For 2019, the work of Carnegie’s Spotlight honorees surfaced the critical lever for scaling continuous improvement in education: infrastructure for improvement. We use this term to refer to the myriad of educational organizations and institutions in this country and across the world, as well as the people doing the work within them. This infrastructure includes school districts and charter management organizations, colleges and universities, for-profit and non-profit companies, technical support providers, and regional, state, and federal agencies. It is this vast system of supports for schools and communities that can be vastly improved through the use of high-quality continuous improvement principles and processes.

These Spotlight educational enterprises used improvement science-based approaches to remake their infrastructure supports for schools and school systems—with tangible progress for students and families. Indeed, evidence is growing that a strong improvement infrastructure in education can dramatically reduce longstanding inequities in educational opportunities and outcomes, which is at the heart of the Carnegie Foundation’s mission.