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How to get there from here What has confused much of the discussion about system improvement in the past is that each system’s journey is different: each school system starts from a different point, faces different expectations, and operates in a different social and political context. These differences have often led even the experts to give poor advice. Rather like in the hoary old tale of a weather-worn farmer who, when asked directions by a lost traveler, replies, “Well I wouldn’t be starting from here, if I were you.” School system leaders, when looking for direction, are all too often told what to do from a starting point that is different from their own. Educators in a moderately performing system would be better off in seeking inspiration from similar systems that are managing to improve, rather than from those that are configured and positioned very differently, even if they are the world’s best-performing ones. This report shows that a school system can improve from any starting point. Its main message is that in order to do so, system leaders must integrate three aspects when developing and implementing an improvement journey. The first aspect is the status quo, called here the performance stage, which identifies the point where the system currently stands according to student outcomes. The second is the set of interventions necessary to make the desired improvements in student outcomes, here called the intervention cluster. The third is the system’s adaptation of the intervention cluster to the prevailing context: taking into account the history, culture, politics, and structure of the school system and the nation.
terms of the sequence, the emphasis, or the rollout approach across schools. It is in contextualizing the intervention cluster where we saw the impact of history, culture, structure, and politics come fully into play. To complete our picture of the complex landscape of school system improvement journeys, in addition to the three basic elements – performance stage, intervention cluster, and contextualizing – we have added two more elements: sustaining and ignition. Sustaining is all about how a system puts in place the processes for ensuring improvement is continued over the longer term, and compromises three elements: the formation of a mediating layer between schools and the ‘center’, a strong pedagogy supported by collaborative practices; and leadership continuity. Ignition describes the conditions necessary to spur a system to embark on its reform journey. These conditions show remarkable consistency across all the improving systems studied here. It needs to be kept in mind, that in the real world, each of these elements is integrated into a whole – the school system – just as human body or a car does not function as a collection of bits. Having acknowledged this, we will now focus on each of the bits, for it is in understanding their role that the functioning of the whole becomes clear.
Performance stage
We have divided our 20 school systems that have been successful in sustaining improvement into performance stages. There are two important aspects to these stages. First, they are stages in two metaphorical senses of the word: reflecting how far the system has progressed relative to others; We find that each performance stage is associated and the place or ground on which the interventions with a dominant cluster of interventions, are acted out. Second, the performance stage is irrespective of geography, culture, or political really a snapshot of a moment in time in a dynamic system. This comprises the set of interventions that process. In actuality, each successful school system systems use to successfully traverse from one stage is undergoing a continuous progression from one to the next (e.g. from poor to fair). While the context performance stage to the next – an improvement does influence the emphasis and combination journey. Exhibit 6 illustrates where our sample of interventions the system chooses from within systems lie on the improvement continuum of poor this cluster, the intervention pattern is strikingly to fair, fair to good, good to great, and great to consistent for systems pursuing similar outcomes. excellent. As can be seen in the exhibit, some of the However, we also find great variation in how a systems have moved all the way from fair to great, system implemented the same interventions, be it in though over a period of many years.