Planning for scale-up, scale-out, sustainability, continuous improvement, and accountability

Abstract

Although the idea of replication-a direct, wholesale transfer of community schools, community learning centers, multi-service schools, and extended-service schools, was the dominant idea in the twentieth century, today there is just cause for considerable caution and even explicit avoidance of what amounts to “one size fits all thinking,” together with generalizable and transportable models and strategies. Instead the idea of going to scale, abbreviated as scale-up, is the preferred alternative because of growing recognition that every new design must be tailor-made for the characteristics of the local population, the school’s organizational ecology, and place-based, social geography. Endemic tensions always are involved when leaders strive to scale-up this new school design, and the tensions and potential conflicts mount when this new design is slated for “scale-out”-which refers to moving the new design from one nation to another. This chapter presents salient issues, frames related challenges, and offers recommended strategies for scale-up, scale-out, and later, for sustainability planning. Significantly, it draws on the exemplars presented in section two and presents a framework for scaling up and scaling out with improvement science. This new framework emphasizes voluntary accountability mechanisms, including the imperative to use relevant research and recommended best practices as guides. The chapter concludes with the “ten R’s” of systems change, perhaps opening avenues to user-friendly planning checklists for the complex developmental journeys that confront all leader-designers.