Tag Archives: School Improvement

Leveraging Teacher Leadership for Innovation and Equity: Lead the Change Interview with Justin Reich

Posted on November 8, 2023 by | Leave a comment

In this month’s Lead the Change interview, Justin Reich reflects on his work on educational systems improvement by targeting the instructional core through adaptive design models. Reich is an associate professor of digital media in the Comparative Media Studies/Writing department at MIT and the director of the Teaching Systems Lab. He is the author of Iterate: The Secret to Innovation in Schools and Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can’t Transform Education, and he is the host of the TeachLab Podcast. He earned his doctorate from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and was the Richard L. Menschel HarvardX Research Fellow. The LtC series is produced by Alex Lamb and colleagues from the Educational Change Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association. A pdf of the fully formatted interview is available on the LtC website.

Lead the Change (LtC): The 2024 AERA theme is “Dismantling Racial Injustice and Constructing Educational Possibilities: A Call to Action.”  This theme charges researchers and practitioners with confronting racial injustice directly while imagining new possibilities for liberation. The call urges scholars to look critically at our global past and look with hope and radicalism towards the future of education. What specific responsibility do educational change scholars have in this space? What steps are you taking to heed this call?

Justin Reich: I’ve had the great privilege of doing a little bit of work with AERA Past President Rich Milner. In a webinar in 2021, Rich explained that twenty years ago he felt isolated and off the beaten path in his work on advancing racial equity in schools. Then, he expressed his excitement at the current surge of interest in these crucial issues. The field caught up to where Rich had been for many years. His welcoming frame reminds me that some work in educational change and improvement hasn’t always centered these issues, and there are other scholars who have been building in this domain for many years. So, as any of us take up this “call to action” to dismantle injustice and construct possibility, we’d do very well to look back on prior bodies of research to discover what we can learn from folks who have been doing the work for some time. 

Justin Reich

When you ask about “steps,” it reminds me of some of the research that I did for Iterate. Over the last decade, human-centered design has developed and become more prevalent, as has the field of “Design Justice,” the name of a book by my colleague Sasha Costanza-Chock. And, of course, human centered design has encountered the same turn to anti-racism/ anti-oppression that education reform and many other humanistic endeavors have in recent years. My question was this: In design models that take design justice seriously, does this entail new “steps” in design processes, or new attitudes, frames, and moves within existing steps? In Plan-Do-Study-Act or Design Based Implementation Research or ideo/d.school style Design Thinking, does design justice show up as a new “step” or as modifications to existing phases? My investigation revealed the near universal consensus is that there isn’t a “justice” step. It’s a set of values, mindsets, and actions that affect all the parts of our work.

All that’s to say, in improvement cycles, there probably isn’t a “justice step” or an “anti-racist step” but rather a commitment to those principles throughout our work. 

LtC: In much of your work, you offer strategies for teachers and their organizations to approach educational change in manageable and thoughtful steps that leverage strengths. Across this work, what are some of the major lessons practitioners and scholars of Educational Change can learn from your work and experience?  

JR: A distinctive feature about improvement work in schools is that the changes that matter most happen in what Richard Elmore called the instructional core, the place where teachers, students, and the resources for learning connect. Schools have lots of other parts–HVAC systems, busses, cafeterias, parking lots, standardized tests, intercoms, and on and on–but if you are interested in improving learning, the action is in the instructional core. 

Schools have lots of other parts–HVAC systems, busses, cafeterias, parking lots, standardized tests, intercoms, and on and on– but if you are interested in improving learning, the action is in the instructional core.

The work that teachers do in this instructional core is astonishingly varied and fine grained. On any given school day, we teach kids to sound out diphthongs, tie their shoes, stand in line, factor polynomials, convert carbohydrates to ATP in the Krebs Cycle, conjugate Spanish verbs, hit a shuttlecock with a badminton racket, how to have sex safely, why they should not have sex until marriage, to obey their government, to challenge their government, and on and on and on. So if you are a superintendent with an idea like, “let’s use formative assessment more frequently to guide our instruction,” and you want the school system to use those assessments weekly, then, functionally, you’ve just placed an order for 45 weeks of assessment multiplied by 13 grades multiplied by the number of subjects that you teach in your district. These are not interchangeable assessments: if someone makes a great formative assessment about factoring polynomials it probably won’t help you in evaluating students sounding out diphthongs. In fact, a formative assessment in your earth science unit on meteorology may not help you much in the next unit on plate tectonics.  

The only people in the system numerous enough to generate the variety of specific, contextual innovations needed to implement a straightforward change like “add more formative assessment” are teachers. There are simply not enough coaches, TOSAs, APs, principals, central office people, etc. to do that work. So, this is my first point: teacher leadership is absolutely essential to innovation. The only people who can make the fine-grained modifications to each local classroom context are teachers. 

So how do teachers choose to adopt new practice? How do they pick up new innovation? If you ask them, as John Diamond did in his article “Where the Rubber Meets the Road” they will tell you their main source of inspiration is “other teachers.” So, every change leadership or innovation problem is actually a peer learning problem. 

When you put these two stylized facts together—that teacher leadership is essential to generating innovation and teacher peer learning is essential to scaling innovation, in my mind, you have the basic model for the conditions of innovation. Want new things? Teachers will have to build and adapt them. Want new things to spread and scale? There need to be time and space for teacher to teacher peer learning. Even when you see things that look top down, like some of the science of reading initiatives going on, look under the hood and you’ll see this same basic process. A small cohort of enthusiastic teachers chooses to adopt a new practice, while the bulk are patient pragmatists–participating in limited compliance until they see results and learn from their peers. 

In Iterate, I call this the Cycle of Experiment and Peer Learning, and it’s the core model that I use to explain how schools change, and how we can think about supporting that change. 

LtC: In your new book, Iterate, you offer different models for envisioning and enacting change. How do you think about balancing the need for immediate change to more equitably serve students and the iterative processes that quality work requires?

If there were known, immediate, dependable, effective steps to improve educational environments or to make them more equitable, we would do them! Even things that work well in one place, do not easily translate to new spaces. They need to be broken apart, reassembled, and grafted into their new environment. 

So, to me, “immediate change to more equitably serve students” is not a realistic option. There is only the slow, steady, shoulder-to-the-wheel work of tinkering and incremental improvement. I happen to think iterative cycles of experiment, testing, feedback, and sharing are great ways of doing this shoulder to the wheel work, but there are other more linear models as well. 

Change takes time! Start today!

LtC: Educational Change expects those engaged in and with schools, schooling, and school systems to spearhead deep and often difficult transformation. How might those in the field of Educational Change best support these individuals and groups through these processes?

JR: I have a few thoughts in Iterate about this.  One is to take joy seriously, and to cultivate environments where faculty sincerely enjoy working with each other, because it’s fun. With the incentives and career ladders that we have in schools, and with the demands we have on teachers contracted time, work on systems improvement essentially takes place during teacher discretionary time. Maybe they’ll make schools better. Or maybe they’ll grade or go home and play with their kids. In my experience, the schools where faculty effectively collaborate with each other are places where the teachers really enjoy their time working together to make schools better. So, joy, enjoyment, satisfaction matter. 

On the flipside, we need to acknowledge that all change involves loss. Doing new things involves saying good-bye to old things. Launching new ideas requires leaving old practice behind. That means experienced teachers needing to grieve as they say goodbye to old practices. Even when there is a certain joy in picking up something new, there needs to be time to mourn what we leave behind. Robert Evans The Human Side of Change has good ideas on this.

Take joy seriously and cultivate environments where faculty sincerely enjoy working with each other because it’s fun...the schools where faculty effectively collaborate with each other are places where the teachers really enjoy their time working together to make schools better. So, joy, enjoyment, satisfaction matter. 

I also share some research in Iterate that my colleague Peter Senge did with folks at the MIT Sloan School of Management and others. I like to tell the story this way. Peter and colleagues are trying to figure out how to make firms better. Where does work get done in firms? In teams. What do teams do? Well, fundamentally, they communicate and collaborate. What are some of the best predictors of effective communication? One turns out to be “the quality of listening.” Typically, we listen to hear moments in a conversation where we can break in with our ideas, or we listen to see if people agree or disagree with us. But we can also choose to listen to sincerely understand the perspective of others– not to wait to say our next piece, but to really hear another person out. I love this story because these nerdy MIT guys look at firms and economic success and they identify “the quality of listening” as an essential element of success.  But of course, the other thing to do is to pay teachers more, which is probably the best way to show and offer support. 

LtC: Where do you perceive the field of Educational Change is going? What excites you about Educational Change now and in the future?

JR: There are many folks who know a lot more about the field than I do; in some respects, I approach it much more like a practitioner than a researcher. As an observer of the field, I’m excited about growing interest in issues of racial injustice. I’m also heartened by a general consensus across multiple models–design based implementation research, networked improvement communities, some of Peter Senge’s work on Learning Organizations, and others– about how schools get better. I don’t think Iterate pushes a whole lot of new ground forward in terms of theory or principles, it’s really about getting these ideas to educators in an accessible format. Put another way, we know a lot about the broad contours of how effective school improvement can work: the core challenges are how to implement these sound ideas in the infinite variety of contexts and specifics. Even if we don’t have a map for every context, we have a pretty good compass. 

[W] e know a lot about the broad contours of how effective school improvement can work: the core challenges are how to implement these sound ideas in the infinite variety of contexts and specifics. Even if we don’t have a map for every context, we have a pretty good compass.

To me the most exciting thing about this particular moment for working in school change is this: while the pandemic was devastating in many respects for schools, teachers, and students, it also showed how incredibly malleable schools are. Everything we thought was fixed turned out to be contingent–schedules, buildings, routines, busses, grades. As a teacher in Madison, Wisconsin told me, “We know how to change. We’ve been changing every three weeks for the past 18 months.” Teachers are tired and beaten down, but I think this newfound sense of possibility remains a latent seed that we can cultivate and help grow. 

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Research, Practice, and School Improvement: Lead the Change Interview with Elizabeth A. Zumpe

Posted on December 21, 2022 by | Leave a comment

In this month’s Lead the Change (LtC) interview Elizabeth A. Lumpe shares reflections on her experiences as researcher, teacher, and a participant in a series of research-practice partnerships in Massachusetts and California. Zumpe is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor in the School of Education at University of Massachusetts Lowell. Starting in January, she will be an Assistant Professor in Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the Jeannine Rainbolt College of Education at the University of Oklahoma in Tulsa. The LtC series is produced by Alex Lamb and colleagues from the Educational Change Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association. A pdf of the fully formatted interview is available on the LtC website,

Lead the Change (LtC): The 2023 AERA theme is “Interrogating Consequential Education Research in Pursuit of Truth” and charges researchers and practitioners with creating and using education research to disrupt institutionalized forms of discrimination. The call urges scholars to challenge traditional methods of inquiry in order to create increasingly useful, responsive, and equity-oriented research that can be used by schools to develop informed policies and practices to better support students. What specific responsibility do educational change scholars have in this space? What steps are you taking to heed this call?

