Introduction

Themes in school design: To distill a long list of school practices into meaningful themes, we used a method called Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA). This approach helped us to group together practices that tend to be reported together. These groups, or clusters, highlight patterns in school practices, showing which are related—but they don’t create a strict typology of schools. This is because schools may be using practices from several clusters at the same time, but it’s the frequency of co-occurrence across schools in the data that defines the cluster. The patterns we observed offer insights into how schools are designing student experiences, and how this has shifted over time.

Our analysis followed a mixed-method design, combining both quantitative and qualitative approaches. We started with a quantitative method—using EFA to organize the practices schools report into 4–8 clusters each year. We then evaluated the fit of these clusters by examining the correlations between practices and whether they fit together meaningfully. In particular, we considered how strongly the practices in each cluster relate to one another, whether they show negative correlations, and whether the clusters make thematic sense. Over several years of analysis, we’ve identified four recurring clusters that capture what Canopy schools are implementing. These clusters are:

We used the four clusters to understand how school practices have changed between 2019 and 2024. Our findings come from a combination of simple counts, statistical models (for example, logistic regression), and additional checks to ensure the robustness of our results. We analyzed survey data from the 119 Canopy schools that responded in at least three different years between 2019 and 2024 (note: no survey was conducted in 2020). By using repeated survey responses we were able to track changes within individual schools as well as broader trends across all schools in the Canopy project.

To ensure our findings were reliable, we also ran the analysis on two additional samples: a larger group of schools with at least two years of survey data, and a smaller group of schools with data from all five years. Across these samples, the overall trends remained consistent, adding confidence to our results.

In the sections below, when we say schools are implementing “new” practices, we mean that the school leader initially didn’t report using the practice in one survey, and then began reporting it in a later survey. Follow-up interviews confirmed that many schools actually started or stopped implementing these practices over the study period. Our analysis showed that schools’ responses remained stable over time, except in 2021 when many reported rapid changes due to the shift to hybrid or online instruction during the Covid-19 pandemic. Despite the limitations of self-reporting, there is reason to believe that the Canopy surveys reliably reflect how school practices have changed over time.

Educational justice and holistic student support

In schools that implement practices in the Educational Justice and Holistic Student Supports theme, staff ensure that students grow socially and emotionally, not just academically. Students see their identities and backgrounds reflected in what they learn, and they’re given resources and support according to their needs. Their teachers design curriculum and instruction to make sure that students who have been marginalized develop independence as learners.

Over time, Canopy schools increasingly reported most of the practices in this theme. The greatest rate of adoption for many of these practices was at the height of the pandemic, coinciding with a period of intensified national focus on racial and social justice following widespread protests against systemic racism and police brutality. Since then, adoption has slowed in most cases. And two related practices that we first introduced to the dataset in 2021, “social justice focus” and “antiracist practices,” have been reported at consistent rates without any notable growth.

It’s likely we’ll continue to see schools adopting new practices in the Educational Justice and Holistic Student Supports theme: when we asked school leaders about up to five new practices they want to pilot in the next five years, some of the most common responses showed that leaders are interested in assessing students’ social and emotional learning and adopting more culturally responsive, trauma-informed instructional approaches. And leaders are interested in piloting these practices even if they don’t have much prior experience: using a predictive model, we found that the schools most likely to pilot Educational Justice practices in the future were those that had reported few or even zero existing practices from this theme.

The interactive charts in this section show the percentage of schools with at least three years of data (on the y-axis) on the implementation of practices in each theme over time (with survey years shown on the x-axis). Each blue line represents a different practice. You can hover over a specific line to highlight that practice’s trajectory, and hover over a dot to see how frequently it was reported by school leaders in a specific year.

Deeper learning for mastery

In schools that implement practices in this theme, students learn through inquiry and problem-solving, and show their skills and knowledge through performance assessments rather than traditional tests. Instead of earning credit for learning by finishing a time-based course and getting a passing grade, they earn credit by demonstrating that they’ve mastered specific skills or content.

Schools rarely added these practices during the pandemic, but added them more often after most schools returned to in-person learning. For instance, “performance-based assessment,” in which students demonstrate their learning through methods other than traditional tests, was relatively constant from 2019 through 2021, going from 67% of schools implementing it to 65%, before jumping to 78% of schools implementing it by 2024.

It’s likely we’ll continue to see schools adopting new practices like these: when we asked school leaders about up to five new practices they want to pilot in the next five years, some of the most common responses showed that leaders are interested in assessing students’ deeper learning, agency, and self-directed learning skills, and encouraging students to plan and lead conversations with teachers about their own learning (rather than traditional parent-teacher conferences). Using a predictive model, we found that schools most likely to want to pilot practices in the Deeper Learning for Mastery theme were schools that already implemented some practices in this theme. Future interest in these practices was most likely among schools that were neither starting from zero, nor already implementing most of these practices.

Postsecondary pathways and the world outside school

In schools that implement practices in this theme, students participate in learning beyond the traditional classroom. These practices can include work-based learning, such as internships or apprenticeships; the school encourages and guides them through career exploration. Students can often begin earning college credit in high school through early college models, and students of all ages can receive credit for learning experiences outside traditional classrooms.

Schools have been adopting most of these practices steadily, including during the pandemic. Interviews with leaders underscored the idea that they’ve prioritized strengthening postsecondary pathways and connecting learning to the real world steadily throughout recent years, not necessarily either spurred on or held back by pandemic disruptions.

