Actors across the five-level framework
The MMI brief's most-cited finding is structural: roughly 73% of the 2,000+ H3-aligned measures it surfaced cluster at the Individual level, leaving Relationships, Unit, Networks, and Ecosystem comparatively underdeveloped. Mapping each actor surveyed so far against the five-level framework makes the imbalance concrete — and surfaces where the field's existing infrastructure can credibly carry weight versus where the gaps are wide enough that the brief's R&D agenda is essentially calling for new institutions.
The short version of the map: at the Individual level, multiple actors with mature work overlap; at Relationships, Search Institute carries the level largely alone; at Unit and Networks, the work is concentrated in two capacity-building organizations rather than in shipped frameworks; at Ecosystem, only the system conditions tier of the E-W Framework is doing real work, and even that is a partial answer.
Individual
The crowded level. Multiple actors with concrete frameworks, tools, or funding pipelines.
- EdInstruments — three of its five outcome domains (Student Learning, Student Well-Being, Pathways to and Through Postsecondary) are Individual-facing. The catalog skews Individual-heavy by design.
- Mathematica E-W Framework — the student outcomes and milestones tier (preK milestones, K–12 academic outcomes, postsecondary completion, employment outcomes) is Individual-level measurement on a temporal axis.
- Urban Institute / SUMI — funds development and validation of measures specifically for the skills that drive economic mobility. Individual-level construct.
- Learning Engineering Tools Competition — has put over $10M into EdTech leveraging data and learning science, mostly to support Individual-level instrumentation.
- ETS and the Carnegie Foundation — psychometric rigor for next-generation competency-based measures. Methods work, applied mostly at the Individual level.
- The Study Group — methods for assessment-in-service-of-learning. Cross-level in principle, but the existing infrastructure they help build out is mostly Individual-facing.
The pattern at this level isn't lack of work; it's redundancy and the implementation gap. The MMI brief notes Individual-level indicators are "the most developed level" but include "redundant indicators with different definitions" — the field has multiple competing measures of agency, critical thinking, collaboration, adaptability. The work at this level isn't create more; it's consolidate, translate, and get into practice.
Relationships
The level the MMI brief most emphasizes as underdeveloped — and the level with the clearest single named actor.
- Search Institute — the Developmental Relationships Framework is the named, structured, behaviorally specific framework at this level. Five elements, twenty actions, decades of supporting research. The MMI brief credits Search Institute with validated survey instruments tied to the framework; the framework's own page does not surface those instruments, which is the live gap on this otherwise mature example.
Adjacent partial coverage:
- EdInstruments — the "Families and Communities" domain catalogs instruments at this level, though the catalog itself doesn't promote them or curate which to use.
- Mathematica E-W Framework — some of the system conditions indicators touch on relational quality (e.g., teacher-student relationships, family engagement), but these are framed institutionally rather than as relationship measurement per se.
The pattern at this level: one named exemplar, plus catalog-level coverage, plus the open question of whether the exemplar's instruments are actually available and rigorous as claimed. A single point of failure for the level. If Search Institute's validated instruments turn out to be thinner than the MMI brief implies, the level is effectively in the position the brief diagnoses: "few, difficult to implement, and not widely accepted."
Unit (e.g., school, hub, program)
The level where the work is concentrated in capacity-building organizations rather than in shipped frameworks.
- Transcend — helps schools and networks design and implement learner-centered models. Work mostly upstream of measurement (school design itself).
- Learner-Centered Collaborative — same tier; explicit practitioner translation focus.
- EdInstruments — the "Teacher and Leader Development" domain catalogs Unit-level instruments.
- Mathematica E-W Framework — the system conditions tier names Unit-level conditions (school climate, instructional quality, opportunity-to-learn indicators) as institutional environments.
The pattern at this level: capacity-building substitutes for shipped Unit-level measurement frameworks. Transcend and the Learner-Centered Collaborative help practitioners adopt new measurement practices, but they don't publish Unit-level frameworks that other actors can pick up and use. The work is necessary but it doesn't compound the way a published framework does. This is the brief's implementation gap in its most acute form — without shipped frameworks for capacity-building orgs to translate, they're translating the Individual-level infrastructure into Unit-level practice, which is structurally awkward.
