The Value of a Systems Review for Catalyzing Districts’ Systemic Improvement

June 11, 2025

By Erica Boas, Ruthie Caparas, and Kelsey Krausen

Sometimes school district leaders spend years trying to improve their systems’ educational quality—yet those efforts don’t lead to improvement in student outcomes. When this happens, what else can they do? In some cases, before piloting yet another new intervention, districts can benefit from a review of their internal systems to determine the path forward. A comprehensive, evidence-based external review of district systems, which WestEd calls a Comprehensive Educational Systems Review (CESR), identifies not just surface-level issues but also deeper, systemic factors that contribute to student outcomes. This kind of deep look at the full picture of a district helps leaders make targeted, lasting improvements.  

As part of California’s state system of support, county offices of education (COEs) must provide eligible districts with assistance for at least 2 years. For districts with widespread and persistent underperformance, this support intensifies.¹ Alameda County Office of Education’s (ACOE) approach to intensive support starts with a systemic review.  

In 2023, two districts in Alameda County met the criteria for intensive support under California’s accountability system. To provide this support, a team of WestEd experts led by Kelsey Krausen and Erica Boas collaborated with ACOE to examine the districts’ data, understand the root causes hindering student success, and identify high-impact improvement strategies. The investigation focused on opportunities for improving outcomes for student groups most in need of additional support. The power of this approach to improvement is not only the value of an objective third party review but also, more importantly, the trusting relationship and collaborative approach that is developed through the review process itself.  

Six Components of Effective Educational Systems

The WestEd team helped each district’s leadership gain a fuller, data-informed understanding of their strengths, areas for improvement, and opportunities. Specifically, the systemic review examined each district through the lens of six components of effective educational systems, adapted from California’s Local Educational Agency (LEA) Self-Assessment. ACOE, like many COEs across California, had already been working with district leaders to use the LEA Self-Assessment as a tool to guide local improvement efforts, so these components offered a familiar framework. 

Extensive Mixed-Methods Data Collection and Analyses

To identify the areas for improvement, WestEd conducted a rigorous data collection process, which included conducting interviews and focus groups with more than 250 central office administrators, principals, teachers, classified staff, students, and family members across the two districts. WestEd held focus groups with families from a variety of backgrounds, including focus groups specifically with Spanish speakers because Latinx students represent between 58 and 66 percent of the students in each district.  

In addition to focus group and interview data, the WestEd team collected and analyzed

• multiple years of quantitative data, including student outcome, demographic, staffing, and student survey data;
• district documents (e.g., strategic and annual plans, website materials) and local media coverage; and
• observational data collected during dozens of classroom visits across eight elementary, middle, and high schools in each district.

Leveraging these many types of data enabled the WestEd team to gain a fuller picture of each district’s system, strengthen the validity of the CESR’s findings, and pinpoint systemic factors that were driving outcome disparities and hindering student success. From these findings, the WestEd team developed a prioritized list of actionable, high-impact strategies for addressing these systemic issues. Next, the districts selected a small number of recommendations to focus on and have begun to organize internally to begin implementation.  

Authentic, Ongoing Collaboration With District Communities

The SIR process also included ongoing opportunities for leaders and school community members to provide input on the evolving findings and recommendations. This included holding recurring meetings and a series of public input sessions before developing the final SIR reports and recommendations. This deeply collaborative process helped ensure that the proposed strategies resonated with the district communities and addressed their top concerns. 

Throughout the SIR data collection, members of each district community expressed a sense of hope that this process would launch their district on a path toward meaningful, systemic improvement. As one teacher shared, “If I didn’t care so much about this district, I wouldn’t even bother talking to you or mentioning the things that I think could be improved, because I would’ve been resigned to things never getting better.” But, equipped with the new insights from the SIR, both district communities are ready to start a new chapter in their improvement journeys. Since releasing the reports, both districts have been deeply engaged in discussions on how to prioritize and sequence implementation of the reports’ recommendations.  

For more information about WestEd’s Comprehensive Educational Systems Review support and about how to partner with WestEd, please contact Kelsey Krausen, Director of WestEd’s Strategic Resource Allocation and Systems Planning team. 

¹ For more information, see https://www.cde.ca.gov/ta/ac/cm/sysofsupport.asp.