Growing the Canopy: Bringing Career-Connected Charter Schools into the National Conversation

Across the country, there are extraordinarily exciting things happening inside many charter schools.

Students designing aircraft components alongside engineers. High schoolers logging hours in real medical clinics or veterinary labs. Welding students fabricating parts that will actually be used by local manufacturers. Future teachers leading lessons in elementary classrooms while still in high school. Others are building robots, producing digital media for local businesses, or managing school-based enterprises that earn money while serving their communities.

These aren’t simulations or occasional field trips. In many of these schools, this kind of work is woven directly into the school day and into the academic program itself. Through strong industry partnerships, work-based learning, and clear career pathways, charter schools are showing what it can look like when students graduate with both academic knowledge and real experience.

Anyone who spends time in these schools can feel the difference. Students aren’t just learning about the future, they’re actively building it. Our team has been lucky enough to spend time in several of these schools already, and every visit leaves us energized. If this sounds like your school, please invite us! We’re always looking for the next great example of career-connected learning.

Yet despite the growing momentum behind these kinds of models, charter schools have not always been fully visible in national research on emerging school designs.

A new partnership between the National Charter Schools Institute and the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) aims to change that.

Through our Future Ready by Design: Classroom to Career (Future Ready) initiative, supported by a federal Charter Schools Program (CSP) Model Development and Dissemination grant, our team is working to leverage the Canopy Project – co-led by CRPE and the education nonprofit Transcend – to highlight and learn from more charter schools that are designing powerful career-connected learning experiences for students.

Expanding the National Dataset

The Canopy Project has become an important national effort to map and understand how schools are redesigning learning. The project highlights emerging models that move beyond traditional structures and create more personalized, flexible, and real-world learning experiences for students.

Hundreds of charter schools are already recognized by the Canopy Project, but through this collaboration, our team is working with CRPE to bring even more charter schools into the Canopy dataset, particularly schools that are integrating career-connected learning, industry partnerships, and workforce pathways into their core design.

This matters.

Across the country, charter schools are doing some of the most exciting work in career-connected learning. But because so much of the original charter movement focused on access to higher education, charters focused on workforce pathways have been underrecognized. 

Through this partnership, we can begin to capture a fuller picture of how schools are evolving and where some of the most promising innovations are happening.

Elevating Career-Connected Charter School Models

Future Ready is built around a simple idea: students deserve schools that prepare them for the full range of opportunities after graduation.

In states like Colorado, Ohio, Michigan, Idaho, and Florida, charter schools are helping lead the way. These schools are creating powerful models that combine strong academics with hands-on industry experience, early college coursework, and real exposure to careers.

In some schools, students graduate with industry certifications. In others, they leave high school with college credits, technical skills, and a network of employers already invested in their future.

Connecting this work to the Canopy Project brings these models into a broader national research conversation. It allows researchers and educators to look across different schools and ask important questions about what makes these models work.

What kinds of partnerships make career-connected learning sustainable?
How do schools structure time differently to allow for internships or work-based learning?
What role do authorizers and state policies play in enabling these designs?

Answering those questions can help more schools build strong pathways for students.

Learning From Schools and Sharing What Works

One of the most exciting parts of this work is the opportunity to learn directly from schools that are already doing it well.

Through this partnership, our team and CRPE will highlight examples of charter schools that are building strong career-connected programs and take a closer look at the design choices behind them.

That includes examining how schools:

• Build long-term partnerships with employers and postsecondary institutions
• Integrate work-based learning into the school day
• Align accountability systems with broader student outcomes
• Design pathways that connect high school experiences to real career opportunities

These lessons can help inform the next generation of charter schools and give state leaders, authorizers, and school leaders better tools to support them.

Building a Broader National Community

At its heart, this effort is about building a bigger conversation.

Career-connected learning is gaining momentum across the country, but too often it is happening in isolated pockets. By bringing more charter schools into the Canopy Project, this partnership helps connect those efforts and shine a brighter light on what is possible.

Charter schools have long served as engines of innovation in public education. Many of today’s most exciting career-connected models are emerging from that same spirit of experimentation and problem solving.

Through this partnership with the Canopy Project, our team hopes to help bring these ideas into the national spotlight and accelerate the work of schools that are preparing students not just for graduation, but for the opportunities that come next.