Creating consistent opportunities for the diverse voices of those impacted by the system to inform decisions made, with intentional work done to include those historically and currently at the margins of the community

Orienting processes to ensure that decisions are informed by and prioritize the goals, circumstances, and aspirations of the young people in the ecosystem.

Seeking to forge new and deeper relationships among individuals in the ecosystem with different types of expertise and lived experiences in order to broaden collective understanding.

Assembling and disassembling component structures according to the needs of the decisions at hand.

Continually monitoring and revising decisions as needed so that decisions are not indelible but, rather, represent the next right step forward.

Illuminating who is directly involved in, or indirectly influencing, decision-making processes; what information is guiding decisions; what meaning is drawn from that information; and what actions are suggested as a result.

Ensuring individuals are not harmed by the decisions of others.

Providing opportunity for each individual to engage (not just be represented) and helping foster their sense of shared responsibility.

Providing visibility into how judgments or determinations are made and the information they are based on.

Defining each ecosystem member’s responsibilities to support the success of others and the ecosystem as a whole.

Meeting the expectations placed upon one group or actor in the ecosystem with corresponding investments in their capacity to carry out those expectations.

Holding space for honest accounting of shortcomings in ways that encourage growth and learning and that advance the collective.

Relying as much as possible on firsthand accounts of what’s happening, rather than inferences made by outsiders.

Enabling any participant in the ecosystem to be able to see what sources of funding are available, where that funding is currently going, and how those decisions are being made.

Pooling investments across different sources in an ecosystem to help streamline services. This includes investments made by not just education agencies but also by health agencies; children, youth, and families; foster care; local, state, and federal government agencies; city and county; and philanthropic sources.

Channeling resources where they are needed the most.

Creating opportunities for all members of an ecosystem to recommend changes to resource allocation through a distributed governance structure.

Collecting and sharing robust information—both quantitative and qualitative—that demonstrates how investments in one part of the system are impacting outcomes in that part and other parts of the ecosystem.

En’owkin is both a philosophy and practice of collective decision-making that stems from the Okanagan Nation. As described by Jeannette Armstrong in “En’owkin: What It Means to Be a Sustainable Community,” the Okanagan people used this concept whenever the community was confronted with a choice. The word itself “elicits the metaphorical image … of liquid being absorbed drop by single drop through the head (mind),” and it refers to “coming to understanding through a gentle integrative process.” Clear norms guide the process, including a first stage of judgment-free collection of information from those with a diversity of opinions followed by a second stage of challenging the group to “suggest directions mindful of each area of concern put forward.” Each speaker in the process self-identifies with one of four roles, each of which is critical to the process: “youth,” who identify innovative possibilities; “fathers,” who safeguard the group’s security, sustenance, and shelter; “mothers,” who are mindful of policy and the workability of systems; and “elders,” who preserve connection to ancestry and the land. And, as Armstrong emphasizes, the “point of the process is not to persuade the community that you are right, as in a debate,” but to allow each person to be “fully informed” by seeing the viewpoints and concerns of others, and to “choose willingly and intelligently the steps that will create a solution—because it is in your own best interest that all needs are addressed in the community.” In this way En’owkin serves to achieve solidarity.

The Quaker practice of group discernment is an example of consensus decision-making in which the community attempts to collaboratively discern God’s will for issues that affect the collective. In “Principle vs. Preference: The Speed of Quaker Decision-Making,” C. Wess Daniels describes the practice and how it affects both the speed and efficacy of decisions. Acknowledging that Quaker decision-making is “deeply counter-cultural for a culture of people who grow up learning to value the practice of voting,” he describes how the process changes the emphasis of the decision. While a process like voting is quick to get to a decision, it creates winners and losers who impede collective buy-in and cause friction when carrying out all the actions that follow a decision. On the other hand, Daniels reflects that Quaker group discernment may be slower in the process of bringing everyone into a decision before it is made, but for that very reason it is faster on implementation because the act of deciding was itself a “community building process.”

