intellectual heavy lifting at the front end of the idea pipeline, while practitioners, those with onthe-ground experience, were expected to implement and adapt idealized innovations. Practitioners simultaneously engaged in local problem solving; however their efforts were rarely seen as significant in the infrastructure of educational R&D. The ideas seeded in our earlier essay and further developed here take a different perspective. We argue that the complex problems of practice improvement demand that a diverse mix of skills be brought to bear and require reconsideration of when and how in the arc of problem solving this diversity of expertise is best exploited. It demands new arrangements for disciplined inquiry where the work of research and practice join in a more dynamic and interactive fashion. It invites strong scholars to engage in applied R&D, but now in quite different ways in the pursuit of a science of improvement. We detail in this essay how the social organization for such work might actually be carried out. Toward this end, we introduce the idea of a networked improvement community. We focus primarily on how research and practice communities might join in initiating such an enterprise. Our inspiration for the discussion below draws on insights from successful R&D activities occurring in diverse fields outside of education including the semiconductor industry, the Linux development community, and efforts at broad-scale quality improvements in health services. In each instance large networks have organized around complex problems and brought about remarkable change. Understanding these developments better, extracting core ideas, and translating them into more productive institutional arrangements for educational R&D pose important questions for learning scientists, organizational sociologists and political scientists interested in how expertise networks advance social improvement. ORIENTING IDEAS Improving the organization of educational R&D requires answers to three seemingly straightforward questions: First, what problem(s) are we trying to solve? Second, whose expertise is needed to solve these problems? And third, what are the social arrangements that will enable this work? While these questions appear to be simple, in the last decades our field’s responses to them have been confused. When the answers to these questions are disorganized, the natural result is a cacophony of questions and innovations that fail to accumulate into real progress on core concerns. Consider community college graduation rates, which is now a major concern for public policy. There is a broad public consensus that community colleges are an important opportunity resource for a large segment of America. In the research and development community, we recognize that improving community college graduation rates is an important priority. Is this level of agreement enough for sustained progress so that more students will successfully graduate? We argue no. Once problems like this cross some public policy threshold, a spate of uncoordinated research and development activity ensues. Some scholars might say community college failure rates are high because, “it is the textbooks”—we need to develop better and open source materials. Others ! !
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