LEARNING TO IMPROVE: HOW AMERICA'S SCHOOLS CAN GET BETTER AT GETTING BETTER

LEARNING TO IMPROVE: HOW AMERICA'S SCHOOLS CAN GET BETTER AT GETTING BETTER by Anthony S. Bryk, Louis M. Gomez, Alicia Grunow, and Paul G. LeMahieu Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press, 2015. 280 pp. $35.00.

In response to the continuing failure of many research-based interventions to spur broadscale instructional improvements, a number of researchers have turned their attention to the goal of enhancing organizational capacity. To achieve this end, researchers and practitioners in education have increasingly embraced the discipline of improvement science (Lewis, 2015), which relies on "rapid tests of change to guide the development, revision and continued fine-tuning of new tools, processes, work roles and relationships" (Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, n.d., para. 1). In learning to Improve: How America 's Schools Can Get Better at Getting Better, Anthony S. Bryk, Louis M. Gomez, Alicia Grunow, and Paul G. LeMahieu translate the major ideas of improvement science to educational settings, drawing on their work with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching as well as high-profile examples of similar efforts in other sectors. The result is an eminently readable core set of principles that is likely to resonate with and challenge all who are involved in the work of improving educational outcomes.

The authors begin by developing a compelling diagnosis of the problem troubling those seeking to improve educational organizations. They argue that there is no universal mechanism in education for transforming the wisdom and knowledge experts accumulate as they work into a broader professional knowledge base. They also provide a number of examples of how wellintentioned educational reforms across the ideological spectrum were unsuccessful because they were formed around a novel solution (such as the small schools movement, an outgrowth of the trend of corporate downsizing) rather than a practitioner-driven problem and were imposed from above without attention to the ways local conditions might require adaptation. To address these two challenges, the authors argue that practitioners, policy makers, and researchers should collaborate across traditional organizational boundaries to engage in ongoing disciplined inquiry. The book introduces six key principles that are foundational to the application of improvement science to the work of school improvement within and across networked communities.

The first principle is making the work of improvement problem specific and user...