Last month, our friends Tania Lyon and David Yeager presented at the Carnegie Foundation Summit on Lean in Education on their research and experience in spreading a culture of continuous improvement. Tania Lyon has been a KaiNexus customer for the last couple of years and has led her team to accomplish some astounding results in her position as Director of Organizational Process Improvement. David Yeager is an Assistant Professor of Psychology and a Faculty Research Associate at UT Austin and will be presenting his research at the KaiNexus User Conference later this year.

St. Clair Hospital is a non-profit independent 329-bed hospital in Pittsburgh, PA with about 2400 employees across multiple locations. In 2008, the Hospital began a journey to become a continuously improving organization when senior management adopted Lean (an adaptation of the Toyota Production System) as its chosen improvement philosophy and methodology.

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THE GOAL

Continuous Improvement in Education has been rapidly growing over the past couple years. Jake Sussman recently talked about continuous improvement in higher education at KaiNexus, but one group that deserves mention is the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

Founded by Andrew Carnegie in 1905 and chartered by Congress in 1906, the Carnegie Foundation is an independent policy and research center that focuses on every level of education. The Carnegie Foundation is committed to developing a network of ideas, individuals, and institutions to advance teaching and learning.

These stated missions and goals also mean that the Carnegie Foundation is at the forefront of Continuous Improvement in Education; they even hold an annual conference on Improvement in Education. This year’s conference is taking place this year in San Francisco, March 27th-29th.

The Carnegie Foundation published an incredibly insightful and informative white paper simply titled “Continuous Improvement in Education,” (2013) by Sandra Park, Stephanie Hironaka, Penny Carver, and Lee Nordstrum. I highly recommend putting it near the top of your reading list. Check out the entire thing here.

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The white paper delves into continuous improvement as a practice, three levels of education in which continuous improvement is currently being implemented, as well as numerous themes found in different types of educational organizations that have implemented continuous improvement.

America’s education system faces an enormously complex set of challenges. Educators find themselves faced with community and government pressure to improve student performance, but often without corresponding funding or influence over policies and expectations. In short, our school administrations and teachers are being asked to do more with less.

That’s why it isn’t surprising to find that education professionals are turning to a business management approach that has proven very effective in other sectors such as manufacturing and healthcare.