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Ce ne sont pas les bonnes idées et les innovations qui manquent dans le champ éducatif. Pourtant, l’école actuelle demeure largement incapable de répondre aux besoins de l’ensemble des élèves, s’agissant notamment des élèves de couleur et des élèves pauvres. Pourquoi nos innovations ne parviennent-elles pas à créer une pression positive en faveur de l’équité ? Face à une trop grande variété des résultats dans une même situation, il est illusoire de vouloir prescrire ce qui a marché ailleurs. C’est au contraire en créant une grande « vigilance et conscience situationnelle » que l’on pourra, de façon fiable, faire face à la diversité des besoins et assurer plus d’équité. There is no shortage of good ideas and innovations in the education field. And yet schooling remains grossly unable to meet the needs of all students, particularly students of colour and poor students. Why do our innovations fail to create a positive press on equity? Faced with too great a variety of results in the same situation, it is illusory to want to prescribe what has worked elsewhere. On the contrary, it is by creating great “vigilance and situational awareness” that we will be able to reliably meet the diversity of needs and ensure more equity. Se puede decir que no faltan las ideas buenas y las innovaciones en el campo educativo. Sin embargo, la escuela actual sigue siendo en gran parte incapaz de contestar a las necesidades de la totalidad de los alumnos, sobre todo cuando se trata de alumnos de color y de alumnos pobres. ¿Por qué nuestras innovaciones no permiten crear una presión positiva a favor de la equidad? Frente a una variedad demasiado grande de resultados en una misma situación, resulta ser ilusorio querer preconizar lo que ha funcionado en otros lugares. Por lo contrario, es por la creación de una gran “vigilancia y conciencia situacional” como se podrá enfrentar de manera fiable con la diversidad de las necesidades y asegurar más equidad.

Un gouffre croit, entre nos aspirations pour nos systemes educatifs, qui augmentent rapidement, et ce que les ecoles peuvent accomplir au quotidien. L’education a besoin d’un paradigme de l’amelioration qui reconnaisse la complexite du travail de l’education et la grande variabilite des resultats (outcomes) que nos systemes produisent actuellement. Cet article decrit ce paradigme. Il reunit la discipline de la « science de l’amelioration » avec le pouvoir de communautes structurees en reseau pour accelerer la maniere dont nous apprenons a ameliorer les capacites a s’ameliorer. Ces communautes d’amelioration en reseau (en anglais NIC : Networked Improvement Community) combinent la pensee analytique et des methodes systematiques pour developper et tester, de maniere plus fiable, des changements qui peuvent ameliorer les resultats. Les NIC sont inclusives dans la mesure ou elles rassemblent l’expertise des praticiens, des chercheurs, des concepteurs, des technologues et bien d’autres encore. La maniere dont elles organisent leurs activites est proche de celle d’une communaute scientifique. Elles developpent des preuves fondees sur la pratique (practice-based evidence) comme un complement essentiel aux resultats (findings) d’autres formes de recherche en education. Il ne s’agit pas seulement de savoir ce qui peut ameliorer ou faire empirer les choses ; il s’agit de developper le savoir-comment (know how) necessaire pour ameliorer reellement les choses.

