Networks Are a Key Ingredient For School Success
Can principals and teachers, through focused planning, collaboration, and data-sharing within networks, raise achievement and increase the academic success of Black, Latino, and low-income students? We at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation believe they can — and that such networks are a key ingredient to advancing a quality public education for students and driving social and economic mobility for our country.
Over the next five to seven years, as a significant part of our K-12 strategy, the foundation will fund multiple intermediary organizations (districts, non-profits, universities, and community-based organizations) to establish and support networks of secondary schools to test this proposition. Earlier this month, we issued an RFP soliciting proposals for the formation, expansion, or strengthening of such networks, and we’ve been buoyed by the early interest.
The approach is from the ground up: schools working in networks will propose and adapt common, promising strategies and solutions to address obstacles to student success and improve the overall performance of their member schools.
Why this evolution in our grantmaking? For the past 17 years, the Gates Foundation has invested in creating new curricula and instructional tools tied to more demanding standards and developing tools that help teachers obtain feedback and improve. We have also funded strategies for individualizing instruction, many enabled by technology. We will continue to make significant investments in these powerful, proven approaches to change.
But we have also learned that without a focus on rigorous implementation at the school-level, these tools and strategies alone are insufficient. We have seen success when school teams regularly analyze critical systems in schools — scheduling, curricula, professional development, coordination of social services, and parent and community outreach, for example — to ensure those systems evolve to meet the academic and social emotional needs of students. School teams look at multiple measures of student performance to judge how effective their school and its team are in helping students stay on track and build on what they’ve learned.
This insight is not new — thousands of schools invest in professional learning communities to build staff capacity and improve practice. Nationally, the Alliance for Excellence in Education has urged educators to better understand critical school-based systems in their Future Ready School work. We believe our collective challenge is to build upon and enhance this emerging infrastructure.
In our new strategy, the foundation will initially direct investments toward networks of schools that are focused on specific problems — such as student attendance, suspension, access to and completion of rigorous college-ready coursework and successful grades. Research suggests that, if we solve these critical challenges, significantly more students are likely to graduate from high school and succeed in a post-secondary program that leads to obtaining a credential with economic value.
What do strong networks look like? Last fall, we issued a Request for Information (RFI) to learn from organizations about how their efforts to work with networks of schools could inform the foundation’s Networks for School Improvement. We received 278 RFI responses from 41 states; 60 percent of those responding had no prior funding relationship with the foundation’s K-12 program. The RFI process expanded our knowledge of work happening in the field, and of different approaches, challenges, and solutions that districts and organizations have worked through.
Tony Bryk and his colleagues at Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, building on similar work by the Institute for Health Care Improvement in medicine, provide a good starting point for the conversation about networks. They contend that effective networked improvement communities share four characteristics. They are:
· Focused on a well-specified aim (or goal) that can be measured with data in a defined timeframe.
· Share a deep understanding of the problem, the systems, or workflow that produce it and a working theory to improve it.
· Use methods of improvement research — like Plan-Do-Study-Act or other inquiry cycles to develop, test and refine interventions.
· Organize themselves to capture lessons learned and apply them to new problems or spread them across the field.
The University of Chicago Network for College Success (NCS) — a partnership between Chicago Public Schools and the Chicago Consortium on School Research — is a great example of these characteristics in action. Their network focuses on using data and evidence that are predictive of student success. They determined, for example, that a 9th grade student who succeeds on four key indicators — high attendance, course completion rates, credit accumulation, and grades — is 84 percent more likely to graduate. And if the student’s grades are a B+ or higher, he or she is much more likely to succeed in the first year of college. Grounded in the smart use of data and collective action, NCS connects high schools with each other as learning communities so that school leaders learn and share knowledge on how to ensure that 9th grade students are on track to graduate.
We don’t believe in a one-size-fits-all in education, and local knowledge and context are key. But there are strong networks using the key elements to drive collective action across the country. High performing charter networks like KIPP, Summit or Achievement First, and urban districts in the Aspen Superintendents Network, constantly learn in different contexts and communities and use these lessons to increase college readiness, improve the performance of English language learners or implement rigorous curricula across their schools.
Similar progress is emerging around social-emotional learning in the Core Districts in California, curricular implementation in Washington DC, school operations and data analysis at New Visions for Public Schools, and Connecticut Rise. The Dana Center Mathematics Pathways, linking student experiences in high schools and community colleges, is one particularly exciting example. We need to establish, strengthen or expand more networks grounded in the real world of schools and governed by a commitment to systematically improve student achievement.
Over the last five years, we have seen progress in hundreds of schools and districts increasing high school graduation rates. By partnering with the field, tapping and strengthening the capacity of our principals and teachers, and supporting educators’ efforts to focus on identification, adoption and execution of research-based strategies, we believe our schools can push further and faster than we have done to date. The stakes are high — thousands of students are depending on us building our ability to collectively learn from one another and rapidly accelerate success. We look forward to what we’ll do — and what we’ll learn — together.
Bob Hughes is Director of K12 Education at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. http://k12education.gatesfoundation.org
