The Networked Improvement Community (NIC) for Students with Disabilities is a pilot community of 10 charter management organizations serving diverse student populations across the country. Collectively, these CMOs serve more than 75,000 students.

With support from technical assistance providers Marshall Street Initiatives, SWIFT Education Center, and research organizations NIRN, RTI International, and SRI International, our goal is to systematically improve the way we serve students with disabilities and bring these solutions back to school systems everywhere.

This work is made possible by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The findings and conclusions contained within are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect positions or policies of the foundation.

Public schools across America struggle to meet the diverse needs of students, particularly those farthest from opportunity such as Black and Latinx students with disabilities experiencing poverty. When marginalization intersects with disability, school systems have additional opportunities to promote social belonging, increase access to college and career curriculum, and provide support for these students to obtain a high school diploma and pursue their dreams.

Nationwide, students with disabilities represent 13.7% of all enrolled students — totaling almost 7 million students in the 2017-18 school year. As a network, we have the opportunity to change the story for our students, as we define common goals, share best practices, and scale solutions to meet their needs. 

Our network is grounded in a central Aim (our ‘north star’) that guides our collective efforts:

By June 15, 2023 each CMO in the network has achieved dramatic gains in the learning experiences, environment, and outcomes for Black and Latinx students with disabilities experiencing poverty.

This network Driver Diagram’s primary drivers are a set of research-based conditions that need to be addressed to make sustained and significant progress towards our Aim. These Drivers allow us to make connections across the 10 CMOs’ contextualized Aims and Driver Diagrams that represent their various areas of focus as well as provide insight on the conditions that can be addressed to reach those Aims. 

Beginning in Fall 2020, the Networked Improvement Community will focus on improving systems, structures, and practices that impact students with disabilities in schools while providing educator professional development and support. This work will begin at two focal sites of each member school network through Spring 2023 — representing two school-year cycles.   

Each semester:

• • Improvement Teams implement new strategies on the ground, continuously improving through rapid testing cycles. This includes completion of all CMO work products, such as the data deck, project charter, change package, presentations of progress, and more.

  • Technical Assistance (TA) Providers form a triad of support for member CMOs, providing coaching calls, principal learning sessions, site visits, and on-demand support.

In particular:

• • Marshall Street Initiatives provides improvement support such as professional development, bi-weekly coaching calls, solutions development (the "Change Package"), analytics support for rapid-cycle testing, and Network-wide communications.

  • SWIFT Education Center provides leadership capacity building, including strategies to enhance the development of equity leaders, professional learning sessions, job-embedded coaching sessions, and assessments to monitor and calibrate organizational change (e.g., the SWIFT Fidelity of Implementation Tool and Fidelity Integrity Assessment).

  • The R-Team of SRI, RTI, and NIRN provides data support, including identification and refinement of data sources to inform our work, data visualizations, and formative feedback on implementation and outcomes.

Each semester concludes with an Improvement Review, an opportunity to reflect on progress and strategize for the upcoming semester. In addition, convenings are held twice-yearly as an opportunity to share key learnings and celebrate progress across the network. The foundations for this continuous improvement effort are being built in the 2020-21 school year.