Thinking and Acting Systemically: Improving School Districts Under Pressure

This volume argues that districts are important as a lever for change given the limited success of school-by-school efforts. Policies that focus on skill development, recognize and support performance, create opportunities for collaboration, build leader capacity, and create networks of knowledge sharing hold great potential for improving districts but it will require a paradigm shift in the way we view our public school system and those who work within it - away from blame and toward complext systems change.

• Language: English
• Publisher: American Educational Research Association
• Release date: May 19, 2016
• ISBN: 9780935302578

Book preview

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© 2016 American Educational Research Association

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Members: D. Jean Clandinin, Amanda L. Datnow, Jeffrey R.

Henig, Michal Kurlaender, Felice J. Levine, Na’ilah Suad Nasir,

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Daly, Alan J., editor. | Finnigan, Kara S., editor.

Title: Thinking and acting systemically: Improving school districts under pressure / edited by Alan J. Daly, Kara S. Finnigan.

Description: Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association, [2015]

Identifiers: LCCN 2015048075| ISBN 9780935302448 (pbk.) | ISBN 9780935302455 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780935302578 (epub) | ISBN 9780935302585 (kindle) | ISBN 9780935302462 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: School improvement programs—United States. | Educational change—United States. | Public schools—United States.

Classification: LCC LB2822.82 .T536 2015 | DDC 371.2/07--dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015048075

Acknowledgments

Edited volumes come about with the support of many groups and individuals. First, we wish to thank the American Educational Research Association. This volume is the result of a two-day meeting of a small group of scholars funded by a grant from the AERA Research Conferences Program (for more information about the meeting, titled Thinking Systemically: Improving Districts Under Pressure, visit www.districtreform.com). Without AERA’s support we could not have pulled together such an incredible group of thinkers. We are grateful to AERA Executive Director Felice Levine and the AERA Books Editorial Board for their ongoing counsel and support. Most important, we are grateful to the participants: Stephen Anderson, William Firestone, Betheny Gross, Laura Hamilton, Julie Reed Kochanek, Kerstin Carlson Le Floch, Karen Seashore Louis, Betty Malen, Julie Marsh, Michelle Palermo-Biggs, William Penuel, Joelle Rodway, Andrea Rorrer, Georgia Sang-Baffoe, Mark Smylie, Louise Stoll, Jonathan Supovitz, Tina Trujillo, Priscilla Wohlstetter, and Kenneth Wong. The collegiality and intellectual conversation of this professional learning community enriched the learning experience for all of us.

We are also deeply appreciative of the many scholars who carefully reviewed the chapters and provided useful feedback to the authors and to us as editors. Their graciousness, insight, and perspective made the book even stronger. And we thank our families for their ongoing support when our schedules were challenging and our on-the-ground work and writing took us away from home. A big thank you to the William T. Grant and Spencer Foundations, especially to Vivian Tseng and Andrea Conklin Bueschel, who became critical friends and pushed our thinking in ways that benefited not only this volume but our work in general. We are grateful for their support and friendship. We would also like to thank the doctoral students who provided critical support at various stages in this work—many of whom have moved on to careers of their own in education. In addition, we are grateful to Tricia Stewart, Jing Che, and Nadine Hylton for their various contributions to our research, which helped form the basis for the conference and book. Our special thanks to Georgia Sang-Baffoe and Michelle Palermo-Biggs for their support at the AERA workshop, and to Pam Kaptein for her coordination of the meeting logistics, enabling all aspects of the event to run smoothly. Finally, we want to thank Yi-Hwa Liou, who has worked tirelessly and continuously on this book and on many of our other projects.

We hope that in reading these chapters, researchers will take away a greater understanding of the important role of central district offices in reform, as well as some unique theoretical and methodological approaches to examining this rich topic. We also hope that practitioners will find it useful, as they carry on the hard work of district reform every day. No longer in educational research can we merely conduct rigorous studies. We must be committed to ensuring the relevance of our work. Reciprocal, trusting partnerships between researchers, policy makers, and practitioners made this book stronger. Such partnerships hold the potential for crafting policies and practices that will reduce inequities in our educational systems and ultimately improve the lives of all youth.