Background/Context Educators around the country are working individually and collectively to improve teaching and learning. Despite marked progress in some places driven by these improvement efforts, overall progress in the education field has been slow and outcomes remain highly variable. This is partly because the field is not organized to learn systematically, accumulate, and disseminate the practical knowledge needed for the improvement of teaching and learning. Purpose/Objective This paper explores the initiation of a social structure to organize collaborative improvement work: the networked improvement community (or NIC). NICs are highly structured, intentionally formed collaborations among education professionals, researchers, and designers that aim to address a high leverage practical problem. We focus on NIC initiation, because of the challenges associated with launching improvement networks. Research Design Drawing on analysis of case studies of network initiation and theory on network initiation and the NIC concept, we posit an organizing framework for describing the process of NIC initiation. Findings/Results The NIC initiation framework specifies five domains of activity that we hypothesize are critical to launching a NIC. These domains attend to: developing a theory of practice improvement; building a measurement and analytics infrastructure; learning and using improvement research methods; leading, organizing, and operating the network; and fostering the emergence of culture, norms, and identity consistent with network aims. We illustrate these five domains with examples from a set of case studies of network initiation that we utilized as a way to test and further elaborate the framework. Conclusions/Recommendations A firm foundation for network initiation is laid through the strategic actions of a network initiation team. By attending to the five domains of activity specified in our framework, initiation teams can catalyze the development of an organizational structure that allows educators to accelerate learning from practice and building a professional knowledge base that enables the field to tackle complex educational problems.

Educators are realizing that individuals working in isolation can’t adequately address the teaching and learning problems that face us today. Collective action networks are needed. Sharing networks use collective energy to support individual action and agency, whereas execution networks typically address complex problems that require sustained collective action to resolve. One kind of execution network -- networked improvement communities (NIC) -- can be of great value to educators as they tackle complex problems of practice. The story of the formation of the Mathematics Teacher Education Partnership (MTEP) illustrates how catalyzing a NIC is different from forming a sharing community and why a formal infrastructure is required for sustained collective action.

Objective: Statway is a community college pathways initiative developed by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching designed to accelerate students’ progress through their developmental math sequence to acquiring college math credit in statistics. Statway is a multifaceted change initiative designed to address the complex problems that impede student success. Specifically, it is a one-year pathway program through which students acquire college math credit. Instructors use research-based learning principles to improve the content and pedagogy for student learning and incorporate social-psychological interventions to sustain student engagement and persistence. In addition, language supports for students’ accessibility to mathematics learning are integrated into the curriculum. Professional development resources assist faculty as they teach new content utilizing unfamiliar pedagogies. Statway is organized as a networked improvement community intending to accelerate educators’ efforts to continuously improve. This study was aimed to assess the effectiveness of Statway during its first two years of implementation. Method: We applied a multilevel model with propensity score matching to control for possible selection bias and increase the validity of causal inference. Results: We found large effects of Statway on students attaining college math credit with persisting effects into the following year as Statway students also accumulated more college-level credits. These improved outcomes emerged for each gender and race/ethnicity groups and for students with different math placement levels. Conclusion: This study provided robust evidence that Statway increases student success in acquiring college math credit and enhances equity in student outcomes. Directions for future work are suggested.

A chasm is growing between our rapidly rising aspirations for our educational systems and what schools can routinely accomplish. Education needs an improvement paradigm—one that recognizes the complexity of the work of education and the wide variability in outcomes that our systems currently produce. This article sketches out such a paradigm. It joins together the discipline of improvement science with the power of structured networked communities to accelerate learning to improve. These networked improvement communities (NICs) combine analytic thinking and systematic methods to develop and test changes that can achieve better outcomes more reliably. NICs are inclusive in drawing together the expertise of practitioners, researchers, designers, technologists, and many others. And they organize their activities in ways akin to a scientific community. They develop practice-based evidence as an essential complement to findings from other forms of educational research. The point is not just to know what can make things better or worse; it is to develop the know-how necessary to actually make things better.

This chapter is a case study of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching's Pathways™ program. The goal of the Statway®™ and Quantway®™ pathways is to improve the success rate of community college students who place into developmental mathematics. What makes these programs unique is their strategy of building a particular kind of professional network, what Carnegie refers to as a Networked Improvement Community (NIC), to organize and lead an array of continuous improvement processes. NICs are a social mechanism through which the collaborative designs and practical theories produced by design-based implementation research (DBIR) can become live resources for the improvement of systems. NICs are comprised of highly structured groups of education professionals, working in collaboration with designers and researchers, to address a practical problem. Driver diagrams are introduced as a tool for organizing the improvement work of NICs. After briefly describing several drivers behind the Pathways program, the chapter details the main elements of the network organization driver as a distinct approach to building communities aimed at improving education. Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets. –Dr. Paul Batalden, Dartmouth Medical School

