Effective Implementation Capacity to Impact Change Within State Education Systems to Support Students With Disabilities

By Kathleen Ryan Jackson, Caryn Ward, and Sophia Farmer

For decades, educational leaders and school staff have made significant investments in practices or programs that claim to be effective in supporting our children’s learning. Yet, despite leaders’ and teachers’ best-efforts to use a given program, students often do not benefit, especially our students with disabilities. Perhaps this scenario sounds familiar as you reflect on the investments your organization has made in programs that were abandoned, only to adopt and abandon another, and then another. Unfortunately, this cycle of adoption and abandonment of programs is not unusual in K-12 education. Some have taken pause and wondered, what is keeping us stuck in this cycle and why? Is it the programs we are using or are critical elements consistently missing in the selection, ongoing professional learning, monitoring of program effectiveness, and other critical system elements?

In response to this common dilemma, the Office of Special Education Programs funded the State Implementation and Scaling-up of Evidence-Based Practices (SISEP) Technical Assistance Center. The Center is charged with developing the capacity of state education agencies and their partners at the regional, district, school, and teacher level to use best practices from the field of implementation science to support the adoption, sustained use, and scaling of effective educational practices. Our center’s work with education agencies is guided by three critical components that can be summarized in a formula (see video below). We not only need to know what practices are worth implementing (effective practice), but we also need to use strong implementation strategies (effective implementation) to support use of the practice within an environment that values teamwork, engagement of the local community, and the use of data (enabling context). Using this formula, the center provides training, coaching, and consultation with their partnering education agencies to support them in:

· adopting useable practices that address their identified needs and is feasible within their context

· developing teams of leaders, teachers, and community members to be responsible for implementation planning and improvement of outcomes for students with disabilities

· ensuring the right supports of training and coaching are in place for teachers

· creating and using communication feedback loops among teams and the community stakeholders, and

· using data to drive planning and decision making for improvement purposes.

The implementation strategies or best practices used by the Center are referred to as the Active Implementation Frameworks (AIFs). The goal of the center’s work is for education agencies to be able to consistently use the AIFs’ implementation strategies so that effective education practices are used sustainably, result in improved outcomes for students, are scalable and withstand the turnover of educators that all experience.

Research from two partnering states agencies suggest use of the AIFs can result in improved outcomes for students with disabilities, black, and Native American students (Kloos et el., 2022; Ryan Jackson et al, 2021). The Center has also documented several key learnings to inform future use of implementation strategies and policies within our K-12 education system. For example, states who ensured a clearly defined practice at the classroom level was selected and who supported diverse teams having regular data and feedback on the practice’s use within classrooms were more likely to demonstrate better outcomes for their students with disabilities.

These states have institutionalized consistent and sustained use of policy to sustain the implementation strategies required to reap the benefits of their investments in programs that promise to improve their students’ outcomes. States that did not, demonstrated limited or no evidence of improved outcomes. State policy should be designed to enable effective practice at the school level. For this to happen, teachers and school staff with boots on the ground who know what is needed must be active partners in the selection, use, and on-going evaluation of an education agency’s investments in programs.

Article details

Effective Implementation Capacity to Impact Change Within State Education Systems to Support Students With Disabilities
Caryn Ward, Tanya Ihlo, Kathleen Ryan Jackson, Sophia Farmer
First Published: May 18, 2022
DOI: 10.1177/10442073221096392
Journal of Disability Policy Studies

About the Author

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Caryn Ward, PhD, is the Director of the National Implementation Research Network (NIRN) and Implementation Division Lead at Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute within The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Ward provides intensive, informed implementation supports to state and local education systems nationally through her work as the Director of the State Implementation and Scaling-up of Evidence-based Practices Center, leader within the Region 7 Comprehensive Center, and the Principal Investigator for the Effective Implementation Cohort funded by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. In addition, she co-leads the development of several implementation capacity measures and fidelity measures.

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Dr. Kathleen Ryan Jackson is an Implementation Specialist at NIRN and the founder of the Western Implementation Society for Practice and Research. She has 20+ years of experience in organizational and system change in the field of education, PreK through adult living, place based school-community partnerships, and juvenile justice. Kathleen met the NIRN team in 2009 as a partner on the SISEP project supporting districts in the state of Oregon. Kathleen is passionate regarding the co-creation of a collective commitment for continuous improvement, to remove the variability in the systems, so policy will support and sustain effective practice and improves equitable population outcomes.