Elizabeth Zumpe (EZ): We live in a time in which educational problems are both urgent and complex. Expectations for public schools have risen substantially over the past 40 years (Mehta, 2013). During the same time, income inequality has also risen (Sommeiller & Price, 2018), and our school system has become resegregated (Government Accountability Office, 2022). Amid a global pandemic and a resurgent racial reckoning, a paradigm of standards-based accountability (Mehta, 2013) continues to dominate education policies. Educators serving high-poverty communities of color find themselves in under-resourced schools labeled as “chronically low-performing” and subject to sanctions. Meanwhile, teacher shortages are growing as many educators leave the profession (Marshall et al., 2022).

I find myself asking, what is the role of education scholars in the midst of this reality? Clearly, research is needed for describing and diagnosing these conditions. But is that enough, given the complexity and gravity of the problems? Perhaps because of my prior career as a public school teacher for over a decade, I think that bridging the research-practice gap is imperative. This bridging requires more than dissemination and brokerage. The work of research needs to be useful to help solve the problems in our education system. We cannot learn how to solve these problems at a distance from the daily realities of preK-12 schools. To understand how improvement unfolds, more scholars will need to get involved in the work of improving.

This interest drove my involvement in a multi-year research-practice partnership (RPP) with a Californian school district. The RPP included a research team from the University of California Berkeley and a team of district leaders. This district serves a high-poverty community of color, has been flagged for low performance for years, and has a reputation of micro-political conflict. We decided up front that our partnership needed to do more than document and describe the challenges. We wanted to learn side by side with educators how to strive towards improvement amid conditions of complexity and adversity. This required researchers to become aware of and curious about the practical dilemmas that educators face. We became embedded in day-to-day decision making, conducting action research as we took part in the improvement work. Researchers and practitioners—district leaders, school leaders, and teachers—met regularly to co-design improvement plans and professional learning and to study the uptake and limitations.

This is not how most academic research traditionally occurs. This approach means putting practitioners’ needs at the center of inquiry. It also means wading into the complexity of urban school districts and recognizing that scholars do not necessarily have all of the expertise. An RPP of this type, therefore, requires new methods and new role identities.

Building on these ideas, in the past year, I helped launch a new RPP between the University of Massachusetts Lowell and the Lowell Public Schools. With co-PI Jack Schneider, this RPP involves researchers and practitioners co-designing a school quality data dashboard and a professional learning series for applying methods of continuous improvement. Research has not yet revealed much about how to build capacity for evidence-informed collective learning in high-poverty school districts that face resource scarcity, turnover, and pressures from test-driven accountability policies (Zumpe, 2022a). We hope that our work in Lowell will begin to shed light on this.

“An RPP means wading into the complexity of urban school districts and recognizing that scholars do not necessarily have all of the expertise.”

LtC: In your work, you use improvement science and design-based school improvement models to define and solve problems in school systems. What are some of the major lessons the field of Educational Change can learn from your work and experience? 

EZ: My research and collaborations with educators have taught me the importance of building capacity for organizational problem solving. I first learned about this while involved in research and development within an innovative EdD program at the University of California, Berkeley, the Leadership for Educational Equity Program (LEEP). In the book, Design-Based School Improvement: A Practical Guide for Education Leaders, by Rick Mintrop, we describe a pedagogy developed in LEEP for education leaders to use design-based problem solving to address an equity-relevant problem of practice in their own organizations (Mintrop, 2017). Initial phases of this approach involve developing a theory of action. This entails first defining, framing, and diagnosing the problem. Then, leaders set goals and identify change drivers—or powerful social psychological forces—that can enable self-directed learning. Throughout this work, education leaders conduct local needs assessments to learn with and from people in the organization and co-design the change process. These steps are similar to principles of improvement science promoted by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (Bryk et al., 2015).

However, through action research within LEEP, we also discovered that it is not straightforward for education leaders to learn how to become organizational problem solvers. Tracing how one cohort of leaders developed theories of action over two years, we found that leaders’ existing ways of thinking about improvement interfered. As described in an article published in the American Journal of Education, we found a countervailing mindset that persisted over time (Mintrop & Zumpe, 2019). Rather than seeking to understand and solve a particular problem, leaders tended to start out with a preferred solution they wanted to implement and to frame their problem of practice as “the absence of my solution.” This implementation-oriented framing strongly constrained how leaders used evidence, engaged with local participants, and thought about change.

“Education leaders, scholars, and policymakers should do more to involve the people in schools in deciding which problems to solve and to build their capacity to learn how to solve them.”

For education leaders, focusing on implementation seems a rational approach to improvement. The typical work conditions they face in districts and schools do not create an environment that favors problem solving. Education leaders are often handed policies or “best practices” to implement. But many also face frustrations about reform churn (Hess, 2011) and so-called “resistance” to change (Knight, 2009). This suggests reasons to question a reform approach that orients leaders towards deciding “for” people what the problem and solution should be. Education leaders, scholars, and policymakers should do more to involve the people in schools—students, teachers, staff, parents, and community members—in deciding which problems to solve and to build their capacity to learn how to solve them.

These findings suggest that educators’ mindsets about improvement can be shaped heavily by their institutional and organizational environments. My research and experience pose an important challenge to the field of educational change: If we want educators to undertake methods of continuous improvement like improvement science or design-based school improvement, then we have to puzzle over how they can come to develop conducive mindsets for this work while embedded in a typical district environment.

LtC: In your recent work, you investigate how district context (e.g., resources, past accountability experiences, turnover, and district norms) matters in establishing collective learning environments for school improvement. How might your findings help scholars and practitioners better support schools in designing and implementing system-wide change?

EZ: As part of our Californian RPP, I spent a year partnering with one school facing especially challenging conditions (e.g., negative reputation, staff shortages and turnover, serving many students who experience recurrent trauma and marginalization), like what many schools are facing today (Zumpe, 2022b). This was a school that eagerly joined the partnership and wanted to improve. But they faced challenges at the core of their work: daily challenges to reach their students, and as one teacher described it, struggles with “the basics of collaboration.” The school served a very high-poverty community of nearly all students of color. Educators talked of daily challenges to engage students who seemed “defeated.” The faculty describing having a negative reputation of what several members referred to as being seen as a “dumping ground” and having been labeled as “low performing” for years. Unfilled teaching positions and a teacher shortage required the principal and teachers to expend substantial daily effort to cover classes and keep their school running.

I endeavored to learn with educators how the pursuit of improvement becomes possible in this kind of environment. Through participant observation and action research with several work teams, including one that I launched and led, I observed how the chronic experience of adversity meant that their work teams had not been able to develop into trusting, “effective” groups able to solve the complex and vexing problems they faced. Rather, amid a history of turnover, overload, and being told that they were a “dumping ground” school, they were struggling to develop a more foundational capability—what I am calling, collective agency, or a group capability to face up to and work together to address any problems (Zumpe, 2020).

This experience left me wondering how educational policies and school improvement models might attend more to the humanity of educators undertaking complex work amid trying circumstances. High-stakes, standards-based accountability reforms tend to treat enduring problems to educate students amid adversity as “excuses” to be surmounted by pressure, ambitious goals, and threats of consequences. However, in the groups that I partnered with, each new low accountability rating tended to have a devastating impact on collective agency, prompting educators to abandon initiatives underway, turn on each other, and feel hopeless when they felt their efforts to improve were “never enough.”

I think policymakers, scholars, and education leaders need to think more about how to nurture collective agency as a key resource for school improvement. This includes identifying concepts and metrics that allow incremental developmental efforts to become visible and recognized. In challenged schools, reforms might be designed to orient educators towards a focus on simpler problems at the outset, to establish basics of teaming and serve as a foundation for building problem solving capacity over time. Another possibility may be to focus less heavily on solving “problems” and leverage insights from strengths-based organizational development models (Daly & Chrispeels, 2005), such as appreciative inquiry (Cooperrider & Whitney, 2005).

LtC: Educational Change expects those engaged in and with schools, schooling, and school systems to spearhead deep and often difficult transformation. How might those in the field of Educational Change best support these individuals and groups through these processes?

EZ: Currently, school improvement research is quite limited when it comes to understanding organizational development in challenged school contexts. A dominant logic of inquiry developed through the effective schools movement has led to a body of case studies of “improved” or “effective” schools that have accomplished great feats while serving high-poverty communities of color, as well as many other cases of schools deemed “ineffective.” We need to learn much more about what might lay in between. How do schools develop? What kinds of dilemmas and struggles are entailed? My research builds on a handful of studies that have pointed to the importance of recognizing how chronic and cumulative adversity functions as a context for improvement (Mintrop & Charles, 2017; Ordenes, 2018; Payne, 2008). As described above, if we take adversity seriously as a context, we will need to build a better understanding of how to cultivate and sustain schools’ collective agency in the midst of an environment that can shut down agency.

“Policymakers, scholars, and education leaders need to think more about how to nurture collective agency as a key resource for school improvement.”

Such an approach—school development “in the next level of work” (City et al., 2009)—would constitute an important departure from how we have historically conceptualized, measured, and practiced school improvement. Learning how to recognize and sustain emergent agency requires attending to human needs, building trust, and sharing in the risks and joys of solving problems in schools. Design, development, and research in this area would necessitate proximity and action-oriented partnerships.

This has important implications for the kinds of methods and dispositions needed for those who seek to support educational transformation. To date, a major function of educational research has been to identify or design “best practices,” and to study the extent to which educators exhibit or implement these. Establishing standards of practice like this can be helpful. However, all too often, such standards are developed at a distance from educators, and educators have not had a say in constructing them. This sets up a situation in which research can end up describing a desired state that educators do not have the resources to attain. Such research can alienate educators rather than serve them.

That is not to say that educators always necessarily “know best.” I think we need to strive towards more mutuality in how scholars and practitioners share in the burdens and rewards of research and development in education. This has profound implications. Putting research into the service of solving real world problems will call for new relationships and models of knowledge production that allow us to pool our intellectual resources to design learning standards, activities, and materials that are engaging and responsive to educational needs. With this approach, I believe we can also produce knowledge that the field of educational change desperately needs about how development unfolds in complex and challenging environments.

“If the practice of scholarship could not enable the pursuit of change, I was not sure what it was worth.”

To get there, we will all need to learn how to understand each other across institutional contexts and status and power differentials. How might we come to understand each other’s limitations and differences as tied to differing institutional pressures and learning needs, and not as moral failings?

LtC: Where do you perceive the field of Educational Change is going? What excites you about Educational Change now and in the future?

EZ: When I left K-12 teaching practice to begin doctoral study, my initial excitement for scholarly learning waned quickly when I experienced the gut punch of the research-practice gap. Too much of the scholarly research seemed disconnected from the everyday problems and experiences facing educators. Too little of it seemed practically relevant for the pursuit of improvement. It also seemed like many established and successful scholars had too little concern for whether their research could or did influence practice. I encountered a pervasive distaste in the academy for action-oriented research. Walking in the library stacks, I often pictured the kids languishing right at that moment in an under-resourced school and asking, who is all this knowledge for? If the practice of scholarship could not enable the pursuit of change, I was not sure what it was worth.

