Systems That Succeed Summit

North Texas is home to some of the most dynamic and promising work in American education. Traditional public-school districts and charter networks across the region are doing things that deserve to be seen, studied, and replicated. Yet too often the leaders doing that work do not have structured opportunities to learn from each other across organizational lines.

The Systems That Succeed Summit is designed to change that. It is a practitioner-led convening that brings together leaders from high-performing traditional public and charter school systems to share what is actually working for students, in their own words, with evidence.

The Dallas-Fort Worth region sits at a remarkable intersection. It is home to some of the state’s most improved traditional public-school districts and a thriving and diverse charter school sector. It is also a region where the professional learning infrastructure has not always kept pace with the ambition of its educators.

Research consistently shows that the effectiveness of teachers and school leaders are the top two school-related factors in student success. Yet many North Texas education leaders have limited structured access to the kind of practitioner knowledge that could accelerate their own improvement work. They know that high-performing systems exist. What they need is a credible, accessible way to learn from them.

The Gap This Summit Fills

• High-performing traditional public and charter systems rarely share what is working with each other across organizational lines. The professional learning ecosystem is fragmented by sector.
• Most national conferences bring researchers and consultants. This summit brings practitioners: the superintendents, principals, and instructional leaders who did the work, with the data to show it.

North Texas educators attending the Learning Forward Annual Conference will have a built-in opportunity to participate the day before, connecting local learning to a national professional learning community of more than 3,000.

The summit will run for approximately half a day on the Saturday before the Learning Forward Annual Conference. It is designed for 75-300 North Texas education leaders and will be free or low-cost to attend thanks to your donation.

Learning Forward is the professional learning association for educators, headquartered in North Texas and operating nationally and internationally for 57 years. We are uniquely positioned to convene this summit because we are trusted across sectors, because we bring the research base and facilitation expertise to draw out the right stories, and because our annual conference provides a built-in infrastructure for the convening that no standalone event could match.

We are not a think tank presenting findings. We are a practitioner community creating the conditions for educators to learn from each other. That distinction matters. The Systems That Succeed Summit is designed in the spirit of Karin Chenoweth’s groundbreaking work documenting high-performing, high-poverty school systems, and grounded in 57 years of Learning Forward’s knowledge about what it takes to build professional learning systems that actually change practice.