School Performance Institute Blog

The marrying of on-track indicator systems with improvement science has caught the attention of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.  

Over the next five years, Gates plans to direct 60 percent of its $1.7 billion in education funding towards networks of schools working together to identify solutions to local problems and using data to drive improvement. This shift at Gates was largely driven by work in Chicago among a network of high schools. These schools used the combination of an on-track indicator system and improvement science to increase the percentage of students on-track to graduate from 61 to 85 percent between 2007 and 2015. Four-year college enrollment rose from 36 to 44 percent during that same time period.¹ All things remaining equal, organizational improvement to this extent is seldom seen in education...