Learning to Improve: How America’s Schools Can Get Better at Getting Better

Abstract

In response to the continuing failure of many research-based interventions to spur broadscale instructional improvements, a number of researchers have turned their attention to the goal of enhancing organizational capacity. To achieve this end, researchers and practitioners in education have increasingly embraced the discipline of improvement science (Lewis, 2015), which relies on “rapid tests of change to guide the development, revision and continued fine-tuning of new tools, processes, work roles and relationships” (Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, n.d., para. 1). In Learning to Improve: How America’s Schools Can Get Better at Getting Better, Anthony S. Bryk, Louis M. Gomez, Alicia Grunow, and Paul G. LeMahieu translate the major ideas of improvement science to educational settings, drawing on their work with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching as well as high-profile examples of similar efforts in other sectors. The result is an eminently readable core set of principles that is likely to resonate with and challenge all who are involved in the work of improving educational outcomes.The authors begin by developing a compelling diagnosis of the problem troubling those seeking to improve educational organizations. They argue that there is no universal mechanism in education for transforming the wisdom and knowledge experts accumulate as they work into a broader professional knowledge base. They also provide a number of examples of how well-intentioned educational reforms across the ideological spectrum were unsuccessful because they were formed around a novel solution (such as the small schools movement, an outgrowth of the trend of corporate downsizing) rather than a practitioner-driven problem and were imposed from above without attention to the ways local conditions might require adaptation. To address these two challenges, the authors argue that practitioners, policy makers, and researchers should collaborate across traditional organizational boundaries to engage in ongoing disciplined inquiry. The book introduces six key principles that are foundational to the application of improvement science to the work of school improvement within and across networked communities.The first principle is making the work of improvement problem specific and user centered. A common tendency—one certainly not unique to the field of education—is to begin the work of improvement with a solution but no clear understanding of the problem the solution is meant to address. As an example, Bryk et al. describe the recent federally supported effort, grounded in microeconomic theory, to push schools to adopt financial incentives for teachers based on student growth on standardized tests. Such an approach is intuitive and elegant but assumes a problem that is not actually borne out by the research: poor performance is primarily a result of a lack of effort on the part of teachers. Nevertheless, merit pay has spread rapidly over the past few years, and, unfortunately, evidence from randomized control trials suggests that such reforms have not resulted in improved student outcomes.An alternative approach, the authors suggest, would begin with understanding the problem—one being the poor performance and attrition of many new teachers. By focusing on the problem, Bryk et al. highlight two important insights that make the solution of financial incentives less compelling: teachers are more likely to persist when they have strong ties to their colleagues, and poor performance is primarily due to a lack of know-how, not a lack of effort. To illustrate their point, the authors tell the story of one district leader trying to improve the quality of teacher feedback. Instead of simply developing a new protocol, he first talked to new teachers about their experiences receiving feedback. He quickly found that the problem was not that teachers were not receiving enough feedback but that there was an incoherent system of providing feedback, with some teachers receiving too little, others too much, and most receiving feedback that contradicted advice from other sources. Bryk et al. conclude the chapter with a refreshing step back, emphasizing that the approach of focusing on the user (e.g., the teacher who receives feedback) is not just more effective, but it also gives dignity and respect to those practitioners working in schools each day.The second principle, focusing on variation in performance, has far-reaching implications for educational policy, as Bryk et al. highlight the weaknesses of both methodological and organizational practices that do not leverage the insight embedded in performance variation. First, they critique the reliance on randomized control trials to guide educational improvement, arguing that such research prioritizes precise measures of average effectiveness over illumination of the variation in effectiveness across particular contexts. They argue that there is more of a need for resea