Holacracy is a model for flat management and governance currently practiced by businesses across the world ranging from Zappos to Mercedes-Benz. The Holacracy Constitution outlines holacratic roles, authorities, and “accountabilities” for every person in an organization. The constitution also describes the self-managed governance processes that are initiated whenever any member of the organization identifies a tension that impacts their or another person’s ability to carry out their roles. A governance meeting is called and attended by a strictly defined set of people organized around the specified role(s) or purpose(s) impacted by the decision. Governance meetings follow a strict protocol through which tensions are explored and, if it is determined they rise to the level of an “objection” (as defined by criteria explicit in the constitution), the objector offers a proposal to resolve the tension. Participants are then asked to respond to the proposal. The phrasing of the request for feedback is important: not “Do you like it?” or “Do you agree?” which can trigger ego-centric responses, but “Does this proposal cause harm?” In this way, the process inclines toward innovation and experimentation. If potential harm is identified, however, the proposal is revised and the process repeats until the group can reach full consensus.

City Neighbors Charter Schools, which operates two K–8 schools and one high school in Baltimore, Maryland, has a cooperative governance model built on a foundation of strong family-school relationships and parental involvement. As illustrated by its Governance Arch, each K–8 school has a board that includes twelve members: the principal, a student representative, a teacher representative, eight parent representatives who each chair a committee, and one parent representative who is a member at large. (The City Neighbors High School Board includes four students, four parents, and four staff members.) The boards strive to reach consensus in their deliberations; in fact, it is written in their bylaws to do so. The schools aim to increase representation and participation by using the board positions as an organizing tool—inviting every parent in the student body to become involved through multiple committee opportunities. Moreover, school leaders have intentionally developed a culture that prioritizes collective good in their decision-making, asking parent representatives to notice when they are speaking from their “parent hat” as opposed to their “board hat.” The effect is a set of community-embedded schools that are parent-driven, where parents “push with” school leadership instead of “push against” as occurs in school boards elsewhere.

Tasked by the Kentucky Board of Education to develop and advance a new vision for education in the state, education commissioner Jason Glass created a diverse statewide coalition, the Kentucky Coalition for Advancing Education (KCAE). The process took an unusually intentional approach to inclusion, with its membership composed in equal parts of participants nominated by state education leaders, participants who heard about the effort and applied to join, and participants who were cold-called and invited in. Inclusion extended to an intensive focus on belonging and valuing the expertise of all participants, including all backgrounds and professional positions. Together, the coalition explored the current state of education in Kentucky through empathy interviews with stakeholders across the state and developed user profiles that communicate the diversity of how stakeholders experience the system. They then worked together to create a shared vision for the future of education in the state, and launched a learning community of “local laboratories of learning” (L3) districts that will develop and test models that advance the shared vision. Since then, with support from a federal grant for innovating assessment systems, the state created a new governing body called the Kentucky United We Learn (KUWL) Council to help channel insights from the L3 innovations into statewide policy and systems change. Like the original KCAE, the KUWL Council is intentionally diverse and representative of the multitude of perspectives (including educators, families, community members, and students), demographics, and geographies across the state.

The North Dakota Department of Public Instruction’s 2020-2022 Student Cabinet demonstrates the importance of including youth perspective in governance decisions. The Student Cabinet engages youth with diverse perspectives, including those for whom the system is not currently working, and convenes them routinely over an 18-month period. In this way, the youth not only provide just-in-time input on decisions but also are involved in monitoring what happens after decisions are made.

Cynefin is a decision-making framework and typology currently employed in multiple sectors across the world to help organizations and agencies make decisions in context. A set of group facilitation methods help members of an organization develop a shared sense of context surrounding the decision and, correspondingly, the most promising actions to take moving forward.

Arnstein’s ladder is a conceptual framework developed by Sherry Arnstein in 1969 to describe the variety of ways in which citizens can be involved in planning and decision-making processes, arranged hierarchically to demonstrate increasing degrees of participation and control by citizens. An adaptation of Arnstein’s ladder by Juliet Young is particularly relevant to communithttp://Arnstein’s ladder is a conceptual framework developed by Sherry Arnstein in 1969 to describe the variety of ways in which citizens can be involved in planning and decision-making processes, arranged hierarchically to demonstrate increasing degrees of participation and control by citizens. An adaptation of Arnstein’s ladder by Juliet Young is particularly relevant to community-led organizing.