Fast forward to today, and that situation has substantially changed. A vast new research territory has opened. I am excited about the emergence of a thriving scholarly community working to build a new paradigm of educational research that is improvement-focused (Peurach et al., 2022). I find new hope in scholars who are building new theories and methods for practice-focused knowledge production in the service of solving educational problems (Bryk et al., 2015). This includes other scholars like me who are involved in RPPs, developing new approaches to research that are more collaborative with educators, and working on the puzzle of how to make research more responsive to practice (Cobb et al., 2018; Cohen-Vogel et al., 2016). I am also excited about research emerging from those who study educators’ experiences with using continuous improvement methods (Yurkofsky, 2022) and who study the dynamics of RPPs to help us figure out how to help them emerge, grow, sustain, and succeed (Farrell et al., 2019; Henrick et al., 2017).

I am also excited about the innovations underway in the field of leadership development. Over the past 15 years, the Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate (CPED) has led the transformation of education doctorate programs towards dissertations-in-practice (Perry et al., 2020). Now with over 130 university consortium members (https://www.cpedinitiative.org/), members of CPED commit to a set of principles that emphasize improvement-focused research and social justice. This innovation offers strong promise for producing new forms of knowledge that can guide scholars, policymakers, and educators towards new practices and new structures for a more just educational system.

These new developments hold promise for stronger connections between research and practice—but that is not a foregone conclusion. The pull of old habits and institutional forces could render “new” approaches new in name only. Funders might shy away. Academics and educators might find that the efforts of connecting research and practice outweigh the rewards. But every week, as I read new research and participate in expanding communities of practice in this new space, I become more optimistic that a new paradigm of knowledge production is emerging.

References: 

Bryk, A. S., Gomez, L. M., Grunow, A., & LeMahieu, P. G. (2015). Learning to improve: How America’s schools can get better at getting better. Harvard Education Press.

City, E. A., Elmore, R. F., Fiarman, S. E., & Teitel, L. (2009). Instructional rounds in education: A network approach to improving teaching and learning. Harvard Education Press.

Cobb, P., Jackson, K., Henrick, E., & Smith, T. M. (2018). Systems for instructional improvement: Creating coherence from the classroom to the district office. Harvard Education Press.

Cohen-Vogel, L., Cannata, M., Rutledge, S. A., & Socol, A. R. (2016). A model of continuous improvement in high schools: A process for research, innovation design, implementation, and scale. Teachers College Record, 118(13), 1-26.

Cooperrider, D. L., & Whitney, D. (2005). Appreciative inquiry: A positive revolution in change. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.

Daly, A. J., & Chrispeels, J. (2005). From problem to possibility: Leadership for implementing and deepening the processes of effective schools. Journal for Effective Schools, 4(1), 7-25.

Farrell, C. C., Harrison, C., & Coburn, C. E. (2019). “What the hell is this, and who the hell are you?” Role and identity negotiation in research-practice partnerships. AERA Open, 5(2), https://doi.org/10.1177/2332858419849595

Government Accountability Office [GAO]. (2022). K-12 education: Student population has significantly diversified, but many schools remain divided along racial, ethnic, and economic lines. GAO-22-104737. https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-22-104737

Henrick, E. C., Cobb, P., Penuel, W. R., Jackson, K., & Clark, T. (2017). Assessing research practice partnerships: Five dimensions of effectiveness. William T. Grant Foundation.

Hess, F. M. (2011). Spinning wheels: The politics of urban school reform. Brookings Institution Press.

Knight, J. (2009). What can we do about teacher resistance?. Phi Delta Kappan, 90(7), 508 – 513.

Marshall, D. T., Pressley, T., Neugebauer, N. M., & Shannon, D. M. (2022). Why teachers are leaving and what we can do about it. Phi Delta Kappan, 104(1).https://doi.org/10.1177/00317217221123642

Mehta, J. (2013). How paradigms create politics: The transformation of American educational policy, 1980–2001. American Educational Research Journal, 50(2), 285-324

Mintrop, R. (2020). Design-based school improvement: A practical guide for education leaders. Harvard Education Press.

Mintrop, R., & Charles, J. (2017). The formation of teacher work teams under adverse conditions: Towards a more realistic scenario for schools in distress. Journal of Educational Change, 18(1), 49-75.

Mintrop, R., & Zumpe, E. (2019). Solving real-life problems of practice and education leaders’ school improvement mind-set. American Journal of Education, 125(3), 295-344.

Ordenes, M. A. G. (2018). Commitment as struggle: Teachers serving students in the face of socioeconomic adversity [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, California.

Payne, C. M. (2008). So much reform, so little change: The persistence of failure in urban schools. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.

Perry, J. A., Zambo, D., & Crow, R. (2020). The improvement science dissertation in practice: A guide for faculty, committee members, and their students. Myers Education Press.

Peurach, D. J., Russell, J. L., Cohen-Vogel, L., & Penuel, W. R. (2022). The foundational handbook on improvement research in education. Rowman & Littlefield.

Sommeiller, E., and Price, M. (2018). The new gilded age: Income inequality in the U.S. by state, metropolitan area, and county. Economic Policy Institute.https://www.epi.org/publication/the-new-gilded-age-income-inequality-in-the-u-s-by-state-metropolitan-area-and-county/

The Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate (2021). A knowledge forum on the EdD. https://www.cpedinitiative.org/

Yurkofsky, M. (2022). From compliance to improvement: How school leaders make sense of institutional and technical demands when implementing a continuous improvement process. Educational Administration Quarterly, 58(2), 300-346.

Zumpe, E. A. (2020). School improvement in the next level of work: Struggling for collective agency in a school facing adversity [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA.

Zumpe, E. (2022a). Evidence-based practices in U.S. schools: The California context. In C. Brown & J. R. Malin (Eds.), The handbook of evidence-informed practice in education: Learning from international contexts. Emerald Publishing Limited.

Zumpe, E. (2022b, August 2). Five of the biggest threats today’s K-12 students and educators face don’t involve guns. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/5-of-the-biggest-threats-todays-k-12-students-and-educators-face-dont-involve-guns-182648

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What’s changing in classrooms and schools right now? Micro-innovations for teaching, learning and education (Part 1)

Posted on November 18, 2022 by | Leave a comment

In this two-part series, Dulce Rivera Osorio explores what’s changing in schools by scanning  news articles that report on “micro-innovations” that teachers, schools and educational organizations are making to improve their educational structures and practices. In Part 1, Thomas Hatch introduces micro-innovations and then Rivera shares a number of examples of micro-innovations being made in instruction or school/district operations that have been described in media articles from the US. Part 2 will describe the micro-innovations at the state level; those being made by companies and nonprofits; and some examples from outside the US. To read more on the numerous proposals to change schools and “reimagine education” post-COVID, read IEN’s previous post: Is anything changing in US schools post-pandemic? Possibilities for rethinking time, place and supports for well-being.

Schools are changing, but those changes are often more subtle and more context-specific than many ambitious reform efforts hope. These smaller changes can be considered micro-innovations: adaptations and inventions new to the contexts in which they are developed. Micro-innovations include those aimed to help specific groups of students learn key concepts for particular disciplines (like a card game and app from Singapore that helps high school students learn key terms for introductory chemistry); an “activity-based pedagogy” from Second Chance that helps out-of-school students in Ethiopia and Liberia catch up to their peers in elementary schools; and the development of a system of vans to provide safe transportation to support the all-female staff central to the success of the schools created by the Citizen’s Foundation in Pakistan. Rather than hoping for some “disruptive innovation” or general approach to educational reform that will magically sweep across schools and education systems, a focus on micro-innovations highlights specific, concrete improvements that can be made right now to develop an infrastructure for more equitable and more powerful learning (for more examples, see “What can change in schools after the pandemic?”.

“Rather than hoping for some “disruptive innovation” or general approach to educational reform that will magically sweep across schools and education systems, a focus on micro-innovations highlights specific, concrete improvements that can be made right now to develop an infrastructure for more equitable and more powerful learning”

What counts as a micro-innovation? Micro-innovations include concrete and visible changes in the structures, practices, and resources of schools and other educational organizations that have the potential to increase the efficiency, effectiveness and equity of educational opportunities in particular contexts. As they are designed to respond to the constraints and opportunities in specific situations and settings, they should not be expected to be replicated across all contexts. However, they may be adapted in some related contexts, and they can help educators envision what might work in their own settings to address critical problems they may be facing.

– Thomas Hatch

Educational micro-innovations in the news

Along with the cascade of news about “learning loss” and the challenges of education today, over the past year, news and research in the US have also described a variety of examples of micro-innovations that have been developed at the classroom, school and district levels in the US. At the classroom level, articles have highlighted how teachers set a positive tone for the day by developing innovative ways of greeting students at their classroom doors (Positive Greetings at the Door: Evaluation of a Low-Cost, High-Yield Proactive Classroom Management Strategy) and how teachers craft questions to help students develop their vocabulary, particularly of scientific terms and concepts (How to Support Vocabulary Building in Science Classes). Research has also pointed to specific ways teachers can design and organize their classrooms including ways that even “symbolic features” of classrooms such as wall décor can influence student learning and sense of belonging in the classroom, “with far-reaching consequences for students’ educational choices and achievement” (Designing Classrooms to Maximize Student Achievement).

How to Support Vocabulary Building in Science Classes, Edutopia

Schools are also showing their inventiveness in tackling the challenges that their students and families are facing. In Massachusetts, staff members in one school created ways to support the transition from hospital to classroom for students struggling with mental health (School mental health program eases transition from hospital to classroom). In California, staff members at a school took on a critical need for housing in their community by creating a homeless shelter to support some of their students and their families (A school created a homeless shelter in the gym and it paid off in the classroom). According to Maribel Chávez, a first grade teacher at the school, quoted in the Hechinger Report, “If the child is not stable, that’s a barrier to their education, so that’s why we felt like as an educational institution, we had a mandate.”

Educators are also implementing a variety of micro-innovations at the district level to tackle challenges encompassing issues like bussing, translation between teachers and non-English speaking parents, and mental health. For example, districts in Boston, Indiana, and Maine are finding ways to use electric buses and scanning technologies to save costs, support the environment and increase safety (Boston to replace school buses with electric ones by 2030; Vans, Transit Passes & Changes to State Law: How Bus Driver Shortages & Soaring Costs Spurred Innovations in Getting Indianapolis Students to Class, Central Maine school districts turning to emerging bus scanning technology to address safety, driver shortages).

Vans, Transit Passes & Changes to State Law: How Bus Driver Shortages & Soaring Costs Spurred Innovations in Getting Indianapolis Students to Class, The74

The Oakland school district invested about $40,000 to use the TalkingPoints translation app to communicate with parents who do not speak English (Translating a quarter of a million text messages for families). As a district English language coordinator described it, “Teachers love it and the families absolutely love it. They tell me it’s made a huge difference. Before, they felt hopeless at times because they couldn’t communicate with teachers or administration.”