It’s likely we’ll continue to see schools adopting new practices in the Postsecondary Pathways and the World Outside School theme: when we asked school leaders about up to five new practices they want to pilot in the next five years, some of the most common responses showed that leaders are interested in helping students earn industry-recognized credentials and get college credit in high school through early college programs. And leaders are interested in piloting these practices even if they don’t have much prior experience: using a predictive model, we found that the schools most likely to pilot Postsecondary Pathways practices in the future were those that had reported few or even zero existing practices from this theme.

Individualized and blended learning

In schools that implement practices related to this theme, students pursue their studies partly through online learning and partly in-person. They move through learning activities at their own pace, advance when they’re ready, and access data about their own progress from across multiple learning platforms.

When we analyzed trends over time for practices in the Individualized and Blended Learning theme, we noticed an interesting pattern. The overall trend line for this theme is fairly flat, suggesting at a glance that schools are neither adopting nor ceasing to implement these practices in big numbers. But a closer look at the practices themselves shows that the trend line doesn’t do a good job representing how schools are reporting these practices over time. Schools are steadily and slowly adopting some practices over time, such as providing accommodations to all students regardless of IEP status (from 64% to 83% of schools). But they are reporting others—specifically, those related to blended learning—less often over time (see figure below).

A closer look at the trends over time for blended learning models is what led us to present the analysis about blended learning in Part 2 of our report, where we argue that the pandemic may have been a watershed moment for blended learning and that since then blended learning may be receding, or at least evolving.

Peeking into what Canopy schools anticipate in the future, our survey data doesn’t suggest increased future interest in blended learning. When we asked school leaders about practices they plan to pilot in the future, very few schools planned to pilot blended learning practices. The one exception was the “à la carte model” for blended learning: eight schools hoped to pilot online courses that students take with an online teacher in addition to other face-to-face courses at school. And using a predictive model, we found that schools were actually less likely to want to pilot practices in the Individualized and Blended Learning theme if they didn’t already have some practices from this theme in place. Even those that already implemented some practices were only moderately more likely to want to pilot more.

An important methodological note: In 2023, we restructured how blended learning practices are displayed in the survey. Instead of displaying “blended learning” and the five models side by side, which we had done in the 2019-2022 surveys, we showed respondents the “blended learning” practice first, then asked a follow-up question about the five models only to respondents who reported implementing blended learning. (Since the models are all ways of implementing blended learning, we decided to “nest” them underneath blended learning in this way.) We carefully considered whether this structural change in the survey could explain the decreased reporting of blended learning models in 2023. To check for this, we analyzed individual responses from schools that responded to the survey in 2023 (when we made the change), as well as in prior years, to see if their 2023 responses were notably different from past surveys. We did not find notable reporting differences among repeat-responder schools, which convinced us that the change to the survey structure did not contribute significantly to the changes we observed in schools’ survey responses. Furthermore, we made the same structural change in the survey with two other groups of practices (co-leadership and alternative and non-traditional assessments), and did not see uniform declines in schools reporting those practices the way we did with blended learning models. We concluded that the declines in blended learning models do likely have a basis in reality — in other words, the declines we saw in schools reporting blended learning models likely represent what schools are actually implementing.

Pandemic interruptions to schools’ reported practices

Across the years of Canopy surveys, on average, schools added about three new practices annually, which suggested a relatively steady pace of evolution in the school-wide practices they adopted. But there were variations, so we set out to understand whether certain school characteristics were associated with faster or slower adoption of new practices over time. For example, we wondered if smaller schools might be adopting new practices at a faster rate thano larger schools, or if charter schools were adopting practices faster than traditional district schools.

To understand this, we analyzed data using models that tracked repeated responses from schools over time. This approach allowed us to explore whether certain school characteristics—such as type (elementary, middle, high), location (rural, urban, suburban), governance (district, charter, independent), school size, or student racial diversity—made a difference in how many practices schools added or dropped. What we found was that these school-level characteristics didn’t significantly affect the rate of change. Rural schools were slightly more likely to drop practices each year compared to urban schools, but the difference was small. In general, all schools evolved at similar rates.

However, when we factored the Covid years into our model, we saw that the impact of Covid was much stronger than any other factor in predicting whether schools would add or drop practices. The pandemic acted as a unique force, pushing schools to make more substantial adjustments to their practices than they typically would. This finding highlights Covid as the strongest driver of change in school practices, over and above any other characteristics we included in our model.

As we looked deeper into Covid’s effects, we noticed a pattern we call “switchbacks.” Switchbacks happened when schools reported using a practice one year, then stopped it, only to bring it back later (i.e., a dip). It could also happen the other way: a school might start a new practice, then drop it in a following year (i.e., a bump). This back-and-forth was especially high during the 2020–21 school year, with switchbacks happening over three times more often than in later years. Normally, schools are slightly more likely to temporarily try new practices (“bumps”) than to stop existing ones, but in 2020–21, they were more likely to pause current practices (“dips”).

The type of practices that experienced bumps and dips during Covid shed light on how schools tried to support students through school disruptions. Many schools temporarily added blended learning methods, such as virtual classrooms and flipped or flexible models, to reach students online. These same practices, however, were also among the ones most often paused. The largest temporary drop was in student-led goal setting, which may have been challenging to maintain in remote or hybrid setups for schools unfamiliar with navigating multiple modalities.

Changes in school practices over time