As described by Taiwan’s first digital minister, Audrey Tang, vTaiwan is an online platform supporting civic participation across Taiwan. Any citizen can participate in the platform to share their own ideas or provide feedback on others’ ideas. vTaiwan uses a process called quadratic voting to calculate and visualize areas of “rough consensus” where people mostly agree on a way forward. The system is used by the Taiwanese government to gather public input on all petitions, regulations, and budget items up for vote. Citizens can also propose their own ideas on the platform, and if they meet a threshold of agreement, the government is legally bound to explore and respond to the idea. The platform has been used to reach rough consensus on issues ranging from how to regulate Uber to the elimination of plastic straws at bubble tea shops. The latter came from a proposal by a citizen who was just 17 years old at the time.

In 1999, Julie Morath, the newly minted chief operating officer of Children’s Hospital and Clinics in Minneapolis, made patient safety her top priority but took a rather unusual approach. Whereas medical accidents and near-misses were typically handled by identifying who was to blame and shaming or punishing them, Morath built a patient safety initiative with “blameless reporting” at its core. As described in a Harvard Business School case study, blameless reporting allowed medical staff to report accidents and near-misses anonymously through a new patient safety report, encouraged them to provide their own perspective on what happened through “good catch” logs, and invited broad participation in solution-finding efforts like “focused event studies” and “safety action teams.” In doing so, culture shifted from a mentality of blaming individuals for failures to collectively understanding system complexity and eliminating where breakdowns occur in systems and processes. Additionally, Morath revised how the hospital reported medical mistakes to the families involved, favoring greater transparency than the tight-lipped policies of the past. While some participants felt the new system put the hospital at legal risk and made it harder to root out individuals who were falling short, others felt the resulting culture shift made them more invested in patient safety than ever before.

In a talk at the 2020 Assessment for Learning Conference, Robert Harvey, the superintendent of East Harlem Scholars Academies, imagined a fundamental rethinking of accountability in education aimed not toward standardization but toward “freedom from oppression and injustice, for the folx who move, live, and function within the system.” Drawing from his book Abolitionist Leadership in Schools, Harvey explores how “abolitionist accountability” is a communal pursuit that seeks to tell a different set of stories and reports nuance and meaning that exist but are often covered up by big data.

Trained psychometrician Susan Lyons imagined what accountability might look like if it were informed by advancements in empowerment evaluation, an emerging practice of program evaluation that is focused on continuous improvement and puts local stakeholders in the driver’s seat. As Lyons noted in her talk at the 2020 Assessment for Learning Conference, applying principles of empowerment evaluation to educational accountability would “involve engaging with communities in defining their goals, priorities, and values for schooling; partnering to provide resources and tools to formatively evaluate progress toward those goals; and ultimately benefiting all students through locally driven, sustainable school program improvements.”

In order for learner-centered ecosystems to monitor progress toward shared commitments, accountability system designers thoughtfully align what they measure with the outcomes they are after. Logic models can be used to aid these measurement goals. Several tools have been developed to help a variety of stakeholders design logic models, including a presentation on Logic Model Building developed by the Learning Accelerator, a Logic Model Workshop Toolkit created by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), and IES’s downloadable browser-based application called the Education Logic Model Application.

Monitoring commitments by collecting and analyzing data may sound like unbiased endeavors, but the decisions that underlie what data to collect, how to collect it, and how to package and report it are deeply vulnerable to personal biases. To help surface these biases, We All Count created the Data Equity Framework, which provides checklists and tools to help data practitioners “identify and understand each place in your work where you are embedding a worldview or prioritizing a lived experience.” As it explains, data projects will never be free from bias, but using the Data Equity Framework can “show our work” to be transparent about where a project makes choices that reflect a particular worldview, and how those choices support rather than weaken desired equity outcomes.

In 2018, after a lawsuit compelling the State of New Mexico to meet its constitutional obligation to provide all students adequate resources to become college and career ready, state policymakers put forward an effort to redesign assessment and accountability systems with ones that honor students’ linguistic and cultural assets. Uniquely, they did not follow a top-down approach to redesign but instead stepped aside to support a community-engaged approach to creating Graduate Profiles that are locally owned and speak to the unique values of each community.

