Improving America's Schools Together: How District-University Partnerships and Continuous Improvement Can Transform Education

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Improving Americas Schools Together: How District-University Partnerships and Continuous Improvement Can Transform Education is the first definitive text on continuous improvement in school district-university partnerships, covering improvement methods, theory, research, and real cases across the United States with practical improvement tools that can be adapted to any setting. Through an array of in-depth stories, this book demonstrates how improvement scienceas a shared methodcan help universities, districts, and schools foster leaders and educators and enhance students learning and opportunities.

Reviews

This volume brings together a dream author teama mix of scholars and scholarly professionals with complementary research and practice-based expertise who have figured out how to work productively together in research-practice partnerships. Their contributions provide inspiration and concrete guidance for educational leaders in schools, districts, and institutions of higher education. The rich cases of higher educationschool district partnership reveal innovative structures and collaborative practices that enable joint work to build capacity for continuous improvement in service of creating more effective and equitable systems. For all these reasons and more, this book is on the cutting edge of the continuous improvement movement in education and is a must-read for educators seeking to transform U.S. education and create equitable learning opportunities for students. -- Jennifer Lin Russell, Peabody College, Vanderbilt University
Leaders in public and higher education are facing unprecedented calls to advance quality and equity in students educational opportunities and outcomes. This volume provides remarkable perspective on the power of districts and universities learning togetherin partnerships and in communityto do more, for more students, than either could possibly do on their own. It serves as both a call and a blueprint for action, with the contributing authors inviting district and university leaders to follow in their footsteps to forge institutional change. -- Donald J. Peurach, Marsal Family School of Education, University of Michigan
What excites me about this edited volume is that it provides illustrations of partnerships that are making an impact in education! It exists as a useful tool for individuals seeking images of the possible in co-designing and co-implementing partnerships that work. And, ultimately, it demonstrates the power of collaborationthat the future of education is through partnership, by tackling persistent problems of practice together. It shows that schools and universities are truly better together. -- Rebecca West Burns, Bill Herrold Endowed Professor, director of Clinical Practice and Educational Partnerships, College of Education and Human Services, University of North Florida
These cases provide wonderful, concrete examples of how district-university partnerships for continuous improvement can benefit both school districts and schools of education. Anyone interested in engaging in such partnerships should read this book, especially to identify the benefits, but also to get a sense of the challenges such partnerships face. -- William Firestone, Rutgers University, Graduate School of Education (retired)
Gomez, Biag, Imig, Tozer, and Hitz bring together powerful examples of howthrough thoughtful and deliberate continuous improvement processespartnerships can be formed to address complex problems of practice in our schools. This text will quickly become a go-to guide for those seeking to engage in equity-focused and contextually relevant collaborations designed to address public school challenges and to develop sustainable and impactful solutions. -- Karen L. Sanzo, Old Dominion University
This book contains cases of district-university partnerships anchored in continuous improvement tools and methods. The book shows how those partnerships formed, catalyzed, integrated efforts, and facilitated organizational change. The multi-case approach is invaluable as a teaching resource because it enables learning conversations and coaching practice. -- Ben Cooper, California State University, Fullerton
This text is full of pragmatic and versatile lessons on continuous improvement in education. I'm not a believer in 'one size fits all' methodologies, so improvement science cannot be a panacea to all education research initiatives. But where evaluation and other important traditional social science research methods stop short of actually fixing problems, improvement science can indeed transform practice through innovation, collaboration, and learning from data. The book covers a variety of common and unique education problems as well as how the continuous-improvement paradigm can be applied in context. Just as healthcare and other vital human service fields have embraced it, education must as well. -- Dane Joseph, George Fox University
The idea that school district-university partnerships for educator preparation should be mutually-beneficial is almost universally acknowledged, but often poorly articulated by practitioners when asked to provide evidence of such a partnership. If youve wondered what 'mutually beneficial and co-constructed partnerships' look like in practice and how they can be authentic and sustainable over time, this book is for you. With one fell swoop, it silences those resistant to change who wield the argument that 'it can't happen here' as their justification for not innovating. -- Sean Kottke, PhD, Office of Educator Excellence, Michigan Department of Education
Blending the expertise of researchers and practitioners with the use of case studies, this book will be valuable for universities and school districts who want to deepen their partnership work and to see what this work looks like in real life. -- Corrie Stone-Johnson, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York; editor-in-chief, Journal of Educational Change
This volume brings together a number of the most important applied thinkers and doers about complex education partnerships active today. The editors are seasoned education researchers who also share an extensive background with using improvement science. Their necessary communication to co-create this volume has proven to be highly generative with each pushing the next to new insights shared and needed detail added, to the benefit of the reader. -- Edmund "Ted" Hamann, University of Nebraska-Lincoln; chair, Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate (CPED) Council of Delegates; AERA Fellow
This text provides examples of how IHEs can move to research partnerships instead of coming in and doing research on a particular problem and having the schools main function be as a participant. I highly recommend this text for school districts and institutions of higher education that want to form a partnership through the lens of improvement science. All IHEs should be training their candidates in school district administration on improvement science and how forming these partnerships not only improve outcomes for students in schools but also create equitable leaders that will be transforming schools and communities in which they are employed. -- Tori L. Colson, EdD, University of Southern Indiana
This important text provides a multifaceted examination and discussion of partnerships between PK12 school districts and universities using real life examples from existing impactful partnerships across the US. The stories and lessons shared in each chapter can serve as a blueprint for others interested in forming similar partnerships with the aim of transforming their surrounding PK12 educational community. -- Christopher Benedetti, Texas A&M University Corpus Christi
University-district partnerships have been hot topics for many years now. Many funding organizations look for this kind of partnership to ensure that research is done with and for Local Education Agencies (LEAs), versus being done on them. Improving America's Schools Together supports those who want to build partnership with universities or LEAs with some 'how to' information. Partnerships are not easy. However, this book demonstrates how improvement science is a rigorous but user-friendly way to get all stakeholders on the same page to do research in the name of making schools better. It showcases the tools of improvement, one of which is the chartera formal, co-constructed document that establishes the partnership. Such tools offer the reader an understanding of what building a partnership looks like and what is needed to sustain it in different contexts with different foci. Each case is co-written by a university faculty member and educational practitioner, which supports the notion of university-district partnerships and decolonizes who owns and produces knowledge. This book is a useful contribution to practitionersboth K12 and universityas they consider venturing into similar work. -- Jill A. Perry, PhD, Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate
This book is a two for oneit discusses improving the content of the leadership development programs as well as the outcomes of the school-university partnerships required to make leadership development effective. Whats unique about this book is the discussion of improving leadership development and partnership using improvement science methods. The authors have actively used the methods discussed and have engaged in the partnerships themselves. I especially appreciate their documentation of iLEAD, an important effort to strengthening university-school district partnerships focused on leadership development. I highly recommend this book for people working in on improvement in the field of education from both practice and research roles and organizations. -- Laura Wentworth, director of research practice partnerships, California Education Partners
This book captures multiple stories of how institutions of higher education can come alongside school districts to tackle complex problems of practice. Each case provides insight into how diverse actors and partners negotiate and engage in the trading zones and boundaries of policies, practices, programs, and processes to reimagine how we continuously improve schools but how we prepare educators and educational leaders to lead and work together. -- Edwin Nii Bonney, Radford University
Heres a must-read volume for those building new disruptive relationships between IHEs and LEAs. Case studies tell examples of intentional, sustainable

