Meredith I. Honig

Crafting Coherence: How Schools Strategically Manage Multiple, External Demands

“Policy coherence” is an often cited but seldom achieved education policy goal. We argue that addressing this policy-practice gap requires a reconceptualization of coherence not as the objective alignment of external requirements but as a dynamic process. This article elaborates this re-conceptualization using theories of institutional and organizational change and empirical illustrations from literature on school reform and education policy implementation. We define coherence as a process, which involves schools and school district central offices working together to craft or continually negotiate the fit between external demands and schools’ own goals and strategies. Crafting coherence includes: schools setting school-wide goals and strategies that have particular features; schools using those goals and strategies to decide whether to bridge themselves to or buffer themselves from external demands; and school district central offices supporting these school-level processes. This definition suggests new directions for policy research and practice.

Evidence-Based Decision Making in School District Central Offices: Toward a Policy and Research Agenda

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.

Street-Level Bureaucracy Revisited: Frontline District Central-Office Administrators as Boundary Spanners in Education Policy Implementation

The designation of district central-office administrators to operate as boundary spanners among the central office, schools, and community agencies can help with the implementation of challenging policy demands. However, educational research teaches little about central-office boundary spanners in practice. This article addresses that gap with findings from an embedded, comparative case study of boundary spanners in the implementation of collaborative education policy. The study’s conceptual framework draws on public management and sociological literature on boundary spanning and neo-institutional theories of decision making. Findings reveal that the boundary spanners in this case initially were particularly well suited to help with implementation in part because they brought non-traditional experiences to the central office. However, over time, many of the resources that aided them initially became liabilities that frustrated their work. This article documents the importance of examining boundary-spanning roles in implementation and suggests how central offices might provide supports to boundary spanners to increase their potential as levers of bureaucratic change.

The New Middle Management: Intermediary Organizations in Education Policy Implementation

Intermediary organizations have become increasingly prominent participants in education policy implementation despite limited knowledge about their distinctive functions and the conditions that constrain and enable those functions. This article addresses that research-practice gap by drawing on theories of organizational ecology and findings from a comparative case study of four intermediary organizations that helped with collaborative policy implementation in Oakland, California. I define intermediaries as organizations that operate between policymakers and implementers to affect changes in roles and practices for both parties and show that such organizations typically vary along at least five dimensions. Oakland’s intermediary organizations all provided new implementation resources—knowledge, political/social ties, and an administrative infrastructure—but faced different constraining and enabling conditions. Using insights from this strategic case study, this article begins to build theory about intermediary organizations as important participants in contemporary policy implementation.

District Central Offices as Learning Organizations: How Sociocultural and Organizational Learning Theories Elaborate District Central Office Administrators' Participation in Teaching and Learning Improvement Efforts

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.

District Central Office Leadership as Teaching: How Central Office Administrators Support Principals’ Development as Instructional Leaders

Purpose: Research on educational leadership underscores the importance of principals operating as instructional leaders and intensive job-embedded supports for such work; this research also identifies central office staff as key support providers. However, it teaches little about what central office staff do when they provide such support and how to distinguish what they do as more or less supportive of principals’ development as instructional leaders. This article addresses that gap with findings from an in-depth comparative case study of the work practices of executive-level central office staff in three districts dedicated to providing instructional leadership support to principals. Research Design: The conceptual framework drawn from sociocultural and cognitive learning theories identifies practices that deepen professional practice in authentic work settings. Data came from 283 interviews and approximately 265 observation hours and 200 documents. Findings: Departing from other studies that do not empirically elaborate central office work practices or that call generally for central office leadership, this analysis identified specific practices of central office administrators consistent with helping principals learn to strengthen their instructional leadership. These practices anchor a conception of central office staff in these roles as teachers of principals’ instructional leadership. Key mediators of their work included their own conceptions of their roles and their opportunities to consult with colleagues, among other conditions. Conclusions: Advancing such work in practice and building knowledge about it in research will require significant shifts throughout school district systems and new approaches to the study of educational leadership.

School–Central Office Relationships in Evidence Use: Understanding Evidence Use as a Systems Problem

Research on evidence use in school districts overwhelmingly focuses within schools on how school staff work with evidence including student performance data, research, and information about teaching quality. While important, this focus on schools reflects a mismatch with federal and state policies that demand not only that school staff work with evidence but that school district central office administrators do as well. This school focus also downplays how complex, social school-level change processes such as evidence use may typically involve central office staff in implementation and vice versa. To what extent do central offices matter to school-level evidence-use processes, and do schools matter to such processes in central offices? We explore these questions with a review of research on evidence use in schools and central offices with a focus on school–central office relationships in the process. We find that central offices and schools influence each other’s evidence-use processes in specific respects. We elaborate what extant research teaches about these relationships and argue that future research should aim to understand how evidence use plays out not solely within schools or central offices but across district systems and through interactions between central office and school staff.

No Small Thing: School District Central Office Bureaucracies and the Implementation of New Small Autonomous Schools Initiatives

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. In this article, the author 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. The data came from a 3-year qualitative investigation of these dynamics in two districts. The 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.

Where's the "Up" in Bottom-Up Reform?

Bottom-up reform as a policy strategy for decades has faltered in implementation. This article starts from the premise that these disappointing results stem from researchers’and practitioners’almost exclusive focus on implementation in schools or on what some call “the bottom” of hierarchical education systems but not shifts in policy makers’roles that might enable school change—the “up” in bottom-up reform. These gaps are addressed with a strategic, comparative case study of city-level policy makers in bottom-up reform implementation in Oakland, California, during the 1990s. The author demonstrates that organizational learning theory defines basic dimensions of policy makers’ roles in implementation and that they faced four paradoxes in adopting these roles. Over time, they tended to favor avenues consistent with traditional topdown, not bottom-up, policy making. Findings highlight policy makers as important participants in bottom-up reform implementation and suggest that new institutional supports for them may enable implementation.

Adaptive Assistance for Learning Improvement Efforts: The Case of the Institute for Learning

Districts across the country face significant demands to strengthen student learning districtwide, and many are turning to intermediary organizations to help them build their capacity for such demanding, large-scale work. However, how these “learning-support intermediary organizations” assist with these capacity-building efforts is little understood. This article reports data from a largely qualitative investigation into how one such intermediary organization, the Institute for Learning (IFL) at the University of Pittsburgh, partnered with multiple urban districts to help build district capacity for districtwide learning improvements. Our conceptual framework draws on sociocultural learning theory to identify key features of the IFL-district assistance relationships that seem associated with these outcomes. We utilized data from interviews, observations, document reviews, and focus groups conducted over a five-year period. Findings elaborate specific features of their assistance relationships—which we call adaptive assistance relationships—such as enabling particular forms of modeling, tools, and opportunities for rich dialogue. We conclude with implications for the research and practice of districtwide learning improvement efforts and the participation of intermediary organizations in the process.