Improvement in Education Summit

Focus on how improvement science can be applied where the work is hardest—and matters most.

• Explore how educators use improvement science methods to navigate complexity in under-resourced, high-need, or rapidly changing environments.
• Learn how to adapt tools like PDSA cycles and driver diagrams when conditions are unpredictable or constraints are significant.
• Examine strategies for identifying root causes in systems with competing priorities, limited capacity, or entrenched challenges.
• Highlight approaches that build resilience, coherence, and momentum in the face of initiative fatigue and change overload.
• Share examples of teams achieving progress by starting small, learning quickly, and improving within—not despite—challenging conditions.

Define what strong partnerships actually look like in improvement work—and why they are essential for success.

• Clarify the core elements of effective school–university–community partnerships, including shared aims, defined roles, and mutual accountability.
• Examine why improvement efforts fail without deep, trust-based collaboration across systems.
  
  • Explore structures that make partnership real, not rhetorical
  • Joint decision-making processes
  • Shared data and learning routines
  • Co-developed measures of success
• Learn how to engage students, families, and communities as true partners in co-design, not just participants.
• Surface lessons from partnerships that have led to stronger implementation, better outcomes, and sustained improvement over time.

Focus on how systems move from isolated success to reliable, system-wide results.

• Showcase how organizations use disciplined improvement cycles to move from promising ideas to proven practices.
• Share methods for testing, refining, and scaling change ideas across classrooms, schools, and institutions.
• Explore the role of measurement systems in determining what works, for whom, and under what conditions.
• Examine how leaders create the conditions for spread, sustainability, and system coherence.
• Highlight examples of scaling efforts that maintain quality and equity while expanding impact.

Reframe the teacher shortage as a solvable systems challenge by applying continuous improvement principles.

• Use improvement science to identify root causes across the educator pipeline, including recruitment, preparation, hiring, and retention. 
• Test and refine strategies—examples include teacher residencies, grow-your-own programs, and differentiated career pathways—through rapid cycles of learning. 
• Build and continuously improve aligned preparation pathways spanning community colleges and universities, while developing new pipelines for paraprofessionals and career changers, leveraging district data to ensure coherence and responsiveness to workforce needs.
• Apply improvement approaches to boost teacher retention, with a focus on support, working conditions, and opportunities for professional growth. 
• Highlight organizations achieving measurable progress in stabilizing and strengthening the educator workforce.