IT’S RARE for School Administrator to devote the majority of its editorial theme coverage to a single school district. (The last one I can remember focused on the extraordinary array of specialty school choices offered in Canada’s Edmonton Public Schools, which consumed much of our May 2001 issue.)

This month, we have chosen to paint a picture of continuous improvement on the school system level by extensively describing the work of the Menomonee Falls district in southeastern Wisconsin. It’s probably not a place most readers have heard about, though it has been at the forefront among school districts that have applied improvement science to the work of running schools.

Patricia Greco invested in a process that sets goals, identifies ways to improve and evaluates the changes to Menomonee Falls when she became its superintendent in 2011. Recently retired from the district, she provided considerable help to me at the conceptual and organizational stages of this issue, for which I am grateful.

While several articles are authored by her, her former colleagues and her successor, others were contributed by a superintendent in Texas, a professor of high-velocity organizational leadership and the heads of two national consultancies that work with school districts on continuous improvement.

We hope you find meaning in these pages.