Two leaders of the Grandview C-4 School District in Grandview, Mo., showcased how they introduced improvement science as a technique to boost student literacy rates in their schools during a workshop at the AASA national conference on Thursday.
Kenny Rodrequez and Prissy Lemay, superintendent and assistant superintendent, respectively, of the Grandview district, attributed their district’s improvement science plan to multiple books by William Parrett, director for the Center of School Improvement and Policy Studies at Boise State University, and Kathleen Budge, associate professor at Boise State University. One of these books, Turning High-Poverty Schools into High-Performing Schools, aligns with research that the two educators performed on high-achieving yet low-income schools across the country.
“We can’t intervene our way to high performance,” Rodrequez said when discussing the historical link between race, poverty and educational outcomes. Seventy percent of students in the Grandview district are classified as non-white, and 65 to 70 percent qualify for free or reduced-price lunch.
When tracking the outcomes that improvement science had on literacy rates in the Grandview school district, Rodrequez and Lemay noticed a 39 percent increase in student literacy from 2021-22. Literacy rates, measuring grade-level reading skills, rose from 29 percent in 2017 to 61 percent in 2023.
Rodrequez and Lemay described improvement science as “bite-size pieces of improvement in order to accomplish everything that we can in a short period of time, while continuously looking ahead.” The two also emphasized that the science involved getting to the root of a problem and developing theories of change.
A districtwide Network Improvement Committee, or NIC, is vital to the success of an improvement science plan, Rodrequez and Lemay said.
Rodrequez emphasized the importance of districtwide unity. “We have a common goal,” he said, “unity of purpose.”
An NIC’s membership involves BLT, or Building Leadership Team, members from each school in the district. These members meet multiple times a year to measure each school’s literacy goals and plan around them.
The literary journey includes consistent focus and sustained leadership over time. “Building leadership is key,” Lemay explained.
(Sia Moon, a junior at Benjamin Franklin High School, is a reporter with Conference Daily Online.)