In 2015, the New Hampshire Department of Education was awarded permission from the U.S. Department of Education to pilot a new accountability model that used performance-based assessments (some common across the state, and some entirely locally designed) in lieu of some state standardized assessments. Known as the Performance Assessment for Competency Education (PACE) initiative, this model sought to transform state assessment and accountability from its top-down, heavy-handed approach to one that prioritizes local capacity-building. To utilize PACE, educators collaborate on designing and scoring performance-based assessments that capture a broader range of the knowledge and skills that matter most.

Jordi Díaz-Gibson and colleagues noted the increasing number of collaborations between education entities and community organizations, both public and private, around pressing issues in education and child well-being. They termed these collaborations “Educational Collaborative Networks” and created a questionnaire to help assess ECN effectiveness. The questionnaire covers five variables of leadership strategies (co-responsibility, transversality, horizontality, collaboration, and projection) and six social capital variables (trust, community connections, commitment with education, participation and diversity, knowledge generation, and collaborative innovation).

As described by the Intercontinental Network for the Promotion of Social Solidarity Economy (RIPESS) in its Global Vision for a Social Solidarity Economy, a solidarity economy is an alternative to capitalism that “is rooted in the practices of participatory democracy and promotes a new vision of the economy, an economy that puts people at the center of the system and values the links rather than the goods.” It exists both as a visionary framework and a set of strategies practiced in contexts across the globe, including family farming associations and cooperatives in Latin America, “agro-pastoral and artisanal cooperatives, savings and credit cooperatives, [and] health insurance mutuals” in Africa, and “short-circuit” producer-consumer associations in Japan. In Massachusetts, a collective of community-based social justice organizations is advancing the solidarity economy concept through a set of initiatives using solidarity economy strategies like building a network of worker-owned cooperatives, organizing tenant buy-outs, generating economic alternatives through social economies, and creating an “ecology of coops” driven by youth and adults from historically disadvantaged communities.

(Sources: https://www.ripess.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/RIPESS_Vision-Global_EN.pdf; http://webalice.viabloga.com/actualites.shtml; https://tsne.org/downloads/SEI_SolidarityRising_Final.pdf)

Participatory budgeting is a practice in which people democratically decide how to spend public money. According to the Oakland, California-based Participatory Budgeting Project, the practice involves an annual cycle of civic engagement in a budgeting process, most commonly involving discretionary public funds set aside for this purpose. It originated in Brazil in 1989 in an effort to reduce child mortality and combat poverty and, since then, has spread across the world. Examples in the U.S. include the Boston Ujima Project, in which a capital fund is financed through direct equity investments from neighborhood residents and is democratically governed; and the Phoenix Union High School District, which allocates district-wide funds that are controlled by students through participatory budgeting.

(Sources: https://www.participatorybudgeting.org/what-is-pb/; https://www.ujimaboston.com/; https://www.participatorybudgeting.org/what-happens-when-students-lead-pb/)

Within the realm of school finance, concepts are already being advanced to make funding portable, meaning dollars follow students wherever they enroll, and divisible, meaning students can divide funds among more than one type of learning experience. These and other concepts—including how to make funding decisions that align with values such as equity and competency-based learning—are discussed in the Center for Innovation in Education paper “Funding Student Success: How to fund personalized, competency-based learning.”

(Source: https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/fbcfbd_3ab9ed8aef384fbf983f5f24949073d9.pdf)

Blending and braiding are two strategies for combining revenues from multiple sources to achieve program aims. In blended funding strategies, funding from multiple sources is pooled into one pot from which funds can be allocated as needed. In braided funding strategies, multiple funding sources are used to achieve broad, collective goals, but each funding source remains distinct and is separately accounted for. Toolkits for designing blended and braided approaches have been advanced in several areas of school finance including early childhood, higher education, and using federal title funds for COVID recovery or school turnaround.

(Sources: https://www.ccf.ny.gov/files/7515/7909/7916/BlendBraidGuide.pdf; https://www.nccommunitycolleges.edu/sites/default/files/basic-page-file-uploads/ccr/bff_0.pdf; https://www.wested.org/resources/blending-braiding-federal-title-funds/; https://csti.wested.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/CST-Thought-Leadership-Forum-Brief2-Braiding-Fed-Funds.pdf)