Four Measures for Creating a Culture of Improvement

A consulting firm’s research with districts makes the connections between continuous progress and school success

When Brian Creasman became superintendent of Fleming County Public Schools, a school district serving about 2,300 students in rural eastern Kentucky, he set an ambitious, even audacious goal: The district’s schools would go from the bottom 5 percent of schools in the state to the top 5 percent on state assessment measures.

Creasman and his colleagues made implementing a common curriculum across all grade levels beginning in 2014 a priority. The state’s school ratings and students’ test scores increased for most subjects. In 2015-16, the district was named a district of distinction by the Kentucky Department of Education.

School districts nationwide routinely follow similar — and familiar — blueprints for improvement. Many regularly conduct diagnostic reviews to identify the most pressing needs, map out a strategy and regularly monitor progress.

So why are some systems successful when many others following similar continuous improvement practices have been unable to drive change in a positive direction? Research derived from our time in more than 36,000 schools and districts across the U.S. and more than 70 countries as part of accreditation and external engagement reviews has shown that continuous improvement can improve outcomes — in all kinds of schools and for all kinds of students. A strong relationship exists between effective improvement practices and high performance, but it takes leaders committed to improving school culture, not checklists and quick fixes, to engage the entire learning community in the pursuit of excellence.

Four Levers

Through our organization’s experience and research, we’ve found four major ways that school leaders create an environment focused on continuous improvement.

 An engaged school culture

By actions and by example, effective leaders shape the written (and unwritten) rules that influence every aspect of how a school functions. In research based on our external reviews, schools where the entire learning community is actively engaged and empowered and members support each other score nearly 10 percent higher on our measures of instructional quality than those with lower culture ratings.

Empowerment was a key in Fleming County. Its leadership team recognized the scale and scope of needed changes would overwhelm educators if presented as top-down mandates. The district actively involved teachers from every school in planning, an action instructional supervisor Lesia Eldridge called “the most powerful thing we have done.”

Culture doesn’t just apply to adults. The more opportunities students have to own their learning, collaborate with peers and participate in activities that require movement, voice and thinking, the higher the school’s overall rating tends to be. And schools where parents are engaged and active also tended to be higher performing overall.

 Development of talent and resource management

Simply put, leaders invested in continuous improvement put the right people into the right roles, then support them with the right resources.

It takes leaders willing to make tough decisions to allocate limited resources where they have the greatest impact. In our research, the correlation between managing resources and school quality was significant, with 35-40 percentage point differences in these measures of resource management between high- and low-performing schools.

Last year the Washtenaw Intermediate School District in Ann Arbor, Mich., which serves 47,000 students in nine traditional K-12 districts and 13 charter schools, put its organizational commitment to equity to life by reallocating supplemental special education resources to high-need schools. Previously, it had been spreading resources equally across its service area.

“When I think about continuous improvement, it’s about our process on a journey so a student’s zip code doesn’t determine their destiny,” says Superintendent Scott Menzel.

 Consistent knowledge

Effective leaders ensure the entire staff has a common understanding of the school’s core goals and expectations, including a commitment to ensuring all students excel. In our research, staff at the lowest-performing schools demonstrated little agreement that their schools were focused on student success, while the highest-performing ones saw near unanimous agreement on student success being a clear priority.

Washtenaw helped create a common perspective through a “preferred futuring” process in which staff and stakeholders collaborated to create a high-level vision of what learning would look like over a decade, not just a few years as is common with traditional strategic planning. To act on expectations, Fleming County used its common curriculum across grade levels as a tool for teachers to share common benchmarks and work together to analyze student performance, identify gaps and focus instruction.

 Decisive execution

Successful leaders act specifically to address the priorities identified through the continuous improvement process. Even the best-planned, most effectively targeted initiatives often falter at this critical stage.

Ensuring schools execute their plans requires leaders, teachers and staff to monitor progress on an ongoing basis and intervene as needed. Data from teacher surveys found schools that appear to struggle in this area have substantially lower overall school quality ratings than those whose educators monitor data closely.

In Fleming County, the district created a standalone internal quality assurance team, which included teachers, classified employees and a parent along with administrators, to monitor progress and inform senior leaders. In Washtenaw, the district is training all supervisors and managers to ensure consistent use of equity initiatives. “We’re being very intentional in building leadership capacity so as we move this out for our staff, we have the language and the tools to support this work,” says Menzel.

Deeper Understanding

These levers are familiar ones, though connecting them to specific indicators of school performance through external review and classroom observation data should contribute to a greater understanding of the importance of effective leadership.

Our experience also has identified what not to do. Culture can’t be legislated or dictated. It must begin by challenging the implicit assumptions that drive day-to-day decisions. Compliance-focused strategies often overlook the time, patience and deep understanding of root causes required for sustainable change. And voluminous school improvement plans that focus on scattershot initiatives and strategies are more likely to overwhelm staff and stakeholders than operationalize improvement objectives.

Recognize also that not all low-performing schools are the same. Some may struggle with student absenteeism or discipline issues. Others may face low literacy or numeracy rates. Only by identifying the root causes that constrain student learning can we pinpoint the differences.

Conversely, even the highest-performing schools must focus on continuous improvement, as low-performing subgroups of students or inconsistent classroom practices can be hidden among the averages of a well-performing school or district. In 2015-16, our external review teams found that between 20 and 30 percent of high-quality schools struggled in vital areas, including consistently establishing high expectations for all students and creating classroom opportunities for students to take risks in learning or review and improve work.

Above all, school leaders must look deeply at their schools and the people in them — adults and students alike — to find ways to engage them and allow others to lead. That was the key in Fleming County, where teachers became champions of the shift to a shared curriculum after being involved in planning and implementing it.

“They were at the table deciding what our students would learn and how they would learn it,” Eldridge says. “Everything else followed.”