Engaging District and School Leaders in Continuous Improvement: Lessons from the 2nd Year of Implementing the CORE Improvement Community (original) (raw)

Abstract

California's shift towards continuous improvement in education makes understanding how districts and schools can learn to improve a more pressing question than ever. The CORE Improvement Community (CIC), a network of California school districts engaged in learning about improvement together, is an important testing ground to learn about what this work entails. This report continues drawing lessons from the CIC's second year as its districts work together towards a common aim: to improve the mathematics achievement of African American and Latinx students in Grades 4-8. The CIC applies a specific continuous improvement approach, called improvement science, to support teams in reaching the aim. Improvement science, unlike many approaches to reform, is not a specific "program" designed to fix educators' performance in a particular aspect of their work (e.g., mathematics instruction). Instead, it is an approach and tools through which educators can better understand the causes of lagging performance, select ideas that they believe will lead to improvement, test them, and collect and analyze data from those tests to systematically see if their ideas indeed yield better outcomes. In 2016-17, the work of the CIC consisted of building district teams that conducted systems analysis to understand the achievement gap in their respective contexts. In 2017-18, the CIC launched local improvement teams (LITs) at schools, which used tools and protocols of improvement science to identify strategies that could impact the problem of practice, test those ideas, and gather data about the impacts of those change ideas. The first section of the report briefly explains the policy context in California and the history of the CORE districts' collaboration. The second part of the report details four major lessons learned from the CIC this year: 1. The simultaneous goals of improving math achievement while building capacity for continuous improvement o er both benefits and challenges for the CORE Districts. 2. Districts have a pivotal role to play in supporting and sustaining continuous improvement e orts focused on classroom instruction. 3. Context matters. Preexisting structures and processes, time for educator collaboration, and supportive leadership all influence continuous improvement e orts. 4. District and school leaders are excited about the potential of continuous improvement to spur deep and lasting improvement. The lessons learned from CORE's second year of implementing the CIC have broad implications throughout the state and the nation as educational organizations seek to bring continuous improvement to bear on problems that have been intractable to date.

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  27. Angela Gong is a graduate student in the Education and Public Policy joint degree (MA/ MPP) program at Stanford University. She was previously a middle school science teacher in Oklahoma City and a test developer for NAEP in Washington, DC. She is interested in how school-and district-level leaders gather, interpret, and act on data, especially formative achievement data.
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  30. Taylor N. Allbright is a doctoral candidate in Urban Education Policy at the University of Southern California's Rossier School of Education. Her research focuses on e orts to further educational equity in K-12 schools, investigating how leaders design and implement policies with equity goals, the enactment of policies intended to mitigate racial inequity, and the politics and process of educational policy change. She also seeks to bridge research, policy, and practice with scholarship that directly informs the work of educational leaders.
  31. Eupha Jeanne Daramola is a doctoral student in the K-12 education policy program at the University of Southern California's Rossier School of Education. Her work focuses on the relationship between education policy implementation and school racial climate.