A systemic intervention research agenda for reducing inequality in school outcomes

ABSTRACT Persistent education inequality is a complex problem in the United States, and, despite efforts to promote equity, education performance and attainment remain highly related to characteristics of students’ families, schools, and neighborhoods. Systemic interventions are designed to address complex problems through the identification and purposeful incorporation of knowledge from the multiple systems implicated in a problem. Although systemic intervention approaches are not widely reported in education, they have yielded positive effects in health and human services and are worth investigating in the education context. In this paper we review policy and research evidence related to education inequality and provide an agenda for designing and evaluating systemic interventions to reduce education inequality.