For more than four decades, researchers, policymakers, professional educators, and the philanthropic community in education have wrestled with how to scale up promising pockets of reform. Centering equity in scaling efforts means working with and prioritizing students who have historically lacked access to powerful learning opportunities,…

Background: Traditional methods of implementing educational innovations face a number of critical challenges that have problematized efforts to improve practice, particularly at scale. Recently, continuous improvement approaches have gained attention, offering structured, iterative processes for developing innovations that incorporate the wisdom…

Background/Context: This study examines the implementation of an academic and social-emotional learning innovation called Personalization for Academic and Social-Emotional Learning, or PASL. The innovation was designed, tested, and implemented using a continuous continuous-improvement model. The model emphasized a top-and-bottom process in which…

There is increasing interest in researcher-practitioner partnerships, particularly those that take the form of a networked improvement community. In this paper, we describe the partnership between the National Center on Scaling Up Effective Schools and the Fort Worth Independent School District to build student ownership and responsibility. By…

The last 5 years have witnessed growing support amongst government institutions and educational foundations for applying continuous improvement research (CIR) in school settings. CIR responds to the challenge of implementing effective educational innovations at scale by working with practitioners in local contexts to understand "what works,…

The last 5 years have witnessed growing support amongst government institutions and educational foundations for applying continuous improvement research (CIR) in school settings. CIR responds to the challenge of implementing effective educational innovations at scale by working with practitioners in local contexts to understand ''what works, for…

There is growing concern among researchers and governmental officials that knowing what works in education is important, but not enough for school improvement. Sound evidence alone is not sufficient for large-scale, sustainable change, both because practitioners may consider it irrelevant to their own problems of practice or run into challenges…

There is growing concern among researchers and governmental officials that knowing what works in education is important, but not enough for school improvement. Sound evidence alone is not sufficient for large-scale, sustainable change, both because practitioners may consider it irrelevant to their own problems of practice or run into challenges…

This chapter describes a model for continuous improvement that guides the work of the National Center on Scaling Up Effective Schools, or NCSU. NCSU is a research and development center funded by the Institute for Education Sciences, the research arm of the United States Department of Education. At the core of the Center's work is an innovative…

Today, with states' near-universal adoption of the Common Core State Standards, the political system has achieved that which was not possible less than 2 decades ago. Just why this is so remains unanswered. Some observers have attributed states' embrace of the standards to the substantial financial incentives that the federal government embedded…

The National Center on Scaling up Effective Schools (NCSU) is a five-year project working to develop, implement, and test new processes to scale up effective practices in high schools that districts will be able to apply within the context of their own unique goals and circumstances. This report describes the activities and findings of the first…

Many political scientists maintain that public policies diffuse across states and that proximate states, in particular, influence one another's policy activities. Using state-funded merit aid for college as its case, this article takes a new approach to the study of the diffusion phenomenon, leaving behind conventional techniques used by…