Dear Districts in Research and Reform SIG members,
I am pleased to present the second District SIG Research Update. Thank you to all SIG members who wrote in with their latest articles, chapters, grants, and ongoing work focusing on districts. The next Research Update will be tied to the 2009 AERA Annual Meeting, and I will send out a reminder to send in SIG- and district-related sessions after notices go out to presenters. I would also like to remind SIG members to please nominate outstanding dissertations and research reports for the 2009 District SIG Awards – if you have questions, please contact David Gamson at gamson@psu.edu.
-- Jacob Mishook
Articles, Books, and Book Chapters
Matthew Militello, Scott Alan Metzger, & Alex J. Bowers (2008). The High School "Space Race": Implications of a School-Choice Market Environment for a Michigan Metropolitan Region. Education and Urban Society, Vol. 41, No. 1, 26-54.
ABSTRACT: This article examines the implications of competition between school districts in a mid-Michigan metropolitan area. Over the 10-year period after Michigan's major school-funding reform in 1994, many urban and suburban districts found themselves competing for per-pupil state funding. Suburban districts need extra students to make up budgetary shortfalls and protect instructional programs that are essential in today's political climate of school accountability. Several districts in this study built new or substantially renovated state-of-the-art high schools, possibly illustrating a space race between the districts to build bigger, better, newer capital assets that attract pupils and residential development. The central city district, surrounded by growing suburbs with higher-value taxable property, is at a disadvantage in this competition.
Alex J. Bowers (2008). Promoting Excellence: Good to Great, NYC's District 2, and the Case of a High-Performing School District. Leadership and Policy in Schools, Vol 7, Issue 2, 154-177.
ABSTRACT: This paper compares two celebrated studies-New York City Community School District 2 (Elmore & Burney, 1999), and Good to Great (Collins, 2001), which examined sustained success in American corporations-to the case of a single high-performing school district. The question of interest concerns how school districts achieve and maintain high performance. The study focuses on five central issues from a combined theory from District 2 and Good to Great: 1) An organizationwide disciplined system that provides boundaries for participants but allows for creativity and innovation within those boundaries; 2) a central defined organizational focus that drives day-to-day decisions and is separate from an organization's vision and mission; 3) getting the right people into the organization through innovative hiring and training practices; 4) funneling budgetary resources to district priorities through multipocket budgeting; and 5) a long-term commitment to success through continuous improvement while maintaining a focus on the current challenges facing the organization.
Meredith I. Honig. (In Press). No small thing: School district central office bureaucracies and the implementation of New Small Autonomous Schools Initiatives. American Educational Research Journal.
ABSTRACT: New small autonomous schools initiatives are relatively recent educational change strategies that in some urban districts aim to remake how district central offices function as institutions. This article draws on theories of organizational innovation and learning to reveal how central office administrators participate in these change processes, what outcomes are associated with their efforts, and the conditions that help or hinder their work. Data come from a three-year qualitative investigation of these dynamics in two districts. Results show that particular bridging and buffering activities by certain central office administrators were consistent with policy goals and linked to increasing district supports for implementation. Particular dimensions of the institutional environments of central offices shaped central office administrators’ choices and actions.
Meredith I. Honig (2008). District Central Offices as Learning Organizations: How Sociocultural and Organizational Learning Theories Elaborate District Central Office Administrators’ Participation in Teaching and Learning Improvement Efforts. American Journal of Education, No. 114.
ABSTRACT: School district central office administrators face unprecedented demands to become key supporters of efforts to improve teaching and learning districtwide. Some suggest that these demands mean that central offices, especially in midsized and large districts, should become learning organizations but provide few guides for how central offices might operate as learning organizations. This article
presents a conceptual framework that draws on organizational and sociocultural learning theories to elaborate what might be involved if central offices operated as learning organizations. Specific work practices that this conceptual framework highlights include central office administrators’ participation in new school assistance relationships and their ongoing use of evidence from assistance relationships
and other sources to inform central office policies and practices. Sense making and managing paradoxes are fundamental to these processes. I highlight these activities with empirical illustrations from research and experience, discuss conditions that help/hinder these activities, and suggest directions for district research and practice.
Meredith I. Honig & Cynthia Coburn (2008). Evidence-Based Decision Making in School District Central Offices: Toward a Policy and Research Agenda. Educational Policy, Volume 22, No. 4, 578-608.
ABSTRACT: District central office administrators increasingly face policy demands to use “evidence” in their decision making. These demands up the ante on education policy researchers and policy makers to better understand what evidence use in district central offices entails and the conditions that may support it. To that end, the authors conducted a comprehensive review of research literature on evidence use in district central offices, finding that the process of evidence use is complex, spanning multiple subactivities and requiring administrators to make sense of evidence and its implications for central office operations. These activities have significant political dimensions and involve the use of “local knowledge” as a key evidence source. Evidence use is shaped by features of the evidence itself and various organizational and institutional factors. Policy shapes evidence use, but other factors mediate its impact. The authors conclude with implications for future policy and research on central office evidence-based decision making.
