Systemwide reform: examining districts under pressure

Citation

Daly, A.J. and Finnigan, K.S. (2013), "Systemwide reform: examining districts under pressure", Journal of Educational Administration, Vol. 51 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/jea.2013.07451daa.002

Systemwide reform: examining districts under pressure

Systemwide reform: examining districts under pressure

Article Type: Guest Editorial From: Journal of Educational Administration, Volume 51, Issue 4.

Background

This special issue is the result of an American Educational Research Association (AERA) sponsored research conference award regarding district reform with participants representing the USA, Canada, and Europe. The articles focus on the role of district central office in school improvement and its relationship to high-stakes accountability policies centered in the US context, with implications for systems across the globe. The work represents not only a variety of settings, but also a range of promising theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches including: organizational learning, learning communities, and social network theory and analysis. Moreover, in this special issue we aim to present not only rigorous studies, but work that also has direct relevance to practice. We also offer the reader three commentaries by well-regarded scholars who consider this work within a larger global context. As a way of introduction for this special issue, we first provide a broad overview of the field and rational for taking a systems approach to understanding the work of district improvement. We then conclude with a preview of the excellent work contained in this special issue.

Overview

This special issue is particularly timely and significant because we have seen an increasing push for higher levels of performance and accountability across the globe. In the USA, No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the American Recovery and Reinvestment of Act of 2009, and Race to the Top (RTT) rely heavily on local education agencies (LEAs) to implement essential pieces of states’ reform agendas. Given the pressure to achieve at increasingly high levels or risk facing sanctions, educators have continued to increase the number of improvement efforts (Mintrop, 2004; Mintrop and Trujillo, 2005), often without significant improvement or meeting expected outcomes (Mintrop and Sunderman, 2009). A continual focus on narrowly defined accountability measures has, as US Secretary of Education Duncan notes, “Created a thousand ways for schools to fail and very few ways to help them succeed” (Duncan, 2011).

While recent research has helped us to understand the challenges faced by schools under significant performance pressure (e.g. see Daly, 2009; Daly and Finnigan, 2011, 2012; Finnigan and Daly, 2012; Finnigan and Gross, 2007; Finnigan and Stewart, 2009; Mintrop, 2004; Sunderman et al., 2005), there has been limited work in helping us to better understand the district context, which may facilitate or impede constructive responses to this pressure. Improving under performing schools is complex and difficult work that requires a more interconnected systems approach to organizational change (Daly, 2010; Daly and Finnigan, 2011; Fullan, 2005; Hargreaves and Fink, 2006; Honig and Coburn, 2008; Stoll and Louis, 2007; Weinbaum et al., 2008). In fact, solving the puzzle of district turnaround to bring about systemwide improvement, rather than focussing on improvement school by school, has the potential to dramatically improve educational outcomes.

Contained within this special issue are papers that discuss the empirical, theoretical, and methodological innovations focussed on the examination of persistently struggling districts, which have received inadequate coverage in the literature. While some scholars have begun to consider the importance of organizational learning, social networks, and professional learning communities in the field of education broadly, there is scant cross-fertilization of ideas across these areas and even less attention to these frameworks at the district level. It is our hope in this special issue to reinvigorate this work and provide an opportunity for authors and ideas to interact in pushing our current thinking.

The papers

The first set of two papers examines districts broadly and the accountability contexts in which they sit. The first paper by Tina Trujillo, The reincarnation of the effective schools research: rethinking the literature on district effectiveness, thoughtfully examines the literature on district effectiveness and contrasts that literature both conceptually and methodologically with the earlier work on school effectiveness. Trujillo's paper provides an excellent discussion of the implications for district-level research on leadership, equity, and school improvement. This work is followed by a paper by Laura Hamilton, Heather Schwartz, Brian Stecher, and Jennifer Steele entitled, Improving school and district accountability through expanded measures of performance, in which the authors provide a careful analysis of the accountability reforms in the USA over the past decades and how these approaches have had a profound effect on culture and practice within districts. The authors conclude the piece by offering both the supports and constraints of an expanded vision of performance measures, which are being considered in the reauthorization of existing policies.

