California, Coherence, and Continuous Improvement

With the release of Getting Down to Facts, Stanford University’s SCALE Initiative finds that school performance in California remains widely uneven. While uneven performance is a finding that shocks no one, what sets Getting Down to Facts apart is—with the help of 112 researchers across 22 research briefs—the meticulous detailing of the conditions of California’s education system and the policy changes needed to improve it.

A key finding: Although better positioned than ever before to pursue” broad and ambitious goals for students, California’s education system lacks coherence. More specifically, “Governance structures are fragmented, and policies have proliferated over time, often creating disconnected, contradictory, and burdensome guidance to schools,” writes Susanna Loeb, director of the SCALE Initiative.

This impressive work has inspired me to reflect. I spend a lot of time thinking about coherence and helping system leaders foster it. For the past 20+ years, I have taught a course on education leadership at George Washington University’s Graduate School of Education focused on coherence (for a great set of resources, including district case studies, see the Public Education Leadership Project (PELP) based at Harvard University). I have adapted PELP’s coherence framework to support school districts across the country—including Los Angeles, Omaha (NE), Champaign (IL), Fayette County (KY), and Washington, DC—assess needs, plan strategically, develop leadership capacity, and improve effectiveness. 

Here are just a few lessons I have learned that are also applicable in California (please visit FourPoint’s Resource page for more information):

1. It all starts with a clear theory of action. Successful district leaders clearly communicate the initiatives that are “non-negotiable” and must be implemented with fidelity. Too frequently, I see a mismatch of understanding between what the superintendent expects to see in schools and what principals believe those expectations to be. Somewhat surprisingly, principals often believe that they are “required” to implement initiatives that the superintendent’s team has not mandated. 

2. Improvement often stalls because school systems try to do too much, not too little. A corollary to lesson one: system leaders should limit the number of initiatives that are non-negotiable to five or less. This is for at least two reasons. First, requiring more initiatives places too much on principals and teachers. Consider the elementary teacher required to implement new ELA and math curricula, MTSS, and specific instructional strategies and also to participate in professional learning communities. I see versions of this all the time, and I’m here to tell you: It can’t be done in a way that improves student outcomes at scale. Second, central offices don’t have the capacity to manage the implementation of a lot of initiatives successfully—which brings me to the next lesson:

3. Improvement science is a missing component of the coherence framework. A key tenet of improvement science is to “implement slow and learn fast.” In practice, this means that administrators and educators should focus on only a few high-leverage initiatives but learn from doing so: Are we getting the outcomes we expected? What are the implementation challenges? How can we do a better job supporting our teachers? I learned early in my GW teaching experience that I needed to supplement the coherence framework with an understanding of improvement science and performance management. These concepts fit with the “systems” of the coherence framework, but they need to be made more explicit for graduate students as well as for school and district administrators.

4. Coherence is a precondition for equity. Ensuring equity—that all students are given the resources and opportunities they need to be successful—requires that “pulling a strategic lever” (such as providing teachers with professional development in the science of reading) results in other an appropriate response from other “levers” (such as instructional coaching, teacher evaluation, resource allocation, etc.). This is coherence, and if all necessary levers are not operating as they should, the impact on students—especially those most at risk of school failure—is likely to be minimal. 

Let me know what you think. I’d love to hear about your experiences working to improve outcomes for students.