In this article, Anthony Bryk, Heather Harding, and Sharon Greenberg report on a roundtable jointly sponsored by Teach For America and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. The authors brought together a group of scholars and practitioners with a broad range of perspectives and asked them to explore several questions related to the emerging national narrative on effective teachers: What is an effective teacher? How do we leverage this moment of enormous energy in producing more effective teaching to advance meaningful improvements at scale? Where are the current sites of success? What can we learn from what is working? The article is organized around the edited transcript of the roundtable discussion and is supplemented by author commentaries. The authors seek to illuminate and reimagine the current “nonsystem” in order to accelerate progress toward a wholly new approach to developing the teaching force our nation and our children need.

Many major urban districts have committed large investments to school-based professional development anchored in the work of literacy coaches. At base is a shared belief that instructional coaches are key levers for improvement. Yet, clinical accounts of the role of an instructional coach suggest that this is a complex practice to implement well. This article seeks to add to this literature through a theory-based quantitative investigation of literacy coaching as enacted in a mature school reform initiative. We examine teachers' actual exposure to Literacy Collaborative coaching and analyze the variability in this exposure both within and between schools. We theorize about the factors at both the individual and school organizational levels that might contribute to this observed variability and test the predictive power of these ideas using data from a longitudinal study of 250 teachers in 17 schools.

 This article reports on a 4-year longitudinal study of the effects of Literacy Collaborative (LC), a schoolwide reform model that relies primarily on the oneon-one coaching of teachers as a lever for improving student literacy learning. Kindergarten through secondgrade students in 17 schools were assessed twice annually with DIBELS and Terra Nova. Scores from the study’s first year, before coaching began, offered a baseline for assessing the value added to student learning over the following3 years. A hierarchical, crossed-level, value-added-effects model compared student literacy learning over 3 years of LC program implementation against observed growth under baseline conditions. Results demonstrated increasing improvements in student literacy learning during LC implementation (standard effect sizes of .22 ,. 37, and .43 in years1,2, and 3, respectively), and the benefits persisted through subsequent summers. Findings warrant a claim of substantial effects on student learning for the LC coaching model.

Research on Chicago school improvement indicates that improving elementary schools requires coherent, orchestrated action across five essential supports.

iven the many challenges facing educa tion, it is natural to look to our na tion's research and development ca pacity to point the way. Even at its best, however, extant education re search today only weakly informs the complex processes involved in improv ing teaching and learning. We simply lack the necessary infrastructure to guide the transfor mations we need. This isn't due to an absence of activity. An indus try of education researchers is -identifying problems and developing new concepts. Individual educators regularly experiment with new practices in their class rooms, and school districts are constantly introducing new programs. Individual consultants and commer cial firms market new services, as state and federal policies incentivize new activity, and foundations pro mote bold new solutions seeking to reinvent the in stitutional enterprise. In short, an impressive array of individual projects focuses on many different issues. Taken as a whole, however, this enterprise isn't leading to solutions for major educational problems. We must reengineer both how we carry out education R&D and the institutional environments in which this work occurs if we want to achieve more produc tive ends. Something new and quite different must emerge if we are to confront educational challenges successfully.

This article analyzes the impact of high-stakes testing in Chicago on student achievement in grades targeted for promotional decisions. Using a three-level Hierarchical Linear Model, we estimate achievement value added in gate grades (test-score increases over and above that predicted from a student’s prior growth trajectory) for successive cohorts of students and derive policy effects by comparing value added pre- and postpolicy. Test scores in these grades increased substantially following the introduction of high-stakes testing. The effects are larger in the 6th and 8th grades and smaller in the 3rd grade in reading. Effects are also larger in previously low-achieving schools. In reading, students with low skills experienced the largest improvement in learning gains in the year prior to testing, while students with skills closer to their grade level experienced the greatest benefits in mathematics.

