Sign up to receive our monthly newsletter, which includes insights, updates, and recommended reads from the Carnegie Foundation.
This series of blog posts presents resources for educators from the 2021 Summit on Improvement in Education (and elsewhere). This offering includes the second volume of resources focused on Leadership.
This series of blog posts presents resources for educators from the 2021 Summit on Improvement in Education and elsewhere.
In early October, Phoenix Union High School District (PXU) hosted participants of the Carnegie Learning Leadership Network (Carnegie LLN) to reimagine high schools and move beyond time-based models of learning like the Carnegie Unit.
This series of blog posts presents resources for educators from the 2021 Summit on Improvement in Education (and elsewhere). This is the third blog post, and it focuses on Data and Measurement.
This series of blog posts presents resources for educators from the 2021 Summit on Improvement in Education (and elsewhere). This is the first blog post focusing on leadership.
This series of three papers presents a set of frameworks designed to assist educational leaders in making concrete improvements that advance deeper learning instruction at scale. They were produced by three study teams convened by the Carnegie Foundation and made up of members of research-practice partnerships and external experts with…
Carnegie Board Chair Diane Tavenner and President Tim Knowles discuss how technology and personal relationships can be combined to create a resilient learning community and why the Carnegie Unit must be reconsidered to stay effective and relevant.
Writer and educator David Kirp talks to Carnegie President Tim Knowles about scalable and sustainable programs in New York, Georgia, and Columbia that are getting teaching and learning right.
Tim Knowles talks with Carnegie board chair Lillian Lowery about the importance of teachers of color, the changing role of assessment, and the future of the classroom.
Lumina Foundation President Jamie Merisotis talks with Tim Knowles about the need for innovation in the post-secondary sector: “Our top priority as a country has to be to narrow and ultimately eliminate those large racial gaps that exist in American society.”
Christopher Emdin and Timothy Knowles share a microconversation about the impact of poverty on the imagination, the role of “freestyleability” and “ratchetdemics” in the classroom, and how teachers are performance artists and students their works of art.
Carnegie President Timothy Knowles and Trustee Yo-Yo Ma discuss the future of learning, why young people will be instrumental to leveraging this moment to make real change for humanity and for the earth, and how happiness can be found in confronting challenges.
Carnegie President Timothy Knowles talks with Senior Fellow Dr. Janice Jackson, formerly of Chicago Public Schools, about education, equity, and the future of learning in a post-pandemic school system.
Addressing complex educational problems using positive deviance requires detective work. The task: to discover “outliers” who have succeeded under conditions where most others fail; uncover the strategies they use; and design opportunities to share those strategies.
Three up-and-coming networked improvement communities share common “messy” challenges and helpful advice at Carnegie’s 2017 Summit on Improvement in Education.
Some of the most successful efforts to identify and solve problems in teaching and learning occur within networked improvement communities. A new journal article lays out five critical strategies for success in building these collaborative teams of professionals.
Variability is everywhere in education. Everything from a school’s location to the textbooks it uses impact student learning. The Six Sigma approach to improvement emphasizes data analysis to reduce variance and inefficiency in school processes to help all students succeed.
Everyone has a stake and a say in the Lean approach to improving educational achievement. The school improvement model evolved from Toyota’s philosophy of building a culture in which all employees were empowered and expected to be part of providing the best possible product.
The implementation science approach to improvement in education centers on how to accommodate local school variables and other contextual factors that can impede successful implementation of change ideas, by creating teams that include external facilitators and specialists.
A school performance framework in California’s Oakland Unified School District gives schools a multi-faceted and detailed look at where they need to improve based on more than a dozen measures of both academic achievement and the culture and climate of the school.
A broad collaboration of stakeholders, from teachers and administrators to researchers and designers, is a key element of design-based implementation research, a school change approach illustrated by an effort to improve genetics instruction from kindergarten to high school.
Social relationships are key to the potential of networked improvement communities to accelerate and sharpen education change using the improvement science approach. Veterans of the process explain how they keep strengthening those connections while expanding their networks.
