Leadership magazine May/June 2018 V47 No. 5 | Page 20

Deep dive :

INFUSING EQUITY IN CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT

The equity consciousness in improvement science is essential and aims to identify institutional and instructional inequities that may be root causes to issues that surface in adult and student access and performance .
20 Leadership
When I was a young boy going to the beach with my brother , we used to climb on rocks exploring new and strange things the ocean provided . We were fascinated to see what was under the next rock we uncovered .
Interestingly , we unearthed certain rocks and were shocked by the ugly worms that were nestled under them . My brother would yell at me : “ Put the rock back and go look for something more interesting and beautiful !”
I use this childhood story to frontload this article about one of the new California educational methodologies that will be introduced to all county offices of education as differentiated assistance for districts that have not made adequate progress in at least two Local Control Funding Formula priorities . This continuous cycle is called improvement science .
Since 2008 , the Carnegie Foundation has been working with school districts to implement improvement science as a means to learn how to use a continuous improvement cycle to solve problems in our schools . Improvement science is a methodology grounded in the essence of the medical model for generating solutions to health problems .
Improvement science methodology is
strongly being recommended to California county office Local Control and Accountability Plan facilitators to guide districts in identifying problems of practice and dig deeper into multiple data sources to explore root causes for solving academic and behavior challenges in our schools .
The root cause analysis deeply explores “ educational rocks ” to unearth that might be lurking below the surface as educational problems .
This article aims to shed light on the new direction of professional development assistance for districts and schools to address worms / causes that prohibit the implementation of effective best practice and “ scale up ” healthy solutions to address problems of practice identified by data from the California School Dashboard .
Please pass the salt
My personal excitement in writing this article , stems from my engagement in facilitating the improvement science in our professional learning network through the California Collaborative for Educational Excellence ( CCEE ).
By Edwin Lou Javius