The K-12 Improvement Imperative: Pathways to Adopting Continuous Improvement

Almost every organization faces an improvement imperative: businesses must grow their profits and market penetration, hospitals strive for better patient outcomes, and nonprofits look to increase their impact. K-12 school systems are no exception. Every principal and superintendent accepts their role knowing that they will be expected to make their schools better. For education leaders, improvement often means boosting state test scores, raising graduation rates, increasing college enrollments, lowering student discipline incidents, implementing new STEM programs, or updating their technology and facilities. When it comes to meeting the improvement imperative, education leaders have no shortage of options to pursue--new curricula, technologies, pedagogies, and programs abound. Historically, most K-12 improvement efforts consist of a top-down approach to implement a solution de jour across a school or district. Unfortunately, however, improvement efforts in education routinely break down because they don't account for the complex interdependencies across a school system that get in the way of faithful implementation. This paper aims to help the proponents of continuous improvement approaches better understand how context shapes choices about how to improve. The insights offered in this report come from looking at improvement efforts through the lens of the Jobs to Be Done Theory. This theory starts with a simple premise: all people--school system leaders included--strive to make progress in their lives.