Improvement in Action: Advancing Quality in America's Schools

Anthony S. Bryk

Feb 2021 · Harvard Education Press

About this ebook

Improvement in Action, Anthony S. Bryk’s sequel to Learning to Improve, illustrates how educators have effectively applied the six core principles of continuous improvement in practice. The book highlights relevant examples of rigorous, high-quality improvement work in districts, schools, and professional development networks across the country.

The organizations featured in the book have addressed, with remarkable results, long-standing inequitable educational outcomes in high school graduation rates, college readiness, and absenteeism. The cases emphasize the measures the educators took and the thinking that motivated their actions.

Bryk describes how improvers, working in different contexts and confronting different problems, used select principles, tools, and methods to make improvement come to life. Brief analytic reflections are embedded throughout the narratives, and each chapter concludes with an analysis of a set of larger lessons illuminated by the organization’s story. Taken as a set, these examples offer readers valuable insights about the actual dynamics of doing improvement work.

Improvement in Action, paired with Learning to Improve, provides readers with a comprehensive understanding of the practice, method, and theory of large-scale continuous improvement in education.

About the author

Anthony S. Bryk is the ninth president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, where he is leading work on transforming educational research and development, more closely joining researchers and practitioners to improve teaching and learning. From 2004 until 2008, he held the Spencer Chair in Organizational Studies in the School of Education and the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. He came to Stanford from the University of Chicago, where he was the Marshall Field IV Professor of Urban Education in the sociology department and where he helped found the Center for Urban School Improvement and the Consortium on Chicago School Research. He is a member of the National Academy of Education and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Bryk is one of America’s most noted educational researchers. His 1993 book, Catholic Schools and the Common Good, is a classic in the sociology of education. His deep interest in bringing scholarship to bear on improving schooling is reflected in his later volumes Trust in Schools (2002) and Organizing Schools for Improvement: Lessons from Chicago (2010). In Learning to Improve (2015), Bryk argues that improvement science combined with the power of networks offers the field a new approach to reach ever-increasing educational aspirations.