Critical Perspectives on Educational Innovation and Improvement Science

In recent years, education has undergone an improvement and innovation revolution; where reformers, policymakers, practitioners, and researchers have been undertaking efforts to do education better and differently. Innovation in education often focuses on understanding and providing pathways that will prepare today’s students for tomorrow’s economy. Innovation efforts include STEAM education (Science, Technology, Engineering, the Arts, and Mathematics), edtech, emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence that are able to accelerate student learning, and school competition that promotes organizational efficiency. At the same time, educational improvement efforts have focused on enhancing school policies and practices. Modern improvement measures in education have centered on implementing systematic changes that would revamp the delivery of education, the services necessary for students to succeed, organizational structures, human or social capital, or curriculum and assessments that would increase student outcomes. Both improvement and innovation have come to symbolize and usher in a new wave of educational practice and policy, one that focuses on student learning outcomes and teacher quality and disrupts the traditional ways that schools operate and are organized. However, improvement-focused educational research has paid limited attention to how race, class, and gender fit within this emerging canon. The schools and districts that are often the targets of improvement efforts have student and teaching populations that are diverse, including large proportions of low-income families and people of color, yet the individuals and organizations promoting and funding improvement science are more often white and affluent. Indeed, the field of improvement-focused educational research has yet to attend to issues of race, class, and gender to its fullest potential. The next phase of improvement science research would be wise to understand how issues of race, class, and gender should be measured, implemented, and accounted for within improvement science processes, models, and practices. Recent research in STEM, and school improvement indicates that there is potential to explore issues of educational equity and diversity. To create sustainable changes that expand opportunities and experiences for students of color, the theory and practice of improvement-focused educational research must move beyond a narrow focus on reducing achievement gaps. This means that improvement-focused educational research will have to evolve in ways that incorporate culturally relevant pedagogy, address issues of re-segregation in schools and districts, and increase the democratic participation in education and educational improvement. There is potential for improvement-focused educational research to draw from traditions in critical policy analysis, the geography of opportunity, and the role of elites in education reform to highlight the potential for improvement efforts in education to be inclusive and collaborative among diverse stakeholders, and to interrogate issues of race, class, gender, and power that can create sustainable change. Efforts such as collective impact galvanize multiple stakeholders in an improvement science process. To this end, we explore what it means to engage historically marginalized and disempowered people as active collaborators in serious educational efforts, as well as the issues around race, gender, structural inequality, power, and democratic control in the context of educational innovation and improvement.