Learning to Improve

Improvement in Action: Advancing Quality in America’s Schools

Anthony S. Bryk

256 pages, Harvard Education Press, 2020

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In Learning to Improve: How America’s Schools Get Better at Getting Better¹, Anthony S. Bryk and his colleagues at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching articulated a set of principles, tools, and processes that educators might use to tackle longstanding inequities in educational outcomes. In the five years since its release, the field of education has seen an explosion of interest in this work. Researchers and practitioners are joining together as improvers to try out these ideas in their local contexts. To capture the most important learnings from this emerging “improvement movement,” Bryk’s newly released companion volume, Improvement in Action: Advancing Quality in America’s Schools, presents dynamic portraits of how six different organizations—including school districts, charter management organizations, and intermediate support networks—put these ideas into practice.

The excerpt below is from the introduction of Improvement in Action. Here, Bryk summarizes the core principles of the improvement paradigm, as detailed in Learning to Improve, that guide productive change in individual organizations and across networked improvement communities. He then offers a preview of how these various organizations embraced these principles and used related tools and methods to solve problems they deeply cared about. Each narrative illustrates how a group of educators came to think about its change efforts in very different ways, and in the course of so doing, fundamentally changed the way that work was carried out in their respective organizations. They now put a premium on learning fast in order to achieve better quality outcomes reliably at scale. In a world where new reform ideas typically just come and go, these organizations present six hopeful accounts of how teachers, administrators, and researchers can join together in new ways to make sustainable and meaningful improvements in students’ lives. — Anthony S. Bryk

Learning to Improve in Action

In Learning to Improve, we brought together a compelling set of ideas, tools, and examples about how educators might better engage to make real progress on longstanding problems of educational inequity. We introduced a guide to continuous improvement organized around six principles. The first principle—to be problem­ specific and user-centered—offers a deceptively complex question: "What is the specific problem or problems you are trying to solve?" The critical word here is specific. Educators typically know what outcomes they want, but often do not know exactly what they need to change to achieve them.

As concerns arise about some educational issue, educators typically move to draw on a standard set of solutions, such as adding a new curriculum, more professional development, hiring extra staff, or introducing a new service. In contrast to just jumping on solutions like this (we referred to this as “solutionitis”), improving organizations take time to analyze the root causes of the particular problem they aim to solve and they do it by being user-centered. Improvers seek to understand problems through the eyes of the students they serve and the adults who work with them. What are they actually experiencing, and how are they making sense of the environment in which they work?

This examination of root causes leads us to the second principle: Attend to the variability in outcomes. Education is complex work and wide variability in performance typically accompanies it. This requires moving beyond knowing that something can work on average to learning how to achieve improved outcomes reliably for different subgroups of students and their teachers, and in the many varied contexts in which they work. This focus on variability, and the sources creating it, is central in attacking disparities in educational outcomes. It stands in stark contrast to all that remains hidden in standard reports about mean differences among sub-groups and average trends. These reports may well document the existence of an educational problem, but they generally offer little insight as to how one might actually solve it.

This consideration drives improvers to the third principle: See the system. It directs attention to the underlying processes, norms, and organizational arrangements that produce unacceptable outcomes year after year. It encourages investigations into assumed chains of causal connections that often remain unexamined. For example, what conditions may be necessary for an investment in instructional coaches to lead to improvements in teacher knowledge that translate into more proficient teaching practices that in turn change the character of students’ learning experiences and ultimately manifest in test results. Improvement teams use their analyses about how their systems actually operate to develop a working theory of improvement.

Principles four and five capture the empirical heart of improvement. Educators today have a lot of student outcome data, but these measures tend to be global in content and typically available only after the work is done, for example end-of-year standardized test scores. Improvers, in contrast, embrace measurement (principle four). They need more timely and finer-grained information that gets down into the actual work processes people enact and the prevailing norms that shape their work, for this is where the observed outcomes take root. Improvement measures signal in “real time” as to what is and isn't working. They also undergird disciplined inquiry cycles (principle five), where changes ideas are tested against data, and then typically revised, retested, and refined in order to work reliably across diverse contexts. Improvers are constantly questioning: ''Are the proposed changes regularly happening? Are we seeing the immediate outcomes expected from these changes? And where these improvements are occurring, is there evidence that this is actually moving us toward the aims we seek?" The kind of causal thinking embedded here will often lead improvers to step back a bit to ask still other, more fundamental questions: "What assumptions might we need to revisit? What else do these results suggest we might need to work on?"

