Design-Based School Improvement

At the heart of the effort to enact and scale up successful school reforms is the need for more robust links between research and practice. One promising approach is design development, a methodology widely used in other fields and only recently adapted to education, which offers a disciplined process for identifying practical problems, assessing evidence of outcomes, accounting for variability in implementation and results, and establishing a foundation for broader understanding of the problem and proposed solutions.

This exciting new book provides a practical guide for education leaders who are seeking to address issues of equity in their schools and want to pursue this approach. The book provides a step-by-step description of the process, augmented by case studies of four education leaders:

• Christine, a middle school principal who is concerned with the volume of disciplinary referrals in her school;
• Michelle, an elementary school principal who wants to address achievement gaps;
• Eric, an assistant superintendent who wants to improve the quality of principals' instructional feedback to teachers; and
• Nora, a high school principal who is concerned about the use of racial and homophobic slurs in the hallways.

Design-Based School Improvement also includes a series of "excursions into theory" that discuss the research basis for design-based improvement.

The author--a leading thinker about policy implementation and school reform--shows a profound appreciation for the complexity of work in schools and the deep and sustained thinking entailed in undertaking productive change. By bringing theory to life and putting it in the hands of skilled practitioners, this book promises to become an invaluable resource for education leaders seeking to solve problems of equity and social justice in schools.
About the Author: Rick Mintrop, currently on the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, was an educator at the school level in various capacities in both the United States and Germany before he entered into an academic career. He received an MA in political science and German literature at the Freie Universität Berlin and a PhD in education from Stanford University.

He was the faculty co-director of the Principal Leadership Institute at UCLA and has been the director of the doctoral program in Leadership for Educational Equity (LEEP) at Berkeley since 2006. LEEP aims to prepare strong leaders for high-need urban schools, and design development studies are the signature pedagogy of this program.

As a researcher, he explores school change and improvement at the nexus of educational policies, teachers' work, and broader institutional changes. He examined these relationships, first, in East German schools that underwent fundamental changes after the collapse of authoritarian socialism. A number of articles and a book, Educational Change and Social Transformation (with Hans Weiler and Elisabeth Fuhrmann, 1996), resulted from this work. He coauthored (with Bruno Losito, CEDE, Italy) The Teaching of Civic Education (2001), which looks at the conditions of civic education teaching in twenty-eight countries. His interest in design-based thinking began in a project that was inspired by the work of the late Ann Brown and produced, among other publications, an article, "Educating Student and Novice Teachers in a Constructivist Manner: Can It All Be Done?" (Teachers College Record, 2002), which was the Top Featured Article in the 2002 volume.

He has written various publications about his research on school accountability; these include Schools on Probation: How Accountability Works (and Doesn't Work) (2004); "The Practical Relevance of Accountability Systems for School Improvement" (with Tina Trujillo, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis); "Predictable Failure of Federal Sanctions-Driven Accountability for School Improvement--And Why We May Retain It Anyway" (with Gail Sunderman, Educational Researcher, 2009); and "Bridging Accountability Obligations, Professional Values, and (Perceived) Student Needs with Integrity," (Journal of Educational Administration, 2012), which was named Commendable Paper for the 2012 volume.