy leaders want to eliminate state accountability systems?

No. They want changes instead, including balancing state test data with other evidence about learning opportunities and outcomes, and right-sizing state testing for a lighter footprint.

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by James