Improvement in Action: Advancing Quality in America’s Schools

by Anthony S. Bryk

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.

Genres: Education

256 pages, Paperback

Published July 14, 2020

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

I suggest reading Learning to Improve prior to digesting this book as it builds off of Learning to Improve with excellent examples that illustrate the potential of improvement science. Improvement in Action explains how the tools applied by improvement science can drive substantial improvements in schools and nonprofit organizations. It is an advanced model that is superior to current organizational frameworks in education featuring a bottom-up culture versus the typical top-down thinking that currently persists in the field.