www.educationcounsel.comFebruary 2019

Transforming the Education Sector into a Learning System Executive Summary | 1

Executive Summary

Transforming the Education Sector into a Learning SystemHarnessing the Power of Continuous Improvement, Research & Development, and Data to Improve Outcomes for Each and Every Child

The history of human progress is defined by our ability to work together to accumulate knowledge and skills and to build upon what came before. Today, sectors that have developed structures, processes, and cultures focused on thoughtfully using data, evidence, experience, and judgment to inform innovation and continuous improvement have experienced ongoing progress and (periodically) breakthrough successes. But this learning engine is ironically and profoundly weak in our education system, which is instead more likely to drive compliance that acts as a barrier to innovation, improvement, and scale.

In Transforming the Education Sector Into a Learning System, we argue that for our education system to achieve equity and excellence for each and every student, we must shift it toward being a learning system at all levels—from the school and classroom to the district, state, and even federal levels. The paper draws on research, experiences from other sectors, and leading efforts underway in education to provide a framework for action regarding why, what, and how to make these shifts. Our treatment of these ideas is not meant to be all-new or to offer the sole possible vision to pursue, but we hope it helps advance the conversation and elevates the issue as a priority for leaders at all levels of the system.

AUTHORS Dan Gordon, Scott Palmer, Sean Darling-Hammond

© 2019 EducationCounsel LLC

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/.

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SECTION 1: Why Do We Need a Learning System in Education?

The science of learning and development affirms our hopes that every child has great potential. Despite some important progress, we are far from achieving excellence for each and every child, based in part on our long history of racial discrimination and continuing structural inequities. The changes we need in our education and related systems are transformative—as has been and remains true in technology, health care, energy, and other complex sectors. Such changes are unlikely to take hold and scale without intentional, sustained focus at all levels of the system on continuous learning to dramatically improve student opportunity and outcomes. This focus must build both structures and cultures of learning, so we can develop and/or surface effective approaches that yield new standards of practice. From that improved foundation, we can then strengthen and spread implementation of those practices as well as develop even more effective innovations for different students in different settings. Finally, this moment of increased expectations, changing demographics, and devolution of authority in our education system creates a window of opportunity to shift from compliance toward learning systems.

SECTION 2: What Are the Essential Components of a Learning System in Education?

Making this shift is ultimately about changing both individual mindsets and organizational culture. We need a learning culture in education in which continuous learning is simply “the way we do business.” Structures and processes can help beget that culture, which then can reinforce and sustain those structures and processes in a virtuous cycle. But there must also be intentional (and early) efforts to build understanding and trust in a learning culture directly. Indeed, without paying close attention to mindsets and hard but essential adaptive shifts, improvement efforts will ultimately fail to take hold.

To build a learning system—including structures, processes, and culture—we need to focus at and across all levels of the system on three interrelated components:

1. A research and development (R&D) infrastructure that generates and evaluates insights, evidence, tools, products, policies, and practices to best inform and support teaching and learning. A strong R&D infrastructure has mechanisms to surface issues and anomalies from practice; prioritize and coordinate research efforts; generate various forms of research evidence; develop research-based tools and strategies; and support ongoing translation and dissemination to engage with and empower professionals across the system.

2. A data infrastructure that makes it possible for every person with a stake in education to have the information needed to make the best decisions possible for the best outcomes possible. An effective data infrastructure collects, links together, and protects the critical data needed to answer end-users’ questions, while safeguarding individuals’ privacy. In addition, it provides transparency as to how the system is serving students while also providing timely, tailored, and appropriate information to stakeholders.

3. A continuous improvement infrastructure that supports ongoing, collaborative efforts in practice and policy to implement, refine, and provide feedback on what is generated by research, development, and practitioner-led innovation. This component of the learning system includes, at all levels, the built-in mechanisms that advance research-based, data-informed actions; guides reasoned adaptations of those actions to account for particular contexts; and feeds further research, development, and movement to scale.

Our paper focuses particularly on unpacking the essential elements of the continuous improvement infrastructure because this component of the education learning system has, in our view, been least attended to in practice, currently poses the greatest barrier to scale, and also holds the greatest potential for impact in terms of revving the learning engine across all levels.1 A strong continuous improvement infrastructure is comprised of the following three elements:

• Organizational design that aligns all aspects of education organizations (e.g., school districts or individual schools) to a learning system vision, including the structures, processes, capacity, and resources needed for teams and individuals to prioritize and support continuous improvement;

• Continuous improvement methodologies that are embedded within organizational and individual routines to guide learning and improvement efforts through appropriate processes of innovation, adaptation, implementation, evaluation, and review; and

• Collaborating communities, both formal and ad hoc, that prioritize informed, facilitated collaboration among an array of internal and external stakeholders, and advance and accelerate the learning beyond what is possible on an individual basis.

Finally, each component of this learning system—R&D, data, and continuous improvement—can be powered by four key drivers of change, which are themselves both part of the learning system and early action areas that can help establish and strengthen each of the other learning system components. These drivers include a focus on leadership at all levels; human capacity with the necessary knowledge, skills, and mindsets; sustained resources, including not just money but also time; and the right mix of enabling policies and incentives.

Taken together, all these parts create a comprehensive vision for a learning system in education—one that must be in place in and across each level of the education system.

