Sarah L. Woulfin

Equity-Oriented Reform Amid Standards-Based Accountability: A Qualitative Comparative Analysis of an Intermediary’s Instructional Practices

Intermediary organizations increasingly provide support for schools serving marginalized students. Some attribute this trend to growing ideological support for market-based strategies to further the public good. This article investigates one intermediary that marketed equity-oriented instructional goals for schools serving high numbers of students of color and English Learners. Drawing on critical policy studies and political science, we analyze its behavior amid a high-stakes accountability environment, its reasons for adopting certain reforms, and the consequences for instruction. We use qualitative comparative analysis to show how policy forces shaped reforms and content in its schools, but not pedagogy specific to students of color or English Learners. We discuss the implications for the research on intermediaries and the democratic control of public education.

The Structure and Substance of Teachers' Opportunities to Learn about Teacher Evaluation Reform: Promise or Pitfall for Equity?.

ABSTRACT Despite growing momentum to overhaul teacher evaluation policies and practices, scant research examines how educators at the street level of such reform—principals and teachers—make sense of them, and almost no research examines the implications of current evaluation reforms for equity. This article provides findings based on a study of 14 districts implementing a new teacher evaluation policy in Connecticut. It focuses on how principals shaped teachers’ opportunities to learn about the new policy. We find that the majority of teachers’ opportunities to learn were formal and in whole group or one-on-one formats. We find important differences in the quantity and quality of learning opportunities at the district level, with districts serving greater shares of low-income students, students of color, and English language learners generally offering teachers fewer and lower quality opportunities to learn about the new reform than their counterparts. As such, this article builds on prior research illustrating the potential of new evaluation systems to exacerbate inequities and raises important cautions regarding the extent to which the unprecedented teacher evaluation reforms (currently underway) may exacerbate inequities among school districts.

District Leaders' Framing of Educator Evaluation Policy.

Purpose: Educator evaluation systems have recently undergone scrutiny and reform, and district and school leaders play a key role in interpreting and enacting these systems. This article uses framing theory to understand district leaders’ interpretation and advancement of a state’s new educator evaluation policy. Research Methods: The article draws on qualitative data from 14 Connecticut districts to highlight the relationship between state policy, district leadership, and the ideas about educator evaluation making their way into schools. We employed frame analysis to systematically analyze interview data from district leaders responsible for evaluation reform. Findings: District leaders’ frames addressed two distinct elements of the evaluation policy: accountability and development. Overall, district leaders tended to emphasize the accountability aspects of the state’s new evaluation system—SEED (System for Educator Evaluation and Development). Second, we find that district leaders’ frames predominately issued solutions and advice regarding the implementation of the evaluation policy. These leaders rarely enforced their framing of SEED. Finally, we present a vignette to highlight how one elementary school principal encountered frames within his district context and elected to respond to the ideas and rules of the new evaluation system. Implications for Research and Practice: This article’s findings encourage additional research on the role of district leaders in translating state policy into school-level change. This article also highlights the need for district-level actors to have a deep understanding of current policy as well as the skills to frame policy messages to diverse audiences.

Reading and Dyslexia Legislation: Analytic Techniques and Findings on the Framing of Dyslexia

In this chapter, we review recent legislation and analyze transcripts of public hearings and associated legislative documents using frame analysis to understand how reading has been constructed as a policy problem. We then engage in a discourse analysis of frames by examining constructions of reading as a policy problem and the positioning of stakeholders made relevant within written testimony. We then discuss the various constructs of reading/reading difficulty in legislative documents within a single state and discuss their implications for implementation and future policymaking.

Controlled Autonomy: Novice Principals' Schema for District Control and School Autonomy.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to gain insights into how a group of novice principals, all in schools that deployed principles of autonomy as mechanisms for improvement, conceptualized what the authors label “controlled autonomy” – a condition in which school leaders are expected to both make site-based decisions and be accountable to district oversight. The study aims to support more effective interactions between school and district leaders around controlled autonomy to increase performance. Design/methodology/approach Using schema as a framework to guide the inquiry, this paper uses qualitative methods and interviewing in particular to explore the questions of interest. Seven novice principals were each interviewed three times over the year each interview lasting approximately one hour (n=21). Data were analyzed thematically using both inductive and deductive coding techniques. Findings Findings show that principals tended to group potential district supports into four categories: operations, instruction, advocacy, and vision and their perceptions regarding the balance between their and the district’s control over activities in each category was dynamic, varied and dependent on views relating to issues as broad as values alignment to perceptions of bureaucratic efficiency. Research limitations/implications Because of the small sample size and methodological approach, it may be inappropriate to generalize the findings across all controlled autonomy contexts. Further research in additional settings is encouraged to support the proposed findings. Practical implications This paper has a number of implications for districts and school leaders. Among these is the need for districts to better articulate the parameters of controlled autonomy and for school leaders to receive more and more effective training and support to effectively utilize autonomy as a mechanism for reform. Originality/value This work fills a gap in the research regarding on how principals conceptualize controlled autonomy or, more specifically, how they view what school autonomy should look like relative to district control and is this paper’s focus. It also provides insights into practice and potential means to enhance a growing, but so far unevenly implemented and under performing reform initiative (i.e. controlled autonomy).

