April 2023 | Written by Anthony S. Bryk, Sharon Greenberg, Albert Bertani, Penny Sebring, Steven E. Tozer, and Timothy Knowles

A comprehensive analysis of the astonishing changes that elevated the Chicago public school system from one of the worst in the nation to one of the most improved. 

How a City Learned to Improve Its Schools tells the story of the extraordinary thirty-year school reform effort that changed the landscape of public education in Chicago. Acclaimed educational researcher Anthony S. Bryk joins five coauthors directly involved in Chicago’s education reform efforts, Sharon Greenberg, Albert Bertani, Penny Sebring, Steven E. Tozer, and Timothy Knowles, to illuminate the many factors that led to this transformation of the Chicago Public Schools. 

Beginning in 1987, Bryk and colleagues lay out the civic context for reform, outlining the systemic challenges such as segregation, institutional racism, and income and resource disparities that reformers grappled with as well as the social conflicts they faced. Next, they describe how fundamental changes occurred at every level of schooling: enhancing classroom instruction; organizing more engaged and effective local school communities; strengthening the preparation, recruitment, and support of teachers and school leaders; and sustaining an ambitious evidence-based campaign to keep the public informed on the progress of key reform initiatives and the challenges still ahead. The power of this capacity building is validated by unprecedented increases in benchmarks such as graduation rates and college matriculation. This riveting account introduces key actors within the schools, city government, and business community, and the partnerships they forged. It also reveals the surprising yet essential role of Chicago’s innovative information infrastructure in aligning disparate initiatives. 

In making clear how elements such as advocacy, civic capacity, improvement research, and strong democracy contributed to large-scale progress in the system’s 600-plus schools, the book highlights the greater lessons that the Chicago story offers for system improvement overall.

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“In this compelling account of Chicago school reform, key players join forces to build a promising future for the city’s students. Policy makers empowered local communities. Funders invested in promising programs. Researchers studied pressing problems.  Administrators cultivated capacity.  And teachers delivered for kids. Despite daunting challenges and setbacks, these reformers achieved remarkable success.“
— Susan Moore Johnson, Jerome T. Murphy Research Professor, Harvard Graduate School of Education

“How a City Learned to Improve Its Schools is a book of monumental importance. At a time when more is asked of public education than ever before, when racialized inequality continues to threaten the promise of public schooling, and when the fastest growing sector of the student population are youngsters of color, school districts should be looking for new approaches to do better for all students. In their new book, Tony Bryk joins some of the most important scholars working in education today to treat us to a panoramic overview of how systems can move the needle in serving all students. This book is the antonym to facile silver bullets, tired old quick-fixes, and magical thinking in education. It is the book every scholar, policy maker, superintendent, teacher, parent and concerned citizen needs to read.“
— Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco, chancellor, University of Massachusetts, Boston, the UCLA Wasserman Dean Emeritus, and author of Education: A Global Compact for a Time of Crisis

April 2023 | Edited by Louis M. Gomez; Manuelito Biag; David G. Imig, Randy Hitz, and Steve Tozer – Foreword by Anthony S. Bryk

Improving America’s Schools Together: How District-University Partnerships and Continuous Improvement Can Transform Education is the first definitive text on continuous improvement in school district-university partnerships, covering improvement methods, theory, research, and real cases across the United States with practical improvement tools that can be adapted to any setting. Through an array of in-depth stories, this book demonstrates how improvement science—as a shared method—can help universities, districts, and schools foster leaders and educators and enhance students’ learning and opportunities.

Among other topics, readers will benefit from reading about how these partnerships developed programs and courses for aspiring school leaders centered on local problems; strengthened improvement capabilities within districts and schools; leveraged improvement science to transform how teachers are professionally supported; and spanned institutional boundaries through shared tools, frameworks, and practices. Through rich stories and detailed artifacts, including protocols, MOUs, and other practical tools, the authors provide insight and guidance on the mechanics of place-based, problem-focused, and improvement-minded district-university partnerships. Readers can assess their readiness and ability to establish continuous improvement partnerships; identify the enabling conditions in their locales; and recognize the kinds of resources and strategies that allow for mutually beneficial collaborations.

