Cumulative Effects at the Local Level

The Implementation of New Special Education Legislation in Finland

“…Our findings suggest that those schools and municipalities that had participated in trainings leading to the enactment of the statute and that had a history of being involved in other school reform initiatives had more capacity and willingness to reform special education practices substantially. These findings are consistent with Knapp et al's (1991), in that institutional learning in one policy domain can generalize to other policy areas. Our findings further show that local flexibility can result in favorable educational arrangements in schools and municipalities; however, this is not the case in all schools and regions.…”

“…Participation in long-term development is an essential part of the implementation process; facilitating municipalities, schools, and school personnel to see change is an opportunity for improving existing procedures and practices. Knapp, Stearns, Turnbull, David, and Peterson (1991) defined these longterm processes as "cumulative effects" (p. 108) in which multiple factors cause a snowball effect on practice at the local level, across time, levels of government, and programs. The cumulative effect of time includes learning through implementation over time, in which schools and districts develop routines to interpret and respond to government initiatives.…”

Between Systemic Reforms and the Mathematics and Science Classroom: The Dynamics of Innovation, Implementation, and Professional Learning

“…The starting point for such studies is thus an enacted policy, a publicly announced set of intentions, often combined with an allocation of resources and other provisions designed to motivate and sustain change-oriented activities lower down in the system. This line of thinking pays special attention to the interaction of policies with their contexts at each stage in the process-for example, at the state level (M. T. Moore et al, 1991) and at the local level (e.g., Knapp, Stearns, Turnbull, David, & Peterson, 1991;Weatherly & Lipsky, 1977)-and argues, in effect, that contextual factors exert ultimate control over the actual direction of policy as "delivered" to "service recipients." Some scholars working in this tradition even talk about the professionals at the lowest level of the system as the "policymakers" (Lipsky, 1980) or "policy brokers" (Schwille et al, 1984).…”

Evidence of the Impact of School Reform on Systems Governance and Educational Bureaucracies in the United States

“…2 As chronicled by Education Week yearly report Quality Counts by 2001 (the year NCLB was enacted), adoption of strong standards and accountability systems and the extent of state testing varied widely across the nation (Boser, 2001; Otlofshy & Olson, 2001). When states did adopt these reforms, they looked quite different from one state to another and reflected differences in state fiscal capacity, local political culture, and governance structures (Knapp, Stearns, Turnbull, David, & Peterson, 1991; Liu, 2006; Sunderman, 1995). Local districts, particularly, large urban districts, often adopted their own standards and assessments that competed with the state ones.…”