Triggering Change: An Investigation of the Logics of Turnaround Leadership

Principals are positioned at the center of school improvement. In the United States, current turnaround reforms target the principalship as a key lever for change. This article uses institutional theory to explore the logics of turnaround leadership that steer principals and their work. Specifically, we draw on qualitative interview data from a phenomenological study of a cohort of aspiring turnaround principals in a northeastern state to explain how educators invoked and enacted four logics of turnaround leadership. We found that, in addition to engaging with the previously identified logics of instructional, managerial, and social justice leadership, participants invoked a new logic that we name “triggering change.” This logic focused squarely on building capacity via positive relationships and shaping culture as mechanisms for whole school improvement. By depicting aspiring principals’ conceptions and negotiations of these four logics, we contribute to the literature on turnaround policy and leadership with implications for turnaround leader development.

The terrain of intermediary organizations’ professional development offerings

Abstract In the current educational policy context, the call for accountability has intensified efforts to raise the capacity of educators. As professional development (PD) is increasingly leveraged to improve student outcomes, state and district administrators seek ways to provide affordable and effective opportunities for educator growth. Intermediary organizations, such as Regional Centers (RCs), have taken on the task of providing PD. In this qualitative study of three RCs, we discuss the nature of their PD commodities across a northeastern state. Our analysis of RCs’ PD offerings revealed patterns in their approaches to PD. In their attempts to serve the needs of districts, each RC focused on teachers as their target audience, yet there was much variability in the format and content of sessions. A relatively small number of sessions reflected best practices asserted by research. These findings have important implications for the role of intermediary organizations as policy actors and for state and district leaders in identifying and selecting PD supportive of adult learning and school improvement.

Sailing Across the Divide: Challenges to the Transfer of Teacher Leadership:

Responding to questions on how to develop and support teacher leaders, this article draws on sensemaking theory to discuss teacher leaders’ transfer of ideas from Developing Exemplary Educators (DEE), an intermediary organization. We share findings grounded in qualitative interview data from teachers and administrators in two urban schools. After describing the elements of teacher leadership that teacher leaders reported transferring into practice, we present the structures, norms, and factors enabling and constraining teacher leadership.

Editors’ Introduction: Organizational Perspectives on Leadership Development

Leadership matters for school improvement (Leithwood & Jantzi, 2008). With the goal of improving outcomes for teachers and students, district and school leaders engage in many types of activities (Grissom, Loeb, & Master, 2013; Rigby, 2014). Moreover, educational leaders work inside complex organizations. Although districts typically operate in a bureaucratic manner, schools are framed as functioning in a loosely coupled manner (Coburn, 2004; Meyer & Rowan, 1977). Inside of these organizations, educational leaders bear responsibility for making decisions, building the capacity of other educators, and motivating change (Coburn, 2006; Gabriel & Woulfin, 2017; Grissom et al., 2013). To navigate the structures of school systems and attain challenging goals, leaders benefit from ongoing professional learning. Leadership development can occur in formal and informal ways. For instance, a formal coaching relationship can offer a new leader ideas and support that results in growth. And, informal networks formed during preparation programs can also enable development. Policy makers, reformers, and system leaders devote resources and attention to raising the capacity of educational leaders. However, many questions remain about how to develop and support leaders for the realities of school improvement. These include questions such as follows: How are districts and schools developing educators’ leadership skills and strategies? What are the experiences of aspiring and current leaders engaged in leadership preparation? And, in what ways do organizational conditions influence leadership preparation? This special issue addresses these questions in five articles that use organizational concepts to advance our understanding of the nexus of leadership, professional learning, and districts and schools as organizations. The articles grapple with the nature of leadership development for teacher leaders, aspiring and early-career principals, district instructional leaders, and superintendents; these leaders are situated at different levels of the education system and hold different types of power and authority. Each article is paired with a practitioner response, delivering reflective voices from current district and school leaders. Taken together, this issue tackles relevant, crucial questions concerning preservice and in-service leader preparation in districts and schools. Weiner and Woulfin apply concepts from sensemaking theory to explain how and why teacher leaders transferred ideas from professional development (PD) provided by an intermediary organization. This piece draws needed attention to the nature of 785535 JRLXXX10.1177/1942775118785535Journal of Research on Leadership EducationWoulfin and Kruse editorial2018

From Tinkering to Going “Rogue”: How Principals Use Agency When Enacting New Teacher Evaluation Systems:

Despite major changes to teacher evaluation since 2009, scant research examines how principals enact these policies. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 44 principals in 13 Connecticut districts, we use structure-agency theory to characterize how principals improvised when implementing the state evaluation model. We find that principals’ use of discretion varied across the system’s components, took different forms, and appeared aimed at varied outcomes. Particular forms of discretion supported the system’s goals, while others likely undermined them. Principals tended to use their discretion to further the system’s development aims as opposed to its accountability goals. Our findings have implications for the enactment of teacher evaluation policy, the roles of district administrators, and principals’ work as instructional leaders in an accountability context.