State Leadership for School Improvement: An Analysis of Three States

Abstract

Purpose: Extant reports on states'policy differences are mostly descriptive and largely ignore the pervasive role of political culture on their educational policy-making processes. This article examines the effect of policy culture on states' policy-making mechanisms. There is evidence that a state's political culture is a significant mediating influence on its educational policy making and leadership practices at the state, district, and local level. Data Collection and Analysis: We conducted an empirical, comparative case study of educational leadership and policy-making mechanisms in three states—Indiana, Nebraska, and Oregon. Those three states, chosen because of their similarities in size but differences in educational policy histories, were part of a larger leadership study of nine states. Within each state, researchers interviewed between 8 and 11 educational policymakers who represented a diverse array of positions and organizations. The interviews were 1 hr in length, conducted in a semistructured format, and revolved around their states' accountability and school leadership policies, key educational stakeholders, and levels of collaboration among those stakeholders. Findings: Each state in the study had very different means through which they pursued educational policies. Indiana had centralized decision-making structures that sought to promote leadership and accountability through policies that revolved around equity and efficiency. Oregon had a high level of participation and collaboration at all levels in the state's mostly decentralized but very open educational policy-making process that emphasized quality. Nebraska's policy culture, which was more independent and decentralized than Oregon's, was highly collaborative but had comparatively low levels of support for state-supported leadership and accountability initiatives. Conclusions: Our findings suggest that political culture is a mediating factor for states' responses to increasing demands for leadership and accountability initiatives; it is therefore necessary to account for the impact of each state's unique political culture when planning for and explaining results of these initiatives.

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

“…Now that state legislatures and policymakers are directing teacher supervision and evaluation policy and legislation, it is important to frame contemporary education policy analysis of supervision and evaluation through a state-level cultural and contextual lens. Previous research in political science, education policy and analysis, and educational leadership, demonstrates that state-level political culture and history has an influence on policy development, governance, and legislation (Elazar, 1994;Fowler, 2013;Louis, et al, 2008). However, no studies have examined the role of state political culture in the development or implementation of TSES model development.…”

“…Among other findings, their analysis revealed that absent a national-level policy agenda or initiative, states from each category diverged in terms of education policy activity and intentions. In a series of related publications, (Louis et al, 2006;Louis et al, 2008; researchers analyzed ten states' education policy activity and press and compared how both state-and local-level actors interpreted policy actions. Collectively, the authors found that the conception of political culture influenced how state and local leaders made sense of policies such as accountability and mandated testing differently across historical political culture categories.…”

“…In addition to understanding decision-making structures across various state political cultures, it is also important to consider how policy rationalism, or the amount of coordinated activity to solve social issues, exists across various state systems. Louis et al (2008) posit the use of technorationalism, a high level of coordinated activities by state policymakers, is often used in the attempt to comprehensively address school reform. Technorationalism applies the ideology that social issues and problems can be controlled precisely and orderly, often through policy efforts and mandates that relate to objective assessment of social outcomes, specifically through quantified data tied to accountability (Cheng, 2015;Orr, 2007).…”

How Do States Implement College- and Career-Readiness Standards? A Distributed Leadership Analysis of Standards-Based Reform

“…These explanations are critical given that studies on the implementation of education policies rarely incorporate leadership principles (Seashore Louis, Thomas, Gordon, & Febey, 2008), though state leadership is necessary in establishing policy environments conducive to standards implementation (O’Day, 2015). Therefore, we extend the distributed leadership framework from its previous applications to school and district contexts (Heck & Hallinger, 2009; Jones, Lefoe, Harvey, & Ryland, 2012), to describe state and local interactions.…”

“…Therefore, we extend the distributed leadership framework from its previous applications to school and district contexts (Heck & Hallinger, 2009; Jones, Lefoe, Harvey, & Ryland, 2012), to describe state and local interactions. Similarly, CCR standards implementation studies so far have tended to shed light on policies enacted by states or districts separately (Achieve, 2014; Cristol & Ramsey, 2014) but have not incorporated leadership principles to explore the state’s interactive relationships with other key players (Seashore Louis et al, 2008) or investigated the networks (Russell, Meredith, Childs, Stein, & Prine, 2015) that facilitate the flow of reform throughout various tiers of the state system. Thus, we highlight aspects of statewide leadership practices that are not typically addressed in distributed leadership, SEA capacity, or CCR studies.…”