When the Kentucky Department of Education wanted a strategy to significantly increase the number of high school students prepared for college and/or careers, it turned to deliverology, a method used by British Prime Minister Tony Blair to make good on his campaign promises.
A special issue of the journal Quality Assurance in Education breaks down seven approaches to improvement in education, beginning with the networked improvement model. Explore key features and principles of this method through a successful example of helping new teachers.
A networked improvement community in Tennessee that’s applying improvement science to address literacy rates finds that journey mapping helps to see the system more clearly, to build empathy for students affected by the problems, and to focus their improvement work.
User-centered design is key to developing meaningful change to improve student achievement, and networked improvement communities help ensure and maintain the focus on human needs.
Continuous improvement is gaining adherents in education for its evidence-based and structured methodology to creating lasting, effective changes to improve student achievement. Two Wisconsin superintendents share lessons learned as pioneers of the improvement process.
Engaging students in learning through ambitious instruction is a chief focus of educational reform and policy in the US and around the world. The University of Michigan and the Carnegie Foundation created MOOCs to support teams of educational leaders in pursuit of this goal.
With the upcoming presidential inauguration and confirmation hearings for the next education secretary, Carnegie Foundation and other scholars are urging the new administration to shift federal education policy to support better school improvement strategies.
Failure can be a learning experience, but only under certain conditions. The work must matter, and there has to be a leader who can manage the costs of failure, understands improvement research, and keeps people focused on finding a solution instead of placing blame.
There’s ample new evidence of successful interventions to increase high school and college graduation rates to prepare students for today’s jobs. But, in this Memo to the President, Carnegie researchers explain what the federal government has to do to help spread this work.
A new president, a new secretary of education, and a new version of ESSA are creating a confluence of unknowns about the future federal role in education policy. Carnegie Foundation scholars propose their recommendations as part of a series of Memos to the President.
Teachers at High Tech High, a network of charter schools in San Diego County, say using improvement science has cultivated collaboration; set guidelines for clear, measureable goals; fostered innovative ideas; and encouraged more teachers to start improvement networks.
The idea of forming collective action networks is growing among educators as they realize that today’s complex problems can’t be solved by one person alone. But there’s more than one type of community and which is best depends on the type of problem to be solved.
Policy can do a lot to support positive changes, but policy alone isn’t effective in such large, diverse, and complex arenas as education, wrote policy analyst Paul Lingenfelter in comments solicited by the federal Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking.
What will it take to make effective, lasting, and scalable education improvements? It’s not a silver bullet. Policymakers and practitioners must start working together to design solutions based on research and evidence.
In a session on leading the transformation of large complex systems at the 2016 Carnegie Summit, three superintendents discuss how they shaped improvement in their school districts by adopting strategies that resonate with three of the principles of improvement science.
In a recent SSIR article, Srik Gopal and Lisbeth B. Schorr make the case that an uncritical application of the "Moneyball" ideal is a flawed approach that overlooks "the fundamental realities of how complex social change happens."
Grantees of the Overdeck Family Foundation, sent to the 2016 Improvement Summit to gain perspective on a networked improvement approach, reflect on their experience at the event and share major takeaways for their ongoing work.
At the Carnegie Summit, panelists from the Gates Foundation and National Science Foundation shared their thoughts about how NICs integrate the collaborative structures and disciplined approaches necessary to accelerate educators’ efforts to improve.
At the Carnegie Summit, Hahrie Han shared insights from her research on participation and activism. One of the big questions she addressed is, how can we best mobilize people to work toward change together?
In his 2016 Carnegie Summit keynote, Bryan Stevenson reminded us of the power of getting "proximate" to suffering to deepen understanding. This blog post explores how this relates to the first core principle of improvement.
At the 2016 Carnegie Summit, Alex “Sandy” Pentland shared his research in the field of social physics that can help us understand the relationships between human behavior, collective experience, and the spread of ideas.
At the 2016 Carnegie Summit, Anthony S. Bryk gave a glimpse of what it looks like to struggle towards a common understanding of a problem and develop a working theory of improvement.
