The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching today announced the three recipients of its 3rd annual Spotlight on Quality in Continuous Improvement. The Literacy Design Collaborative (LDC) of New York, the Northwest Regional Education Service District (NWRESD) of Oregon, and the Queensland Department of Education (Australia) will be honored on November 21 at the Spotlight on Quality in Continuous Improvement Symposium in Washington, DC, at the National Press Club.

“We are thrilled to honor the exemplary efforts of these three educational enterprises and share out into the field the practical lessons from their work,” says Anthony Bryk, President of the Carnegie Foundation. “These organizations illustrate and exemplify a nascent improvement infrastructure that can support schools and school systems to achieve quality academic outcomes at scale across diverse contexts.”

The Carnegie Foundation launched the Spotlight program in 2017 to elevate clear and compelling examples of how the rigorous application of improvement principles, methods, and tools can solve educational problems. Selected from a large and diverse group of applicants, the three Spotlight honorees for 2019 have demonstrated quality in their application of continuous improvement in addressing significant educational problems.

The three enterprises were chosen as Spotlight honorees for the following reasons:

• LDC uses disciplined inquiry cycles to test and refine their strategic supports for instructional improvement. These inquiry cycles have helped the program achieve dramatic achievement gains in two of America’s largest school systems.
• Queensland’s improvement journey dramatically changed the nature of instruction across regions and schools and has achieved compelling gains in student outcomes, most significantly for the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students.
• NWRESD leveraged interagency collaboration to make measurable improvement on a state-level education policy priority—9th-grade on-track rates—at a large scale by establishing a common improvement aim, analyzing underlying causes of low success rates, and devising interventions aimed at supporting deeper learning with equity.

“We received many impressive applications demonstrating a wide range of improvement work underway across the country, in many contexts, and at varying stages of development,” says Penny Carver, senior fellow and director of the Spotlight program. “It was gratifying and heartening to learn about the progress being made by so many educational enterprises, and we are delighted to celebrate the improvement work of LDC, NWRESD, and Queensland Department of Education at this year’s Spotlight on Quality in Continuous Improvement Symposium.”

About Carnegie

The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching is committed to developing networks of ideas, individuals, and institutions to advance teaching and learning. We join together scholars, practitioners, and designers in new ways to solve problems of educational practice. Toward this end, we work to integrate the discipline of improvement science into education with the goal of building the field’s capacity to improve.