How State Leaders Can Support Local Innovation and Improvement

While priorities for educational reform have shifted many times over the decades, one constant idea underpins all reform from the mid-20th century on: A rapidly changing world requires educators to gain new concepts, understandings, and practices to meet the needs of students, families, and the country. As states with limited capacity wrestle with renewed calls to take a more active role in school improvement, state leaders may find a productive path forward in educational improvement networks (EINs).

These networks empower local educators, school and district leaders, community partners, technical assistance providers, and applied researchers to learn, solve problems, and advance changes in practice based on their own inquiry and experimentation with new practices.[1] The networks engage local educators in investigation of the root causes of problems—gaps in academic achievement or chronic absenteeism, for instance—and provide the structure for testing new practices that address those root causes.

To enable collaborative inquiry and experimentation, a central hub organization coordinates the network’s ongoing operations. Hub organizations may operate within the formal governance structure—in district teams or units, county offices of education, or charter management organizations—or beyond, in teams within universities or technical assistance providers.

The hubs collaborate with school-based teams to make progress toward an improvement goal. Thus, a network addressing early literacy might form teams in elementary schools comprising early grade teachers, a literacy coach, an English learner specialist, and an interventionist that provides direct support to students. Network hubs help teams use structured inquiry processes—plan-do-study-act cycles being one—to explore root causes of shared problems, identify potential solutions, and test those solutions in practice. For example, an early literacy network could examine factors contributing to their students’ literacy development and identify and test changes that address student learning needs.

Another critical job of the hubs is to create opportunities for teams to share what they are learning. By bringing together educators grappling with the same challenge, networks increase educator access to expertise and ideas relevant to specific problems of practice they could not otherwise readily access. This sharing includes learning from teachers in other schools as well as from applied researchers and professional development providers. Hubs also perform knowledge management tasks: They document what school-based teams are learning and encourage other teams to test promising changes and adapt them to their local contexts (box 1).

Learning from a Network of Networks

To the extent that the idea of EINs resonates, state leaders will naturally ask what they might do to support their development. A recent initiative of the Gates Foundation provides some insights.

The Networks for School Improvement (NSI) initiative was a $500 million competitive grant program that provided 38 networks with five to six years of funding to support the academic and career success of middle school and high school students, particularly those furthest from opportunity, such as students experiencing poverty. It is the largest effort to date to incubate a state-sized network of EINs. We were part of this initiative, leading the Improvement Network Health and Development (INHD) study. Its goals were to provide feedback to network leaders, consolidate insights across networks, and learn from the variation in the networks we observed.[2]

While no state is likely to match the level of resources this initiative enjoyed, its broad outlines provide a useful framework for state leaders who are considering innovative initiatives to support EINs aimed at addressing school improvement. Five lessons on network design stand out.

Establish a bounded “problem space.” The NSI Initiative prioritized three pervasive issues across local communities, with individual networks then choosing to focus on local manifestations of one of these problems: 1) addressing low graduation rates by ensuring that students stayed in school and on track to graduate, 2) addressing low academic performance by increasing the quality and ambitiousness of students’ instructional opportunities and experiences, and 3) addressing low levels of postsecondary enrollment by supporting applications to vocational and higher education institutions that matched students’ college and career aspirations. A bounded problem space created opportunities for collaborative learning and targeted assistance for subsets of networks working on common problems.

Begin with a coalition of the willing and able. The NSI Initiative’s competitive grant process attracted aspiring networks in which members were already disposed to (and experienced in) producing and managing local knowledge. In the parlance of innovation research, these networks fit the profile of innovators and early adopters. They brought will and skill and were comfortable and capable of navigating high levels of uncertainty in policy, funding, and research environments and at the local level. These pioneering partners were ready to create a model for others.

Go tight and loose on formal improvement methods. The NSI Initiative was “tight” on the requirement that participating networks use formal methods of continuous improvement and “loose” on the choice of specific methods. Formal methods of continuous improvement have different histories and animating values: for example, improvement science, with roots in the health care sector; design-based implementation research, with roots in the learning sciences; and participatory action research, with roots in workplace democratization. Flexibility played to the methodological strengths, values, and cultures of hub organizations and of network schools, as long as methods provide a rigorous approach to collaborative inquiry and experimentation.

Curate a supportive ecosystem. The NSI Initiative funded an ecosystem of organizations that provided technical assistance to networks and supported the professional development of hub leaders. It included a community of practice in which network leaders regularly convened to share insights and address common challenges; organizations and consultants with experience providing technical assistance in key areas such as leadership development, equity-centered improvement, and community engagement; and teams of evaluators to assess the organization, work, and outcomes. This ecosystem brought order and coherence to the environments in which networks operated and it privileged organizations and agencies that could support networks’ development and operations.

Provide essential resources. The NSI Initiative provided three categories of instrumental resources: The first was funding. Producing and managing knowledge requires work that is above and beyond what districts and schools typically do, so funding is essential. The second was legitimacy. The standing of the Gates Foundation was instrumental in securing support and participation for EINs in their local communities. The third was time, as the initiative provided a stable policy context from 2018 through 2026 amidst the pandemic, political turbulence, and other threats to agenda stability.

Study Findings

Just as the NSI Initiative provided insights to guide states in supporting EINs, the INHD study that we led provides research insights useful for states as they begin to experiment with—and to learn from—the networks’ introduction. Five insights stand out.

