A new brief by Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE) outlines the strategies used in partnership with California Education Partners (Ed Partners) aimed at improving student outcomes. Over the past four-years, 48 districts participated in an Ed Partners’ collaboration with the goal of improving student outcomes in one of two areas — in preschool through third grade or to increase the proportion of students who are on track to graduate high school having met California’s A-G requirements (which are required for admission to a University of California or California State University school).
Ed Partners collaboration
Ed Partners typically works with mid-size districts that serve between 2,000 and 20,000 students and include a high population of underserved student groups. The first step is a facilitated capacity review to build a shared understanding of where the district is, reform efforts already underway and an opportunity to reflect on what can be improved to support student outcomes. A cross-district “improvement team” is then selected, composed of one to two district leaders, at least one or two principal and teachers representing the range of grades and subjects that are the focus of the collaboration.
The PACE report provides an analysis of the Ed Partner approach, which emphasizes “sustainable system improvement that leads to improved student outcomes. While many professional development activities have historically focused on creating meaningful learning opportunities for participating adults, the Ed Partners Promise sets the tone that the success of districts and the collaboration as a whole will be measured based on outcomes that the district is expected to sustain at the end of its collaboration with Ed Partners.”
Five components make up Ed Partners’ approach to continuous improvement:
- Identify stakeholders within the system at the classroom, school and district levels who are needed to scale improvement.
- Create a culture where it is safe to try new things, even if they fail, in the service of learning and improvement.
- Use data to understand gaps in performance, monitor progress and provide instruction that meets students’ needs.
- Pilot test promising ideas and gather evidence of effectiveness and educator support through the pilot process.
- Scale effective practices by expanding the pool of educators trying the piloted approach and leveraging system structures, processes and leaders’ authority to spread the change so that all students who can benefit receive that approach.
PACE posits that many education reform efforts fail due to their lack of scale — either the reform never expands beyond a small group of early adopters, or the reform is implemented widely but superficially and does not meaningfully change practices or outcomes.
“Adopted reforms are only significant if they persist over time, so they need to become embedded in the structures, processes, and norms of the district,” wrote researchers. “While reforms are often initiated, required, and/or supported by external mandates, over time the authority and capacity to support the change and the understanding of how to enact the change must shift to be held within the organizations (i.e., districts, schools, and teachers).”
Ed Partners teaches districts a staged approach to go from small-scale pilot tests to districtwide implementation:
- Team members pilot a new practice, gain evidence about how it is working, and adopt, adapt or abandon it.
- Once the team members have figured out how the approach can be implemented in their system, they start expanding testing by recruiting willing and relevant colleagues outside the improvement team. This may lead to further adaptation of the approach; it is also intended to create support for broader implementation among teachers not on the improvement team.
- The expansion more systematically identifies teachers in participating schools and focal grades by engaging system structures and processes to support scale as the work moves beyond early adopters.
- The work spreads farther in the district across traditional organizational silos, such as grade levels, departments, or schools, becoming embedded in norms, structures, and processes.
- Finally, the changes are spread districtwide and become new norms. The district office’s role is to monitor and make adjustments as needed to sustain high-quality implementation across all sites.
“Ed Partners’ approach to continuous improvement and scale intentionally slows initial implementation and spread, interrupting the iterative cycles of superficial change that are the norm in many. Instead, this approach encourages sustained focus on specific high-leverage practices with a deliberate rollout. As Ed Partners clearly states, districts will not be able to move through all five stages within the three years of the collaboration, but they will ideally both make progress and learn how to pilot and subsequently scale interventions in their systems,” states the report.
Outcomes
Ed Partners-led districts have inconsistently made the types of gains that the organization wants them to achieve. PACE extracted a series of lessons from their study of the Ed Partners’ collaborations.
Real reform requires buy-in at all levels
With strong support from the superintendent and other district leaders such as the school board, multilevel leadership and commitment at the classroom and school levels are key to taking
advantage of what Ed Partners’ approach.
Transforming systems in a long-term commitment
Ed Partners uses three-year collaborations because that timeline creates a productive sense of urgency for teams, and because Ed Partners’ goal is to build districts’ capacity to improve, not to create a long-term dependency on its supports. In three years, Ed Partners aims to give districts new knowledge about evidence-based practices, a strong start in scaling them and experience with sustainable approaches for system improvement, and sustain that improvement beyond the collaboration.
“The work has shown that Ed Partners’ approach to district collaboration — providing opportunities for districts to own their improvement work while Ed Partners provides scaffolding in the form of frameworks for understanding how to scale system reform, research-based ideas to push through a district system, and supports for districts to scale changes — has promise for building system capacity and improving student outcomes. But the success of these initiatives depends heavily on the engagement and commitment of district leadership at all levels, from the classroom to the school to the district office,” concludes the report.