Contextualizing the Evaluations of the NSI Initiative: Perspectives on Hub Leadership in Educational Improvement Networks

• In Event: Networked Continuous Improvement at Scale: Research Findings and Reflections from the NSI Initiative

Abstract

The Gates Foundation’s Networks for School Improvement initiative was a landmark effort to support educational improvement networks in advancing educational opportunities and outcomes for poor and minoritized high school students. One distinguishing feature of these networks was their dependence on “hub organizations” responsible for their development, operations, and success. The leadership of hub organizations is hypothesized to be a key driver of networks as “scientific-professional learning communities” engaged in iterative analysis, design, implementation, and evaluation (Russell et al., 2025). Thus, our purpose is to establish context for the summative evaluations of the NSI initiative by providing perspective on hub leadership in the participating networks.
This paper integrates findings from a series of studies on hub leadership within the Gates NSI initiative (Duff, 2024; Peurach et al., 2020; Peurach et al., 2025; Peurach et al., under review). These studies were one component the Improvement Network Health and Development (INHD) study conducted by Partners for Network Improvement at the University of Pittsburgh, a capacity-building and research effort within the NSI initiative conducted in collaboration with researchers at Vanderbilt Peabody College, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and the University of Michigan.
We used methods of inductive theory building (Locke, 2007) to conceptualize and measure the practice, organizational contexts, role/team structure, and professional demographics of hub leadership. Data sources included:
• Interviews with 26 senior hub leaders in high functioning improvement networks.
• Responses from three administrations of the Improvement Network Health and Development Survey (Bryk et al., 2025).
• Documents from the Gates Foundation and the participating networks.
• Participation in a “community of practice” for hub leaders within the NSI initiative.

Our findings suggest that hub leadership is categorically distinct from conventional educational leadership as enacted in districts and schools. In contrast to institutionalized bureaucracies, hub leadership is enacted in “temporary adhocracies”: adaptive, organic, often-informal organizational arrangements in which multi-disciplinary teams mobilize diverse sources of expertise for bounded periods of time to solve complex problems in uncertain environments. Within these temporary adhocracies, the core work of hub leaders included:
• Developing and sustaining the hub as an organization.
• Building and managing the network.
• Supporting improvement activity within the network.
• Integrating equity into the network.
• Managing relationships external to the network.
• Analyzing and improving the network as a learning system.
• Navigating persistent challenges of change management and systems alignment.
Our findings also suggest that hub leadership roles and teams were constructed with limited functional specialization, such that responsibility for multiple domains of work raised the cognitive demands on individual leaders. Even so, hub leaders reported have having had limited prior professional training or professional experience in managing such work in network contexts.
Our findings have potential to support more nuanced consideration of the results and implications of the summative evaluations of the NSI initiative, in that hub leaders were working in novel organizations with complex roles and responsibilities, and developing the knowledge and capabilities needed to enact their roles within the context of NSI initiative, itself.

Authors

• Donald J. Peurach, University of Michigan

• Megan Duff, UNC Chapel Hill

• Jennifer Zoltners Sherer, University of Pittsburgh

• Chris Matthis, Partners for Network Improvement