Well-developed networks make an impact. The NSI Initiative yielded a body of evidence that demonstrates significant improvements for math achievement, grades, and completion of financial aid documents. Results were based on a rigorous summative evaluation that included a randomized controlled trial and other quasi-experimental methods.[3] Our study found that EINs that had positive student impacts were more likely to have key features of well-developed networks: strong hub capabilities and robust continuous improvement practices and norms in particular. Taken together, this evidence indicates that, under supportive conditions, EINs can address problems of practice that move student outcomes.

Hubs drive high-functioning networks. Networks that realized improvements benefitted from hub leaders who launched and stewarded their development. Hub leaders need to recruit and onboard network members; build the capacity of participating educators to use systematic improvement methods; ensure participants’ access to high-quality, research-based evidence and expertise relevant to the target problem; and operate knowledge management systems to enable ongoing learning. To do all of these things, hub leaders needed to develop new skills. Our study theorizes that this sort of leadership drives the quality of networked improvement activities that educators ultimately carry out, which in turn produces better outcomes for students.

Networks take time to develop. Given that EINs are novel forms of organizing school improvement, it is no surprise that building them takes time. Most NSI hubs were building networks from the ground up. Hub leaders reported that even in their sixth year of operation they were still heavily engaged in organizational development. Our study suggested that in aggregate, networks participating in the NSI Initiative expanded capacity over time. Even so, variability emerged, with a few networks ultimately making limited progress.

Productive networks stimulate educators’ agency and collective commitment. While the discussion so far has focused on how well-developed networks can improve student outcomes, our study also documented how high-functioning networks cultivated educator agency and commitment to continuous improvement. Educators in well-developed networks saw the benefits of this work.

Networks benefit from district and principal support. Our study suggests that district and school leaders’ support was also key for the networks. Because many networks operate outside formal governance structures, district and school leaders provide the space for educators to spend time meeting with colleagues, identifying improvement priorities, and engaging in iterative testing of new practices. By extension, if they are to realize the benefits of networked improvement in their states, state and professional leaders will also need to be able to make the case for why educators at all levels should invest in networked improvement.

Implications for State Leaders

Up to now, the idea of—and early experimentation with—EINs has been supported largely by philanthropy. With increasing proof that these networks can increase local capabilities, educator agency, and student outcomes, the question shifts to the potential public role in continued development of these networks.

The NSI Initiative provides design and research insights for states interested in engaging local educational communities in producing and managing knowledge for educational improvement. By cultivating and supporting high-functioning networks, states can increase local capabilities not only to use new resources and technologies but also to gain understanding, practices, and tools responsive to their own aspirations, needs, and problems.

State efforts will require leadership and coordination among state boards of education, state legislatures, state education agencies, governors, and membership organizations, each with different constituencies, sources of power and influence, and dispositions toward collaboration. Among their tasks will be to forge a supporting, state-level ecosystem that includes university partners, county-level agencies, and technical assistance providers with knowledge and expertise in network-based inquiry and experimentation.

State boards have an especially important role in leveraging the bully pulpit to advocate for a local role in evidence-based improvement, using their convening power to introduce EINs to diverse constituents and building political support. Given the charged politics of the moment, such efforts to foster collaboration and coordination among diverse policy actors may seem unlikely. But these constituents may find common ground around EINs, appealing to

• those who champion a reduced federal role and a return to local control over education;
• those who champion local empowerment and inclusive improvement approaches in responding to community priorities for students’ development; and
• those who champion a pragmatic orientation to coordinating knowledge production—both in educational environments and in local communities—to address “wicked problems” that have stymied reformers for decades.

The matter of how to fund EINs looms large. A state role in fostering their development will likely require associating the networks with other high-priority policy initiatives that state and federal funding streams already support. Indeed, EINs are a new way to organize local responses to such policy priorities as early-grades literacy learning, chronic absenteeism, and high school dropouts. The Kentucky Department of Education, for example, was an early innovator in collaborating with districts and schools to use EINs to improve elementary and middle school mathematics proficiency among students with disabilities.[4]

Our research and the experience with EINs show that they can improve student outcomes. And with continued challenges of educator recruitment, absenteeism, and retention postpandemic, initiatives that promote educators’ agency and efficacy are worthy of investment.

Certainly, EINs are neither a panacea nor a quick fix. Rather, they are an emerging, promising, nonpartisan strategy that can, with the proper support, enlist local communities in producing and using the knowledge they need to advance their students’ success and well-being.

Notes

[1] Anthony S. Bryk et al., Learning to Improve: How America’s Schools Can Get Better at Getting Better (Harvard Education Press, 2015); Jennifer Lin Russell, Donald J. Peurach, and Anthony S. Bryk, “Introduction to Themed Issue: Educational Improvement Networks: Exploring the Development of Scientific-Professional Learning Communities,” Peabody Journal of Education 100, no. 1 (2025): 1–6, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0161956X.2025.2444824.

[2] The study was run out of the University of Pittsburgh, in collaboration with partners at Vanderbilt University, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, the University of Michigan, and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

[3] Rebecca Herman et al., “Evaluation of Networks of School Improvement: Impacts, Implementation, and Lessons for Network-Based Continuous Improvement,” research brief (2026); Susan Bush-Mecenas et al., “Evaluation of the Networks for School Improvement Initiative—How Network Hubs Develop and Support Continuous Improvement Networks: Final Report,” RR-A4409-1 (RAND Corporation, 2026).

[4] Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, “National Implementation Research Network and Kentucky Department of Education,” spotlight, February 9, 2026.