Translating a quarter of a million text messages for families, The Hechinger Report

Four districts in Iowa are also testing a new tele health platform, Classroom Clinic, developed by a psychiatric nurse practitioner, with a focus on providing services to rural areas of the state (Iowa nurse creates virtual mental health service with focus on rural schools).

Micro-innovations at the classroom level

Positive Greetings at the Door: Evaluation of a Low-Cost, High-Yield Proactive Classroom Management Strategy, Sage Journals

How to Support Vocabulary Building in Science Classes, Edutopia

Designing Classrooms to Maximize Student Achievement, Sage Journals 

SXSW EDU Launch Winner Our Worlds Bringing Native American Culture to Life Through Mobile-Based Immersive Reality, The 74

Micro-innovations at the School Level 

A school created a homeless shelter in the gym and it paid off in the classroom, The Hechinger Report 

School mental health program eases transition from hospital to classroom, New England Public Media

Trying to give students in low-wage majors some extra skills they can cash in on, The Hechinger Report

What COVID-Era Learning Looks Like in 144 Innovative Schools Around the Country, The 74

How One School Is Using House Calls to Keep Kids Learning During the Pandemic, The 74

For these six schools, pandemic-era innovation demanded “know thyself, CRPE

Rural Schools Have Battled Bad Internet, Low Attendance and Academic Decline Through the Pandemic. Now the Push Is On to Return Students to Classrooms — Safely, The 74

Micro-innovations at the District Level 

Translating a quarter of a million text messages for families, The Hechinger Report 

Boston to replace school buses with electric ones by 2030, AP News

Central Maine school districts turning to emerging bus scanning technology to address safety, driver shortages, Portland Press Herald

Vans, Transit Passes & Changes to State Law: How Bus Driver Shortages & Soaring Costs Spurred Innovations in Getting Indianapolis Students to Class, The 74

Study of 6 ‘Grow Your Own’ Teacher Prep Programs Shows How They Can Improve the Diversity of the Workforce, The 74

Using tech and circuit riding to beat the pandemic, New Mexico in Depth

How a Diverse School District Is Using a Strategy Usually Reserved for ‘Gifted’ Students to Help Everyone Overcome COVID Learning Loss, The 74

California schools press ‘play’ on esports leagues during pandemic, EdSource

3 summer program strategies to address learning loss, support emotional health, K-12 Dive

Iowa nurse creates virtual mental health service with focus on rural schools, Iowa City Press-Citizen

‘More than a warm body’: Schools try long-term solutions to substitute teacher shortage, The Hechinger Report

– Dulce Rivera Osorio

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What can change in schools after the pandemic?

Posted on August 4, 2021 by | 8 comments

“What if this is a moment when we can re-imagine education?” But “What if it isn’t? What if, despite the changes wrought by the pandemic, the conditions that sustain conventional schooling remain in place?” These are the questions that IEN Editor Thomas Hatch asks in the 2nd commentary in a series launched by Corrie Stone-Johnson and the Journal of Educational Change. These questions build on the first commentary in that series by Yong Zhao and Jim Watterston – “The changes we need post-Covid” and follows up on last week’s IEN post from Larry Cuban – “Downsizing school reform.” Future posts on IEN will track both what changes in schools and what does not in order to reveal the conditions and constraints that have to be addressed to transform education over the long term. These IEN posts are part of a long-term project exploring school improvement efforts and educational innovations in both developing and developed contexts and follow-up on issues Thomas Hatch, Jordan Corson and Sarah Van den Berg  raised in The Education We Need for a Future We Can’t Predict (Corwin, 2021).

“We will now resume our regular programming…”

Excerpt of  a commentary from Thomas Hatch originally published in the Journal of Educational Change, August 2021 (Full commentary available at the Journal of Educational Change website)

The times are always changing. The question this year is whether we can build on some of the changes schools made in the face of the coronavirus and reimagine education altogether. Like many, I am hopeful that we can take advantage of the current moment to make at least a few meaningful steps in some of these directions.

Nonetheless, my work over the past thirty years on school improvement and school reform efforts in the US and in “higher” and “lower-performing” countries also makes me deeply skeptical. Time and again, I have seen how ambitious plans and visions fall short of their aspirations. As a consequence, although I believe this may be a crucial time to ask: “What if this is a moment when we can re-imagine education?”, I also know that we need to ask a second question: “What if it isn’t?”  What if, despite the changes wrought by the pandemic, the existing institutional structures, practices, incentives, and beliefs that sustain conventional schooling remain in place?

Is there a real opportunity to re-imagine education post-pandemic? Or will the existing institutional structures, practices, incentives, and beliefs that sustain conventional schooling remain in place?

I don’t see this as a pessimistic take. It’s imagining the future and understanding the past that enables us to take off on journeys where the exact destination is unknown. When getting ready to climb a mountain, adventurers don’t just hope that the path they envision does not lead to an impassible ledge; they don’t rely on the hope that the weather will hold. They try to imagine what might happen when they turn a corner or reach a new level, and they get prepared. When the unexpected happens, when the conditions predictably change in unpredictable ways, we need to be ready to respond and rise above.

As my colleagues Jordan Corson and Sarah Van den Berg and I argue in our new book, The Education We Need for a Future We Can’t Predict, education systems all around the world find themselves in this situation today. Now more than ever, it’s clear that we do not know exactly what lies around the corner, and we cannot determine, with certainty, what today’s students will need as adults or what roadblocks or supports societies will put in place for helping them to get there. But we can build on what we know about why it’s so hard to improve schools, and we can imagine what it will really take to create more powerful and equitable educational opportunities in the future.

We can build on what we know about why it’s so hard to improve schools, and we can imagine what it will really take to create more powerful and equitable educational opportunities in the future.

In my commentary in the Journal of Educational Change, I explore what it will take to support real changes in schools post-pandemic by exploring three questions:

Part 1: Why don’t schools change?

Part 2: How (and why) did schools change during the pandemic?

Part 3: How can schools change post-pandemic?

My responses to those questions build on several key principles derived from my work in and studies of a variety of efforts to create more powerful learning experiences in both developed and developing contexts:  

  • First, new possibilities for schooling are most likely to take off when their goals, capacity demands, and values fit the common needs, existing capabilities, and prevailing conditions in the schools and communities where they’re supposed to work.
  • Second, this first principle leads to a corollary that seems particularly problematic for those who want to reimagine schooling altogether: the more radical our visions are for education and the more they diverge from conventional practice, the less likely they are to take hold on a large scale. However, that does not mean that it is impossible to pursue the new visions for education that Zhao and Waterston and others imagine. It means that the demands and pressures of conventional schooling make it easier to bring those visions to life in particular circumstances and contexts – ecological “niches” in a sense – rather than across entire school systems.
  • Third, this tension between the nature and extent of reform efforts, however, yields a further principle that opens up another avenue for change: There are places – “niches of possibility” – where the conditions are more amenable for transforming education. That does not mean that we have to accept every aspect of the conditions or ignore those that are deeply problematic. But we have to figure out how to challenge and work with and around the conditions in order to change them.

Schools will be transformed, over time, with changes in the conditions and the construction of the infrastructure for more powerful learning.

From this perspective, the specific vision for learning remains important, but that vision has to be accompanied by the recognition that it is not the vision itself that will change schools; schools will be transformed, over time, with changes in the conditions and the construction of the infrastructure for more powerful learning. Rather than aiming to develop a program and scale it across contexts, the focus shifts to the student level and to making sure that all students, particularly those left out and systematically disadvantaged by conventional schooling, encounter more and more opportunities inside and outside schools to engage in powerful learning experiences. Those experiences create new emergent possibilities for education that build directly on the specific conditions in which students live and learn every day.

(Full commentary available at the Journal of Educational Change website)

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What will change in schools post-pandemic?

Posted on July 28, 2021 by | 2 comments

The school closures and related educational adaptions throughout the Covid-19 pandemic led to many calls for “re-imagining education,” but which changes in schools actually can be made right now? Which ones will be made in the future? To address these questions, IEN is launching a new series to track both what changes in schools and what does not in order to reveal the conditions and constraints that have to be addressed to transform education over the long term.  The series is part of a long-term project exploring school improvement efforts and educational innovations in both developing and developed contexts. The series pursue issues my co-authors, Jordan Corson and Sarah Van den Berg, and I raised in The Education We Need for a Future We Can’t Predict (Corwin, 2021). The first post in the series comes from Larry Cuban, co-author with David Tyack of Tinkering Toward Utopia(Harvard University Press, 1995), who highlights how calls for ambitious educational reform already may be “downsized” as the realities of returning to school get closer — Thomas Hatch 

Downsizing School Reform after the Pandemic

Posted originally on Larry Cuban’s blog on July 15, 2021

The silence is deafening. Perhaps other observers have noted calls for major school reforms, I have not. The pandemic’s closure of public schools in March 2020 and the partial re-opening of schools in fall 2020 and full return to face-to-face instruction in winter 2021 have grabbed mainstream and social media attention. Especially for the rapid expansion of remote instruction and the Zoom marathon that all of us are running.

No reform agenda, however, have I seen for bettering the nation’s public schools. I have yet to detect any groundswell for altering the familiar school organization, Common Core Curriculum, and existing accountability measures already in place. There is much reform talk, of course:

Consider the words from a recent report of the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights of the disparate effects of the pandemic on white and minority students:

[W]e have a rare moment as a country to take stock and to begin the hard work of building our schools back better and stronger—with the resolve necessary to ensure that our nation’s schools are defined not by disparities but by equity and opportunity for all students.

Or the head of a major administrators’ professional organization:

“There are a lot of positives that will happen because we’ve been forced into this uncomfortable situation,” said Dan Domenech, executive director of AASA, the school superintendents association. “The reality is that this is going to change education forever.”

Talk is one thing, however, action another. Reform-driven policies have notably been absent from most of the 13,000 school districts spread across 50 states and territories during and after the pandemic, particularly when it comes to repairing inequities prior to and during the Covid-19 crisis.

Consider state and national testing. During the pandemic, the then U.S. Secretary of Education postponed the federally-required National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) until 2022. The current administration has called for standardized tests to be administered in the fall of 2021.

Apart from temporary suspension of nation and state tests, I have yet to hear of or read about any coalition of reformers offering concrete policies that can reduce the stark differences in funding and staffing schools in urban and suburban districts that have become, in a word, re-segregated. Progressive educators and their allies have surely called for such changes before, during, and after the pandemic’s closing of schools, but beyond exhortations, I have not noted an emerging coalition of school reformers at either the state and federal levels not only endorsing but also funding such efforts.

In fact, as Republicans have taken over most state legislatures–they now control 62 percent of them–, the appetite for funding schools and igniting school reform have shrunk considerably. Although conservative state legislators have called for more teaching of patriotism and less teaching about race, keeping schools as they are remains strong.

