Developing, Implementing, and Institutionalizing Complex Educational Innovations: Considerations for Balanced Assessment Systems

• In Event: Toward Balanced Assessment Systems: Considerations for Implementation and Use

Abstract

Beginning in the 1980s, increasing recognition of the complex, interdependent problems underlying persistently low quality and inequitable educational outcomes in the United States has given rise to increasingly complex innovations that aim to address multiple problems simultaneously, in interaction. Examples include “whole school”/school-wide reforms, comprehensive school reform programs, school turnaround models, charter school networks, and networked improvement communities.

Developing, implementing, and institutionalizing complex innovations is no simple matter. Doing so involves coordinated efforts among interdependent actors distributed among multiple organizations, each with its own agenda and constituencies; in variable authority and influence relationships; with different stocks and flows of resources; in diffuse, dynamic educational environments; and over long periods of time. Yet any such efforts rest atop a fundamental problem: The very complexity of many of these innovations often makes them difficult to understand, never mind to design, implement, and institutionalize.

Balanced assessments systems are a case in point. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to (a) establish a general framework for understanding the fundamental ideas that underlie complex educational innovations and (b) model the use of this framework for the fundamental ideas underlying balanced assessment systems (see Table 1). The paper first establishes context, introduces the analytic framework, and describes how to further develop it. The paper then develops (and models the use of) the framework at both the state and local levels. Finally, it discusses the necessary learning and engagement of state and local leaders for the implementation of balanced assessment systems.

Authors

• Donald J. Peurach, University of Michigan

• Jennifer Lin Russell, Vanderbilt University