Episode 137: Continuous Improvement in Education: Myth or Reality?

Imagine sending your child to a school that claims to be "continuously improving" year after year, yet educational outcomes continue to decline. Something doesn't add up, right? 

This episode dives deep into the mechanisms behind school improvement efforts, revealing how the educational system's approach to enhancement often misses the mark. Drawing from both research and personal experience as an education advocate, I unravel the complex web of continuous improvement methodologies, school improvement plans, and the often misunderstood role of accreditation in K-12 education.

I explore the Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle that drives most improvement initiatives and why these well-intentioned efforts frequently fail to deliver meaningful results. The discussion highlights a critical oversight in many improvement frameworks: the absence of social justice perspectives and authentic family engagement, particularly for marginalized communities. When schools view families as external to the improvement process rather than essential partners, they perpetuate existing inequities despite their stated goals of enhancement.

Perhaps most eye-opening is the examination of school accreditation – that mysterious "seal of approval" granted to 95% of America's public high schools by just six regional associations. I pull back the curtain on this process, revealing the close-knit relationships between accreditors and the schools they evaluate, and questioning whether the system truly measures educational effectiveness or merely maintains the status quo.

Whether you're a parent navigating school choices, an educator involved in improvement initiatives, or simply someone concerned about educational quality, this episode provides crucial insights and actionable steps. Share your experiences with accredited schools in the comments at k12educationuntangledbuzzsprout.com, and follow the podcast to continue untangling the complexities of our education system together.

Check out my 24/7 interactive expert on my website!  There are some great questions being asked and insightful conversations happening there…  Go to https://liberation through education.com/ask-me-anything

Love my show? Consider being a regular subscriber! Just go to https://tinyurl.com/podcastsupport. 

Chapters

• 1:40 Podcast Introduction and Background
• 4:10 Understanding Continuous Improvement
• 8:42 School Improvement Plans and Social Justice
• 19:09 The Role of Accreditation in Schools
• 26:55 Connecting Accountability and Accreditation
• 30:10 Action Steps and Key Takeaways

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:56

Welcome to another episode of K-12 Education Untangled. My name is Dr Kim J Fields, former corporate manager turned education researcher and advocate, and I'm the host of this podcast. I got into this space after dealing with some frustrating interactions with school educators and administrators, as well as experiencing the microaggressions that I faced as an African American mom raising my two kids, who were in the public school system. I really wanted to understand how teachers were trained and what the research provided about the challenges of the public education system. Once I gained the information and the insights that I needed, I was then equipped to be able to successfully support my children in their education and progress. This battle-tested experience is what I provide as action steps for you to take. It's like enjoying a bowl of educational research with a sprinkling of mother wisdom on top. If you're looking to find out more about current information and issues in public education that could affect you and your children, and the action steps that you can take to give your children the advantages they need, then you're in the right place. Thanks for tuning in today. I know that staying informed about K-12 public education trends and topics is important to you, so keep listening. Give me 30 minutes and I'll untangle the latest trends, issues and topics pertaining to this constantly evolving K-12 public education environment. In this episode, I'll be discussing why K-12 schools persist in pursuing continuous improvement and the role of accreditation. Why do schools persist in continuous improvement efforts? Do we actually see the results of these continuous improvements and what is the role of accreditation in continuous improvements? You may be feeling something like this If public schools are continuously improving, why is the state of education in this country declining based on comparisons with other countries? I discussed the topic of continuous improvement, school improvement plans and education and accreditation in this episode. Let's untangle this.

Speaker 1: 3:46

Continuous improvement engages key stakeholders administrators, educators and community in the system in used to address the problem, as well as make predictions, collect data about change practices and study the potential influence of those change practices on specific outcomes of interest. Continuous improvement is based on the principles that making sustainable change takes time and involves collective effort. It's context-specific and it requires constant adaptation, data collection and learning. By focusing on a series of small changes combined with ongoing review, continuous improvement can lead to large-scale change. Continuous improvement in the education space applies to principal preparation, teacher preparation and curricula improvements. It can also be used for online class environments, early childhood education environments and the entire K-12 public education environment. Continuous improvement has existed in business and healthcare for more than two decades.