ALAN J. DALY AND KARA S. FINNIGAN

Contents

Introduction

Why We Need to Think Systemically in Educational Policy and Reform

KARA S. FINNIGAN

University of Rochester

ALAN J. DALY

University of California, San Diego

Recent research has helped us to understand the challenges faced by schools under significant performance pressure from high-stakes accountability policies (e.g., see Daly, 2009; Finnigan & Gross, 2007; Finnigan & Stewart, 2009), but efforts to understand the district context that may facilitate or impede constructive responses to this pressure are limited. Recognizing that improving low-performing schools is complex work with limited success at scale, scholars have shifted their attention to the broader system in which schools reside, exploring linkages between central offices and sites in engendering change (e.g., see Hightower, Knapp, Marsh, & McLaughlin, 2002; Honig, 2006; Honig & Coburn, 2008; Hubbard, Mehan, & Stein, 2006; Marsh, 2002). In addition, a host of nonsystem actors or intermediaries play roles in the spread of knowledge, information, and other resources throughout a district (Finnigan & Daly, 2014; Honig, 2004; Penuel, Korbak, Sussex, Frank, & Belman, 2007). Central office leaders tend to rely on these intermediaries to bring about schoolwide improvement, with varying degrees of success (Finnigan, Bitter, & O’Day, 2009; Honig, 2004). In this volume, we try to capture the knowledge base that exists today on the importance of focusing on the larger system and the intermediaries rather than on school-by-school change. As our educational policy shifts from the rigid pressure and sanctions of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) to the more pliable and local capacity of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), this shift toward a more systemic lens will be important, particularly for effecting change in the lowest performing schools. We borrow a term from Smylie, Wenzel, and Fendt (2003), who argue that it is time to "think systemically [emphasis added] about schools and their development and see educational organizations in terms of their interdependent parts" (p. 155).

This volume offers both substantive and methodological value to the field. We have gathered a cadre of outstanding scholars who represent a variety of research strands and approaches to understanding the role of the school district in reform. The volume offers a breadth of perspectives while simultaneously providing depth within each of its sections. This is important because while some scholars have begun to consider the roles of school organizational learning, social networks, and professional learning communities, there is little cross-fertilization across these areas, particularly in district-level studies.

In addition to the research chapters, we have included commentaries by two well-regarded scholars, Mark Smylie and Kenneth Wong. By bringing their commentaries into the work (as opposed to just providing the research studies included in this volume) we offer the reader different perspectives on the research, hoping to further illuminate the complexity of improvement efforts under pressure from accountability policies and the role of the school district in such efforts.

Background and Overview

This volume is particularly timely because we have seen an increasing push by nations around the world for higher levels of performance and accountability. In the United States these efforts have been codified through federal policies and programs such as No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, whose effects we are only beginning to understand. Given the pressure to achieve at increasingly high levels or else risk facing sanctions, educators have ratcheted up their improvement efforts (Mintrop & Trujillo, 2005); yet these efforts have resulted in inconsistent performance and have not led to significant improvement (Mintrop & Sunderman, 2009). The limited success of the last decade of high-stakes accountability policies at the school level suggests both an urgent need for action and a need to reconsider the system (or school district) as the leverage point for improvement, as opposed to the more common emphasis on school-by-school change. We are at a critical turning point as our nation shifts gears with ESSA, maintaining some aspects of NCLB while moving the design of the accountability and support systems for low-performing schools back to the states and relying on competitive programs to spur change. Solving the puzzle of district turnaround to bring about system-wide improvement, rather than focusing on improvement school by school, has the potential to dramatically improve educational outcomes.

Our objective in this volume is to share and discuss empirical, theoretical, and methodological innovations that are focused on the examination of persistently struggling districts. Indeed, system-wide approaches to improvement under pressure have received inadequate coverage in policy-related discussion about low academic performance, which we argue is a missed opportunity to improve educational opportunities and outcomes for youth in our public education system at scale.

