Opinion
School & District Management Opinion

Why Education Improvement Strategies Always Disappoint

By Laverne Srinivasan — December 05, 2018 4 min read
BRIC ARCHIVE
  • Save to favorites
  • Print

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’t fit well together. Or they don’t 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’t 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’t fit well together."

As a long-time participant in educational reform, Carnegie Corporation of New York—where I serve as the program director for education—sees 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 recent report on a Carnegie Corporation initiative, the Integration Design Consortium, 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’s 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’s 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—with isolated programs imposed from on high—we will again be disappointed with the results.

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

Events

Ed-Tech Policy Webinar Artificial Intelligence in Practice: Building a Roadmap for AI Use in Schools
AI in education: game-changer or classroom chaos? Join our webinar & learn how to navigate this evolving tech responsibly.
Education Webinar Developing and Executing Impactful Research Campaigns to Fuel Your Ed Marketing Strategy 
Develop impactful research campaigns to fuel your marketing. Join the EdWeek Research Center for a webinar with actionable take-aways for companies who sell to K-12 districts.
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
Privacy & Security Webinar
Navigating Cybersecurity: Securing District Documents and Data
Learn how K-12 districts are addressing the challenges of maintaining a secure tech environment, managing documents and data, automating critical processes, and doing it all with limited resources.
Content provided by Softdocs

EdWeek Top School Jobs

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

Read Next

School & District Management The Eclipse Is Great for Learning. But It's Tough on School Logistics
A total solar eclipse will cross a large swath of the country on April 8, sparking tough management choices for leaders of the districts in its path.
5 min read
A woman and stands outside with her arm on the back of a boy as they look up at the sky while wearing special paper glasses made for viewing a solar eclipse.
Jackie Johnson and her son Bradley Johnson, 9, watch a partial solar eclipse at the Frost Science Museum on Oct. 14, 2023, in downtown Miami. In 2024, some districts are planning to delay or cancel school on the day of a total eclipse, out of safety concerns.
Matias J. Ocner/Miami Herald via AP
School & District Management Opinion A Good Principal Knows When It's Time to Leave
I didn’t leave my job because of burnout; I stepped away from being a school leader because it was in everybody’s best interest.
Matthew Ebert
4 min read
Conceptual illustration of someone handing off a baton to someone else over a completed puzzle.
Vanessa Solis/Education Week via Canva
School & District Management Principals Tell Politicians on Capitol Hill: We’re Burning Out
Students' mental health top principals' growing list of concerns.
6 min read
People walk outside the U.S Capitol building in Washington, June 9, 2022.
Visitors walk outside the U.S Capitol building in Washington on June 9, 2022.
Patrick Semansky/AP
School & District Management Women Superintendents Experience Bias on the Climb to Leadership
Interpersonal slights and inequities make it hard for women to land the job and stay in it.
3 min read
Woman stands in front of a staircase in different colors. She is about to walk up the stairs. Concept of standing in front of a challenge and finding the right solution and courage to move on.
mikkelwilliam/E+