Speaker 1: 5:22

In school settings, it utilizes the plan do Study Act or PDSA cycles, which are multiple tests of small changes. Using the Plan Do Study Act cycle, the improvement team plans the test, asking what change will need to be tested, with whom or with what measures they will be tested and what changes are expected as a result. The team then does the test, gathering information on what was happening during the test and as a result of the test. Third, the team studies the information gathered during the test, comparing it with predictions that were made about effects during the test. Comparing it with predictions that were made about effects. Finally, the team acts making a decision about whether to abandon a new process, revise it or skill it up with a larger number of users. After testing the change on a small scale, like with a few teachers or a limited number of classrooms, the plan do study act cycle repeats.

Speaker 1: 6:36

If this sounds like an undertaking for a continuous improvement project is time-consuming and energy-demanding, that's because it is. This can lead to frustration for educators and administrators, especially in the area of collecting and analyzing data and not having sufficient time to implement the changes discovered. Measures for continuous improvement should be closely aligned to student learning goals and implementation of the instructional strategies that drive the continuous improvement effort and, more importantly, they should be practical to use in the classroom setting. Continuous improvement includes five distinct repeating processes Understanding the problem, identifying specific targets for improvement, determining the change to introduce, implementing the change and evaluating if and how the change led to any improvements. Continuous improvement initiatives are primarily concerned with building a system that's constantly seeking to improve how it tackles the consistent problems of instructional practice.

Speaker 1: 7:58

What does the continuous improvement initiative look like within the school context? It can look like a group of grade level subject area teachers who are implementing and testing a new instructional practice or curriculum material through the plan do study act cycles and who need support in developing multiple practical measures to assess improvement beyond the interim and summative assessments typically available to them, including periodic progress assessments and annual statewide tests. Or it can look like a principal who wants to participate in a new district-wide school climate initiative and wants teachers in her building to implement it. The principal envisions a model in which she trains a core set of lead teachers on continuous improvement processes to drive implementation of the initiative in the school. The principal is familiar with improvement science, but she needs support on practical measurement, including how to create instruments to collect data specifically aligned to implementation of the initiative as well as the intended outcomes. Just so you know, improvement science is a systematic approach to implementing and testing strategies to solve problems and drive change in complex systems.

Speaker 1: 9:29

Educators using an improvement science approach begin by defining the problem or student learning that needs to be addressed, consider the teacher and student factors that are related to the need, determine a strategy to drive improvements and collect evidence or data about whether the strategy is working. At the district level, continuous improvement could look like a district-level administrator who oversees the district's eight elementary schools and is in year three of a networked improvement community prepare and use data displays. The administrator wants a set of professional development and planning sessions with teachers focused on data displays. Also, a continuous improvement initiative could look like math department chairs at four district high schools who seek to improve algebra scores through the plan-do-study-act cycles and who want to ensure that the teachers in the departments show inter-rater agreement when they use the practical measures they've developed. As an aside, inter-rater agreement means that whoever scores the test will typically come up with the same score. The department chairs need protocols and process steps to use with the teachers as they test and measure interator agreement on the rubrics on the rubrics. These examples should help clarify the different situations in which a continuous improvement initiative gets underway within various school contexts.

Speaker 1: 11:26

School improvement plans, or SIPs, have become a central focus of public education. Educational leaders experience tension between balancing compliance with accountability demands and continuous improvement, but neither of these lenses is centered on social justice necessary for closing opportunity gaps. Unfortunately, schools tend to view families and community stakeholders as external to the improvement planning process, and this issue is exacerbated for schools serving higher percentages of African American students and higher percentages of economically disadvantaged students. The Continuous School Improvement Framework's goal is to improve educational outcomes and opportunities for all students. School improvement efforts that are not specifically grounded in a commitment to social justice fall short of creating the cultural shifts that are necessary for closing the opportunity gaps for children of color. School improvement needs to be connected to educational equity that's grounded in social justice, including equity audits, community-based equity audits, school culture audits and self-evaluation processes. Data use is a key component of a school improvement plan what data get noticed, how data are interpreted and how those interpretations are connected to actions are all connected to educators' beliefs and experiences. When social justice frameworks are absent from data use processes, data can be used to affirm deficit thinking about students, families and marginalized communities, narrow the instruction and curriculum for marginalized students and create conditions where opportunity gaps are ignored. Therefore, it is necessary to integrate social justice frameworks into data use and school improvement practices.

