Exploring the journey of school improvement: Classifying and analyzing patterns of change in school improvement processes and learning outcomes

Few subjects are of greater concern to education policymakers than how to initiate and sustain school improvement. Yet there is no single map available for charting the way in the “journey of school improvement” for schools operating under different conditions (Fullan & Hargreaves, 1998; Jackson, 2000). Research that links patterns of change in school improvement processes and outcomes in different types of schools could inform our understanding of this issue. This paper reports results from a four-year study of school improvement among 200 elementary schools in the USA. The research first classified schools according to their patterns of growth in math achievement over four-years. Then we describe how the school improvement journeys differed among the three groups of schools.