1 There are many models for engaging in thoughtful and systematic improvement efforts, from networked improvement communities to the Six Sigma methodology. All generally include some variation of an improvement cycle (e.g., Plan-Do-Study-Act or PDSA cycles) but have important distinctive features that are better suited to particular contexts and actors. For more information on seven of the leading models and their application to education, see Paul LeMahieu, et al., “Working to improve: seven approaches to improvement science in education,” Quality Assurance in Education, Vol. 25 Issue: 1 (Feb. 27, 2017).

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Education Learning System

This image summarizes our vision for a learning system that would exist at and across all levels of education. With students at the center and a learning culture permeating throughout, a learning system deeply integrates the three interrelated components and maximizes the impact of the four key drivers.

SECTION 3: How Can We Drive the Shift to a Learning System in Education?

Building strong, sustainable learning systems at each level of the education system will be a long-term endeavor that will itself require continuous improvement. This is true of any major sector or system effort but also because the United States education sector presents some unique challenges. For example: Our education system is fractured and decentralized, not a unified system. We currently lack the dedicated resources and time needed to do this work well. Education leaders often face pressure to achieve quick improvements within short political cycles. Many practitioners, especially at the school level, report “initiative fatigue” from implementing a succession of new approaches. Our education systems are deeply entrenched in a compliance orientation. Some influential education stakeholders have a deep aversion to “experimenting on children” and might view continuous learning efforts through that lens. And many education personnel have never been given the opportunity or support needed to master the competencies required for improvement processes.

Notwithstanding these challenges, there are several important efforts underway to advance an education learning system. The systemic nature and scope of the change we seek suggests the need for a comprehensive approach, yet we must be nimble when opportunities arise to elevate bright spots or seed new approaches.2 Identifying all of the highest-leverage strategies and sequencing them appropriately is beyond the scope of this paper, but it is where we hope to go next. One certainty is that it will involve work at every level of the system. To that end, the paper concludes with a description of what a learning system might look and feel like at each level (summarized below), along with some initial ideas about how to begin making the necessary shifts.

• SCHOOLS: Schools operating as learning systems should be designed to focus on human capital development. They should also broaden roles and responsibilities to ensure educators and other school staff are empowered to engage in improvement efforts in an ongoing, embedded manner and granted sufficient time and resources to do so. This has particular importance for the roles and capacity of principals and other school leaders, as well as for transforming current approaches to individual and collective professional learning. Additionally, schools manifesting a learning system approach would collaborate with a wide array of partners (e.g., families, community organizations, other schools, local businesses), provide their school districts with usable data regarding their improvement efforts, and transparently share progress.

• DISTRICTS: Districts that continuously learn and improve would be organized to integrate functions and teams to focus on driving district priorities while breaking down silos and supporting schools in their efforts to become learning systems. District leadership would align schools throughout the district behind shared goals, specific strategies for achieving them, and a plan for using and sharing resources, such as through facilitating networks for improvement. Central office and school staff

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2 For example, implementation of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) provides important opportunities for the federal government, states, districts, and schools to adopt or advance a learning system approach. We outlined a number of them in the third section of an earlier issue brief, Shifting from Compliance to Continuous Learning: Leveraging ESSA to Advance a Learning System in Education.

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would have a shared understanding about when schools should faithfully implement and when they should exercise professional discretion. Districts would be transparent regarding progress towards goals and what they are learning through improvement efforts. They would provide data that help students, parents, and teachers work toward achieving goals, and also provide timely, actionable data to their state to guide broader improvement efforts and insights.

• STATES: Continuously learning states would develop, administer, and safeguard integrated data systems (connected where possible to other state agency data sets) that can, among other things, help identify positive and negative anomalies. These states also would transparently report data and engage in constant data reviews and evaluation to guide implementation and improvement of their key policies. They would model good behavior for their districts by using improvement processes to improve their internal state functions, including, crucially, improving the data infrastructure itself over time. Leadership throughout the state education agency, and especially leadership in offices devoted to measurement and support, would signal the importance of this work. Finally, the state would frequently use its convening power to facilitate state-district and district-district learning, such as via networks across rural or other districts that may lack internal capacity and resources.

• FEDERAL GOVERNMENT: A federal government oriented toward a learning system would use the powerful incentives at its disposal to encourage states and districts to innovate and improve as well as to build the systems needed to engage in those improvement efforts. It would seek to leverage (and dramatically expand) the research resources available—to both generate more evidence and support states’ and districts’ use of evidence. It would guide states and districts to adopt continuous improvement as a key strategy and provide technical assistance to help them succeed at this work. The federal government would also pursue new policies and regulations that demonstrate a tolerance for innovative risk-taking. For example, USED could take new approaches to its monitoring, reporting, and grant management that shifted from a compliance focus to one that makes state and local leadership on continuous improvement a precondition for giving greater federal deference to state and local judgments. It would also revise and/or remove policies and regulations that serve as unnecessary barriers to innovation, collaboration, and improvement. A federal learning system would model good behavior by transparently continuously improving its own systems (e.g., via regulations with feedback loops), and it would also use the bully pulpit to extol the value of continuous improvement.

CONCLUSIONWe hope this paper helps make the case for why a new approach—one grounded in data, evidence, innovation, evaluation, and continuous improvement—must be a critical pillar of any attempt to achieve our ambitious goals for our students. We have also attempted to establish a common vision for what such a learning system might look like and begun to identify how we might initiate the adaptive and technical shifts necessary to achieve that vision. This is complicated and difficult work, but we are optimistic that the education system can build and strengthen the culture, structures, and processes necessary to make sustained changes in practice that lead to dramatic improvements in outcomes for each and every student.