Chapter 3: Continuous Improvement in Stem Education: Collaboration Among Four Partners to Co-Design an Innovative and Equitable STEM School

In response to ongoing inequities in education, a research–practice partnership (RPP) was formed among a university, a large urban school district, an engineering industry partner, and a historically marginalized and highly engaged community. These partners co-designed and implemented a neighborhood STEM school with two key aims: improving college and career trajectories for students by providing excellent STEM education paired with wraparound services; and developing and documenting an equitable, replicable model for transformation in urban education. By sharing the project logic model and telling the emerging story of the RPP in this chapter, we seek to demonstrate our learning to date in the first 2 years of implementation, document our continuous improvement practices, and describe how to apply an equity lens to collaborative work by mapping key components of our RPP onto the principles of continuous improvement.