Achievement Advisors Group

Clifford Stockton III, Founder and Managing Principal, Achievement Advisors Group — Memphis, T.N M.Ed. candidate, Leadership and Organizational Performance, Vanderbilt Peabody College (2027). I come to the ISN from the practice side. My formal training in improvement research is recent; the work is not. I run Achievement Advisors Group (AAG), a K-12 education leadership consulting firm in Memphis, and I am a third-generation educator in a family whose work has been rooted in this city’s schools and civic life. Most of my career has been spent in the organizations that sit between schools and the systems around them. At the Memphis Education Fund, nd I served as Chief of Staff, overseeing a portfolio of education investments across the city. I worked at ALLMemphis on early literacy. At Beacon College Preparatory Charter School, I held a founding board role and later chaired the board; my work centered on improvement and change management rather than compliance oversight. Coalition building, youth research, and spread. The work I would most want other ISN members to know about is EmpowerED Birmingham, which I helped stand up during my time at TNTP. It combined youth participatory action research, coalition building, and change management in a single effort, and it produced two things that outlasted it: a new organization and a blueprint for community-led change built around digital storytelling and around treating the people closest to a problem as the people who should define it. That blueprint became a catalyst for related efforts in other cities, including Salt Lake City and Durham, North Carolina. It is the closest thing in my own history to an improvement network, and what I took from it is that the hard part of spread is rarely the model. It is whether the receiving community is permitted to redefine the problem in its own terms. Where I work. K-12 district and charter schools, charter management and school-support organizations, education funders and intermediaries, and family- and community-facing organizations. The work is concentrated in Memphis and the mid-South, with earlier work in Birmingham. I typically enter through executive leaders and boards, and I am trying to change that—to enter instead through the people closest to the work, whose knowledge those leaders systematically underuse. A current continuous improvement project. I administer the finances for the PTO at Chimneyrock Elementary, and that unglamorous role has become a useful imposter for improvement. The problem of practice is one many schools share: family sign-ups are plentiful, sustained participation is scarce. Rather than treating it as a parent-motivation problem, I have been working on it as a system problem — mapping what actually happens between a family’s sign-up and their first real task, and studying variation across committees, since some retain volunteers well and others do not. My near-term aim is a small set of practical measures a volunteer-run PTO can collect without adding burden, plus short tests of the sign-up-to-first-assignment handoff. What I offer, and what I am rebuilding. AAG engagements are organized around a Diagnose-Align-Execute-Sustain sequence, supported by a family and community engagement diagnostic and a playbook for leaders sustaining work after external support ends. Coursework this year in Designing and Implementing Program Improvement and in Research Design and Data Analysis has made the limits of that model plain. DAES shares improvement research’s insistence on understanding a system before, during, and after acting, but it is consultant-centered where improvement is practitioner-centered; it leans on leadership interviews and milestone reporting where practical measurement asks for brief, theory-linked data gathered during the work; and it recommends-then-rolls-out where the PDSA ramp makes scale something a team earns. Redesigning DAES so the deliverable is a team that keeps improving rather than a report is the central design problem of my practice right now. It is also what I would most like to think about with other ISN members, because I suspect every technical assistance provider in this network faces some version of it. Areas of expertise. Community-led change and youth participatory action research; coalition building across schools, families, and civic institutions; family and community engagement, including the design of engagement diagnostics; instructional coherence across a system’s curriculum, professional learning, and evaluation; organizational diagnosis, alignment, and change management; executive coaching; and philanthropic and intermediary strategy. I also bring a less common technical asset: more than five years building data infrastructure in Salesforce — donor and grantee workflows, dashboards, data hygiene, reporting — for organizations that previously had none. In most of the schools and small organizations I serve, measurement fails less often for want of a good measure than for want of any workable place to put the data and any routine that returns it to the people who generated it. Field building. Birmingham is the work I would point to, and it shaped the ambition I am carrying now: making improvement methods usable by small, under-resourced organizations — school-support nonprofits, PTOs, single-campus charters — that will never have a research partner, an evaluator, or a hub team. Translating method into something a three-person organization can actually run on a Tuesday is where I want to contribute. I would welcome connections with members working on youth participatory action research, on community-led change and its spread across sites, on improvement in the South, on measurement infrastructure for low-capacity organizations, or on how consultants and technical assistance providers can build improvement capability instead of substituting for it.