Progressive rhetoric for reducing inequalities in funding districts, ending disproportionate assignment of inexperienced teachers to high poverty, largely minority schools, and increasing “ambitious” teaching remains high in mainstream and social media but has yet to lead to substantial adoption of such policies, and most important their implementation in schools and classrooms.

Of course, lack of concrete reform-driven policies and their implementation does not mean that reforms begun prior to the pandemic and then put on hold have disappeared. Those reforms seeking the expansion of remote instruction have gained ground with the sudden switch from face-to-face to screens in March 2020. While surely distance learning now has a secure niche in a school district’s kit-bag of “solutions” to emergency closures, becoming more than an option for parents to choose is, well, doubtful (see here and here).

Remote instruction, then, is, by default, the coercive reform du jour. Yet frequent reports of test score decline and loss of academic skills especially among minority and poor students during the pandemic have yet to push the “pause” button on distance instruction as a choice for parents to have should they reject face-to-face instruction in school classrooms (see here and here).

With the spread of remote instruction as a school reform, what has thus far emerged from the pandemic emergency are not big-ticket, comprehensive overhaul of public schools aimed at reducing inequities among American children and youth but a shrunken version of what the past 18 months have offered.

And that is why I titled this post: Downsizing School Reform after the Pandemic.

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Leadership, Improvement and Educational Change: The Lead the Change Interview with Chad R. Lochmiller

Posted on July 21, 2021 by | Leave a comment

This week, the Lead the Change (LtC) interview features a conversation with Chad R. Lochmiller, an Associate Professor of Educational Leadership at Indiana University Bloomington. His research examines issues related to educational leadership, with a particular focus on instructional leadership, continuous improvement, and strategic resource allocation. A pdf of the fully formatted interview is available on the LtC website.

The Lead the Change series highlights promising research and practice and offers expert insight on small- and large-scale educational change to spark conversation and collaboration. The LtC series is a product of the Educational Change Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association; Jennie Weiner, Chair; Olga O. Fellus, Program Chair; Corinne Brion, Secretary/Treasurer; Alexandra Lamb, Series Editor; Cynthia Wise, Social Media Coordinator

Lead the Change: The 2021 AERA theme was Accepting Educational Responsibility and invites those of us who teach in schools of education to accept greater responsibility for the inadequate preparation of educators for work in racially, ethnically, culturally, and linguistically diverse P–12 schools and postsecondary institutions. For example, when educators discipline African American students at disproportionately higher rates, misdiagnose them for special education, identify too few of them for advanced placement and international baccalaureate programs, deliver to them a culturally irrelevant curriculum, teach them in culturally disdaining ways, and stereotype their families as careless and hopeless, the schools of education that produced these professionals are just as responsible as the professionals themselves. Furthermore, if scholars who study and document these trends do too little to make our findings actionable, then we, too, are contributors to the cyclical reproduction of these educational inequities.  Given the dire need for all of us to do more to dismantle oppressive systems in our own institutions and education more broadly, what specific responsibility do educational change scholars have in this space? What steps are you taking to heed this call?

Chad Lochmiller: I think education scholars, particularly those who study educational change, have a moral obligation to use their research to identify and disrupt perpetual cycles of oppression, inequity, and injustice in educational organizations and practices. This obligation applies regardless of what we study or the methods we use. This isn’t always comfortable work for folks who look like me, a white, male academic, and it requires a conscious choice to focus on these issues. I’ll also be unequivocal in stating that, because of my identity, I have disproportionately benefitted from the inequitable structure of our society, its educational institutions, and our workplaces. I have benefitted because folks who look like me set up the system to reward similarity and disparage difference. This isn’t right. In our increasingly diverse society, it’s fundamentally wrong when scholars turn a blind eye toward the very system that perpetuates these cycles of inequity and has privileged their own academic rise.

This is true of public elementary and secondary schools in the United States, as well. I often recall the words of Ron Edmonds (1979), whose landmark work on schooling for students from low-income backgrounds prompted much of the debate about what constitutes an effective (and equitable) school. In his seminal work, he noted that “We can, whenever and wherever we choose, successfully teach all children whose schooling is of interest to us” and that “Whether or not we do it must fully depend on how we feel about the fact that we haven’t so far” (p. 23). Focusing on equity and orienting our scholarship toward issues that perpetuate injustice is a choice. It’s the choice for scholars, for journal reviewers and editors, for tenure reviewers, for hiring committees, and for institutions of higher education. It’s on all of us to take on these issues, but especially those of us who have benefitted disproportionately.

As Ron Edmunds said: “We can, whenever and wherever we choose, successfully teach all children whose schooling is of interest to us” and “Whether or not we do it must fully depend on how we feel about the fact that we haven’t so far”

Now, as I write this, I have to admit that I have not done enough to address equity issues in my own scholarship nor taken enough actions to promote equity through my research. It’s a weakness in my research and I own that weakness because of the choices that I made. It’s also something that I am working to address by choosing to situate my work with a stronger equity/justice frame. For instance, in work that I am starting on school district strategic planning, I am looking specifically at the ways districts frame equity issues as part of their overall strategy for organizational improvement. Coviello and DeMatthews (2021) just published a piece on the community-level engagement around district equity issues. I want to understand how districts prioritize equity as a strategic improvement goal and follow-up with these commitments through differential investments for historically under-served students. In other words, do they put their money where their mouth is when they say they’re investing in equity? There are clearly some districts who do. But there are also many who treat these issues like a politically convenient talking point that receives no sustained attention in their practice.

Finally, as an instructor, I also try to address these issues more focally in my classes. I teach Indiana University Bloomington’s school improvement course for pre-service administrators and have introduced research that addresses issues of culturally responsive school leadership, disproportionality, and other issues that are appropriately considered in broader conversations about district and school improvement. I’ve asked students to read Anjalé Welton’s (2013) work, “Even More Racially Isolated than Before: Problematizing the Vision for ‘Diversity’ in a Racially Mixed High School.” I use this piece to help my students see diversity as a strength from which to build their improvement efforts. This piece, along with others like it, has created some really impactful conversations in my courses. I’ve found that students are increasingly speaking about their commitment to take up difficult conversations in their schools, challenge issues related to racial diversity that confront their schools, and ultimately make the choice (as urged by Edmonds) that schools will serve all of their students.

LtC: Given some of your work focused on how new teacher evaluation policies shape principal practice and the types and scope of supports needed for them to effectively implement such policies, what are some of the major lessons the field of Educational Change can learn from your work and experience?   

CB: The adoption of new teacher evaluation policies throughout the Obama administration was the classic example of a well-intentioned policy that went terribly wrong. State policymakers who adopted the policies failed to consider the real-world impact of the policy on districts and schools. In this case, policymakers incorrectly assumed that leaders within system had the capacity to implement new evaluation practices without significantly increasing resources, providing adequate professional learning supports, or building new infrastructure to help manage data. Districts incorrectly assumed that principals had the capacity to manage new evaluation requirements without fundamentally reconsidering who should be involved in or responsible for the evaluation process. What became clear as this initiative wore on was that school leaders could handle ‘quick’ evaluations with relative ease but lacked the capacity to handle the required ‘comprehensive’ evaluations that were used with early career classroom teachers and a sample of teachers selected for review each year. As the number of teachers who required comprehensive evaluations increased, the evaluative burden simply grew too much for principals to handle. In sum, the system basically collapsed under its own weight (Lochmiller & Mancinelli, 2019).

If we step back and think about this as a broader policy issue, there are three major implications that we need to consider:  First, education policy tends to be heavy on prescription, but light on incentives for change. Policymakers tend to state what will be required of educators with the hope that this is enough. They rarely offer the same kind of detail when specifying how educators will be supported, which we know is vital for the success of any change initiative. Policymakers, including district leaders, clearly need to think more holistically. They need to consider what systems will need to be built and/or which existing systems might need to be leveraged. Instead of introducing wholesale changes in education practice, as they attempted to in the case of evaluation, it behooves them to make more modest changes that are more strategically focused. For example, some of the work done by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in the Building Teacher Effectiveness Network (BTEN) is an excellent example of districts working collaboratively to make progressive enhancements in their practice.

“Education policy tends to be heavy on prescription but light on incentives for change.”

Second, when policy aims to address practice, we need to consider whether practitioners have the capacity to accept new responsibilities. When educators don’t have the capacity to accept a new responsibility, I think it creates a policy selection phenomenon that is detrimental to policy implementation and organizational change. Prior research has described this as ‘street-level bureaucracy’ (Weatherly & Lipsky, 1977), a phenomenon that characterizes how frontline policy implementers tend to make sense of policy requirements in ways that fit their local context. In my view, policy selection relates to how educators strategically ignore policies that pose too significant a burden for them to adopt in their practice. I think it relates to Down’s (1957) notion of policy ignorance, which speaks to the costs of educating oneself about a policy relative to the potential benefits that one might derive from doing so. Educators tend to ignore (or loosely implement) policies that they think will not contribute to improved practices or outcomes. This reflects their own understanding about what constitutes good practice, and it ultimately contributes to unevenness in the implementation of policies. I think this exacerbates some of the difficulties achieving coherence in the education system, which are still not well understood.

Finally, given the increasing need to capture, analyze, and report information in education, policymakers need to consider the information infrastructure that policy changes may require. As I learned by studying evaluation policy, absent consideration of the information infrastructure, we end up with Google Spreadsheets because many classroom teachers use technology that is familiar to them or already embedded within their practice. This makes understanding the effect of a policy more difficult and presents challenges to learn how to improve the policy over time. It also misses an important recognition – technology tools can be useful in guiding educator practice. Thus, if we want to change fundamental practices, it behooves policymakers to consider how technology can be used to streamline what information is deemed important and thus sensitize what practices educators attend to.

LtC: In some of your recent work, you find that content-specific leadership practices are important not only for instructional improvement in science and math but also as a means of enhancing distributed or shared leadership practices. Given your findings, what do you see as the most needed changes to policy/practice to address these issues in the field, in educators’ daily practice and interactions with colleagues and students alike?

CB: My interest in content-specific leadership (Lochmiller, 2015; 2016) started because I saw pre-service administrators struggling to evaluate classroom teachers in content areas with which they had no previous experience. I found that pre-service principals were especially hesitant to evaluate teachers in mathematics and science because they perceived these subjects were too complex to understand. Through my research, I’ve seen that principals often avoid these subjects by delegating supervisory responsibility to other members of their administrative teams or by offering generic feedback that attends to classroom conditions but does not really promote reflection that could contribute to changes in instructional practice. My work in this area seeks to identify tools, strategies, and other supports that help administrators engage in more productive supervisory conversations and/or to help them reconceptualize the leadership function in their schools to promote more attentive supervision in mathematics and science. This includes advocating to district leaders and policymakers to allow non-administrators to participate in peer evaluation as well as creating coaching structures in buildings that provide greater support to teachers in these subject areas. Certainly, this work is also motivated because of the vast inequities that we see in access to high-quality mathematics and science instruction as well as the differential outcomes that have been reported in mathematics and science for low-income students, students of color, students who are learning the English language, and students with disabilities. So, to my earlier point, this is one area of my work where I’ve been really intentional about making connections between my research and the (in)equities in schools.

