Patricia Burch

Managing in the Middle: School Leaders and the Enactment of Accountability Policy

This article investigates how mid-level managers make sense of and mediate district accountability policy. Arguing that teachers’evolving perceptions and understanding of accountability policies are likely to be mediated by school leaders, the authors explore how school managers enact their policy environments, focusing chiefly on the ways in which they construct district accountability policies. Adopting a cognitive or interpretive frame on implementation, the authors illuminate how school leaders’ sense-making is situated in their professional biographies, building histories, and roles as intermediaries between the district office and classroom teachers.

Educational Policy and Practice From the Perspective of Institutional Theory: Crafting a Wider Lens:

Institutional analyses of public education have increased in number in recent years. However, studies in education drawing on institutional analyses have not fully incorporated recent contributions from institutional theory, particularly relative to other domains such as law and health policy. The author sketches a framework that integrates recent institutional theorizing to guide scholarship on these and other issues in K–12 public education in the United States. The author argues that although concepts such as “loose coupling” have been widely used, education researchers have not fully tapped institutional theories that have emerged more recently. The author introduces three interrelated constructs and applies them to a case study of district reading and mathematics reform. In the final section, the author considers how current developments in the governance of public schooling increase the utility of institutional perspectives and identify critical issues that need to be addressed in future work.

Supplemental Educational Services and NCLB: Policy Assumptions, Market Practices, Emerging Issues

The supplemental educational services (SES) provision of No Child Left Behind introduces a federally mandated after-school tutoring intervention in schools that fail to make adequate yearly progress. This article examines market dynamics in relationship to the law’s goals of expanding access to and improving the quality of after-school programming. Analysis of operational and financial data from seven SES providers suggest that relative to smaller local firms, national firms are positioned to capture more of the SES market. Analysis of data on SES provider activity (from 2004 to 2006) within an urban district suggests that firms gaining market share charge higher hourly rates and have larger class sizes. Survey data from 30 state administrators reveal the limited capacity of states to monitor providers. This analysis points to a mismatch between the implementation of SES and the concerns for quality and equity that are claimed as priorities within federal law.

The Changing Nature of Private Engagement in Public Education: For-Profit and Nonprofit Organizations and Educational Reform.

Recent years have seen a shifting landscape around private engagement in K-12 public education, one that involves a reorientation of education policy and practice around the principles of the marketplace. In this article, we examine the roles of both not-for-profit and for-profit agencies, as distinct from government agencies, in this movement. Past research has generally focused on subsets of these private actors (i.e., for-profit firms, charter management organizations, or alternative preparers of educators for public schools). We try to look more broadly in order to examine how private actors and the roles of those players in K-12 education are changing, both in terms of the scope of their engagement and the extent to which their role increasingly involves areas at the core of educational practice. In doing so, we consider some of the reasons for these changes, including the influence of federal policy, markets as drivers, and the broader political context. We conclude by raising questions for future research and examining how these developments intersect with values such as democratic voice, equitable distribution of resources, and the public purposes of schooling.

The Bigger Picture: Institutional Perspectives on Interim Assessment Technologies

Drawing on a study of new forms of educational privatization, this article examines how ideas from institutional theory can be useful in analyzing the complex dynamics behind interim assessment technologies. The study was based on qualitative research methods and included interviews, a small-scale questionnaire, participant observation, and analysis of public and financial documents. As defined here, interim assessment technology is the software that is sold to schools and districts in order to gauge students’ progress toward high-stakes tests and to comply with the testing and reporting requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. The design and implementation of these assessment technologies reflects the complex pressures on schools and districts—to be more efficient, to be more compliant, and to be more equitable. I argue that in understanding the consequences of these technologies, we need to pay close attention to interactions between private firms and public agencies. Examining these interactions is important—for drawing attention not only to what is changing in public education but also to what is not. Private vendors can design sophisticated technologies for generating, storing, and reporting test score data. These technologies can be adopted system-wide. However, from the perspective of school staff, privately designed services and products still can seem very disconnected from the actual challenges of improving instruction.

The professionalization of instructional leadership in the United States: competing values and current tensions

While there has been considerable scholarship on the role of school and district leadership within instructional change, there has been little analysis of the values and orientations that undergird current policy debates about instructional leadership. In this chapter, the author argues the importance of examining instructional leadership in the context of broader political and cultural debates about government and about how society should be organized. She identifies two distinct models of instructional leadership emerging as part of these dynamics: the market model and the polis model.

