Exploring Policy From the Ground Up: Illuminations from the Da Vinci Network

By: Sarah Bishop-Root and Lindsy Ogawa

All images are credited to Da Vinci RISE.

Hundreds of learner-centered leaders who deeply understand their learners’ needs have told us a similar story: they spend an extraordinary amount of energy navigating regulations and engineering workarounds. They’d prefer that energy be invested in young people and learning. This creates a constant tension between local leaders and the broader system structures, priorities, and conditions that were not designed with their learners in mind.

When sites are clear about who they serve, are anchored in a shared learner-centered purpose of education, and know how they will get there through practices, policy becomes a set of tools to reach for and navigate. We also observe that when policies and conditions shift, even the strongest designs become fragile.

Design Begins with Community

When Education Reimagined visited Da Vinci RISE in South Los Angeles, a graduating senior greeted us with a smile. “I’m so excited to tell you about RISE. It’s the best!” She and Erin Whalen, Assistant Superintendent of Student Services and Co-Founder of Da Vinci RISE High School, showed us around, stopping to greet friends, advisors, and social workers. They pointed to Richstone Family Center, one of two nonprofit partners co-located on campus, where learners use their counseling and wellness services. We stopped in a room where she has advisory—a group that unpacks challenges and lifts each other up. As we walked back to the entrance, she paused and said, “These are all my people.”

In a few weeks, she will leave for aviation school in New York. Flying hadn’t always been part of her plan. She had moved around a lot growing up. Her focus had been on getting through the present, not considering what comes next. That changed when a pilot visited the school to talk about their personal and professional journey, one of dozens of professionals who are regularly invited to share at RISE, helping her imagine futures she hadn’t considered before.

Her outlook was the result of a place designed for the lives learners are living.

Da Vinci RISE is part of the Da Vinci Schools network, which comprises five public charter schools and four specialized programs, serving 2,819 students and intended to serve as lab schools for education transformation in which each school could address distinct needs of their community. “We aren’t in competition with neighboring public schools,” said Kaitlin Toon, Former Principal of Da Vinci Connect TK8. “We identify unmet needs of the community and create schools around those needs.” That philosophy has policy roots.

Da Vinci Schools and Wiseburn School District established a Magna Carta to formalize an agreement between them in 2016. It codifies governance, expansion opportunities, and values and practices that shape the partnership and network, including real-world learning and small learning communities, transparency, collaboration, and funding. By putting these commitments in writing, the partners were thinking about sustainability beyond changes in leadership or politics.

Policy Can Create Possibility

In California, the charter law requires that charters operating in a district also offer the grade levels the district already serves. Rather than treat that requirement as a compliance exercise or open a school that would compete with the district’s already strong K-8 programs, Da Vinci asked which population wanted or needed to be served differently. The answer became Da Vinci Connect TK8, a hybrid elementary school built in partnership with the region’s growing community of progressive homeschooling families.

Connect leverages California’s Independent Study policy to offer a hybrid model that supplements home learning with two days of on-campus learning. This creates flexibility to blend real-world and project-based learning, advisories, exhibitions of learning, mastery-based assessments, and the ability to be on-site for four days for families who need it due to work or emergencies.

Da Vinci RISE High School also leverages California’s Independent Study policy. The policy reorients learning around documented experiences at work, home, or on campus rather than seat time and attendance. This creates flexibility for learners with complex life circumstances, like those in foster care or experiencing housing instability.

RISE was originally seeded through a $10 million XQ grant to redesign high school for at-promise youth. This guaranteed funding and marketing visibility gave them a runway to design and launch a model with fewer constraints. To implement their vision, RISE leveraged California’s countywide benefit charter policy to eliminate district boundaries, enabling it to exist in multiple locations across Los Angeles County and be close to their learner population. Also critical to RISE’s approach is the Alternative Education Provision, which enables formal partnerships with workforce programs such as The Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) and YouthBuild. Strengthening these partnerships became important to support older students, address geographic limitations, and establish eligibility under applicable Education Code provisions. Together, these policies created the conditions for a school designed around the lives of young people.

Policy Can Create Challenges

The same policies that created opportunity also introduce challenges. For example, the Independent Study Model requires tedious explanation and documentation to demonstrate instructional rigor, attendance compliance, and fiscal sustainability. This policy also decreases the resources schools using this model receive—charter schools receive less per-pupil funding than district schools, and independent study schools receive less than that, with transportation also left for these schools to solve for.

This year, when the countywide benefit charter’s policy changed, RISE learned that they no longer fit its criteria. RISE has found itself needing to secure another authorizer despite promising outcomes, including increased graduation rates for youth in foster care, growth in academic achievement and engagement, and testimonials from young people and caregivers. As part of this shift, they had to accept that joining a district would likely entail changes in policy and conditions, such as transitioning to a seat-time model, which would require adjustments to their approach to attendance and real-world learning. “It’s just a different way to look at time. We’ll figure it out,” said Erin, who remains confident they can achieve their vision and values within different parameters.

Despite extensive efforts, the road to charter reauthorization has not yet been in their favor, and the consequences of losing it have already been felt. It has required the closure of their sites at Richstone Family Center and A Place Called Home, the reassignment of staff, and individualized placement planning to ensure that every current student can continue in Da Vinci programming. As they identify another district that could be a potential authorizer, RISE will continue serving young people as a program, thanks to partners and funders who have chosen to sustain the work for at least another year.

Policy Should Sustain Learner-centered Design

The journey of the young woman who greeted us wasn’t shaped by regulations. It was shaped by people and the practices designed for her and each of her peers to be known.

Da Vinci RISE is not unusual in this regard. Like so many learner-centered sites across the country, they have run toward and embraced young people whose lives are the most complex. Yet these are also the places spending the most energy navigating the education system, while proving their impact to keep the lights on. If we believe education is a public good that strengthens our society, then policies should be driven by enabling and sustaining places like Da Vinci RISE, which work alongside learners and families facing the greatest barriers. When we prioritize creating the conditions for young people facing the greatest barriers to rise, we all rise.

“Yes, we find ways to work with the system,” Erin told us. “But it’s really hard. It shouldn’t need to be this hard.”

Lindsy Ogawa is senior partner of practice and learning at Education Reimagined. She works alongside educators nationwide to bring learner-centered education into practice. A former special education teacher, she believes in the brilliance of every young person and the responsibility of education to nurture their interests and respond to their needs so they can shape purposeful, sustainable lives with and for their communities. Lindsy lives in the Bay Area.

Sarah Bishop-Root is the Senior Partner of Policy at Education Reimagined. She was formerly the Policy Director of Next Generation Learning at ExcelinEd and led the Network of State Innovation Partners, a community of practice supporting state education agencies. Prior to ExcelinEd, Sarah worked at Blackboard, focusing on open education and educators’ adoption of online best practices. Sarah earned an MSEd in Instructional Systems Technology from Indiana University Bloomington.