Organizing Schools for Improvement

Research by Anthony S. Bryk on Chicago school improvement indicates that improving elementary schools requires coherent, orchestrated action across five essential supports

The Effects of High School Organization on Dropping Out

This paper examines the effects of school characteristics on both the probability of dropping out and the strongest predictor of dropping out - absenteeism. The authors employ a sub-sample from the High School and Beyond database which contains results of background questionnaires and standardized achievement tests given in 1980 to approximately 30,000 sophomores in 110 public and private high schools. The students, both those still in school as well as those who had dropped out, were resurveyed two years later. Supplemental school data were also obtained from principal questionnaires

Accélérer la manière dont nous apprenons à améliorer

Un gouffre croît, entre nos aspirations pour nos systèmes éducatifs, qui augmentent rapidement, et ce que les écoles peuvent accomplir au quotidien. L’éducation a besoin d’un paradigme de l’amélioration qui reconnaisse la complexité du travail de l’éducation et la grande variabilité des résultats (outcomes) que nos systèmes produisent actuellement. Cet article décrit ce paradigme. Il réunit la discipline de la « science de l’amélioration » avec le pouvoir de communautés structurées en réseau pour accélérer la manière dont nous apprenons à améliorer les capacités à s’améliorer. Ces communautés d’amélioration en réseau (en anglais NIC : Networked Improvement Community) combinent la pensée analytique et des méthodes systématiques pour développer et tester, de manière plus fiable, des changements qui peuvent améliorer les résultats. Les NIC sont inclusives dans la mesure où elles rassemblent l’expertise des praticiens, des chercheurs, des concepteurs, des technologues et bien d’autres encore. La manière dont elles organisent leurs activités est proche de celle d’une communauté scientifique. Elles développent des preuves fondées sur la pratique (practice-based evidence) comme un complément essentiel aux résultats (findings) d’autres formes de recherche en éducation. Il ne s’agit pas seulement de savoir ce qui peut améliorer ou faire empirer les choses ; il s’agit de développer le savoir-comment (know how) nécessaire pour améliorer réellement les choses.A chasm is growing between our rapidly rising aspirations for our educational systems and what schools can routinely accomplish. Education needs an improvement paradigm – one that recognizes the complexity of the work of education and the wide variability in outcomes that our systems currently produce. This article sketches out such a paradigm. It joins together the discipline of improvement science with the power of structured networked communities to accelerate learning to improve. These networked improvement communities (NICs) combine analytic thinking and systematic methods to develop and test changes that can achieve better outcomes more reliably. NICs are inclusive in drawing together the expertise of practitioners, researchers, designers, technologists, and many others. And they organize their activities in ways akin to a scientific community. They develop practice-based evidence as an essential complement to findings from other forms of educational research. The point is not just to know what can make things better or worse ; it is to develop the knowhow necessary to actually make things better

Improvement Research Carried Out Through Networked Communities: Accelerating Learning about Practices that Support More Productive Student Mindsets

The research on academic mindsets shows significant promise for addressing important problems facing educators. However, the history of educational reform is replete with good ideas for improvement that fail to realize the promises that accompany their introduction. As a field, we are quick to implement new ideas but slow to learn how to execute well on them. If we continue to implement reform as we always have, we will continue to get what we have always gotten. Accelerating the field's capacity to learn in and through practice to improve is one key to transforming the good ideas discussed at the White House meeting into tools, interventions, and professional development initiatives that achieve effectiveness reliably at scale. Toward this end, this paper discusses the function of networked communities engaged in improvement research and illustrates the application of these ideas in promoting greater student success in community colleges. Specifically, this white paper:* Introduces improvement research and networked communities as ideas that we believe can enhance educators' capacities to advance positive change. * Explains why improvement research requires a different kind of measures -- what we call practical measurement -- that are distinct from those commonly used by schools for accountability or by researchers for theory development.* Illustrates through a case study how systematic improvement work to promote student mindsets can be carried out. The case is based on the Carnegie Foundation's effort to address the poor success rates for students in developmental math at community colleges.Specifically, this case details:- How a practical theory and set of practical measures were created to assess the causes of "productive persistence" -- the set of "non-cognitive factors" thought to powerfully affect community college student success. In doing this work, a broad set of potential factors was distilled into a digestible framework that was useful topractitioners working with researchers, and a large set of potential measures was reduced to a practical (3-minute) set of assessments.- How these measures were used by researchers and practitioners for practical purposes -- specifically, to assess changes, predict which students were at-risk for course failure, and set priorities for improvement work.-How we organized researchersto work with practitioners to accelerate field-based experimentation on everyday practices that promote academic mindsets(what we call alpha labs), and how we organized practitioners to work with researchers to test, revise, refine, and iteratively improve their everyday practices (using plando-study-act cycles).While significant progress has already occurred, robust, practical, reliable efforts to improve students' mindsets remains at an early formative stage. We hope the ideas presented here are an instructive starting point for new efforts that might attempt to address other problems facing educators, most notably issues of inequality and underperformance in K-12 settings

