Students with disabilities frequently face low expectations, barriers to rigorous courses, and insufficient support to graduate high school and pursue their dreams. For students at the intersection of race, class, and ability, the challenges are even greater. However, research shows that up to 90% of students with disabilities can achieve at grade level when they receive high-quality instruction and appropriate accommodations.
Over the past three years, the Networked Improvement Community for Students with Disabilities (NIC) employed a targeted universalism approach to show what is possible when we center Black and Latino students with disabilities experiencing poverty in our collective efforts to transform mindsets, practices, and systems across the field. Led by Marshall Street, and supported by leading researchers and content experts, the NIC’s 10 public charter organizations serving 75,000 students closed achievement gaps and dramatically improved learning outcomes for our most marginalized students.
Driven by collaboration among educators, researchers, and content experts, the NIC bridged the research-to-practice gap to develop and implement over 20 evidence-based practices for classroom- and system-level interventions. Marshall Street codified these strategies into the “Research-to-Impact Practices,” sharing them broadly to benefit students nationwide and fulfilling the NIC’s goal of developing and spreading emerging best practices to better serve students both within the NIC and beyond.
However, much work remains. Motivated by the NIC’s success and the resulting positive impact on student outcomes and experiences, Marshall Street is expanding this work to more schools, districts, and partners nationwide. Through the newly launched Marshall CoLab, we will continue to bring together communities of educators, researchers, and content experts to co-develop and implement evidence-based practices and make them available to all schools.
Making Best Practice Standard Practice
Influencing the Field
Expanding Impact for Lasting Change
The coalition of organizations spanning the education sector worked toward and achieved a common goal. They codified a set of proven, evidence-based practices and built meaningful tools to support their implementation. And they developed models and systems that make lasting change possible for students positioned furthest from opportunity. We can see the measurable impact of these new practices on student learning and in their spread and scale within NIC schools and districts.
NIC schools took these practices and determined how to make them work effectively and efficiently to accelerate impact for historically underserved students. Outcomes were impressive, with nine of the ten charter districts meeting or making significant progress toward their goals.
These gains both accelerated performance for students with disabilities and in many cases narrowed achievement gaps between students with disabilities and their non-disabled peers.
The publication of the Research-to-Impact Practices provided an opportunity to share evidence-based best practices and to advance the national conversation about improving education for students with disabilities. Transforming our education system to center students at the intersection of race, class, and ability requires educators to collaborate in new ways and to reject assumptions that limit possibilities for students with disabilities. In short, changing practices goes hand-in-hand with changing mindsets, habits, and beliefs.
That’s why Marshall CoLab worked to disseminate the Research-to-Impact Practices through the voices and networks of NIC participants. With nearly all participating schools continuing to implement their improvement strategies, we believed that our priority audiences — school leaders, the charter sector, and the improvement science community — would want to hear directly from those who had made progress and were continuing their work.
In 2024, Marshall CoLab presented at a range of education conferences attended by more than 9,000 people in partnership with NIC school participants and technical assistance providers. These presentations introduced the most promising Research-to Impact Practices (Repeated Reading, Co-planning, and Routine Data Cycles) and highlighted lessons from the NIC about the importance of centering the needs of students at the intersection of race, class, and ability. We discussed how to move from pilot to scale, how to build organizational support for sustainable change, and why targeted universalism provides a powerful framework for putting our collective commitment to equity into action. Through August 2024, presentations and interviews included the following:
In addition, Marshall CoLab presented a 60-minute EdWeb webinar in collaboration with the Educating All Learners Alliance. The live event attracted 343 participants and generated more than 70 newsletter sign-ups. An on-demand recording of the webinar was streamed more than 1,100 times in the first two weeks after posting.
We also developed a turnkey communications toolkit that allowed partners to share the Research-to-Impact Practices online and through social media. Partners including Blue Engine, the Gates Foundation, the Educating All Learners Alliance, Spark Educational Consulting, and NIC schools shared the practices through their channels. On the Marshall Street website, the practices have been viewed online more than 4,000 times, and collections and individual practice PDFs have been downloaded nearly 1,000 times.
Building on the success of the NIC, Marshall CoLab is launching the IGNITE Network, a coalition of up to 50 schools across five states committed to making dramatic gains in the experiences, environments, and outcomes of our most underserved students, specifically Black and Latino students with disabilities experiencing poverty. Funded by the Gates Foundation and Bloomberg Philanthropies, and working in partnership with Tennessee Score and the New Jersey Children’s Foundation, the IGNITE Network will implement and refine the Research-to-Impact Practices that led to positive outcomes for students with disabilities. The two-year network will launch in the 2024–25 school year.