Author Bio

Contributors
Erin Anderson, Douglas W. Anthony, Cynthia K. Barron, Carole Basile, Michelle M. Beavers, Barnett Berry, Manuelito Biag, Regina Biggs, Anthony S. Bryk, Susan P. Carlile, Charoscar Coleman, Diana Cornejo-Sanchez, Shelby Cosner, Kathleen M. W. Cunningham, Kris DeFilippis, Mark E. Deschaine, Felice Desouza, David Eddy-Spicer, Segun Eubanks, Christina Flesher, Louis M. Gomez, Betsy Hargrove, Brian Harvey, Marni Herrington, Zipporah Hightower, Randy Hitz, David G. Imig, Janice Jackson, Julia Jacobsen, Sandra Lochhead, Peter Martinez, David Mayrowetz, Tania McKey, Kara Miley-Libby, Peter Moyi, Christine M. Neumerski, Margaret Terry Orr, Deborah S. Peterson, Meisha Porter, W. Bradley Roberson, David Rock, Natasha Saunders, Farnoosh Shahrokhi, Claire Silva, Jean Snell, Denise A. Soares, Elizabeth Leisy Stosich, Nicole L. Thompson, Steve Tozer, Samantha Viano, Sam Whalen, Tinkhani Ushe White, Paige Whitlock, Paul Zavitkovsky
About the Editors
Louis M. Gomez works to help educators take a new perspective on design and educational improvement by catalyzing long-term, cooperative initiatives. The work gains its power through highly focused collaboratives called Networked Improvement Communities. He is a Professor of Education (and Information Studies) at the University of California, Los Angeles. Since 2008 he has also served as a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Gomez received a B.A. degree in psychology from the State University of New York at Stony Brook and a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from UC Berkeley.
Manuelito Biag currently serves as the managing director of the Center for Postsecondary Innovation at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. In this role, he leads an international portfolio of projects aimed at increasing students' social and economic mobility. He also serves as senior associate and provides instruction, coaching, and research support in the area of networked improvement science. Prior, he served as senior researcher at the John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities at the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University. Biag earned a Ph.D. in education policy from UC Davis.
David Imig holds emeritus status from the Teaching and Learning, Policy and Leadership program at the University of Maryland at College Park. He served as president and chief executive officer of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE) from 1980-2005. He is past chair of the National Policy Board for Educational Administration and the National Society for the Study of Education. He helped to establish the Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate (CPED), serving as chair of the Board of Directors from 2010-2020. He serves as a senior fellow for the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. He holds three academic degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and an honorary doctorate from Bridgewater State University in Massachusetts. He is the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Universities Council for the Education of Teachers in the UK.
Randy Hitz is Dean Emeritus of the College of Education at Portland State University. His higher education administrative experience spans three decades and includes dean positions at Portland State, the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and Montana State University. He currently serves as a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching where he has been part of the iLEAD project for five years. Hitz served as Chair of the American Association for Colleges of Teacher Education and he chaired the Council for Accreditation of Education Professionals (CAEP) Commission as well as participating on CAEPs Board of Directors. He earned a Ph.D. from Indiana State University.
Steve Tozer is Professor emeritus and past university scholar in educational policy studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), where he was the founding director of the UIC Center for Urban Education Leadership. His collaborations with colleagues from UIC and Chicago Public Schools were continuously funded for 18 years by numerous foundations and the US Department of Education. He is the lead author of a textbook, School and Society, Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, 8th Edition (McGraw-Hill, 2020), and lead editor of The Handbook of Research in Social Foundations of Education (Routledge, 2011). Tozer earned his Ph.D. in educational policy studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.