Systems, by their very definition, are about connections — each part influences the others.

Think of the human body, our most miraculous example of a system: when one element is not working, the entire system shifts; often it suffers. Our education system, though, often does not feel at all connected to those in it. Even in our most successful systems, fragmentation flourishes.

Imagine a traditional school day: children spend a chunk of time in English class, a bell rings, and they move on to math, with little sense of continuity with what happened earlier in their day. A student might have forgotten his/her lunch because of a family challenge at home, but the only person who knows this is Grandma, who doesn’t get a chance to call the school. After school, that same student might head to a local recreation center for basketball practice, but the coach doesn’t know much more about the student than he/she is a great point guard. Communities’ resources are often accidentally misaligned — either with each other and/or underlying priorities — which makes it more challenging to help all kids get what they need. On the greater scale of education reform, fragmentation is even more apparent, and maybe even more costly. As the Carnegie Corporation of New York’s Integration Design Consortium (IDC) explains:

“Our habit in the field is to approach improvement and innovation as if it were relatively straightforward. We reach for solutions before we sufficiently investigate the problem, and we fail to test and refine those solutions before taking them to scale. The typical approach is to go straight from the data (e.g., college-going rates are low, or teacher evaluations seem inflated) to a remedy (e.g., more rigorous high school requirements, or new evaluation criteria).

A linear and laser-focused strategy works best when the consequences of change are predictable, contexts are similar, and there are a small number of easily measured and agreed upon outcomes. In education, none of that is true.

Too often, we get cosmetic changes, leading us to abandon strategies and try something new. To be sure, many of the improvement strategies pursued in recent years have moved the needle in some important ways. But it would be hard to argue that the levels of performance they produced were anywhere near what was hoped for or anywhere near what we need to ensure the future success of all students.

Unless we adopt more integrative ways of working, we may find ourselves continuing to experience the same frustrations, even as the field bets on a new set of strategies.”

The work of the IDC, which 2Rev and Virginia Beach are a part of, rests in the belief that communities who can create systems that intentionally take a more integrative approach will see a positive impact not only on students, but on all stakeholders within the community.

But how?

The journey, facilitated by 2Rev in partnership with Virginia Beach City Public Schools, sought to rise to that challenge. Explore the stages of the work here.