We present the concept of instructional program coherence and explain why school improvement frameworks that incorporate instructional program coherence are more likely to advance student achievement than multiple, unrelated efforts. We present evidence that Chicago elementary schools with stronger instructional program coherence make higher gains in student achievement. We also share observations on how, in specific schools, principals and external partners directed key school resources toward the development of instructional program coherence. In closing, we discuss factors within the educational system that discourage instructional program coherence and suggest ways that school leaders, school improvement partners, and policymakers can support greater instructional program coherence.

This paper considers the issues raised in using standardized achievement test scores for purposes of examining the academic productivity of schools. We critique some commonly used practices by urban school districts and suggest an alternative approach – the school productivity profile. This profile is based on an assessment of each school's contribution to student learning, or value-added, rather than just the overall level of student attainment. We illustrate, using 10-year achievement trend data from the Chicago Public Schools (CPS), both the problems with some commonly reported indicators of school effectiveness and the idea of a school productivity profile. While our analyses suggest broad-based improvements in student learning in many Chicago schools over the past 10 years, we also found that the current testing system is not well designed to make such judgments accurately. We conclude that extant standardized testing systems, like the ITBS used in Chicago, do not afford an accurate basis for assessing school productivity and how this might be changing over time. These results have important policy implications. As school districts seek to become more “outcome oriented,” they will need to invest in better testing and reporting systems in order to know whether they are making genuine progress in this regard.

The Center for School Improvement (CSI) collaborates with a number of Chicago elementary schools on an Urban School Development Initiative. The schools, which are racially isolated and serve low-income communities, agree to work with CSI toward supporting fundamental restructuring using literacy as a lever for change. This article draws together evolving understandings based on several years of work in these schools. The authors first discuss their approach to comprehensive school development, then detail the literacy initiative that is the major academic component of their work, The article concludes with reflections on the role of the research university in promoting urban school reform.

A central means of assessing the health of educational systems involves using longitudinal data to examine patterns of academic growth across a series of grades (e.g., the extent to which the range of achievement among students widens or narrows over time and whether students tend to “slump” in particular grades). The purpose of this article is to illustrate, through a series of analyses based on a longitudinal study of reading achievement in the Chicago Public Schools, that the conclusions one draws about patterns of academic growth and, in turn, the decisions one makes regarding the kinds of interventions that may be needed can be extremely sensitive to the metric used (i.e., whether achievement is measured using grade equivalents or based on item response theory metrics).

In applications of hierarchical models (HMs), a potential weakness of empirical Bayes estimation approaches is that they do not to take into account uncertainty in the estimation of the variance components (see, e.g., Dempster, 1987 ). One possible solution entails employing a fully Bayesian approach, which involves specifying a prior probability distribution for the variance components and then integrating over the variance components as well as other unknowns in the HM to obtain a marginal posterior distribution of interest (see, e.g., Draper, 1995 ; Rubin, 1981 ). Though the required integrations are often exceedingly complex, Markov-chain Monte Carlo techniques (e.g., the Gibbs sampler) provide a viable means of obtaining marginal posteriors of interest in many complex settings. In this article, we fully generalize the Gibbs sampling algorithms presented in Seltzer (1993) to a broad range of settings in which vectors of random regression parameters in the HM (e.g., school means and slopes) are assumed multivariate normally or multivariate t distributed across groups. Through analyses of the data from an innovative mathematics curriculum, we examine when and why it becomes important to employ a fully Bayesian approach and discuss the need to study the sensitivity of results to alternative prior distributional assumptions for the variance components and for the random regression parameters.