“Educators need tools. They need models. They need processes that help them identify what changes need to be made and how these changes look once they are implemented.”

LtC: Educational Change expects those engaged in and with schools, schooling, and school systems to spearhead deep and often difficult transformation. How might those in the field of Educational Change best support these individuals and groups through these processes?    

CB: My basic belief is that educators need tools. They need models. They need processes that help them identify what changes need to be made and how these changes look once they are implemented. One of the reasons that I’ve been so interested in improvement science (and Networked Improvement Communities) is that this model for improvement puts a great deal of power in the hands of educators to envision new practices, processes or structures that can fuel long-sought transformation. Improvement science is a form of disciplined inquiry that seeks to improve educational practices through the systematic application of small-scale tests of change. Networked Improvement Communities serve as social learning structure to guide largescale improvement activities focused on a common aim. In truth, I’m less interested in these ideas as an academic exercise than as a tool to help schools experiment with practices in ways that could potentially contribute to something better. I also think that this work is timely because of what we’ve experienced in the past year with COVID-19. When you take away the schoolhouse, you end up with students, teachers, instruction, and social networks. That’s the essence of schooling. So, I think it’s beneficial to explore improvement activities that marry these foundational qualities with a disciplined improvement process.

LtC: Where do you perceive the field of Educational Change is going? What excites you about Educational Change now and in the future?

CB: I think we need to think about the field in two ways. In the short term, my sense is that we’re going to see a lot of research that describes the effects of COVID-19 on different practices in schools. This will likely point to COVID-19 as a significant disruption in educational organizations, an external force for change, a crisis that necessitated management by leaders and teachers, and insights about how schools used technology to facilitate rapid educational change given the uncertainty of the moment. I’d also hope to see some critical appraisals of the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on low-income students, students of color, students with disabilities, students residing in rural communities, etc.

Once we get outside of this recovery period, I think the field is poised for some really exciting advances over the next several years. This period has taught us some important new ways of working, interacting, and organizing educational systems, including schools. These urge us to consider what schools and the school day look like, for whom this model works, and how this model might be amended to better serve students. I think this creates opportunities to raise important questions about inequities that the COVID era has made much more transparent. That’s where my excitement about the field comes from – we are living in a unique moment where we might be able to revisit our long-held conceptions of educational change so that they better reflect the diverse society that we live in. We might actually be able to make education systems work better for the students who attend them.  

References

Coviello, J., & DeMatthews, D. E. (2021). Knowing your audience: Understanding urban superintendent’s process of framing equitable change. Journal of Educational Administration, online first. https://doi.org/10.1108/JEA-07-2020-0164

Down, A. (1957). An Economic Theory of Democracy. New York: Harper.

Edmonds, R. (1979). Effective schools for the urban poor. Educational leadership, 37(1), 15-24.

Lochmiller, C. R. (2015). Exploring principal leadership for math and science. Journal of School Leadership, 25(1), 24-53.

Lochmiller, C. R. (2016). Examining administrators’ instructional feedback to high school math and science teachers. Educational Administration Quarterly, 52(1), 75-109.

Lochmiller, C. R., & Mancinelli, J. L. (2019). Principals’ instructional leadership under statewide teacher evaluation reform. International Journal of Educational Management, 33(4), 629-643.

Weatherley, R., & Lipsky, M. (1977). Street-level bureaucrats and institutional innovation: Implementing special education reform. Harvard Educational Review, 47(2), 171–197.

Welton, A. (2013). Even more racially isolated than before: Problematizing the vision for “diversity” in a racially mixed high school. Teachers College Record, 115(11), 1-42.

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What Do We Know About School Leadership in Lower and Middle Income Countries?

Posted on July 7, 2021 by | Leave a comment

Global School Leaders (GSL), recently released the results of a survey of school leaders from programs run by country partners in India, Kenya, Malaysia, and Indonesia.  This week Sameer Sampat shares some of the background and key results from that survey (with the full results of the survey available on their website). Sampat has also discussed the evolution of GSL in two previous IEN posts – Supporting school leadership around the world and the context of leadership & the evolution of the India School Leadership Institute.

Strong school leadership impacts student outcomes, and this relationship is more important during a crisis. School leadership training can be cost-effective if it is delivered using best practices. However, there are limited programs focused on working with school leaders in lower and middle income countries (LMICs). As a result, the evidence base on this issue is sparse relative to the central role that school leaders play in a school’s functioning.

My organization, Global School Leaders (GSL), aims to play a catalytic role in developing evidence on school leadership in LMICs. In order to do this, we have been scaling school leadership training programs while strengthening our monitoring, evaluation, and research systems to contribute to the larger ecosystem of learning on this issue. We have worked with over 3,500 school leaders, impacting approximately 920,000 students.  Our primary countries of focus are India, Indonesia, Malaysia and Kenya. During COVID, we have expanded to work in Peru, the Philippines, Uganda and Nigeria.

Why survey school leaders?

In 2020, we conducted a thorough review of the evidence on school leadership in LMICs. One of the key questions that emerged from that review is: “What are the key leadership practices that impact student learning for students from marginalized backgrounds?”

In order to deepen our understanding of this question, we have developed a set of High-Leverage Leadership Actions (HLLA) that synthesizes key leadership practices identified by our review and our experience training school leaders. We then developed a consultative process with a group of 10 education leadership researchers, our Academic Advisory Council, whose work is rooted in LMICs, to further refine this list.

These focus areas are not intended to be a complete framework of practices for school leaders. Instead, they serve as actions that 1) impact student outcomes and teacher performance 2) are trainable 3) are relevant across contexts.  The six High-Leverage Leadership Actions we have identified are:

  1. Create a positive school culture that reflects high expectations
  2. Build teacher skill through observation & feedback
  3. Understand effective teaching practices
  4. Set school goals, create plans, and monitor progress
  5. Promote teacher leadership
  6. Disrupt inequitable patterns

In order to understand the quality of school leader practice in HLLA areas and the amount of time school leaders give to HLLA areas, we developed a set of school leader, teacher, and student surveys.

We piloted this survey toward the end of 2020 with our partners from India, Kenya, Malaysia, and Indonesia.  Each of our four partners identified one school leader training program that started in early 2020. From this group of 180 schools, we randomly selected 10 schools from each partner. From each selected school, we surveyed the school leader, 5 teachers, and 20 students in grades 5 or 8. Our sample was thus 40 school leaders, 200 teachers, and 200 students. We ended up collecting data from 34 School Leaders, 116 teachers, and 145 students. The biggest gap in data collection was that our India partner was unable to collect teacher or student data.

What did you learn from the survey?

Overall, three findings from the study stood out:

1. The belief that all students can learn, and that teachers are critical in this process, is not universal.

In our sample survey, we saw that the percentage of teachers who believe that “all students can learn” is lower than the percentage of school leaders who believe the same. While 74% of our school leaders believe that all students can learn regardless of familial background or educational experience, only 48% of teachers agree.

While 74% of our school leaders believe that all students can learn regardless of familial background or educational experience, only 48% of teachers agree.

2. School leaders are providing teachers with limited opportunities to grow professionally.

Less than 40% of teachers reported receiving monthly short observations of at least 5 minutes from their school leader. Further, only 12% of school leaders reported conducting monthly observations of 30 or more minutes. Less than 50% of teachers reported their school leaders doing monthly in-service activities related to improving teacher skills and only 16% of teachers stated that they had opportunities to learn from their colleagues.

Less than 50% of teachers reported their school leaders doing monthly in-service activities related to improving teacher skills

3. School leaders use little data for decision making.

In our sample, less than 20% of school leaders reported using learning data to make curriculum changes, and only around 25% reported using data to incentivize teachers. Even though student absenteeism was identified by both teachers and parents as the biggest hurdle to student learning in their schools, only 62% of school leaders reported tracking student attendance. While almost all the school leaders reported having a school improvement plan that included student learning targets, in a majority of cases, these are not updated or reviewed regularly.

Less than 20% of school leaders reported using learning data to make curriculum changes, and only around 25% reported using data to incentivize teachers

Moving forward, we plan to conduct yearly follow up with this group of schools to see how their practice changes over time. We also will continue to test and refine our understanding of key actions leaders need to perform to impact students and improve our ability to measure these actions. We believe that understanding the detailed actions and choices school leaders make can have a substantial and sustained impact over the quality of education students receive.

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Beyond any one school: Abe Fernandez on the development of community schools and collective impact in New York City (Part 1)

Posted on June 21, 2021 by | 2 comments

This week, IEN shares the first part of an interview with Abe Fernandez about what he’s learned through his work on community schools, community organizing and collective impact in New York City. Fernandez is Vice President for Collective Impact and Director, National Center for Community Schools, Children’s Aid. Children’s Aid is one of the oldest and largest nonprofits serving young people in New York City. Established in New York City over 165 years ago, Children’s Aid addresses all kinds of issues related to children and youth, including early childhood, schooling, and foster care. This interview follows up on an earlier post on the evolution of work on collective impact in New York City. Part 1 of the conversation begins with Fernandez sharing the story of his own educational experiences and continues with a description and reflections on Children’s Aid’s community schools approach and their work on issues like chronic absence. Next week, in Part 2, Fernandez discusses some of the key steps in creating community schools and goes on to talk about work on collective impact more broadly

IEN: Can you tell us a little bit about your background and how you got involved in Children’s Aid and started working on community schools and collective impact?

Abe Fernandez:  My story is that I grew up in the Bronx, the son of immigrants from the Dominican Republic.  They came to this country hoping that education would be their ticket to prosperity, which I think is still a pretty typical story for many immigrants. I have a lot of belief in the system that we have all built together, although it is flawed. But there’s a real perception that it can lead to some real opportunities, and I have to say I was really lucky. I was lucky born to a family with parents who were really working hard – despite all the barriers around language and culture that they and other immigrants faced – to navigate through a pretty challenging system. I had the good fortune of going to an elementary school that had teachers who saw something in me and my twin brother, and they helped create pathways that allowed us to find opportunities in that school. And then I got really lucky in fifth grade, and I was introduced to a program called Prep for Prep. That’s a program which, as I look back on it now, is problematic in some ways (as detailed in a New Yorker article by a program alum). Essentially, the program creams really high performing kids out of the public school system and deposits them into private schools and the independent school system.

Despite the challenges around that approach, it created some real opportunity for me, and I ended up going to a very elite independent school in New York City, Riverdale Country Day School, and then on to Brown University. At Brown, I got involved in a program that’s still going on today, the Breakthrough Collaborative. It’s a program that has a dual mission of getting younger kids into competitive high schools and encouraging really smart high school and college students to get involved in teaching.  They’ve had a pretty good track record, with large percentages of their college students choosing to do at least a year of teaching after doing that program.

