As students and communities emerge from the ravages of a global pandemic, authorizing faces a key challenge: embracing its fundamental role of providing high-quality educational opportunities, while evolving to meet new demands and expectations, especially those created by the pandemic. How it navigates this tension will impact millions of students and families.

This moment presents a golden opportunity for authorizers to model, share learnings, and lead. Authorizers who balance autonomy, accountability, and access appropriately—based on what we’ve learned in the pandemic—can support schools to help students, especially students of color and low-income students, to not just recover, but thrive.

Learn more through our recent analysis of opportunities to evolve the field, Innovation After the Pandemic: Opportunities to Evolve Authorizing and School System Oversight.