An iZone School

The New York City Department of Education created the Innovation Zone (iZone) in 2010 to challenge longstanding assumptions around “business as usual” in K-12 education. While most industries have experienced tremendous change over the past 50 years, our education system has remained remarkably static, adhering to the following set of 19th century assumptions that fail to fully engage and challenge students who have grown up in a digital world:

• School Time: The school calendar revolves around the harvest calendar and consists of 180 days per school year with approximately six hours of instruction per day.
• Teacher Roles: As part of one job, teachers are responsible for managing classrooms, delivering instruction, assessing performance, and presenting feedback to students; teacher compensation is tied to time on the job rather than performance on the job.
• Instructional Delivery: Students are grouped in similar cohorts of 25-30 students who move together through a set of classes taught by a single adult.

Operating under these traditional educational models, U.S. students’ average educational attainment and scores on international assessments have stagnated over the past 20 years. The growing gap between U.S. students’ performance and that of their global counterparts illustrates the very real need to introduce change into the education structure and to accelerate student growth.

New York City has designed the iZone to free schools from the compliance-oriented culture that has inhibited real innovation in our nation’s schools. Schools within the iZone are provided the resources and support to pioneer new models that transform what schools look like, personalizing instruction to the needs of each individual student, and dramatically improving student achievement. Over the next three years, the iZone will help more than 400 schools design, develop, evaluate, and scale disruptive new models that restructure and rethink K-12 education.