Chapter 8: Building Capacity for Continuous Improvement: Iterating to Center Racial Equity in a PK–8 Community School

Schools are intended to be places that promote student learning. However, schools are not traditionally designed to facilitate learning for the adults or engage those adults in systems change –they are not built for continuous improvement (Ball & Cohen, 1999; Kazemi & Resnick, 2019). We align with a definition of continuous improvement that takes “continuous” to mean ongoing and job-embedded, and “improvement” to originate from the notion of quality improvement. Quality improvement is the use of rigorous methods to improve the effectiveness of processes in a system (University Research Company [URC], n.d.). The Carnegie Foundation has done important work to bring the practices of improvement into education. The six core principles of improvement and many of the tools and routines used by the Carnegie Foundation form the basis for the work we will share in this chapter.