The next set of three papers look within specific urban district contexts to explore the role of the district in reform. In the first paper of this set, Systemwide reform in districts under pressure: the role of social networks in defining, acquiring and diffusing research evidence by Kara Finnigan, Alan Daly, and Jing Che, explores the use of research evidence through a unique framework of organizational learning and social networks and mixed methods. Their work suggests a nuanced understanding of the use of research evidence across a district as well as how a web of relationships may both support and constrain the movement of evidence in relation to district improvement. In their paper, Portfolio district reform meets school turnaround: early implementation findings from the Los Angeles Public School Choice Initiative, Julie Marsh, Katharine Strunk, and Susan Bush examine the role of “portfolio models” in large-scale district improvement. This important work provides the reader with both the facilitating and inhibiting conditions at work in Los Angeles that have implications for the work of systemic improvement. The final paper by Priscilla Wohlstetter and Joanna Smith examines the children first networks in New York city, the largest school district in the USA In this paper, NYC's children first networks: turning accountability for district improvement on its head, the authors provide a compelling narrative of how a district office reposition itself to provide a more supportive role to networks of schools.

The special issue is brought to a close by three well-crafted commentaries that speak to both the papers in the issue as well as to the larger global perspective of district reform. These excellent commentaries offered by Karen Seashore Louis, Stephen Anderson, and Louise Stoll and explicitly move the work from a US focus out to a more global perspective in examining the work of district reform. The commentaries provide important insights into where the work of district reform may be headed as well as considering both policy and educational change that are informed by both the research of these fine scholars as well as their broader international work in reform.

Teaching the hippos to dance

Of course these special issues do not come about without the support of many groups and individuals. First, we wish to thank the AERA for this award without which we could not have pulled together such an incredible group of thinkers (for more about the conference see www.districtreform.com). We are also deeply appreciated to the editors and staff at the Journal of Educational Administration for their ongoing counsel and support and to Pam Kaptein who provided administrative support and Georgia Sang-Baffoe and Michelle Palermo-Biggs who provided research support. Most importantly, we are so grateful to the participants: Stephen Anderson, Bill Firestone, Betheny Gross, Laura Hamilton, Julie Reed Kochanek, Kerstin Carlson Le Floch, Betty Malen, Julie March, Bill Penuel, Joelle Rodway Macri, Andrea Rorrer, Karen Seashore, Mark Smylie, Louise Stoll, Jon Supovitz, Tina Trujillo, Penny Wohlstetter, and Ken Wong. The collegiality and intellectual conversation of this “professional learning community” of researchers was a wonderful experience and we believe enriched the learning of us all.

We hope in reading the papers and commentaries across this special issue you will take away not only the importance of the role of the central office in reform, but some unique theoretical and methodological approaches to examining this rich topic. Moreover, in this special issue we also set out to also speak to practitioners who do the hard work of district reform everyday. No longer in educational research can we just conduct rigorous studies, we must also be committed to moving to ensuring that this research is relevant to the work of improvement. We think of this as “teaching the hippos to dance.” In this analogy the “hippos” are the rigorous, important, and often big ideas we as researchers generate, publish, and present to the larger public. Often these ideas, like hippos, do not move easily out of the academy into the world of practice. Through the scholars in this issue, our own work, and as guest editors, we hope to teach the hippos to “dance” into, and with, the world of practice.

Alan J. Daly and Kara S. FinniganGuest Editors

Acknowledgements

Authors are listed in alphabetical order and contributed equally to this piece.

These papers were presented at an American Educational Research Association (AERA) supported research conference. All opinions and conclusions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of AERA.

About the authors

Alan J. Daly is Associate Professor in the Department of Education Studies at the University of California, San Diego. Alan J. Daly is the corresponding author and can be contacted at: ajdaly@ucsd.edu

Kara S. Finnigan is Associate Professor and director of the doctoral and master's programs in educational policy at the Warner School of Education, University of Rochester.