The program started at my high school when I was there, and after I went to Brown I participated in the program, and I went back every summer to teach at Riverdale. When I graduated from Brown, there was actually an opening at Riverdale to run the program there, and they brought me in to run it. As a result, I had this incredible opportunity to jump into the nonprofit world at the same time that I was learning how to become a teacher. I realized as I was working at Riverdale that I was in an extraordinary environment to learn how to teach because we had tons of resources.  I taught middle school math, and I had maybe 13 kids in the classroom, all incredibly motivated kids, with parents who were incredibly engaged, and it was just a great. What a great way to learn the craft of teaching!  But I remember thinking at the time, there’s something wrong about this. How could it be that only a small selection of New York City children get this kind of experience? So after a number of years of running that program and teaching in that environment, I wanted to be closer to the communities and the kids where I grew up.  That led me to join Union Settlement in East Harlem. There, I ran a number of programs that were based inside public housing, and we worked with kids as young as two all the way through 24 year olds.  That was a real shift for me. I got to really understand some of the issues that I knew from my own background, butI got to know them more professionally and to see the systems that were responsible for some of the challenges that young people and families face.  After working there for a few years, I realized that I missed being engaged in education. We were doing great work, but it focused more on hunger and other kinds of issues. I didn’t have the access to what was happening in school where these kids spent most of their time. I found myself wanting to bridge those two parts of my experience, and that’s why I took a job at Children’s Aid, where I’ve been for the last 16 years, working primarily on Community Schools and now collective impact.

IEN: Can you tell us about your work on community schools?

AF: Community schools bring together all kinds of resources that we think kids and families need. They address everything including early childhood education, school-based health, adult education, you name it. The idea is to bring all these partners and programs together in a really coherent way to meet the comprehensive needs of kids and families. Children’s Aid was involved in helping to develop and support community schools long before I got there in the early 1990s. Right away, we had a lot of people from other places who wanted to learn about the approach. They wanted to come kick the tires, talk to principals, talk to us.  But we found that they would go back to their home communities and say “Okay, we’re totally inspired, but we’re totally confused. Now what do we do?” We wanted to meet that need and build the capacity to help teams of people to go back to their communities, get to know their local context, and figure out some next steps. That’s what we’ve doing for the last 25 years through our National Center. Over the past 20 years, we’ve worked on almost every major community schools initiative across the US.  

            So in New York City, we now have 22 community school partnerships, but we never thought it would go systemic the way it has in Oakland and Chicago. We were also really pleasantly surprised in 2014 when New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a plan to make community schools a big part of his agenda here in New York City. Now, New York City has one of the largest Community School initiatives anywhere, and the infrastructure for community schools that has been built here is pretty exciting.

IEN: How has your work on community schools developed and what have you learned in the process?

AF: Children’s Aid started their work on community schools in the 1990’s in Washington Heights, in Northern Manhattan, with about five or six schools.  Those schools were part of a wave of new schools that were established in New York City, and these schools were actually brand new schools, with facilities designed and built with the idea that they would be community schools. We had the opportunity to think about where to put a school based health center, the community school director’s office, or a parents’ room.

When we expanded the work into the Bronx in the early 2000’s, we didn’t have that luxury. We had to turn existing schools into community schools.  We found ourselves working with schools that were completely overcrowded, and we couldn’t just displace a classroom to put in a health center or something.  Instead of creating new school buildings, we ended up creating a kind of “campus” of community schools. We worked with four or five schools in one area and in the middle of them we built a health center.  Later we put social workers and then an early childhood center into the building.

Although this campus grew out of convenience and practicality, creating this partnership of four or five different schools gave us an opportunity to work in the community in a different way. In the process, we started working on a whole set of issues that we as Children’s Aid didn’t have enough expertise or capacity to really do anything about. Instead of concentrating on how to get all the services in the community into schools, we started to imagine what could happen if we got all the partners in the community to work together on issues that went beyond any one school.  We thought about issues like making sure all kids are healthy, all kids are ready for school, and all kids are graduating high school ready for college and career; and, if we’re developing a vision of supporting children from “cradle through college and career,” we can’t be the ones doing all the work ourselves. Instead, we took on this new role as a kind of “backbone” organization. We’re convening all the partners that work in a community to develop a common results framework with some shared goals and with some indicators that will tell us all how things are moving forward at the neighborhood level.  Part of that backbone role also includes basic things like just making sure that the PowerPoint is up, the coffee is hot, and the notes are being taken the meetings, but, overall, the work is being done by the community. That’s what we’ve been doing for the past five or six years in the South Bronx, playing this facilitating role.

Instead of concentrating on how to get all the services in the community into schools, we started to imagine what could happen if we got all the partners in the community to work together on issues that went beyond any one school

We’re not going to walk away from community schools or stop providing services, but this has what’s expanded into what’s now being called our collective impact approach.  We’re getting many, many partners to work together, looking at the same data together; we’re all coming up with a shared vision for what, what could look different, and then collectively working toward that new vision. As we continue to develop this work, we’re also hoping that the City will pay attention and begin to devote its resources to collective impact, just as they did for community schools.

IEN: What were some of the challenges that you encountered as your work with community schools developed, and how did you address those challenges?

AF: The biggest challenge is that the mindset needs to change. Right now, people tend to think categorically about schools: we believe that school is where students receive curriculum and instruction. Even though this notion that schools can be more than that makes sense, it’s really hard for people to think beyond the current paradigm. I think that mindset manifests itself in different ways. Take attendance for example, which is something many community schools have focused on. In New York City, for all grades K through 12, about 25% of students are chronically absent, which means that they’ve missed about a month or more of school; and in the schools in the South Bronx where we’ve been working, we found that it’s closer to 40 or 50%.  Why are these students absent? One is health. In fact, the South Bronx has one of the highest rates of childhood asthma anywhere in the world (a documentary, Asthma Alley, chronicles the issues in the South Bronx). If you have lots of asthma in your community, kids are going to be sick, and they’re not going to go to school. But that’s not the only issue. In some cases, kids have to stay home to care for their siblings; some high school students might have jobs or other responsibilities; some kids are homeless.  What program solves all these problems? It doesn’t exist. There have to be a number of different partners working together, which is why looking into chronic absence can help people to change their mindset and to explore community schools.  People start to see all these factors at play for why kids are missing school, and they begin to realize schools cannot address this problem by themselves. They have to bring in more partners and more resources and find a way to coordinate everything.

Looking into chronic absence can help people to change their mindset and to explore community schools.  People start to see all these factors at play for why kids are missing school, and they begin to realize schools cannot address this problem by themselves. They have to bring in more partners and more resources and find a way to coordinate everything.

But schools are not built to think that way, and they often take a much narrower approach.  Here in New York City, there is a mandate that every school must have an attendance team. If you listen to some of the conversations in those teams, it sounds like “Okay, who was absent this week? How many kids have hit the threshold for being chronically absent? Did we send the letter? Did we make the phone call?” They check the items off a list. It’s a compliance driven approach. That’s different from a problem-solving approach. In a problem-solving approach, we look at the data, and that can get you thinking about who’s sitting around the table because we need more voices to interpret the data. Once we understand what the issues are, then we have to think about who’s going to help us create a plan and implement the intervention? That requires other people to be involved. All of that requires that shift in mindset. It’s an approach that helps to get at the stories behind the numbers, to help schools understand what’s happening for students and their families, so they aren’t just “rubbernecking” and saying “Isn’t that terrible.” It puts schools in a position to do something about the issues their students are facing.  It is a lot to ask schools beyond what’s already a very challenging set of responsibilities, but if you add more partners to the mix, we can begin to share those responsibilities. That shift in in attitude is critical, but frankly, not every school leader is interested in doing it that way. There are some leaders though, who see the challenges and want to open up their doors and bring other voices in; look at that information and collectively problem solve; and share in some of the responsibility for work on these issues together.

Another critical challenge is that there is nothing you can do without principal leadership. It’s the linchpin, but if there are problems with a principal, it can be really hard to replace them. We’ve seen how, in the same building, you can have two different leaders with completely different outcomes. The challenge for us as a capacity building organization is that we still have not figured out how to implant a vision inside of a principal just by showing them PowerPoints or giving them books. A lot comes down to conversation and building trust. The most effective tool we have is other principals who get it, so creating networks of learning among the principals has helped quite a bit. The good news is that in the very beginning, people just wanted to build one community school, and now we’re seeing people who want to build systems of community schools. One of the really nice features of that is that you can start building these networks.

A lot of times the communities that are drawn to doing this work, tend to have populations that have higher rates of poverty, higher rates of tons of issues, and the schools in those communities tend to have less experienced teachers and less experienced principals. We’re asking them to work on a very high level, and many of them just haven’t had the chance to develop their own skills as school leaders, let alone as community school leaders. It’s a hard sell for some. On the flip side, we’ve come across principals who said this has been my vision from the minute I walked into my first classroom. I didn’t know it had a name, but I’m so glad that I can now join this community of people who work in this way. We have to find ways to build this way of working and these opportunities earlier into the careers of teachers and principals.

IEN: Given these challenges, how do you get started? How do you figure out who to work with?

AF:  When it comes to New York City, we have identified particular neighborhoods where the data tells us we need to do something right away. And those places have changed over the years. When Children’s Aid started this work, the work was on the northern parts of the Upper East Side, which today looks very different. It doesn’t really need community schools the way it once did. As a result, we moved the work into the Bronx, and we’ve been there for about 20 years. The work starts with thinking about what’s the community we want to work in? And then it’s finding those people who have a real desire to work differently; that bring a sense of curiosity and have a feeling that things really should be different; who know that they can be doing things with partners, but they might not know how to do that quite yet. It does help quite a bit to have some top down support. There are some communities around the country where there’s a really inspired superintendent, who’s been willing to think about how to create the environment for their principals to want to do this work. Other times we find it is a really strong community partner that has had a relationship with a school and has already built some trust, but maybe they’ve realized they’ve been doing programs in the school for decades and have not seen the outcomes that they wanted to see. They come knocking on our door wondering how to better integrate their work with the other work going on in schools.

IEN: You said you’ve transitioned a bit from focusing on working with one school at a time and are now thinking more about a “hub and spokes” model.  How does that work?

AF:  We’re still doing both really. We often say community schools is not a program. It’s a strategy. It’s made up of many different programs and depending on what the needs are in that community, they’re all going to look different. We also don’t say it’s a model because the actual mechanics of how you’re going to move forward really needs to be worked through locally.  Figuring out what your needs are and how are you going to meet them is actually part of the work.  You can’t just implement a list of steps someone gave you. There are some benchmarks and some tools we want to use, but you want to engage local stakeholders in that process.

In some communities, you might start with a school. For example, they might have a YMCA attached to the building with a pool and many things you might want. But it’s totally disconnected. In that case, we’re going to find ways to connect those two and bring other folks into that space. In another community, we might find a school with a clinic or hospital across the street, and then we’ll find ways to bring those people together. It really depends community by community.

More recently, we’ve also been thinking about economies of scale. For example, in New York City you have 10 schools all working in one neighborhood, and they might all figure out that many of their students have asthma. Instead of having 10 different conversations with 10 different principals you can try to create one conversation between these schools and two or three partners to meet those needs. That ends up being a much, much more efficient way to work. It’s more likely to attract a partner because you’re talking about a scale that actually makes sense for them and chances are it’s much more sustainable.

