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Many researchers who study the relations between school resources and student achievement have worked from a causal model, which typically is implicit. In this model, some resource or set of resources is the causal variable and student achievement is the outcome. In a few recent, more nuanced versions, resource effects depend on intervening influences on their use. We argue for a model in which the key causal agents are situated in instruction; achievement is their outcome. Conventional resources can enable or constrain the causal agents in instruction, thus moderating their impact on student achievement. Because these causal agents interact in ways that are unlikely to be sorted out by multivariate analysis of naturalistic data, experimental trials of distinctive instructional systems are more likely to offer solid evidence on instructional effects.

This essay probes the relationship between instructional policy and teaching practice. In the mid 1980s, California State officials launched an ambitious effort to revise mathematics teaching and learning. The aim was to replace mechanical memorization with mathematical understanding. This essay considers one teacher’s response to the new policy. She sees herself as a success for the policy: she believes that she has revolutionized her mathematics teaching. But observation of her classroom reveals that the innovations in her teaching have been filtered through a very traditional approach to instruction. The result is a remarkable melange of novel and traditional material. Policy has affected practice in this case, but practice has had an even greater effect on policy.

Educational reformers increasingly seek to manipulate policies regarding assessment, curriculum, and professional development in order to improve instruction. They assume that manipulating these elements of instructional policy will change teachers' practice, which will then improve student performance. We formalize these ideas into a rudimentary model of the relations among instructional policy, teaching, and learning. We propose that successful instructional policies are themselves instructional in nature: because teachers figure as a key connection between policy and practice, their opportunities to learn about and from policy are a crucial influence both on their practice, and, at least indirectly, on student achievement. Using data from a 1994 survey of California elementary school teachers and 1994 student California Learning Assessment System (CLAS) scores, we examine the influence of assessment, curriculum, and professional development on teacher practice and student achievement. Our results bear out the usefulness of the model: under circumstances that we identify, policy can affect practice, and both can affect student performance.