Networks
The most underpopulated level.
- Transcend and Learner-Centered Collaborative — both work across networks of schools, but their unit of intervention is the school, not the network. Network-level measurement is implicit in their evaluation work, not foregrounded.
- Mathematica E-W Framework — some system conditions indicators address network-scale phenomena (system coherence, data interoperability), but the framework's primary scaffolding is the early-education-through-career continuum, not the network-of-units lens.
The pattern at this level: nobody's home. No surveyed actor's central contribution is Network-level measurement. The MMI brief's own framework names the level but its appendix lists fewer example measures here than at any other level. R&D area #2 (Advance System-Level Research) is essentially the brief's response to this gap.
Ecosystem
Partial coverage by one framework's secondary tier.
- Mathematica E-W Framework — the system conditions tier addresses Ecosystem-level questions (policy environment, funding mechanisms, system coherence, data infrastructure). This is the most substantive existing work at the level.
- LearnerStudio's broader theory work on H3 ecosystems (the Learning to Flourish canon, not yet ingested into this KB) likely lands here.
- Mentioned but not surveyed: the Aurora Institute's State of CBE Policy Map (queued candidate) maps state-level competency-based-education policy and would be the most direct Ecosystem-level contribution in the broader field.
The pattern at this level: the framework that addresses it does so as a secondary tier, not as a central contribution. Mathematica's E-W Framework wasn't built to measure ecosystem health; the system conditions tier emerged as the framework's way of acknowledging that learner outcomes aren't independent of the systems producing them. The framework is genuinely useful here but isn't designed for the work — which is essentially what the MMI brief diagnoses.
The shape of the imbalance
Putting it together:
| Level | Actors with mature work | Pattern |
|---|---|---|
| Individual | 6+ (EdInstruments, E-W, SUMI, LETC, ETS, Study Group) | Redundancy + implementation gap |
| Relationships | 1 (Search Institute) | Single exemplar; instrument verification open |
| Unit | 0 frameworks; 2 capacity-builders (Transcend, LCC) | Capacity-building substitutes for frameworks |
| Networks | 0 | Nobody's home |
| Ecosystem | 1 partial (E-W system conditions tier) | Secondary tier of a framework with another primary axis |
The MMI brief's "73% Individual" finding describes the measures surveyed in the scan. The matching pattern at the actor level — repeated and corroborated across the actors ingested here so far — is that infrastructure to support measurement at the upper four levels is sparse, concentrated in single exemplars, or substituted by capacity-building work that doesn't compound.
Implications for the MMI brief's R&D agenda
The brief's R&D area #2 (Advance System-Level Research) is the part of the agenda the mapping above most validates. Specifically:
- "Create practical tools to measure relational health" — the Relationships level is single-exemplar dependent and the exemplar's instruments are unverified. This sub-area has the most acute case.
- "Create system-level indicators and tools to measure the evolution and health of H3 education ecosystems" — Ecosystem coverage is real but partial; the framework that does the work wasn't built for it.
R&D area #4's (Align Funders and Innovators) Implementation Labs are the corresponding response at the Unit level — capacity-building infrastructure currently exists (Transcend, LC-Collaborative) but doesn't substitute for shipped frameworks. The Implementation Lab proposal is essentially asking for dedicated infrastructure that both ships frameworks and translates them — addressing the gap this mapping makes visible.
Open questions
- Whether Search Institute's validated relationship-measurement instruments actually exist and are accessible. The brief credits them; the framework page doesn't surface them. The whole Relationships-level story rests on this verification.
- Whether the system conditions tier of the E-W Framework can carry Ecosystem-level work that the framework wasn't centrally designed for. Examining the specific system-conditions indicators is the next test.
- Whether Network-level measurement is genuinely absent or whether actors not yet surveyed (Aurora Institute, KnowledgeWorks, Full Scale, NewSchools Venture Fund, the Imagine Network) carry it. The Aurora Institute State of CBE Policy Map and KnowledgeWorks' policy work are the most likely candidates to investigate next.
- Whether the Mathematica E-W Framework was adopted at scale by state agencies, districts, or funders, and what that adoption looks like in practice. Uptake evidence would substantiate or contest the implementation gap framing for this specific framework.