Beyond Instruction: Continuous Improvement in a Research-Practice Partnership to Transform Attendance Practices in Detroit

• In Event: Can Continuous Improvement Work in the Turbulent World of Urban Districts?

Abstract

Continuous improvement in schools has mainly been applied to classroom teaching and learning (Cobb & Wilhelm, 2022). Yet, an enormous amount of educational time and resources are devoted to non-instructional efforts. As schools and districts strive to improve practices and outcomes, they face much uncertainty as they develop or adapt practices with ambiguous cause-effect relationships that vary across contexts (Yurkofksy, 2022) like attendance. Though pupil accounting is an old practice (Hutt, 2018), attendance-promoting practices are not well-defined, and attendance issues are “ecological” in nature (Author, 2021, 2022, 2024). Continuous improvement is best suited to help schools and districts address technical uncertainty, particularly in well-defined domains of practice like instruction, and do not necessarily help resolve uncertainties imposed by a demanding and incoherent external environment (Yurkofsky et al., 2020). Likewise, traditional approaches to continuous improvement are less clearly applicable when it is unclear how best to represent and monitor progress on an issue.

Our study reports on an effort to embed continuous improvement practices in the work of attendance agents—school-based personnel focused on increasing attendance and decreasing chronic absenteeism—in the Detroit public school district. As part of our research-practice partnership, we worked with district personnel to train attendance agents on continuous improvement and supported their application of improvement methods in their schools. Drawing on two years of qualitative data from interviews, observations, and artifacts, we consider how the principles and tools of continuous improvement translate to domains outside of the “instructional core” of schooling. Specifically, we ask:

1. In what ways did attendance agents adopt the routines, tools, and processes of continuous improvement to address attendance issues?

2. What institutional and organizational factors mediated attendance agents’ adoption and implementation of continuous improvement?

3. To what extent did attendance agents’ adoption or implementation of continuous improvement transform attendance practice in schools and the district?

Our study yielded three core findings about the use of continuous improvement methods in attendance work. First, because of the nature and complexity of chronic absenteeism as an issue, continuous improvement methods helped practitioners understand the issue better while simultaneously generating new uncertainties about how to address it. Second, while the NIC provided social and emotional support for these practitioners, it failed to produce useful technical support or innovation of new practices. Third, attendance agents experienced a clash between the regimented nature of continuous improvement methods on one hand, and their uncertain and often-conflicting role expectations and responsibilities on the other hand.

Our study offers useful evidence on the potential to translate continuous improvement to domains beyond instruction. For attendance specifically, continuous improvement methods may be difficult to adopt in the context of uncertainty (Yurkofsky, 2022), and they may not deal adequately with the relational and political dimensions of practice necessary to sufficiently address out-of-school barriers to attendance (Yurkofsky et al., 2020). Our findings offer insight on opportunities and limits of continuous improvement to support attendance improvement and suggest the need to combine CI with other perspectives and approaches.

Authors

• Danica Brown, Tulane University

• Jeremy L. Singer, University of Michigan-Flint

• Sarah Winchell Lenhoff, Wayne State University