Educational System Building in a Changing Educational Sector: Environment, Organization, and the Technical Core

Abstract

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.

The Heart of the Matter: How Reforms Unsettle Organizational Identity

“…Whereas the Center held fast to many parts of its Montessori identity, the Archdiocese was more flexible in redesigning itself; to do otherwise was to risk closing more schools in the face of competition from charters. One approach was to build new infrastructure—to adopt pieces of the public-school model, that is, to “pull in” parts of the public sector as a strategy to try to improve (Spillane, Seelig, Blaushild, Cohen, & Peurach, 2019). This involved moving closer to the public sector, as the Archdiocese adopted standards-based report cards, assessments aligned with the Common Core, common curricula, and a blended learning instructional approach.…”

“…We interviewed leaders in different systems to begin understanding this relationship, and as we expected, they described a relationship between the design of their school systems, the ways in which they managed instruction, and important environmental influences. (We report on these findings elsewhere: see Peurach, Yurkofsky, & Sutherland, this 2019; Spillane, Seelig, Blaushild, Cohen, & Peurach, this 2019.) What we did not expect was that they would describe another critical element to their work in systems: They perceived the identity of their school systems as changing.…”

A Thirty State Analysis of Teacher Supervision and Evaluation Systems in the ESSA Era

“…Indirect forces and processes strip away autonomy from schools before educators can even challenge policy interpretations. According to Spillane et al (2019), schools seek legitimacy and funding for survival, so school leaders are not in a position to challenge teacher evaluation policy interpretation. We recommend that district and school leaders work with teachers and teacher leaders to develop locally meaningful and developmentally focused teaching and learning improvement processes that meet the needs of their communities.…”

Comparatively Studying Educational System (Re)Building Cross-Nationally: Another Agenda for Cross-National Educational Research?

“…The articles report on commonalities and differences among these systems. One finding is that a quarter century of societal and policy pressure contributed to U.S. public and private school systems transforming themselves either to be more instructionally focused education systems or to extend existing education systems to hitherto disadvantaged students (Neumerski & Cohen, 2019; Peurach et al, 2019b; Spillane et al, 2019). Whereas leaders in the public and private school systems were (re)designing, using, and managing their educational infrastructures to respond to the standards movement and its press to increase educational quality and to reduce disparities, leaders in AMI and IB felt the need to make the case that their educational infrastructures were compatible with the standards movement and to include hitherto disadvantaged students (Neumerski & Cohen, 2019; Spillane et al, 2019).…”

“…One was a new organization, a Charter School Network that used public and private resources to try to greatly improve schooling for disadvantaged students. Two others were legacy public school systems trying to redesign themselves as education systems in response to standards-based reform and high stakes accountability policies (see Spillane et al, 2019a). One—Montessori (AMI)—was a private education system that tried to remedy inequity by recruiting disadvantaged and minority group students and reconfigure itself to be educational for those students; hence, it began to move toward becoming a hybrid system.…”