While the United States is simultaneously recovering from a global pandemic and facing a national reckoning of racial injustice, the effects of COVID-19 continue to exacerbate academic and opportunity gaps that were decades in the making in K-12 systems. Most students are performing worse than before the pandemic. For students of color, there is a growing learning gap that is disproportionately impacting Black, Brown, and Indigenous students. It would be unjust for the American education system to simply return to its pre-COVID form. The entire ecosystem of learning needs transformative change. Innovation, working in concert with more than $190 billion of K-12 federal relief, can be a method to improve outcomes and tailor whole-child efforts to support learners without any system constraints. In particular, state-constructed innovation zones can provide school districts with a mechanism to identify policy barriers and improve flexibility from state regulations and statutes that impede implementation of new instructional models for the 21st-century learner. This policy brief provides an overview of the concept of innovation zones, how states are using them, and why the time is ripe for innovation zones to catalyze largescale systems change for all students.