The volume is the result of a two-day intensive workshop of scholars funded by a grant from the American Educational Research Association’s Research Conferences Program. Entitled Thinking Systemically: Improving Districts Under Pressure, the workshop was held in Rochester, New York, and facilitated by the editors. The participating scholars (see participants list) focused on district improvement under high-stakes accountability policies, with a particular emphasis on the linkages between organizational learning, district-wide learning communities, and underlying social networks.

This volume is intended for a wide variety of readers. We think it will appeal most to school and district leaders who are working to leverage change each day; policy makers who are trying to better understand and enact educational policies that improve (rather than work against) the effectiveness of schools and districts; and researchers interested in leadership, policy, school change, and district reform. Additional potential readers are those interested in assessment, design-based research, portfolio reforms, social network analysis, and the politics of education. The chapters represent a variety of settings and contexts across the country and examine them through multiple lenses, such as organizational learning and professional learning, as well as multiple methodological approaches.

Section 1 is a good resource for faculty who teach courses in organizational development, change, and leadership. Sections 2 and 3 focus on current programs and policies, highlighting challenges in implementation of interest to site and district leaders. Section 2 may have particular relevance for individuals engaged in design-based partnerships, while Section 3 focuses on system-wide policy change. A number of chapters may be of special interest to researchers, particularly those in Section 4, as they help us to understand the implications of the role of districts in reform. Finally, the volume as a whole is directed to policy makers and funders who want to encourage research and development efforts on the role of districts in reform. In the concluding chapter we address how to move ideas into action.

Readers with specific interests in district-wide change can identify the chapters most relevant to their work in the detailed discussion that follows.

Contents

This text is divided into four sections. Here, we briefly summarize their contents.

Section 1. School Districts as Leverage Points for Systems Change

Section 1 frames the volume and provides the reader with quick access to large issues that are at play in examining the role of the district in reform. In Chapter 1, Tina Trujillo examines the parallels between school effectiveness and district effectiveness, focusing on how schools and districts frame notions of success and the purposes of schooling; the contextualized nature of school performance; and theoretical explanations for student outcomes. She argues that holistic examinations of district effectiveness, incorporating multiple measures of success and more diverse methods of analysis, are critical to moving the field forward. In Chapter 2, Laura Hamilton and Heather Schwartz draw on prior research on accountability reforms to provide guidance on expanding measurement systems to incorporate 21st-century competencies. They note that while expanding measures can direct educators’ attention to previously neglected aspects of schooling, doing so requires time and resources to ensure that the added measures are accurate.

Section 2. Systems Learning at the School and Classroom Levels

This section explores new possibilities in the development of partnerships that by design involve co-learning between different parts of the system (e.g., teachers and leaders). In Chapter 3, Jonathan Supovitz explores the relationship between experimental research and program learning through a case study of an experiment with a local district in which teachers examined data on instruction in conjunction with data on student learning, in an effort to improve the quality of teaching. In Chapter 4, William Penuel and Angela Haydel DeBarger describe a partnership between middle school Earth science teachers and leaders in a large urban district, working together to design and test classroom assessment resources intended to improve the efficacy of district-adopted curriculum materials. Their chapter highlights the ways the partnership provided subject matter, design, and research expertise to contribute to the district’s efforts to bring coherence to curriculum, instruction, assessment, and professional development. In both chapters, the authors highlight the opportunities and challenges of embedding research and learning in the intervention process.

Section 3. How Politics, Underlying Theories, and Leadership Capacity Support System-Wide Change

The chapters in this section each focus on the implementation of a policy reform at the local (district) level. These chapters should be especially important for state and district leaders who are implementing ESSA and seeking to better understand the challenges on the ground to school and district improvement. The authors pay close attention to the assumptions behind and unintended consequences of these reforms. In Chapter 5, Susan Bush-Mecenas, Julie Marsh, and Katharine Strunk examine the Los Angeles Unified School District’s Public School Choice Initiative, which allowed teams of stakeholders to compete to turn around the district’s lowest performing focus schools and to operate newly constructed relief schools designated to ease overcrowding. The authors found that district leaders scaffolded the plan development process with an array of supports from multiple organizations; selected plans on the basis of quality, for the most part; and ensured transparency at each stage of the process. Nevertheless, the scale and complexity of the initiative made it a formidable undertaking for district administrators and partners. The initiative was fraught with challenges, which weakened several of the key mechanisms of change.

