Areas of Expertise: Systems Improvement

District and School Systems

District central offices can play a critical role in catalyzing, supporting, and assisting in district-wide school improvement efforts. Employing a strategic and coherent array of strategies leveraging the resources of the district can effectively address multiple challenges that a district’s schools may face. Assessing and understanding how the multiple challenges systemically impact student achievement in each school and throughout the district is a first step in identifying those strategies that can have the greatest impact on raising student achievement.

We have developed and used a portfolio of tools and processes that can help a district to engage in its own improvement efforts. Embedded in each of our supports and tools is an explicit focus on equity, assisting districts and schools in finding new ways to better meet the needs of all students .

These tools and processes include:

• District Organizational Assessment: A collaborative organizational assessment of the district-level structures, programs, and practices that support (and/or inhibit) effective school improvement throughout the system, leading to a set of jointly determined recommendations and actions intended to improve the coherence of district and school improvement strategies.
• Strategic Mapping: A process for assisting a district to discern and better understand the multiple issues and challenges hindering its schools from making significant improvement in student achievement, and to identify the central challenges that are having the greatest impact on student achievement. The process assists district representatives in assessing the impact of its current strategies and use of resources, and identify new strategies and use of resources that might better support significant improvement in achievement.
• Designing Effective District-wide School Improvement Processes: We work with districts to develop a system for supporting and monitoring school improvement efforts through fundamentally changing how districts assist schools in areas such as needs assessment, planning, implementation and evaluation. Through our support districts have redefined the expectations for all of their schools, the improvement process itself, and the district role in this endeavor.
• Strategic Alignment of School Improvement Strategies: As schools continue to employ strategies to better meet the needs of their students, sometimes the additional deployment of these strategies can cause unintendend conflict and consequences. The Strategic Alignment Guide can be used by a school improvement team to strategically analyze whether new improvement strategies or programs might unintentionally impact other programs or attributes of the school. If conflicts are identified, the process guide then assists teams in identifying ways to adapt or integrate the implementation of desired programs to better ensure their success. In addition to providing this guidance, the guide is specifically designed to assist schools with diverse student populations, and in particular high ELL populations, providing a rich array of resources to best serve their students.
• Designing Services for Underperforming Districts and Schools: Targeted technical assistance and professional development, focused on issues such as ELL instructional strategies, providing school improvement workshops, evaluation consultation, and facilitating the development of cross-school professional learning communities.