Finally, as educators tackle larger and more complex problems, they organize as improvement networks (principle six). Many of the problems embedded within contemporary educational systems are too complex for educators to solve alone. Addressing such concerns requires coordinated, collective action involving diverse sources of expertise from practitioners, researchers, designers and, depending on the problem, often families and students as well. In response, improvement leaders form networks that support members to develop a shared working theory of improvement and common measures and inquiry tools to facilitate learning from each other. They build mechanisms for consolidating emerging knowledge, making it quickly accessible to others, and they continue to learn from the variation that emerges as change ideas move out into other contexts.

We knew back in 2015 that educators wanted to learn more about improvement, but we did not anticipate how quickly this interest would grow, and with it, how a critical new question would surface: "What does it take to actualize these principles with quality in execution?" Many of the tools and processes of improvement, such as empathy interviews, process maps, and PDSA cycles, are now being taken up in schools. The “secret sauce,” however, is not in the adoption of a principle here or there or the routine use of a particular tool or method but rather in engaging the improvement principles as a different way of thinking and acting in their work. The transformation of an organization into a continuously improving one is no small endeavor, and the tendency to fall back on the old ways is understandable, and even to be expected. The improvement principles represent a fundamental change and a major challenge for educators, and this is true at every level of a school system from the classroom to the senior cabinet and board and out to those entities who partner with them as well. Helping to illumine this organizational transformation into quality in improvement became our next challenge. It is truly a paradigm shift for all involved.

Across the pages of Improvement in Action (2020)², we recount the journeys of six different educational organizations who are undergoing this transformation. Each has created new roles, routines, norms and structures to orchestrate their improvement efforts. Two of the stories involve traditional school districts; two others are accounts of innovative charter management organizations; and two document the efforts of intermediate organizations working with large networks of schools. Each offers a different window into living the improvement paradigm.

The account about Fresno Unified School District, located in California’s Central Valley, introduces us to the metaphor of a “leaky pipeline” that characterizes their improvement challenges. At multiple steps in the journey from high school entry to matriculation in college, Fresno students were falling through the cracks. To improve high school graduation and college-going, especially to more selective institutions, Fresno educators had to orchestrate changes in multiple different processes where their “pipeline leaked.” The Fresno team kept their eyes on how their system actually operated—identifying specific hurdles that students might confront and knock them off track for success. Finding these leaks required longitudinal analyses on the flows of individual students over time from middle school through to college matriculation. The team then tackled these issues one by one. This problem-solving took them into thinking about data in new ways, creating new data tools and processes for their use, and putting in place the staffing and professional development supports necessary for practitioners to turn useable evidence into productive action. Over time, Fresno witnessed a 50 percent increase in student applications to selective post-secondary institutions with the biggest improvements occurring for Latinx and African American students.

The efforts at New Visions, an improvement hub for a network of over 80 New York City high schools, took them into how basic administrative systems around student absenteeism, course-taking, grades, and credits earned contributed to the high school graduation problem they wanted to solve. On the surface, the functioning of these data systems might seem mundane and uninteresting. But the breakthrough at New Visions was to realize that embedded within these processes were taken-for-granted ways of working that needed to be changed. Like Fresno’s leaders, New Visions focused on building good data systems and visualization tools to better see the problems needing address. While tallying up end-of-the year successes and failures might provide adequate accountability reports, they were inadequate to inform improvement. New Visions created a new standard: get the right information to the right people and at the right time so that they can actually make a difference in students’ progress through schooling. Hub staff collaborated with network educators to create a safe environment to field-test and refine new data tools and a new process called the Strategic Data Check-In. Today, substantially more students are now moving successfully through high school onto college, and the SDC process is moving out across the entirety of the New York City Public School System.