In Chapter 6, Priscilla Wohlstetter, Brandon Buck, David Houston, and Courtney Smith examine the rollout and implementation of the Common Core State Standards in New York City, paying close attention to the uptake of the instructional expectations in schools and partnerships between schools within the Children First Network. The reform efforts in high-performing schools aligned closely with the district’s theory of action, as school leaders used their increased autonomy and accessed district supports. But the low-performing schools faced challenges resulting from the need to juggle reforms and from geographic dispersion; as a result, those schools did not benefit from the Children First Network support infrastructure.

In Chapter 7, Kara Finnigan, Alan Daly, and Yi-Hwa Liou consider how the social interactions underlying district improvement efforts are disrupted when a high percentage of actors leave or enter the system, creating a type of social network churn. The authors used longitudinal social network analyses to examine the ties between school and central office leaders in a low-performing school district in the northeastern United States, finding that nearly half of the leaders left during a four-year period, with a constant flow into and out of leadership positions. A loss of knowledge or expertise—or even of a person who helps to bind a social system—has detrimental effects on an organization, in terms of training and development as well as relational connectedness and support.

Section 4. Systemic Lessons for Policy and Practice: Improving School Districts Under Pressure

The two commentaries in this section draw together the major ideas covered earlier and challenge readers to consider new directions and promising areas for study and review. In Chapter 8, Mark Smylie argues for the need to define the problem of district improvement as one of organizational change. He cautions that effectiveness is not improvement, acting systemically requires multiple levers for improvement, and accountability pressure must be applied with care. And he points to the critical role of leadership in system-wide change. In Chapter 9, Kenneth Wong focuses on the federal government’s role in advancing systemic school reform. He considers the chapters in light of these efforts, highlighting the implementation challenges at the district level, in particular, that must be addressed. He points to the importance of strengthening vertical and lateral communication in districts and developing analytic capacity and professional learning opportunities regarding data and research. He also argues for a broader focus on leadership, politics, and governance to uncover effective systemic strategies for urban districts across the country. Professor Wong’s insights about federal policy will continue to be important even in a changing policy context. He points out areas to which state departments of education and the federal government must attend in bringing about equitable and sustainable changes in educational systems across the country.

Final Thoughts

This volume provides important insights into why we need to begin to think systemically about educational policy and reform related to districts. Three key lessons emerge for how to create sustainable change at scale:

Large-scale change requires attention to the role of school districts.

Large-scale change requires partnerships between researchers and practitioners.

Large-scale change requires strong and stable leadership.

The chapters that follow bring these themes to life through a variety of lenses and methodologies.

Perhaps even more important than the focus on change strategies is the empirical evidence provided in this volume indicating that pressure should not be the preferred lever in educational policy until capacity is built within education systems. As Smylie points out in his commentary,

This is a good moment to note that underperforming and underresourced school districts serving large proportions of low-income and racially isolated students are the districts likely to be subject to the most extreme combinations of environmental stressors, to have the least human and organizational capacity and sources of support, and to be on the receiving end of the greatest pressure from reform policy. (p. 216)

The contributors to this volume point to the need not just for capacity building in these low-performing systems but also for relationship building, to form connections with knowledge communities outside the systems (see Finnigan & Daly, 2014). Many of the chapters identify challenges related to human capital, and leadership in particular. However, an equally strong theme in this volume, one that ordinarily receives less attention in the field, is the importance of the underlying relationships among educators and other stakeholders, which can either facilitate or hinder large-scale improvement. In this new era of ESSA, it is time for state and federal policy systems to alter underlying assumptions and leverage points if they are to shift educator beliefs and responses from maladaptive patterns to productive, sustainable large-scale efforts that reduce the current inequities in educational opportunity and outcomes. We have a unique opportunity in this new period to intentionally and collaboratively co-create systems that will make use of our collective wisdom and move forward to better outcomes for all.