School Instructional Program Coherence: Benefits and Challenges

This report is one of a series of special topic reports developed by the Chicago Annenberg Research Project. It discusses an important reason why schools involved in multiple improvement initiatives do not always improve their students' achievements. It introduces the concept of instructional program coherence and presents new evidence that students in Chicago elementary schools with stronger program coherence show higher gains in student achievement. The report suggests ways in which school leaders, school improvement partners, and policy makers can act to bring about the instructional coherence that will reward their school improvement efforts

Is politics the problem and markets the answer? An essay review of Politics, Markets, and America's Schools

Politics, Markets, and America's Schools is an ambitious book that draws eclectically on concepts from political science, the sociology of organizations and educational learning theory. Chubb and Moe employ an extensive array of data seeking to link the mechanisms that control school operations to student achievement. They conclude that a total restructuring of the governance system of American education -- from democratic to market control -- is necessary. Our review scrutinizes a set of critical decisions made by Chubb and Moe in defining their key concepts and in the analytical models employed in this research. We argue that many of these decisions are not justified on either theoretical or methodological grounds. Moreover, the cumulative effect of the decision tends to tilt the empirical evidence toward supporting the authors' a priori beliefs. As a result, we conclude that Politics, Markets, and America's Schools is best viewed as a policy argument, where extensive, but not always solid empirical evidence has been artfully employed to advance the authors' preconceived notions about American schooling.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/29704/1/0000036.pd

La fiabilité : une voie vers l’équité ?

Ce ne sont pas les bonnes idées et les innovations qui manquent dans le champ éducatif. Pourtant, l’école actuelle demeure largement incapable de répondre aux besoins de l’ensemble des élèves, s’agissant notamment des élèves de couleur et des élèves pauvres. Pourquoi nos innovations ne parviennent-elles pas à créer une pression positive en faveur de l’équité ? Face à une trop grande variété des résultats dans une même situation, il est illusoire de vouloir prescrire ce qui a marché ailleurs. C’est au contraire en créant une grande « vigilance et conscience situationnelle » que l’on pourra, de façon fiable, faire face à la diversité des besoins et assurer plus d’équité.There is no shortage of good ideas and innovations in the education field. And yet schooling remains grossly unable to meet the needs of all students, particularly students of colour and poor students. Why do our innovations fail to create a positive press on equity? Faced with too great a variety of results in the same situation, it is illusory to want to prescribe what has worked elsewhere. On the contrary, it is by creating great “vigilance and situational awareness” that we will be able to reliably meet the diversity of needs and ensure more equity.Se puede decir que no faltan las ideas buenas y las innovaciones en el campo educativo. Sin embargo, la escuela actual sigue siendo en gran parte incapaz de contestar a las necesidades de la totalidad de los alumnos, sobre todo cuando se trata de alumnos de color y de alumnos pobres. ¿Por qué nuestras innovaciones no permiten crear una presión positiva a favor de la equidad? Frente a una variedad demasiado grande de resultados en una misma situación, resulta ser ilusorio querer preconizar lo que ha funcionado en otros lugares. Por lo contrario, es por la creación de una gran “vigilancia y conciencia situacional” como se podrá enfrentar de manera fiable con la diversidad de las necesidades y asegurar más equidad

Bayesian analysis in applications of hierarchical models: Issues and methods

In applications of hierarchical models (HMs), a potential weakness of empirical Bayes estimation approaches is that they do not to take into account uncertainty in the estimation of the variance components . One possible solution entails employing a fully Bayesian approach, which involves specifying a prior probability distribution for the variance components and then integrating over the variance components as well as other unknowns in the HM to obtain a marginal posterior distribution of interest (see, e.g., Draper, 1995

A Multi-Level Analysis of the Impacts of Services Provided By the UK Employment Retention and Advancement Demonstration

Background: The United Kingdom Employment Retention and Advancement (U.K. ERA) demonstration was the largest and most comprehensive social experiment ever conducted in the United Kingdom. It examined the extent to which a combination of postemployment advisory support and financial incentives could help lone parents on welfare to find sustained employment with prospects for advancement. ERA was experimentally tested across more than 50 public employment service offices and, within each office, individuals were randomly assigned to either a program (or treatment) group (eligible for ERA) or a control group (not eligible). Method: article presents the results of a multilevel nonexperimental analysis that examines the variation in office-level impacts and attempts to understand what services provided in the offices tend to be associated with impacts. Result: The analysis suggests that impacts were greater in offices that emphasized in-work advancement, support while working and financial bonuses for sustained employment, and also in those offices that assigned more caseworkers to ERA participants. Offices that encouraged further education had smaller employment impacts. Conclusion: Plausible results are obtained identifying those particular implementation features that tended to be linked to stronger impacts of ERA. The methodology employed also allows the identification of which services are associated with employment and welfare receipt of control families receiving benefits under the traditional New Deal for Lone Parent program