Speaker 1: 13:44

It's important to understand the political context of school improvement plans because they are tightly coupled to US accountability and accreditation policies as a way to centralize and standardize education reform over the last 50 years. Most school improvement plans use standardized test scores to evaluate those plans and this facilitates a closed policy improvement loop. This tight coupling of accountability policy, accreditation and school improvement pushes authentic discussions of social justice, equity, community engagement and the socio-political context of schooling into a narrative that places all the responsibility for student success on the curriculum and instruction in a school. Traditional family involvement models maintain the status quo power dynamics and contribute to deficit use of marginalized communities. However, school improvement plans that focus on family engagement, in other words, authentic partnerships in schools, tend to get better results through collaboration in their improvement efforts or require schools to include family and or community members in their improvement planning activity. Schools are more likely to include the stakeholders and also have a stronger community focus in their school improvement strategies. It's particularly important for school improvement plans to include parents of ninth graders who will be transitioning to high school. These improvement plans should focus on the ABCs of staying on track to graduation, attendance, behavior and course performance. Schools and districts pay little attention to engaging families, especially those from low-income and immigrant communities, during this critical transition to high school, when family engagement tends to decline. Part of the school improvement plans should include well-planned practices that will lead to improved outreach to all families in order to increase their knowledge, skills and motivation to support their students in the transition to high school and throughout ninth grade. Now let's transition from continuous improvement and school improvement plans to accreditation and its purpose in K-12 schools.

Speaker 1: 17:32

Six regional associations have been granting seals of approval for accreditation to the nation's public schools since the late 19th century, and they wield considerable influence with local teachers, principals and superintendents. Most principals describe accreditation visits like a trip to the dentist, a routine examination that provokes unmatched anxiety. In most cases, however, principals and school staff roll out the red carpet when the accreditation evaluators visit a school Accreditation was established about a century ago by university scholars to make sure that schools employed competent teachers and maintained hygienic facilities. About 95% of the nation's public high schools and one-sixth of the elementary and middle schools are accredited by these six regional associations. The accrediting agencies are ultimately operated and policed by the school officials they monitor. They monitor. The accreditation visit, which occurs every five to ten years, can include interviewing teachers about their curricula, quizzing staff members about dropout statistics and inspecting the district's buildings to make sure they meet mandated health and safety codes. Accreditors check everything from instruments in the science labs to the arrangement of libraries card catalog. The guidebook for the accreditation inspection comes from the National Study of School Evaluation. It requires schools to provide detailed documentation on a broad set of topics. Most of these regional accreditation associations deliver the good or bad news in a report to the school within a few weeks of their visit. After schools review the evaluation, which can run hundreds of pages, they hand it over to district officials. Winning accreditation or retaining it, according to principals, certifies that they're on the right track. This is helpful for reassuring parents about the viability of the school, as well as making sure colleges are accepting of the school's work Without the accreditor's seal of approval, school enrollment would drop, because there would be no advantage for students to attend an unaccredited school if they have college plans.

Speaker 1: 20:17

Schools often host the teams of educators that review their facilities, with the schools paying for their hotels, meals and travel expenses. Once the school passes the initial accreditation test, membership is virtually irrevocable. However, fewer than three percent of schools up for accreditation lose their certification each year. The process for once the school has lost accreditation is that the school must first be put on probation by an association's executive board. Unless the situation is dire, like facilities becoming hazardous, teachers are uncertified or the library has no books, schools routinely get years to fix their problems, for example, if the science building burns down. For example, if the science building burns down, the school would lose its accreditation.

Speaker 1: 21:17

Schools are expelled only by majority vote of the committee of their peers from throughout the region. Membership has its privileges. Member schools pay between $300 and $1,000 a year in dues to their associations, money that, along with dues from colleges, makes up the bulk of the association's operating budgets. Local school officials often make up the accrediting group's board of directors. You can see how the accrediting groups are close-knit organizations, right, but you have to wonder if these visits are based on the mission of the school and improving learning or based on the wishes and dreams of a few school administrators on what they would like to have. Most parents would like to know that accreditation is about documenting schools' effectiveness for learning outcomes instead of just putting a rubber stamp on accreditation. So let's pull it all together.

