Defining and Measuring Sustainability of Reform: Factors That Affect Our Abilities to Generate Enduring Change

• In Event: Empirical and Conceptual Views of Organizations, Actors, and Practices

Abstract

This paper comes out of an NSF-funded project that focuses on brining clear definitions and common language to work on scaling and sustaining innovations in education. Drawing from a comprehensive search that yielded over 30,000 abstracts and a review of nearly 600 full sources, this paper presents three main areas of findings. First, we will show the range of definitions used by the field when discussing sustainability. Second, we will present the factors identified during this review that appear to contribute to an inhibit sustainability as well as measures we have created to identify them. Finally, we will present some of our developing and emerging models of relationships between these factors and the spread and endurance of innovations in education.

Authors

• Jeanne Rose Century, University of Chicago

• Mollie Rudnick, RAND Corporation

• Cassie Freeman, University of Chicago