Sustainability of the school improvement prompted by educational technical assistance

Abstract

We applied a qualitative collective case study approach to study the sustainability of school improvement processes prompted by external educational technical assistance. We studied four schools that received a four-year external support and increased their students‟ academic results, comparing two cases in which those increases were sustained after three years of the end of the program with two cases in which the increases were not sustained. We identified a set of conditions, characteristics and processes, at the school, teachers, local authorities and consultants, that we associated with the observed differences in the sustainability of the school improvement processes. We interpreted those results as linked to two contrasting types of "school improvement": a non-substantive, parceled, superficial and unstable school improvement, and other collective, deep, and multidimensional, which we defined as genuine school improvement.