Improving America's Schools Together: How District-University Partnerships and Continuous ImprovementCan 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 country with practical improvement tools that can be adapted to any setting. Through an array of in-depth stories of district-university partnerships, the book aims to demonstrate how improvement science—as a shared method—can guide institutions of higher education and their local education agency partners to enact the types of infrastructures that foster leaders and educators capable of enhancing students’ learning outcomes and opportunity structures. Among other topics, readers will benefit from reading about how these partnerships developed course and program offerings for aspiring urban school leaders centered on local problems of practice; strengthened improvement capabilities within districts and schools; leveraged improvement science to transform how teachers are professionally supported; and spanned institutional boundaries through shared tools, frameworks, and practices. Through rich stories and detailed artifacts, including protocols, MOUs, and other practical tools, the authors provide deep insight and practical guidance on the mechanics of place-based, problem-focused, and improvement-minded district-university partnerships. Readers can assess their readiness and ability to work in such ways; identify the constraining and enabling conditions in their locales; and recognize the kinds of tools, resources, and strategies that allow for mutually-beneficial collaborations.

As a field, education has largely failed to learn from experience. Time after time, promising education reforms fall short of their goals and are abandoned as other promising ideas take their place. In Learning to Improve, the authors argue for a new approach. Rather than "implementing fast and learning slow," they believe educators should adopt a more rigorous approach to improvement that allows the field to "learn fast to implement well." Using ideas borrowed from improvement science, the authors show how a process of disciplined inquiry can be combined with the use of networks to identify, adapt, and successfully scale up promising interventions in education. Organized around six core principles, the book shows how "networked improvement communities" can bring together researchers and practitioners to accelerate learning in key areas of education. Examples include efforts to address the high rate of failure among students in community college remedial math courses and strategies forimproving feedback to novice teachers. Learning to Improve offers a new paradigm for research and development in education that promises to be a powerful driver of improvement for the nation's schools and colleges.

Critics within and outside the field of education often point out the absence of a strong reciprocal connection between research and practice. The emergence of standards-based reform and the passage of NCLB have generated increasing pressure for evidence-based decision making at all levels. Yet there is little clarity about how research results are actually used in education, or what kinds of evidence are most useful to practitioners and policymakers. In this book, leading scholars in the field examine the available research on the use of evidence in education and provide suggestions for strengthening the research-to-practice pipeline.