Carnegie Foundation President Anthony Bryk recounts his experience of facilitating a workshop activity that enabled participants to accelerate their collective problem-solving and helped them see the power of attacking a common problem as a structured network.
When we look for “bright spots,” we tend to see the tools or practices that we believe contribute to the positive results in certain classrooms, schools, or districts. In this way, we identify the what of improvement; but are we overlooking how these changes came to be?
Studies on the effects of educational programs often focus on “fidelity of implementation.” But this approach often fails to consider the complexity both of the programs themselves and of the demands they place on the contexts in which they are carried out.
In this AEI report, Alan Ginsburg and Carnegie Senior Fellow Mike Smith analyze 27 RCT mathematics curriculum studies contained in the What Works Clearinghouse, and they find serious threats to the usefulness of all 27.
In this final post of the series on networked improvement community (NIC) initiation, Donald Peurach analyzes the relationships NICs have with the environments in which they operate.
The fifth post in our series on the initiation networked improvement community explores what lessons can be taken from other similar efforts outside of the education industry, primarily pop up businesses.
In the fourth post in our series on initiating networked improvement communities, we explore how the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards focused on building a culture of improvement.
In “Quality and Equality in American Education: Systemic Problems, Systemic Solutions,” Jennifer O’Day and Carnegie Senior Fellow Marshall (Mike) Smith explore how the field might understand and address the underlying systems that result in disparate educational outcomes.
This third post of our series on networked improvement community (NIC) initiation focuses on how to organize and lead a NIC to maximize individual engagement, while ensuring individual work is related to the shared aim.
This second post in our series about networked improvement community initiation focused on how to build capacity of network members to use improvement science to learn from practice.
In the first post of our network initiation series, we outline the networked improvement community initiation framework, exploring each of the 5 domains.
All students can learn and succeed in math. Professor Jo Boaler presents how schools and teachers promote growth mindsets in math through certain tasks and teaching methods.
In a recent article, Carnegie Corporation of New York's Kathryn Baron outlined the development, success, and future of the Community College Pathways. Drawing on student and faculty experiences, the article highlights supporting students' mindsets.
Data mining is a powerful tool being used by educational institutions to support student success, but often students do not know what data are being collected and how their privacy is being protected. This post explored the tension between privacy and data mining.
Working to reliably land paper airplanes, educators, researchers, and other workshop participants experienced how improvement science offers a different way to solve problems and collect data.
In response to Carnegie President Anthony S. Bryk's post on expanding the conversation about learning to improve, we received numerous responses. President Bryk replies to two of them in this post.
Since 2008, Carnegie has been working to find a better way of learning how to improve. We have learned a great deal by doing, including that this work is a continuous improvement task. We invite you to join in on this ongoing process.
A look into how Carnegie is using design-based development to support our Networked Improvement Communities and the key design principles to help make the sites successful and useful for the users.
A growing number of districts have adopted multi-rater evaluation systems, in which multiple observers watch, assess, and respond to teachers’ practice. While multi-rater systems are more complex, every district in this study reported many benefits.
Pathway faculty leaders are developing bridge courseware that can enable Pathways students to be eligible to take the math courses in STEM or business majors without having to enroll in an additional developmental math course.
Iterative testing from a Carnegie Alpha Lab practitioner-researcher partnership highlights the potential impact of a mindset intervention followed several weeks later by a utility value intervention administered online to reduce course dropout.
Carnegie's Pathways are design and testing around arousal reappraisal, which instructs individuals that the physiological arousal experienced during stress is not harmful, but rather can be conceived of as a coping resource that aids performance.
White paper, Improvement Research Carried Out Through Networked Communities: Accelerating Learning about Practices that Support More Productive Student Mindsets, explores improvement science as a way to address problems facing educators.
When looking for comparisons, people who want to change education often consider health systems.
Permanent link to page: https://www.carnegiefoundation.org/blog/making-healthcare-better-has-lessons-for-making-education-better/