S. Stringfield, D. Reynolds, & G. Shaffer. (In Press). Improving Secondary Students' Academic Achievement Through a Focus on Reform Reliability: Four- and Nine-year Findings from the High Reliability Schools Project. School Effectiveness and School Improvement.
ABSTRACT: In an article to appear in the December 2008 issue of School Effectiveness and School Improvement, two colleagues and I describe a multi-year effort to substantially raise achievement for all students in an 11 secondary school Welsh Local Authority. We also provide data from a 5-year follow up. Results were dramatically positive. Among other things, the district has been declared by their national government to be the most "value added" district in the country. A second district-wide effort with the same intervention was found to be one of the 10 most improving in England. Of particular interest to a SIG focused on the district is the fact that a third district attempted the same secondary school reforms, but in some--not all--of its schools, and got essentially no positive effect at all. A clear implication is that the district matters as a unit of intervention/improvement.
Reports and Grants
Evaluation of the Texas High School Project
Chris Padilla of SRI International is leading a substudy under the larger evaluation project that is looking at district leadership support being provided through the initiative to 3 large urban districts in Texas, described below.
(Texas Education Agency, 2007-2011)
Reforming today's high schools to achieve better educational outcomes is at the top of most national, state, and local education agendas. With funding from the Texas Education Agency (TEA), the Community Foundation of Texas, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, the Texas High School Project (THSP) constitutes one of the country's most ambitious statewide efforts to transform high schools. THSP is made up of several high school reform initiatives, including High Schools That Work, Early College High Schools, charters, T-STEM, and High School Redesign.
THSP's success will be crucial to the future of the state's secondary and postsecondary education. To provide policy makers and educators with objective, timely, and targeted information that will help ensure the progress and success of the high school reform initiatives, TEA, with support from THSP funders, has commissioned SRI International and its subcontractors to conduct a longitudinal evaluation of THSP. The evaluation team seeks to:
- Provide annual formative and summative evaluations of THSP initiatives to TEA and THSP funders.
- Design systems to compile and analyze assessment data.
- Document the process and outcomes of educational change.
- Identify factors that lead to success or pose challenges.
- Analyze policy factors affecting success.
- Synthesize lessons learned into best practices.
The primary audiences for the evaluation are the THSP program staff and the THSP-funded schools; however, the evaluation also has an external audience of policymakers, funders and practitioners in the field of educational reform.
The research team's approach to the THSP evaluation is grounded in the simple proposition that what matters most in comprehensive reform is what happens in the schools—where teachers teach and students learn. The evaluation design also reflects THSP’s complexity and multiple initiatives. The evaluation is designed to identify and understand the role of state and district policy, school reform networks and support providers, school conditions, and teacher and student activities in the implementation of THSP reforms. These factors will be studied through qualitative interviews and case studies, as well as quantitative surveys and analyses. We will also track student outcomes such as: attitudes towards academics, attendance, course-taking patterns, and achievement.
Data collection and analysis activities will concentrate on understanding the implementation and outcomes of various initiatives at individual high schools. The evaluation team will closely examine change at the school level and then trace the contributions of the different support efforts to that change.
Evaluation Study of California’s District Intervention and Regional Capacity Building Project
Principal Investigator: Chris Padilla
Project Director: Juliet Tiffany-Morales
SRI International
Project Description
The Evaluation Study of California’s District Intervention and Regional Capacity Building Project is a two-year evaluation (October 2007 through December 2009) of the state’s efforts to support Program Improvement districts as identified under NCLB or districts at risk of being identified as Program Improvement in the future. The District Intervention and Assistance Teams (DAIT) is currently a pilot project in 15 districts across the state where districts and their DAIT providers (generally County Offices of Education) complete a comprehensive needs assessment to identify, prioritize, and implement actions that have the potential to bring about improvements in district and school operations across seven key DAIT areas including governance and leadership; alignment of curriculum, instruction, and assessment; data systems; achievement monitoring; alignment of human and fiscal resources with district goals; meaningful parent and community involvement; and targeted professional development for teachers and administrators.
The Regional Capacity Building (RCB) component of this project brings together the leadership of the 11 county superintendent regions identified by the California County Superintendents Educational Services Association (CCSESA) in an effort to build the capacity of all county offices to support districts in the development of the seven key DAIT areas.
This evaluation is using a mix of telephone and on-line surveys of multiple sources, case studies of a subset of pilot DAIT districts and their DAIT provider, and an analysis of publicly available student achievement data to determine the extent to which the DAIT/RCB initiative is a viable district intervention and support model worthy of statewide replication. The first year of data collection and analysis was completed in October 2008.
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