In the early 1990s, the logic and policies of systemic reform launched a press to coordinate the pursuit of excellence and equity in U.S. public education, with each other and with classroom instruction. There was little in that policy moment to predict that these reforms would sustain, and much to predict otherwise. Yet, nearly three decades hence, many public school districts are working earnestly to pursue the central aims of the reforms: all students engaging rich instructional experiences to master ambitious content and tasks at the same high standards. That begs a question: What happens when new educational ambitions collide with legacy educational institutions—not in a policy moment but across a historical moment? This chapter takes up that question by reviewing the rise of mass public schooling in pursuit of universal access, a historic pivot toward instructionally focused education systems in pursuit of excellence and equity, and changing patterns in instructional organization and management that follow. The lesson we draw is that, even amid incoherence and turbulence in education environments, sustained public, political, and policy support for new educational ambitions opens up new opportunities for those ambitions to manifest in the structures and the work of public school districts.
The environment of U.S. schools has changed dramatically over a quarter century as standards tied to test-based accountability and market competition became commonplace. We examine the issues that school systems face in this changing environment, to identify considerations for researchers interested in reform as educational system building. We highlight a central dilemma: Systems manage environmental pressures to become more coherent enterprises that focus on tested outcomes while managing the inherited differentiated organizations and environmental pressures which support these enterprises. We identify four activity domains that are defined by these competing pressure: consensus on outcomes; infrastructure to connect outcomes with instruction; recruitment that is aligned with outcomes; and competing environmental pressures.
The institutional environment of U.S. school systems has changed considerably over a quarter century as standards and test-based accountability became central ideas in policy texts and discourses about improving education. We explore how U.S. school systems are managing in this changed environment by focusing on system leaders’ sense-making about their environments as they attempt to build educational systems to improve instruction, the core technology of schooling. We identify the policy texts and discourses system leaders notice and their framings, interpretations, and uses of these cues as they build educational infrastructures to support more coherent instructional visions. We argue that school systems’ educational infrastructure building efforts were intended at coupling their systems’ formal organization with particular environmental cues in an effort to influence classroom instruction. In turn, we argue that these educational infrastructure building efforts can simultaneously be motivated by, and in pursuit of, institutional ritual and technical rationality.
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