June 2022 | Written by Kelly McMahon, Erin Henrick, Felicia M. Sullivan | Published by Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching

For decades, researchers and educators alike have been caught in waves of reforms that sought to change the quality of teaching and learning at scale. The press to make instruction more engaging has been amplified by calls to make our educational systems more effective and equitable. While progress has been made in identifying practices and conditions that promote deeper learning in some classrooms, knowing how to scale ambitious instructional reforms equitably remains an open question.

Research-practice partnerships (RPPs) emerged as a promising strategy for generating new knowledge and building new capabilities for improving teaching and school systems through research. Defined as “a long-term collaboration aimed at educational improvement or equitable transformation through engagement with research,” partnerships are “intentionally organized to connect diverse forms of expertise and shift power relations in the research endeavor to ensure that all partners have a say in the joint work.” What this definition doesn’t capture, however, is the complexity of standing up an RPP.

RPPs seeking to improve instructional practice at scale face dual learning imperatives in that partners must learn how to (1) manage and confront the complexity involved in trying to change instruction at scale and (2) develop a model of partnership that is equipped to the task. The pursuits of these learning imperatives suggests a need for ongoing learning over time. Referring to this as partnering rather than partnership more accurately reflects the active learning needed to address the likely realities of bringing the worlds of research and practice together to confront complexity and drive change.

This paper presents a framework and a reflective tool for partnering for instructional improvement at scale. The framework is composed of four elements: (1) the commitments partners make to each other to solve the problem they set out to solve, (2) the structures an RPP puts in place so that partners can learn together, (3) the expertise it initially brings together and continues to develop as it learns about improving instruction, and (4) the social learning capabilities the RPP develops so that partners can learn together. The interactions among the components create the conditions for learning through partnering that, in turn, influence whether a partnership could be up to the task of achieving equitable instructional reform at scale.

May 2022 | Written by Rick Mintrop, Elizabeth Zumpe, Kara Jackson, Drew Nucci, and Jon Norman | Published by Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching

Designing for and implementing deeper learning across classrooms and schools that serve communities disadvantaged by the U.S. educational system is challenging. This paper illuminates this challenge by asking the question: What would designers of interventions at the classroom, school, and district levels have to take into consideration when they want to powerfully set their organizations on a developmental path towards deeper learning?

The thinking put forth in this paper is closely informed by the experiences of a number of change projects aimed at furthering deeper learning districtwide. The projects were funded by the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation and organized as research-practice partnerships (RPPs) in which improvement teams worked together to design interventions or change activities over a period of three to four years. The approaches taken by the projects differed widely. The purpose of this paper is to aid the thinking of deeper learning designers for future undertakings by putting forth a theory of improvement informed by prior research, offering a matrix of concrete design tasks, and exploring trade-offs of pursuing different approaches.

Deeper learning in the instructional core is characterized by students productively struggling with complex ideas that are important to them given their lived experiences. Students explore these ideas with voice, inquisitiveness, imaginativeness, and collaboration. Therefore, deeper learning in the interaction between students and teachers is the hoped-for outcome of the designed and implemented intervention.

A Theory of Improvement

Realizing deeper learning in classrooms, and with a clear and consistent focus on attenuating inequities, requires substantial shifts in the work of teaching. It is therefore imperative that any deeper learning initiative provide sustained, high-quality professional learning opportunities for teachers.

However, the influence of professional learning experiences on teachers’ daily practices are heavily shaped by the broader school and district context in which they work. This means that, under current circumstances in typical districts, there is a need for sustained professional learning opportunities for other role groups (e.g., principals, district leaders) and attention to ensuring that the school and district organizational routines and cultures support deeper learning.

In mapping the territory of designing for deeper learning, there are three sites of development that a design effort for ambitious instructional improvement must take into consideration: (1) teacher professional development, (2) school organizational development, and (3) district organizational development. Furthermore, designers need to be enabled “to see the system” across these sites of development.

Across these sites, interventions revolve around the learning dimensions of motivation and commitment, conceptual understanding, instructional materials, asset-based orientations and practices, and forms of inquiry in professional community. Important dimensions of school and district organizational development are mobilization of instructional leadership, programmatic focus and coherence, and systems and routines for iterative improvement.

Design Tasks and Trade-Offs

A matrix of design tasks for each learning dimension across the three sites of development makes designing more concrete. The system becomes actionable, but given the systemic complexity of the design challenge, potential activities are numerous.

