Empowering Community School Attendance Teams Through Improvement Science Practices

• In Event: Building Equitable Leadership Capacity: An Improvement Science Toolkit

Abstract

The community school model is an equity strategy that empowers historically marginalized school communities through partnerships with external community-based organizations, drawing on both professional and community-held knowledge and practices to reduce inequitable academic outcomes by targeting contributing factors through extended learning time opportunities, increased student and family engagement, culturally responsive practices, and the reduction of chronic absenteeism in the school community.
Chronic absenteeism in particular is a critical predictor for student achievement and high school graduation rates and helps to identify at-risk students. It is a significant challenge in the public school system, driving inequitable outcomes for marginalized students. Since 2014, a major metropolitan school system has used the community school model as an equity strategy, providing funding to external community-based organizations that partner with individual schools to provide non-instructional supports, including attendance teams dedicated to reducing chronic absenteeism.
This study focused on the use of Improvement Science through PDSA (Plan-Do-Study-Act) cycles at two secondary schools that have used the community school model for more than five years (Forman, 2018). The first cycle focused on de-implementation, a healthcare strategy that is being applied to community school work for the first time. De-implementation is the reduction or elimination of ineffective strategies to increase capacity, creating more time for implementation of highly effective strategies (Wang et al, 2018). De-implementation was repeated as needed until enough capacity was created to introduce new culturally responsive strategies that drew on professional and community-held forms of knowledge and practices. Both high schools successfully used de-implementation to increase the efficacy of their attendance teams and to increase the capacity of their attendance team members. Additionally, one of the two schools created enough new capacity to implement a new attendance strategy focused on the collection of intersectional data through student mentoring.
The scholarly significance of this work is threefold. First, it introduces Improvement Science into attendance team work at community schools, which allows for short term data collection and analysis. This reduces reliance on solely longitudinal data, which has primarily informed attendance team practices. Second, this study centers the knowledge and practices held by community members through prioritizing their evaluation of existing attendance team strategies during the de-implementation process. This is a significant shift because previous attempts at school reform in this metropolitan area prioritized the knowledge of reformists that were external to the school community. Third and most significantly, this study introduces the concept of de-implementation itself into school-based improvement science work, where it has been primarily used in the healthcare field prior to this study. De-implementation is a promising Improvement Science approach that can potentially transform equity initiatives in school communities through community-informed recalibration of existing equity strategies, grounding culturally responsive initiatives in data that can inform ongoing evaluation and revision of these initiatives.

Author

• Kevin J. Coyne, Fordham University