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 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."
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.
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.
Teachers know that motivation matters. It is central to student learning; it helps determine how engaged students are in their work, how hard they work, and how well they persevere in the face of challenges. Though we hear mostly about the “achievement gap” between demographic groups, researchers have also identified…
The third brief in a series examining trends in teacher evaluation, this report details findings both from recent research on observer training and from conversations with experts from district officials in five districts.
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.
In education, we often talk of confronting complicated problems, when they are truly complex problems. The difference between complicated and complex truly matters in how we works towards our end goals. It is time we approach complex problems as complex.
Trying to improve practice is part of most educators practices, but what if we moved from trying to get better to getting better at getting better. Improvement science offers a method and set of tools to systematically build the know-how to reach our goals
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.
Improvement science relies on an understanding of the problem before creating solutions. Groups have found three key things helped them gain clarity on the problems and make the knowledge explicit, helping them design solutions with users, data, and will in mind.
Senior lecturer Marshall Ganz closing keynote at the 2016 Carnegie Summit on Improvement in Education focused on a framework for social action. Drawing on his own experience in social movements, Ganz talked of combining the power of the heart, head, and hands.
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