It is rare that any given deeper learning initiative could cover the full spectrum of design tasks that the theory of improvement suggests. Given incontrovertible limitations in local capacity and collective energy, designing in the local context is the art of selecting a finite but well-chosen number of activities that unleash the drive to change in the desired direction. The design connects local needs assessment and analysis of locally germane obstacles and assets with powerful drivers of change, given an organization’s prevailing knowledge, sentiments, and emotions.

During this process, designers face a series of design decision points: How many sites of development or learning dimensions are possible and useful to tackle and with whom? Can all relevant sites of development will be tackled at once, or would local needs or available resources suggest it is most impactful to concentrate on certain ones? When making selections, designers assume that a certain degree of reasonable change will result if addressing at least some of the design tasks, perhaps sequenced over a given period of time.

By analyzing their chosen set of activities for a given period of time in reference to the full spectrum of multi-level design tasks, designers can realistically assess what aspects of the deeper learning challenge are still unaddressed, what outcome are realistic to expect, and what elements should be phased in over time.

May 2021 | Written by Jennifer Russell, Anthony S. Bryk, Donald J. Peurach, David Sherer, Paul LeMahieu, Edit Khachatryan, Jennifer Z. Sherer, Maggie Hannan | Published by Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching

A burgeoning set of education-related organizations join networks each year, reflecting a shared belief that problems in education are too complex for any one educator or organization to solve on their own and that collaboration can support educational improvement. The goal of this paper is to describe how networked improvement communities (NICs) create a social structure to catalyze the type of community that can solve complex problems. We draw from prior theorizing, the research literature on network and learning community development, and observations of developing NICs to articulate a framework for network development. The framework is intended to be an analytic tool for thinking and reasoning about NIC emergence and maturation.

July 2020 | Written by Anthony S. Bryk

Improvement in Action, Anthony S. Bryk’s sequel to Learning to Improve, illustrates how educators have effectively applied the six core principles of continuous improvement in practice. The book highlights relevant examples of rigorous, high-quality improvement work in districts, schools, and professional development networks across the country.

The organizations featured in the book have addressed, with remarkable results, long-standing inequitable educational outcomes in high school graduation rates, college readiness, and absenteeism. The cases emphasize the measures the educators took and the thinking that motivated their actions.

Bryk describes how improvers, working in different contexts and confronting different problems, used select principles, tools, and methods to make improvement come to life. Brief analytic reflections are embedded throughout the narratives, and each chapter concludes with an analysis of a set of larger lessons illuminated by the organization’s story. Taken as a set, these examples offer readers valuable insights about the actual dynamics of doing improvement work.

Improvement in Action, paired with Learning to Improve, provides readers with a comprehensive understanding of the practice, method, and theory of large-scale continuous improvement in education.

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“A must-read for educators who aim to put the principles for continuous improvement into action, transforming their organizations in the process. The six diverse case studies of successful improvement efforts provide vivid images of what it means to live the improvement principles. Taken together, the cases offer concrete, actionable insights into the core aspects of improvement work that can inform readers’ pursuit of ambitious improvement goals.”
— Paul Cobb, research professor, Vanderbilt University

“In Learning to Improve, Anthony Bryk boldly challenged educators to adopt and adapt modern, scientifically grounded principles of improvement. Now, in Improvement in Action, he offers six textured case studies that bring the theory to life in ways invaluable for anyone who wishes to accelerate toward profoundly better educational systems. In this, Bryk extends his legacy as one of the most important education change agents of his generation.”
— Donald M. Berwick, president emeritus and senior fellow, Institute for Healthcare Improvement

June 2020 | Written by Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching

The Summit on Improvement in Education engages a growing community of education professionals, including school and district leaders, staff from charter management organizations, leaders in state departments and professional organizations, entrepreneurs, and faculty from higher education organizations.

The Summit community continues to grow in size, going from 400 attendees at the inaugural conference in 2014 to more than 1,700 attendees in 2019, but it has also grown in thought and practice. It extends opportunities for those new to improvement to learn more about the productive use of improvement principles, networks, and supportive methods and tools; for those already engaged in improvement to present on their progress; and for all to learn from others realizing measurable improvement in processes and systems and achieving more ambitious goals for the students they serve.

