69传媒

Opinion
School & District Management Opinion

Why Education Improvement Strategies Always Disappoint

By Laverne Srinivasan 鈥 December 05, 2018 4 min read
BRIC ARCHIVE
  • Save to favorites
  • Print
Email Copy URL

Those of us who work for change in education need a new set of habits to avoid a repeat of recent reform disappointments.

We must learn how to study the problems we aim to solve in the contexts in which they occur, before latching onto solutions. We must listen more closely to students and practitioners, to better understand their circumstances and needs. We also must be deliberate in forging a shared understanding among stakeholders about how to best support young people in their development.

In doing so, both officials at all levels of public education and leaders in the philanthropic and nonprofit sectors would greatly reduce the extent to which their well-intentioned strategies create conflicts and unnecessary burdens for the people they mean to support.

Improvement strategies often don鈥檛 fit well together. Or they don鈥檛 fit well with the contexts in which they are implemented, or with the realities of how people learn and adapt to change.

There are many examples of this fragmented approach to new education strategies: teacher professional development initiatives that don鈥檛 help educators teach their students what they need to learn, academic standards that were changed without looping in parents, or one-size-fits-all programs that fail to address the varied needs of individual students.

This fragmentation prevents young people from receiving the full benefit of the energy invested in their education. It also forces educators to expend their own effort figuring out how to deal with contradictory and unsupported demands.

Improvement strategies often don鈥檛 fit well together."

As a long-time participant in educational reform, Carnegie Corporation of New York鈥攚here I serve as the program director for education鈥攕ees this diversion of energy as a large part of why improvement strategies so often fail to produce significant gains in student learning, or significant progress toward equity in outcomes.

We can do something about this. The full spectrum of people who create, promote, and implement strategies for educational improvement can learn to work differently, and support others in doing the same.

What all of us need to do differently is to put the students whose circumstances we aim to improve at the center of our attention. That means building our understanding of how students and educators experience the system whose outcomes we want to change. We need to test innovations with multiple small trials before moving to full implementation. And we must do so while being more inclusive of different perspectives.

A , sheds some light on how education leaders can build these habits. In this consortium, grantee organizations across the country work with teams of leaders at the state and local level to improve how they develop and carry out strategies to improve the lives of young people.

Participants in the consortium鈥檚 five projects include teams from state education agencies and local districts, community organizations, teacher leaders, and social service agencies. What binds them all is the recognition that their constituents will be better served if they better coordinate their efforts.

Participants are learning to apply a variety of approaches to problem-solving that, while already well established, have yet to be employed extensively in education. For example, human-centered design begins the design process with an understanding of how people experience a problem and its potential solutions. Another promising approach is systems thinking, the discipline of identifying the key actors and forces at work in producing a particular set of outcomes.

Education leaders in the consortium also are learning to orient themselves toward equity in a way that goes beyond addressing longstanding differences in outcomes among different populations. In viewing their improvement strategies through an equity lens, they are confronting the hard truths about the causes and consequences of inequities. As a result, participants are focusing on including marginalized populations in the planning and development of new strategies and initiatives.

Importantly, the IDC projects were not designed to promote particular programs for educational improvements. This was not a case of stipulating that resources be used, for example, to expand after-school programs or improve reading instruction. The consortium鈥檚 goal is to enhance the capacity of those involved to address whatever challenges are before them, in ways that produce coherence and not fragmentation.

Building this capacity is essential to break free of the long running cycle of reform and limited improvements. Certainly, there are strong cases for the new bets being made on social-emotional learning, curriculum guidance, and competency-based instruction. But if we pursue these as we typically do鈥攚ith isolated programs imposed from on high鈥攚e will again be disappointed with the results.

To achieve better outcomes, we must learn to work differently.

Events

School & District Management Webinar Crafting Outcomes-Based Contracts That Work for Everyone
Discover the power of outcomes-based contracts and how they can drive student achievement.
This content is provided by our sponsor. It is not written by and does not necessarily reflect the views of Education Week's editorial staff.
Sponsor
School & District Management Webinar
Harnessing AI to Address Chronic Absenteeism in 69传媒
Learn how AI can help your district improve student attendance and boost academic outcomes.
Content provided by 
School & District Management Webinar EdMarketer Quick Hit: What鈥檚 Trending among K-12 Leaders?
What issues are keeping K-12 leaders up at night? Join us for EdMarketer Quick Hit: What鈥檚 Trending among K-12 Leaders?

EdWeek Top School Jobs

Teacher Jobs
Search over ten thousand teaching jobs nationwide 鈥 elementary, middle, high school and more.
Principal Jobs
Find hundreds of jobs for principals, assistant principals, and other school leadership roles.
Administrator Jobs
Over a thousand district-level jobs: superintendents, directors, more.
Support Staff Jobs
Search thousands of jobs, from paraprofessionals to counselors and more.

Read Next

School & District Management 69传媒 Want Results When They Spend Big Money. Here's How They're Getting Them
Tying spending to outcomes is a goal many district leaders have. A new model for purchase contracts could make it easier.
7 min read
Illustration of scales balancing books on one end and coins on another.
iStock/Getty
School & District Management Reports Strategic Resourcing for K-12 Education: A Work in Progress
This report highlights key findings from surveys of K-12 administrators and product/service providers to shed light on the alignment of purchasing with instructional goals.
School & District Management Download Shhhh!!! It's Underground Spirit Week, Don't Tell the 69传媒
Try this fun twist on the Spirit Week tradition.
Illustration of shushing emoji.
iStock/Getty
School & District Management Opinion How My Experience With Linda McMahon Can Help You Navigate the Trump Ed. Agenda
I have a lesson for district leaders from my (limited) interactions with Trump鈥檚 pick for ed. secretary, writes a former superintendent.
Joshua P. Starr
4 min read
Vector illustration of people walking on upward arrows, symbolizing growth, progress, and teamwork towards success.
iStock/Getty Images