The educators as Summit Public Schools, a California-based charter management organization, confronted a unique quality concern. Summit embraces an extraordinarily innovative agenda for high school reform that aims to give students more choice in the work they do and allows them to move at their own pace toward well-articulated learning outcomes. Teachers at Summit function as mentors and advisers supporting students to take charge of their own learning. Figuring out how to actualize these aspirations—every day, for every student, and in every learning context—proved a huge challenge. Specifically, with students moving at their own pace, many moved ahead but some languished and this sub-group was disproportionately English Language Learners. Rising to this equity challenge, Summit invested in developing improvement capabilities among its teachers to tackle this issue; assembled support in a central hub to facilitate their efforts; and built analytic capacity to inform this work. Along the way, Summit cultivated relationships with applied researchers whose knowledge and skills could help them on their journey to improve.

Embrace of the improvement principles at High Tech High in San Diego is a story of organizational change in an unexpected place. The progressive educators who founded High Tech High harbored deep skepticism about data and held a strong commitment to individual teacher autonomy. HTH educators, however, came to recognize that even though everyone was working hard, their organization was coming up short on its core equity aspiration: preparing every student to graduate high school and succeed in college. This recognition propelled them to explore new ways at getting better. Successes in initial projects to improve student progress through the college applications and financial aid processes and at reducing chronic absenteeism expanded interest among HTH educators to learn more. Much like at Summit, an organic organization-wide change process built on early successes. Today, High Tech High operates multiple networked improvement communities across its system of schools. It has developed a strong cadre of teacher leaders who support these improvement efforts and has woven improvement science into its new graduate school of education. They now aim to spread these practices to a next generation of teachers and other educational professionals.

Developments in these two charter management organizations offer an interesting contrast to those in the Menomonee Falls (Wisconsin) School District. Unlike Summit and High Tech High, Menomonee Falls’ transformation did not grow out of initially solving some discrete problems, but rather evolved through skillful executive leadership committed to an ambitious aim: the transformation of the whole district into a continuous improvement organization. In support of this goal, literally every person—teachers, auxiliary staff, operations personnel, board members, the leadership team, and students—was trained in continuous improvement methods. The logic of iterative improvement cycles is now widespread, and reporting on these cycles has become a regular part of school board meetings. Improvements have been advanced on diverse issues from cutting electricity and health care costs to reducing suspension rates in middle schools to improving teaching. Vibrant in this story is a key normative shift from telling educators what to do, and thereby fostering a passive orientation toward change, to catalyzing active agency for improvement—everyone now is learning to improve. As they say at Menomonee Falls: “This is just how we do our work here.”

Lastly, the improvement account for the National Writing Project (NWP) offers a look at some of the distinctive challenges involved forming improvement networks focused on instruction. The Common Core standards brought new emphasis to argument writing, but few educators had much experience teaching this genre and there was little agreement as to what constituted a quality argument. Absent a shared framework for discussing student work, improvements at scale would remain elusive. The standards offered an aspiration, but there was no roadmap to follow. In attacking this problem, NWP drew on the expertise of affiliated university faculty, consulting teachers and the established trust relationships resident in its national network. In just two years, the network designed and refined rich instructional units as grist for students’ writing, ongoing professional development on key pedagogical practices to enable teachers to use these materials well, and a practical tool to examine students’ writing that provides formative feedback to teachers, students and the larger improvement community on their progress. The efforts of the improvement hub at NWP were akin to conducting a symphony—multiple parts, each needing to work well on its own and all needing to be orchestrated well together. NWP achieved high-quality instructional improvement at scale in a remarkably short period of time by drawing on the power of a structured improvement network. 

Each of these six organizations has made real progress. Regardless, their leaders remain humble about their improvement journeys. They acknowledge that they still have much more to learn and do. In this sense, their stories offer dynamic portraits of improvement in action. They afford all of us an opportunity to see the extraordinary in the ordinary day-to-day work of getting better—the what, how, and why of quality in improvement.