The CORE Improvement Community: Testing Continuous Improvement in a Network of Large Urban Districts

• In Event: 66.051 - Testing Continuous Improvement in Practice: Learning Locally to Improve at Scale

Abstract

This paper examines the improvement journey of the CORE Improvement Community (CIC). The CORE districts are a network of eight of California’s large, urban districts, serving over one million students, which partnered together to form a Networked Improvement Community (NIC). This paper presents the findings from the developmental evaluation of the CIC’s second year using the NIC approach to support improvement with the aim of closing the African-American and Latinx achievement gap in 4th-8th grade mathematics.

Data come from fall and spring semi-structured interviews with CORE staff (n=13) and district improvement team leaders in all eight districts (n=17). Spring site visits were conducted in three of those districts, selected to represent attempts to implement the work of the CIC with fidelity. Starting with the site visit interview data (n=44), researchers analyzed artifacts, and observation notes collected at district meetings and CORE network events (25 hours total) to complete three case studies of CORE CIC implementation. We then employed multiple cross-case analysis (Yin, 2013), finding three main tensions in the data:

1. Unclear aim: One of the central mechanisms in a NIC model is the shared aim, around which collaborative work is organized. Yet, with California’s statewide emphasis on continuous improvement, some of the CORE districts are engaged in the CIC as a general strategy to build their improvement capacity. While the explicit aim is complementary to the broader goal of building improvement capacity in the districts, district and CIC was organized differently depending on whether the NIC aim or the general capacity goal drove the work, thus putting them in tension.
2. Context: No school or district is a blank slate—each brings contextual strengths and challenges. Furthermore, many have prior experiences with collaborative structures (e.g. professional learning communities) and prior improvement approaches (e.g., Baldridge) with which the work of the CIC interacts. CORE needed to maximize its own finite resources and build collaboration in the network by offering shared learning experiences for participating schools and districts, which was in tension with districts’ desires for differentiated supports and local adaptations.
3. District role: Improvement attempts contain an understanding of what will motivate people in organizations to engage. Improvement offers front-line agency and responsibility to teachers in return for transparent measurement and attempts to change. Yet districts have a clear role to play in setting priorities and finding resources. The CIC is “learning their way into” understanding the balance between top-down and bottom-up approaches necessary to sustain the collective work of improvement, fundamental to a successful NIC.

The conclusions provide new insights into this particular approach to reform, while also building on the existing knowledge based about taking innovations to scale (Cannata, Cohen-Vogel, & Sorum, 2015; Sutton & Rao, 2014; Coburn, 2003) the role of the district (Stein & Coburn, 2008), and the ways practitioner autonomy affects the implementation of educational interventions (Mehan, Hubbard, & Datnow, 2010; McLaughlin, 1990; Weatherley & Lipsky).

Authors

• Alix Gallagher, Stanford University

• Heather J. Hough, Stanford University

• Taylor N. Allbright, University of Southern California

• Kate Kennedy, University of Southern California