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Brahm Fleisch on South African education during the pandemic

Posted on June 9, 2021 by | 1 comment

What predictable problems and unexpected surprises have emerged in schools in South Africa during the pandemic? This week IEN interviews Brahm Fleisch to gain his perspective on the school closures that began in March of 2020 and the resumption of in-person schooling, for some students, in August. Fleisch is a professor in the Division of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the School of Education, University of Witwatersrand. Fleisch has written extensively about the challenges and opportunities for improving schooling in South Africa. That work includes the development of the Early Grade Reading Study and examinations of what it may take to establish a New Infrastructure for Learning that strengthens foundational learning and the instructional core.   

IEN: What has been happening in schools in South Africa since the pandemic began? 

Brahm Fleisch: One of the standout characteristics of South African education is the extreme inequality. The pandemic has exacerbated it. Elite private and middle-class schools in the public sector (about 10-15%) rapidly moved online. And while there were concerns about the quality of teaching and learning taking place online, most middle-class children were able to return to some form of schooling routine. This was not the case for most working-class and rural children, the overwhelming majority of whom are Black. Given the high cost of data, and the limited digital infrastructure in schools serving the majority of children, the evidence suggests that most of these children had very little schooling in 2020. This has continued into 2021. Even when schools serving poor and working-class children started reopened in August last year, many attended less than half the number of days they would have had had there been “normal” schooling. The majority of schoolchildren have experienced substantial learning loss. 

Even when schools serving poor and working-class children started reopened in August last year, many attended less than half the number of days they would have had had there been “normal” schooling.

IEN: What has worked?  

BF: South Africa has a national curriculum, most often referred to as the Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS). The government strategy last year was to “streamline” the curriculum, that is, cut the number of topics or themes to be covered in each of the respective subjects, assuming that the curriculum content that was missed would be covered in later grades. The problems with the curriculum streamlining approach is that it assumes that children have acquired the core basic knowledge and skills. At least for the early grades, the evidence suggests that the proportion of children able to read fluently in either their home language and/or in English (the language of schooling for the majority from Grade 4 onward) has dropped dramatically.  If majority of children haven’t learnt to read or lost the skill of reading, streamlining is not going to help. While there is clearly a serious problem with government strategy, two important developments need to be highlighted.  First, the national education department facilitated the development of a dedicated TV channel to make lessons in the high-stakes subjects available for all secondary school learners.  Unlike using the internet, which has serious financial limitations, nearly all parts of South Africa have access to public broadcasting and is a relatively low-cost way to reach poor and rural communities. Second, after the first major period of lockdown, the schools were required (by a court interdict) to provide school feeding even when the schools were formally closed.  Without doubt, ensuring that children received a daily meal benefited the majority of South African children.

IEN: What has surprised you?

BF: No one could have predicted how popular the institution of the school actually is with the vast majority of children, their parents and the wider community.  Much of the work of university researchers had been focused on documenting the major inadequacies of schools. In particular, the research had focused on both the overall low levels of learning taking place and the gap between children at the top and bottom of the income distribution.  What was never fully appreciated is that despite the major weaknesses of the school system, children and their parents really missed the routines, rhythms and rituals of schooling.  And while some school types did emerge such as the pod schools (small private classes of between 5 and 10 children of different ages mostly working online in a common space), it is hard to say if the new model will endure beyond the pandemic.  These ‘schools’ fitted somewhere between home schooling and small private schools.  While pod schools emerged in an ad hoc fashion to address the needs of children and parents, given the choice most children and their parents appear to be shifting back to more traditional school models.

IEN: What have you learned? 

 BF: As suggested above, there have been two clear learnings from the pandemic. First, absence from face-to-face schooling for a prolonged period disproportionately negatively impacts poor and working-class children. Although schools tend to reproduce inequality, the absence of schooling in conventional school buildings accentuated this inequality. The second insight suggest the deep cultural resonance of the archaic 19th century institutional form. All the talk about 21st Century skills and personalized learning appeared to signal a potential revolution in how we organize education.  If anything, Covid-19 has surfaced the enduring popularity of the standard structure of the egg-crate/factory school model. 

No one could have predicted how popular the institution of the school actually is with the vast majority of children, their parents and the wider community…If anything, Covid-19 has surfaced the enduring popularity of the standard structure of the egg-crate/factory school model. 

IEN: What’s next — what are you working on now?

BF: In the Global South, in systems such as those of South Asia (and South Africa), the challenge is to shift focus from curriculum compliance towards teaching at the right level. For these education systems that placed an emphasis on the syllabus or schemes of work, rethinking what teachers do in classroom with children who may be years behind curriculum expectations is going to be very challenging. For example, middle school teachers are going to be forced to confront a growing majority of children who cannot read for meaning or do basic mathematics. Simply doing the same, or even a slimmed down version of the national curriculum is likely to make things worse rather than better. Real thinking needs to go into teaching basic skills further and further up the system. 

Rather than a catalyst of radical reform of the institution called the school, the hope for the future must focus on better teaching system-wide. 

IEN: What’s your hope for the future?

BF: Rather than a catalyst of radical reform of the institution called the school, the hope for the future must focus on better teaching system-wide.  We need greater effort on how we can mobilize the resources of the state better, unleash the creative energy of teachers as an organized profession, excite parents and students in diverse communities towards the task of incremental but sustainable improvement of teaching and learning.  

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A Conversation about School Improvement Networks and Collaborative Inquiry in Chile

Posted on March 11, 2020 by | Leave a comment

This week, Mauricio Pino-Yancovic and Alvaro González talk with IEN about their new book on the Chilean Ministry of Education’s recent improvement strategy relying on school networks. Written with Luis Ahumada and Chris ChapmanSchool Improvement Networks and Collaborative Inquiry: Fostering Systematic Change in Challenging Contexts describes the processes and challenges of implementing collaborative practices between schools.

Why this book, why now?

The School Improvement Strategy was put in place at a moment when the Chilean school system was going through a period of significant structural reforms to improve the quality and equity of public education. A basic principle of this reform effort was to produce a cultural change from competition to collaboration as a way to produce the necessary conditions for systemic improvement. The School Improvement Networks (SINs) were instrumental to making that change. The Networks were mandated by the Chilean Ministry of Education to bring together between 5 and 15 schools, each represented by their principal and curriculum coordinator, a representative of the municipal department of education, and one or two Ministry supervisors. Through LIDERES EDUCATIVOS, a Center at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, we were commissioned by the Ministry to produce a yearly monitoring report of networks across the country based on questionnaire data. In addition, in 2016 we did a qualitative study of 15 networks in different regions to deeply understand how networks had been formed and were initially developing.

This book was born out of the necessity to open a dialogue with scholars around the world investigating networking and collaboration. We have learned very much from US and Canadian as well as European scholars. In fact, the opportunity to publish our manuscript came from an invitation by Chris Brown at the University of Durham and Cindy Poortman at the University of Twente to write for a series on Professional Learning Networks (PLNs) they edit with Emerald. Also, we have collaborated in this book with Chris Chapman from the University of Glasgow who has been a key supporter and friend in our projects. Finally, we were driven by the conviction that we had something meaningful to contribute from the Global South regarding collaboration and networking. Although the book is focused in Chile, we are aware that the challenge of developing a culture of collaboration in a context of privatization, competition and isolation, resonates with many countries.

What did you learn in working on this book that you didn’t know before?

From our experience studying and working with networks, we realized that it is much more powerful to think about the challenge of improvement from a systemic perspective rather than an individual one. Networks facilitate developing such a systemic approach, but we were first hand witnesses of how difficult it was to enact such change in practice, especially in a competitive environment such as the Chilean one.

By pulling together the evidence from several studies about networking, we produced a clearer picture of what networking among schools looks like in practice. This picture shows us that there are three key elements that need to be in place to ensure the sustainability of networks:

  • Building professional capital among network actors which would allow them to increase their capacity for collective change and improvement
  • Developing network leadership capacities for leading upwards, leading laterally, and leading downwards, which mobilizes influence and power relations within and outside networks, which is crucial in a challenging context
  • Establishing an appropriate system infrastructure to support and legitimize changing cultural patterns beyond the remit of networks themselves.

What’s happened in these contexts since you wrote the book?

In October 2019, Chileans took to the streets demanding social reforms aimed at tackling inequality and changes to a constitution that dates back to the 1980s, during the dictatorship of general Augusto Pinochet. It has been four months of massive protests and harsh police repression, which have mobilized the country to hold political actors to account on several topics. Education has been a central issue in these past months, as social and economic inequality is reproduced and reinforced in our neoliberal-inspired school system. Teachers and school leaders have had to deal with the consequences of this social discontent in schools and, in some cases, networks have been a key support in helping them to decide how to approach the situation. School networks seems to be an appropriate path to continue supporting a cultural change.

Unfortunately, the current government had decided earlier in 2019 to partially withdraw support to the School Improvement Networks strategy, although they have not phased it out altogether. Ministry supervisors were redeployed to focus on providing support and intervention directly to underperforming schools. Nonetheless, in most cases, networks have continued their work as school leaders value the opportunities to share and exchange experiences among schools in the same geographical area. In addition, we have been invited to support several school networks project at district levels. The findings described in this book are also being used by those who are pushing forward strategies based on meaningful collaboration for school improvement.

What’s next — what are you working on or what do you hope will happen in these contexts?

The agreement between the Ministry of Education and the LIDERES EDUCATIVOS Center ended in December 2019 but a renewal application was submitted, and we are awaiting a response. In the meantime, everyone in our team has gone to work elsewhere although still linked to the issue of networking and collaboration for school improvement. For instance, Mauricio is now a researcher of the Center for Advanced Research in Education (CIAE), Institute of Education at Universidad de Chile, working on projects to develop and support school networks using Collaborative Inquiry, and working closely with districts on the systemic improvement of the territory. Álvaro has gone to work as a postdoctoral researcher at Universidad de O’Higgins and he is starting a three-year study about the support provided to underperforming schools in Chile, where interorganizational collaboration and learning play a key role. Luis Ahumada has returned to his position as Professor at the School of Psychology at PUCV, still involved in educational leadership. Also, we hope to continue our collaboration with Chris Chapman, Chris Brown, Cindy Poortman and many other scholars that we had the chance to know through the ICSEI PLN network and elsewhere.

What do you hope those working in other parts of the world will take away from your experiences?

Many educational systems have opted for the strategy of networking to support improvement not only for schools in difficulty but also entire systems. This movement builds on the empirical evidence showing how difficult it is for a school to improve on its own. Our book shows that in marketized school systems, such as the Chilean one, it is possible to overcome the logic of individual accountability, promoting collaboration and co-responsibility between all levels of the system. We hope that our book will inspire decision- and policy-makers to promote networking at different levels of the system and to create spaces where collective support and democratization allow for the development of a different bond among schools and the communities they serve.

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