Scheduled for April 1–3, 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic forced us to cancel the in-person event on March 9. Knowing the distinct opportunity afforded by the Summit learning environment, the connections among educational professionals and their problems of practice, and the disciplined efforts to advance improvements on these problems, Carnegie made the decision to reimagine the Summit as a virtual learning experience over the same dates and with the same quality that is delivered at the in-person meeting.

The resulting Virtual Summit schedule leveraged digital technology to offer three keynotes, 43 breakout sessions, 25 on-demand prerecorded breakout sessions, and 22 virtual poster presentations over the course of the three days. In moving the conference into the virtual space, what began as a necessity became an opportunity for presenters to think more creatively about how to enhance social learning in their sessions and deepen connections among attendees. After the Summit, we curated the digital content from the virtual sessions into a resource for improvers to draw from into the future.

The aim of this report is to document what we did to pivot from an in-person to a virtual event within three weeks—while working remotely without the benefit of face-to-face meetings and huddles. The areas of focus are (1) organization, (2) technology, (3) program development and support, and (4) communications.

April 2020 | Written by Christina Dixon and Simone Palmer

This Reflection Guide summarizes the findings of a Carnegie Foundation project to understand how executive leaders in education transform their organizations to be capable of producing new levels of system performance through the use of improvement science principles. Described here are the key dispositions, core practices, and levers of transformation used by executive leaders and, within each of these categories, vital elements of successful executive leadership of such a transformation are identified. Each element includes a description accompanied by an illustration drawn from the experience of an executive leader. Some of these elements may be familiar, but others are likely to be new or offer “stretch goals” for leadership practice.

Few leaders in our field routinely incorporate all elements into how they lead, and learning to lead improvement, like improvement itself, is a never-ending journey. For this reason, each category concludes with questions to stimulate reflection and deeper learning to support leaders in self-discovering opportunities for changing their own thinking and behavior to advance continuous improvement in their own contexts.

February 2020 | Written by David Sherer, Jon Norman, Anthony S. Bryk, Ash Vasudeva, and Kelly McMahon

Across the social sectors, a growing number of organizations are embracing continuous improvement models and organizing themselves as networks to attack complex problems. To succeed, networks must learn quickly by studying their own practices, continuously adapting to changing circumstances within their organizations and in the broader environment, and incorporating this learning into their ongoing work.

This paper describes our integrated Evidence for Improvement (EFI) approach that outlines how a variety of tools and practices drawn from diverse forms of program evaluation can inform the leaders of networks in advancing productive change. In addition, improvement networks can be conceptualized and measured using a three-level nested model (see Figure 1) composed of (1) a working theory of improvement, (2) an improvement enterprise, and (3) environmental contexts.

As those with evaluative expertise engage in inquiry targeted at each of these levels, they become authentic partners with improvement leaders and fully align their analytic efforts with the improvement activities and social contexts of the network. The EFI approach is designed to enhance a network’s internal learning processes and, in turn, lead to more positive impacts for educators and students. It has implications for improvement practitioners, evaluators, and funders.

The EFI approach builds on evaluation techniques developed over the last 50 years to craft a coherent and integrated framework that can guide future evaluative efforts for continuous improvement networks. We see the primary contribution of this paper as making more visible the connections between (1) longstanding practices in program evaluation and, (2) the gathering and use of evidence for continuous improvement carried out through structured networks.

Evidence for Improvement: An Integrated Analytic Approach for Supporting Networks draws on our direct experiences working with improvement networks, a review of existing writing in the evaluation field, and the advice and opinions of prominent evaluators and scholars who study the use of evidence and joined with us in this inquiry. We encourage future research and writing to examine and investigate the usefulness of the practices proposed here in pursuit of a more refined understanding of how working analysts might use them. Such inquiry has the potential to advance our understanding of the best way to support networks as they engage in the challenging work of continuous learning and improvement.

June 2018 | Written by Anthony S. Bryk

Carnegie Foundation President Anthony S. Bryk discusses the topic of “Advancing Quality in Continuous Improvement” in his keynote at the 2018 Carnegie Summit. Reflecting on seven diverse examples of quality improvement work in action, Bryk presents four key lessons illuminated by these efforts.

The video of this keynote is also available.