The Carnegie Foundation catalyzes transformational change in education so that every student has the opportunity to live a healthy, dignified, and fulfilling life.
On April 24, 2025, the Carnegie Foundation and ACE announced a redesigned system, including a revision of the historic Basic Classification and introduction of the Student Access and Earnings Classification.More
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This session, recorded at the 2021 Summit on Improvement in Education, explores the human side of change. Grounded in the Institute for Healthcare Improvement Psychology of Change Framework, the session includes reflections from a panel of leaders about their work supporting improvement in their contexts.
This session, presented at the 2022 Summit on Improvement in Education, explores how examination of variation can point to opportunities for improvement and support focusing improvement resources in a system. Presenters demonstrate using Shewhart charts to understand variation, and ways to use tools to investigate variation to answer questions posed…
Run charts are an important tool for representing data in an improvement effort, for understanding variation over time, and for making evidence-based decisions. This session, recorded for the virtual 2020 Summit on Improvement in Education, details rules and practices for creating and interpreting these data displays.
In this session, offered at the 2021 Summit on Improvement in Education, presenter Huggy Rao, professor at the graduate school of business at Stanford University, shares ideas about scaling change within organizations. The session is builds on ideas and research from the book Scaling Up Excellence that Prof. Rao co-authored…
This session, pre-recorded as part of the virtual 2020 Summit on Improvement in Education, explores ways that measurement for improvement differs from measurement for other purposes in education. It introduces the concept of a “system of measures” and offers a case example of how a such a system functions to…
This session, presented at the 2020 Summit on Improvement in Education, shares how narratives can be used to foster improvement culture and shared identity among networked improvement communities and teams.
This session, presented at the 2020 Summit on Improvement in Education, explains how change packages are developed and how they can be used to scale effective ideas.
This session, presented at the 2022 Summit on Improvement in Education, introduces key causal system analysis tools and discusses how fishbone diagrams can be leveraged to organize root causes and to deepen shared understanding of the problem and the system producing it.
This session, presented at the 2023 Summit on Improvement in Education, introduces the role of disciplined inquiry in improvement efforts and unpacks key moves and considerations to support learning about a change idea utilizing a plan-do-study-act (PDSA) cycle.
This session, presented at the 2024 Summit on Improvement in Education, discusses key considerations for planning to spread or scale a change idea in a new context. The session includes a handout to help you plan for how to attend to social factors related to the diffusion of innovations as…
This blog post summarizes five areas of activity for an initiation team launching an improvement effort. Synthesizing ideas presented in “A Framework for the Initiation of Networked Improvement Communities” (Russell et al, 2017), it describes each of the five areas and offers a related example.
This blog post discusses the challenge of bringing empirically-warranted solutions into new settings in ways that are sensitive to local conditions and contexts. Contrasting integrity of implementation with fidelity of implementation, author Paul LeMahieu offers considerations for designing for implementation with integrity.
This 2015 blog post introduces the distinctive features of Networked Improvement Communities (NICs) and identifies some of their advantages for accelerating learning about high-leverage educational problems.
This site offers definitions, guidance, examples, and technical briefs related to leveraging practical measures for continuous improvement. Designed to help the user get started with practical measurement, the site includes a path from getting started through identifying and testing a measure as well as a resource library.
The Six Improvement Principles are core organizing ideas for improvement science. They speak to how problems are unpacked and understood and to how learning towards improvement is undertaken.
Read or watch this keynote delivered by past Carnegie President Anthony S. Bryk at the 2017 Summit on Improvement in Education. In it, Bryk discusses the promise of networked communities to address educational inequities.
Permanent link to page: https://www.carnegiefoundation.org/improvement-products-and-services/articles/redressing-inequities-an-aspiration-in-search-of-a-method/