Schools today confront ambitious new societal goals aiming at greater learning for more students. Simultaneously, we are demanding that our educational institutions operate more efficiently. A growing cadre of scholars and policy organizations argue that responding to these challenges requires a fundamental reorganization of the connections among research and practice. This chapter details new ways for scholars and practitioners to engage together in disciplined inquiry organized around specified problems of practice improvement. It describes the social organization of networked communities aimed at systematic learning from practice to improve it. Embedded within the day-to-day work of such improvement communities are multiple cycles of design, engineering, and development (DEED) that generate numerous small tests about what works for whom under different circumstances. We call this improvement research. The chapter details a core set of structuring agents necessary to form such networked improvement communities (NIC). We illustrate these ideas drawing on early design experiences from an emerging NIC seeking to address the extraordinary high failure rates in developmental mathematics in community colleges. These “developmental” courses currently operate as a barrier to opportunity, blocking access to both occupational training certification and transfer to 4-year institutions. We posit that research and practice properly arranged can reframe the opportunity equation.

The Consortium on Chicago School Research is a unique research enterprise that is attempting to achieve a productive blend of rigorous social science and vital democratic activities. So far, it has facilitated the development of a research agenda on Chicago school reform and completed surveys of teachers and principals.

Politics, Markets, and America's Schools is an ambitious book that draws eclectically on concepts from political science, the sociology of organizations and educational learning theory. Chubb and Moe employ an extensive array of data seeking to link the mechanisms that control school operations to student achievement. They conclude that a total restructuring of the governance system of American education — from democratic to market control — is necessary. Our review scrutinizes a set of critical decisions made by Chubb and Moe in defining their key concepts and in the analytical models employed in this research. We argue that many of these decisions are not justified on either theoretical or methodological grounds. Moreover, the cumulative effect of the decision tends to tilt the empirical evidence toward supporting the authors' a priori beliefs. As a result, we conclude that Politics, Markets, and America's Schools is best viewed as a policy argument, where extensive, but not always solid empirical evidence has been artfully employed to advance the authors' preconceived notions about American schooling.

This study examines the role of exposure to speech in children's early vocabulary growth. It is generally assumed that individual differences in vocabulary depend, in large part, on variations in learning capacity. However, variations in exposure have not been systematically explored. In this study we characterize vocabulary growth rates for each of 22 children by using data obtained at several time points from 14 to 26 months. We find a substantial relation between individual differences in vocabulary acquisition and variations in the amount that particular mothers speak to their children. The relation between amount of parent speech and vocabulary growth, we argue, reflects parent effects on the child, rather than child-ability effects on the parent or hereditary factors. We also find that gender is an important factor in rate of vocabulary growth. Early childhood is a period of rapid linguistic development. By 2 years, the average child acquires 900 root words (cf. Carey, 1978) and at least a rudimentary syntax (cf. Brown, 1973). Although there has been considerable recent interest in syntactic development, much less attention has been devoted to lexical development. Yet in tracing the development of language from its inception, lexical development must necessarily be a focus of study because the acquisition of words constitutes the child's initial achievement as a language user. A certain amount of vocabulary must be acquired before words can be combined into sentences, and, indeed, several months elapse between the time children start to produce words and the time they start to produce multiword utterances. In addition, vocabulary and syntax are not independent aspects of language knowledge; for example, verbs frequently encode actions involving relations among entities (e.g., give, feed) which are specified by the verb together with its arguments. A major concern in the recent work on syntactic development has been with the relative contributions of the child's innate preparedness for language versus language input. Yet the rapid growth of vocabulary in early childhood also is a manifestation of the human preparedness for language, and parallel questions arise concerning the relative contributions of capacity and input. Especially at the start of language learning, innate preparedness surely plays a role in acquiring word meanings because inferences about meanings are based on pairings of words with situations. As Quine (1969) has persuasively argued, the variety of aspects of a situation which might be encoded by a word is enormous. Because of this, Gleitman and Wanner (1982) point out, it seemscritical to posit innately available constraints on the possible meanings children entertain.