Oregon’s Effective Behavioral and Instructional Support Systems (EBISS) initiative was implemented in 25 school districts. The initiative trained and coached district leaders and teachers in the use of the EBISS model through the lens of implementation science. The EBISS model integrates school-wide positive behavior intervention and supports (SWPBIS) and the school-wide reading model (SWRM) to improve schools for all students and to reduce the number of students at risk of learning difficulties. Proximal outcomes included gains in the number of building-level SWPBIS and SWRM implementation teams and the activities of those teams. Distal outcomes included statistically significant gains in oral reading fluency (ORF) in first and third grades and marginally significant decreases in the percentage of students in the intensive category for reading in second and fourth grades. These findings suggest that to optimize improvements in teacher and student outcomes, a rigorous system of professional development and coaching appears necessary.

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There is a continued call for the use of practices supported by evidence to improve the quality and effectiveness of services provided for students with disabilities. Despite best intentions, our education systems continue to struggle to adopt these practices and transfer them into consistent, sustained use by practitioners. Implementation science, the multi-disciplinary study of methods and strategies to promote use of research findings in practice, seeks to address this by providing frameworks to guide creation of conditions that facilitate use of evidence-based practices. The present article describes how an implementation science approach, Active Implementation Frameworks, was used by a national technical assistance center to cultivate systemic change and create improved outcomes for students with disabilities within several state, regional, and local education agencies. A summary of the lessons learned thus far and resulting considerations for practice and policy are presented. A key lesson was that state education agencies (SEAs) supporting districts and schools in implementation of a specific, educator-student-level practice realized improved outcomes for their students with disabilities. SEAs implementing frameworks or processes without an operationalized and measurable educator-student level practice had limited or no evidence of improved student outcomes.