References

Daly, A. J. (2009). Rigid response in an age of accountability. Educational Administration Quarterly, 45(2), 168–216.

Finnigan, K. S., Bitter, C., & O’Day, J. (2009). Improving low-performing schools through external assistance: Lessons from Chicago and California. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 17(7). Retrieved from http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v17n7/

Finnigan, K. S., & Daly, A. J. (Eds.). (2014). Research evidence in education: From the schoolhouse door to Capitol Hill. Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Springer.

Finnigan, K. S., & Gross, B. (2007). Do accountability policy sanctions influence teacher motivation? Lessons from Chicago’s low-performing schools. American Educational Research Journal, 44(3), 594–629.

Finnigan, K. S., & Stewart, T. J. (2009). Leading change under pressure: An examination of principal leadership in low-performing schools. Journal of School Leadership, 19(5), 586–618.

Hightower, A. M., Knapp, M. S., Marsh, J. A., & McLaughlin, M. W. (Eds.). (2002). School districts and instructional renewal. New York: Teachers College Press.

Honig, M. (2004). Crafting coherence: How schools strategically manage multiple, external demands. Educational Researcher, 33(8), 16–30.

Honig, M. (2006). Street-level bureaucracy revisited: Frontline district central-office administrators as boundary spanners in education policy implementation. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 28(4), 357–383.

Honig, M., & Coburn, C. (2008). Evidence-based decision making in district central offices: Toward policy and a research agenda. Educational Policy, 22(4), 578–608.

Hubbard, L., Mehan, H., & Stein, M. (2006). Reform as learning. New York: Routledge.

Marsh, J. A. (2002). How districts relate to states, schools, and communities: A review of emerging literature. In A. M. Hightower (Ed.), School districts and instructional renewal (pp. 25–39). New York: Teachers College Press.

Mintrop, H., & Sunderman, G. L. (2009). Predictable failure of federal sanctions-driven accountability for school improvement—And why we may retain it anyway. Educational Researcher, 38(5), 353–364.

Mintrop, H., & Trujillo, T. (2005). Corrective action in low-performing schools: Lessons for NCLB implementation from first-generation accountability systems. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 13(48), 1–27. Retrieved from http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v13n48/

Penuel, W. R., Korbak, C., Sussex, W., Frank, K., & Belman, D. (2007). Catalyzing network expertise: Year 1 report. Menlo Park: SRI International.

Smylie, M., Wenzel, S., & Fendt, C. (2003). The Chicago Annenberg Challenge: Lessons on leadership for school development. In J. Murphy & A. Datnow (Eds.), Leadership lessons from comprehensive school reforms (pp. 135–158). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

The two authors contributed equally to this chapter.

SECTION 1

School Districts as Leverage Points for Systems Change

Chapter 1

Learning From the Past to Chart New Directions in the Study of School District Effectiveness

TINA TRUJILLO

University of California, Berkeley

This chapter aims to explain whether, and in what ways, our theoretical and practical knowledge is advanced by the most recent generation of studies in district effectiveness. Over the last two decades, the local district has risen as a key unit of analysis in research on urban school reform. During that time, many scholars and practitioners have come to view central offices—once relegated to ancillary roles in school improvement—as valuable instruments for effecting large-scale change. This shift follows, in part, from researchers’ findings about the potentially constructive roles of districts in enhancing teaching and learning and implementing state policy (Elmore & Burney, 1997; Hightower, Knapp, Marsh, & McLaughlin, 2002; Honig, Copland, Rainey, Lorton, & Newton, 2010; Leithwood, 1995; Spillane, 1996; Supovitz, 2006; Weinbaum, 2005). In this sense, district-level studies represent the next evolutionary step in the urban reform literature, which once focused solely on the school as the key organizational form for improvement. At least three conditions set in motion these district-level investigations.

First, throughout the restructuring era of the early 1980s, scholars tended to discount the role of districts in school-level inquiries on reforms such as site-based management and whole-school reform (Anderson, 2006). At that time, policy makers and practitioners concentrated primarily on the school as the unit of change because they were influenced, in part, by organizational theories about the advantages