After the fall: educational contracting in the USA and the global financial crisis

Key legislative objectives for the US Federal educational policy over the past several decades relied heavily on quasi‐market strategies (such as school rating, school closure, the contracting out of schools) as central levers in ‘reforming’ public schools. Using financial data on 11 national for‐profit firms contracting with schools and districts, I argue that for‐profit firms continue to benefit from significant public revenues made available through policies that seek to align public education with market place values. This trend precedes and continues in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2007. Even as public school districts across the USA struggle to pay for core instructional services (reasonable pupil–teacher ratios), for‐profit firms display increased sales in the absence of any evidence of cost savings or improved student achievement – the main objective of the current Federal education policy. These developments press for closer scrutiny of activities of these firms and a more assertive Federal role in evaluating the performance of these firms, many of which rely on public funds to support their operations.

Class Size Reduction in Practice Investigating the Influence of the Elementary School Principal

Class size reduction (CSR) has emerged as a very popular, if not highly controversial, policy approach for reducing the achievement gap. This article reports on findings from an implementation study of class size reduction policy in Wisconsin entitled the Student Achievement Guarantee in Education (SAGE). Drawing on case studies of nine schools, we identify school principals as critical and overlooked influences in the implementation of class size reduction policies. Principals’ influence proved central in three challenge areas: the use of space, serving the needs of diverse learners and building teacher capacity. By comparing the patterns of practice across schools, we have identified school leadership practices and dispositions for CSR that appear related to improving achievement levels.

The New Landscape of Educational Privatization in the Era of NCLB.

PRIVATIZATION is a buzz word in education circles. It covers a broad range of activities, initiatives, programs, and policies, including charter schools, vouchers, and the contracting out of services and management. Educational privatization has a long history in the United States. (1) In the past two decades, much media and scholarly attention has been devoted to the educational management industry. Educational management organizations (EMOs) are comprehensive in nature and include companies that manage entire school systems or entire schools. These firms typically assume full responsibility for all aspects of school operations, including administration, teacher training, and such noninstructional functions as building maintenance, food service, and clerical support. Edison Schools, the brainchild of entrepreneur Chris Whittle, is perhaps the best known of the EMOs. However, educational privatization has implications for public schooling far beyond what is evident in the efforts of todays EMOs. The next chapter of educational privatization is being written by firms of a different kind, which have tended to receive much less attention from researchers and the press but cannot be ignored. These are the specialty-service providers. (2) Specialty-service providers contract to fulfill specific educational functions. Their products and services range from software for tabulating and reporting test scores to the design of instructional materials. In contrast to other forms of privatization, such as vouchers, school districts maintain direct control over funds paid to specialty-service providers and, in theory, control the use of those funds through the design of requests for proposals and the establishment of contracts. No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is just the most recent effort in a decades-long national movement to give the private sector a larger role in school reform. However, NCLB is distinctive in that it requires, not simply permits, some local school systems to contract with private providers for services. Across the U.S., test publishers, software companies, and research firms are swarming to take advantage of the revenues made available by NCLB. Such well-established firms as ETS have been joined by a newer breed of providers whose product design and marketing strategies have been informed by the Internet. These later firms have names such as PowerSchool, Brainade, and Orions Mind. Many begin as start-ups and then, once they demonstrate their profitability, are acquired by conglomerates such as publishing houses. Like their counterparts among the EMOs, the firms gaining prominence under the new educational privatization are drawing on political networks, new technologies, venture capital, and government revenues to become major suppliers of services to school systems. Among the accountability measures faced by schools that fail to meet NCLBs specified goals is the requirement that they offer students the chance to receive after-school remedial instruction from private service providers. It is more than a little ironic that, while NCLB puts real teeth into its accountability policies for schools and districts, it offers little guidance or meaningful sanctions for strengthening the accountability of private firms that are increasingly responsible for providing such tutoring. To analyze the role of NCLB as a driver of current developments in the K-12 education market, we examined market-trend data from the education industry and from annual reports (1997-2004) filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission by publicly traded key suppliers. (3) We identified four dominant domains of contracting with specialty-service providers in the K-12 education sector: test development and preparation, data management and reporting, remedial services, and content-specific programming. In investigating these four domains, we collected data on the roles of both governmental and nongovernmental organizations. …

Improving Access to, Quality, and the Effectiveness of Digital Tutoring in K–12 Education

There is considerable variation in how providers of digital education describe what they do, their services, how students access services, and what is delivered, complicating efforts to accurately assess its impact. We examine program characteristics of digital tutoring providers using rich, longitudinal observational and interview data and then analyze student attendance patterns and effects of digital tutoring on low-income students’ reading and mathematics achievement. We find significant associations between formats, curriculum drivers, tutor locations, and other characteristics of digital providers and their effectiveness in increasing student achievement, as well as differential access by student characteristics, that warrant further investigation as digital providers’ roles in K–12 instruction continue to expand.