Our Mission
Our mission is to serve as a collaborative hub that convenes, connects, catalyzes, and communicates best practices, resources, and expertise to support the launch, growth, and success of empowered district school communities to improve outcomes for California's historically and systemically underserved students.
What We Do
Convene
We facilitate communities of practice of aspiring and existing empowered district school communities and school systems to share best practices, learn together, and identify opportunities to strengthen work through changes in practice, policy, advocacy, and collective action.
Connect
We connect aspiring and existing empowered district school communities and school systems to best in class experts, partners, and organizations to provide technical assistance and support to explore, design, launch, grow, and strengthen empowered district schools and empowering school systems.
Catalyze
We serve as an intermediary funder to support empowered district schools and school systems design, and to launch, grow, and strengthen their work.
Communicate
We identify and highlight bright spot successes and practices in empowered district schools and empowering systems. We advocate for policies and conditions that support empowered district schools and empowering districts.
How We Define
Empowered District Schools
and Empowering Districts
Empowered District Schools
Empowered District Schools are community-centered models that enable educators, families, and students to make decisions and control their resources in order to build and sustain student-centered schools.
High performing empowered district schools often:
-
Offer innovative or community school models that are student centered and require a different set of conditions in order to best serve the needs of their students and communities
-
Are granted formal decision-making authority (through an MOU, CBA, or other types of contract) or informal decision-making authority (through leadership goodwill) over a set of operational levers typically held by the central office and/ or school board - e.g., hiring, schedule, budget, curriculum, assessment, and/or governance
-
Include distributed leadership structures that work to empower educators, families, and community leaders to authentically participate in decision-making processes alongside school and district leaders
Empowering Districts
Empowering Districts enable and support educators, families, and school communities to make decisions and control a variety of resources that lead to exceptional student outcomes.
High performing empowering districts often have:
-
Aligned leaders
-
A clear theory of change that includes site based decision making
-
Supportive policies and labor agreements
-
Strong systems and structures
How to Get Involved
Take Our Survey
Principals, District Leaders, Teachers/ Teacher Leaders, Instructional Coaches, and Parent/Family Leaders are encouraged to take our survey.
This survey is deigned to identify both existing and aspiring district schools and empowering districts across California.
We will use this survey to learn more about your school/district, build a powerful network of school communities and district leaders, and provide information for future programs, initiatives and funding opportunities.