Speaker 1: 22:27

Accreditation and accountability are two distinct processes with different goals. Accountability systems, usually instituted after a federal act has been implemented in most states, capture a moment in time for student achievement, graduation rates, career readiness and other factors. They weren't designed to identify root causes for performance or explain why the results are what they are. Accountability systems are not forward-looking to consider what factors are impacting student success or how to drive improvement Improvement. Accreditation, on the other hand, availability and strength of student support, leadership, financial management and the use of data in decision making. Accreditation and accountability systems are complementary, however, together they can be used to drive improvement for students by better informing accountability and supporting schools.

Speaker 1: 23:57

Incorporating a regional accreditation process within a continuous improvement framework picks up where accountability leaves off. The process uncovers details about how well the school is performing, where it falls short and what schools can do to be even more successful, with a focus on continuous improvement. An independent standard space accreditation review process looks at accountability, data and performance and challenges institutions to take action to foster ongoing improvement in areas that impact learning. This process looks behind the numbers and deeper into school quality factors like culture, learning environments, student engagement, leadership, capacity for sustaining improvements, the use of technology, the importance of family and community engagement and more. Accreditation identifies what graduation rates, test scores and other indicators cannot tell on their own, and that is what takes place in the school. That leads to its results. That leads to its results. Accountability factors into a system of continuous improvement to guide the improvements and establish a pathway forward.

Speaker 1: 25:25

So what can you do about accreditation, accountability, continuous improvement and school improvement plans? Here are the action steps you can take regarding these topics. But first a short story. My children attended Blue Ribbon Schools as designated by the Western Region Accrediting Body, or WASC. I wasn't overly impressed by this designation because I just had the sense that there was some fraternity that granted accreditation. I touched on this a little bit in my earlier discussion in this episode, but what was important about going to accredited schools was that the work that my children were required to complete would be recognized by the colleges that they pursued. The main action item for you is to ensure that your children attend accredited schools, especially high school, where their course credits will be recognized by the colleges they choose to apply to. If you're really feeling ambitious, seek or reach out to school administrators to get on the committees that address continuous improvement for family engagement, so that your input can be heard. It's vital that the continuous improvement process not only looks at instruction and curriculum, but also the importance of family and community. Here are this episode's takeaways Continuous improvement engages key stakeholders school administrators, educators and community in the system in order to focus on a specific problem of practice and, through a series of iterative cycles, identify and test new approaches, tools or new strategies that can be used to address the problem, as well as make predictions, collect data about change practices and study the potential influence of those change practices on specific outcomes of interest.

Speaker 1: 27:54

Most school improvement plans use standardized test scores to evaluate those plans, and this facilitates a closed policy improvement loop. This tight coupling of accountability policy, accreditation and school improvement pushes authentic discussions of social justice, equity, community engagement and the sociopolitical context of schooling into a narrative that places all the responsibility for student success on the curriculum and instruction in a school. Instruction in a school. Traditional family involvement models maintain the status quo power dynamics and contribute to deficit use of marginalized communities. However, school improvement plans that focus on family engagement, in other words, authentic partnerships in schools, tend to get better results through collaboration in their improvement efforts. When states provide schooling plan templates that emphasize or require schools to include family and or community members in their improvement planning activity, schools are more likely to include the stakeholders and also have a stronger community focus in their school improvement strategies.

Speaker 1: 29:18

Accreditation and accountability are two distinct processes with different goals. Accountability systems, usually instituted after a federal act has been implemented in most states, capture a moment in time of student achievement, graduation rates, career readiness and other factors. They weren't designed to identify the root causes for performance or explain why the results are what they are. Accountability systems are not forward looking to consider what factors are impacting student success or how to drive improvement. Accreditation, on the other hand, is a rigorous multi-year process in which schools and district leaders work with teams of peer reviewers to demonstrate that their schools meet or exceed standards that are set by the profession. It provides a deeper view into the vital systems of the school. Those include the effectiveness of instruction, availability and strength of student support, leadership, financial management and the use of data in decision making.

Speaker 1: 30:45

What's been your experience with your children in an accredited school or a non-accredited school? Let me know your thoughts by leaving a text comment on my podcast website, k12educationuntangledbuzzsproutcom. If this is the type of subject matter and discussion that resonates with you, please follow my podcast on whatever service you're listening to this. You can also follow my podcast by going to k12educationaluntangledbuzzsproutcom. Forward slash follow. Thanks for tuning in today. I hope you'll come back for more K-12 educational discussions with even more exciting topics to untangle. Until next time, aim to learn something new every day.