Networks for School Improvement Evaluation: Intermediary Supports

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Thursday 8:00 a.m. Four Seasons Ballroom 2-3
  In Roundtable Session: Networked Continuous Improvement Across Varied Contexts: Results from the First Three Years of the Networks for School Improvement Initiative (Table 1)

Abstract

Prior research has identified challenges in using CI to center student experience and opportunities, which may require modification of traditional CI practices and approaches (e.g., Diamond and Gomez 2023; Eddy-Spicer and Gomez 2022; Valdez et al. 2020). The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Networks for School Improvement was created to improve high school and college enrollment outcomes for students who are Black, Latino, or experiencing poverty. For this analysis, we primarily draw upon data from 25 NSI networks over three years, including interviews with intermediary staff (n=253) and district leaders (n=27).
We find that intermediaries actively worked to center students in their work. They recognized early the need to improve their own organizational understandings of students, their experience and needs, and how to support teachers in understanding their students. Drawing on Gutierrez’s (2012) Dimensions, we found that intermediaries worked with schools to improve access to learning opportunities, identify and redress differences in achievement, and develop skills in reflecting on students’ identity in their work. While intermediaries used all three dimensions, they most frequently reported disaggregating student data to identify gaps in achievement and focus their efforts on reducing those gaps. However, some intermediaries also worked to better understand students’ complex identities and how best to engage students as individuals, especially by drawing on student voice to shape their improvement efforts.
In most NSI, efforts to center students increased over time. First, intermediaries made substantive efforts to center focal students in their own organizational work. As they developed their NSI, intermediaries recruited schools based on whether they served a majority of the focal students groups, or, less frequently, on schools’ existing emphasis on fairly addressing student needs. Finally, intermediaries centered students in their capacity-building supports for schools by focusing on fair student opportunities in coaching and convenings, and encouraging the use of student voice data by school CI teams. Using student voice data to understand student needs and tailor change ideas was a growing focus for networks over time. Disaggregation of student data also remained a common strategy to understand student needs. Existing research notes concerns that an overemphasis on student outcomes, rather than the experience and opportunities, may not be well suited to addressing systemic differences in experience (Roegman et al. 2018).
On the whole, intermediaries made purposeful efforts to center students in their work, integrating these efforts into operations and support of the network, and eventually into the work of school teams, remained more challenging.

Authors

• Rebecca Herman, RAND Corporation

• Susan Bush-Mecenas, RAND Corporation