Running head: DECIDING TO CHANGE
Deciding to Change: One District’s Quest to
Improve Overall Student Performance
S. David Brazer, Assistant Professor, Education Leadership,
Erin E. Peters, Doctoral Student,
Corresponding Author:
S. David Brazer, Assistant Professor
703-993-3634
Introduction
School
districts wrestling with inadequate student performance as determined by
standardized tests face choices and dilemmas about how to respond. Their
biggest challenge may be having adequate capacity at the school site level to
make changes that will address students’ instructional needs (Elmore, 2004). This
article presents a case study of the
We elaborate our specific purpose for this study below, followed by discussion of significance. After presenting our research questions, we describe the conceptual framework of the study as we apply it to this particular district. Findings and conclusions follow.
This case is part of a larger study of four school districts implementing different changes focused on improving student progress through school. We seek to understand the subtlety and complexity of educational decision making by exploring the relationships among change decisions, how change decisions are communicated to the district at large, and decisions relevant to the implementation of change. This case focuses in particular on the transition from deciding how to address external accountability to implementing a mandated change in all of the district’s elementary schools. It provides one example of how decision making evolves during the process of addressing substandard state-mandated test results.
With a few exceptions (Allison & Zelikow, 1999; Cohen, March, & Olsen,1972), theorists, empirical researchers, and authors oriented toward practice explain leadership and decision making before and after multiple stakeholders are involved, but leave out what happens during the interactions of numerous players as decisions develop (Blase & Blase, 1997; Bolman & Deal, 2003; Fullan, 2001; Sergiovanni, 2001). Empirical research about how decisions are actually made is relatively difficult to find in the general literature related to how organizations function, and practically non-existent in education leadership literature. Studies that do exist are experimental (Gersick, 1989), retrospective, and focused primarily on non-educational organizations (Allison & Zelikow, 1999; Gersick, 1988; Keeney, Renn, & von Winterfeldt., 1987; Rogers, 1995; Weick, 2001; Winn & Keller, 1999; 2001). Decision making theory and retrospective studies are vital for developing the conceptual framework analyzing educational decision making that we present in the next section. But a critical weakness of retrospective studies is the tendency for participants to forget, filter, and rationalize their recollections of how they decided to take specific courses of action (March, 1994). This paper moves beyond past research to demonstrate how decisions evolve by collecting data as those decisions are being made, or shortly thereafter.
Our analysis of the transition from a change decision into implementation provides researchers with a more complete understanding of how schools and districts engage in the change process and what roles various leaders (e.g., superintendents, principals, or teacher leaders) play in the transition between types of decisions. The model we employ and our findings create a jumping off point for additional fieldwork in different types of districts grappling with similar and different issues. The benefits from this and future studies include new practical insights into change, decision making, and leadership in educational settings and model refinement that may inform leadership education and professional development.
To guide our exploration of decision making in the setting of a school district grappling with change intended to improve student achievement, we ask the following research questions:
1. Which stakeholders influence educational decision making in this district?
2. How does stakeholder influence steer decisions in a specific direction?
3. How does communication about a change decision affect the transition into implementation?
The conceptual framework we employ to study these questions is one portion of a larger model we developed to guide this kind of field work (Author, 2006).
In this section we apply a general framework of multiple stakeholder decision making to the specific school district at the center of this study. Through text and figures we show how the model we are using illuminates decision making. We begin with a description of the research context, followed by development of the conceptual framework.
The Rolling Hills
Union School District (RHUSD) is a medium-sized K – 8 district in
In
Back in 2003, the RHUSD board, superintendent, and administration were concerned about the difficulty they were having meeting state standards in English/Language Arts. As a result, they accepted the invitation from a local university’s education leadership program (that we call the Leadership Development Center) to join with school districts from California and other states focused on identifying local needs and learning how to make change effectively. Starting in October 2003, RHUSD began the process of figuring out what kind of change would help schools achieve higher levels of student achievement and emerge out of PI status. One of the authors joined with the school district in the summers of 2004 and 2005 as a participant observer during Leadership Development Center Summer Institutes.
The
The RHUSD
superintendent’s decision to participate in the
In Rolling Hills, the NCLB Team is the most obvious stakeholder group involved in the change decision to improve student achievement. But each of the members of the NCLB Team represents other stakeholders as well. Additionally, stakeholder groups outside the district that exert influence over the superintendent’s ultimate decision include the federal government because of NCLB mandates associated with Title I funding and the California Department of Education as the enforcer of state standards. Potential additional stakeholders include district parents and principals and teachers not serving on the NCLB Team. Figure 1 displays the dynamics inside Superintendent Steve Thomas’ stakeholder web.
[INSERT FIGURE 1 HERE]
During
the first
Other influences on the change decision are less clear. Boards often direct superintendent’s to make change, but in RHUSD their influence is ambiguous. As a result, we have placed a two-headed dashed arrow between the school board and the superintendent to indicate that the change impetus could be going in either or both directions. We are likewise uncertain about the influence of principals and teachers outside of the NCLB Team and have therefore drawn a dashed arrow from those stakeholder groups to the ultimate change decision.
The
NCLB Team overlaps into the circle titled Superintendent’s Change Decision
because this group was established with the specific purpose of helping the
superintendent to determine what change is required and how the change should
be carried out. Inside the NCLB Team, influence potentially flows in a number
of directions. The solid arrow running from the Principals and Teachers box to
the superintendent indicates their direct influence as a result of Superintendent
Thomas inviting their input by creating the team and placing them on it. The Instructional
Services stakeholder group participates in a similar fashion. Both groups may
also exercise influence on the NCLB Team indirectly by promoting their ideas to
Javier Martinez, the Assistant Superintendent for Instructional Services, also
a member of the NCLB Team. We have drawn dashed arrows from the Principals and
Teachers and Instructional Services boxes to
To express the relative strength of influence from any given stakeholder or group, we use the terms power, legitimacy, and urgency, borrowed from early studies of multiple stakeholder decision making (Keeney, et al., 1987; Winn & Keller, 1999; 2001). We define power as control exercised from position, through relationships, or from access to resources (Pfeffer, 1982); legitimacy is the appropriateness for a person to be involved in the decision; and urgency refers to the time pressure an individual may feel to get the decision made. Each stakeholder and group’s priorities for influencing the change decision in a specific direction stems from their personal and collective objectives and the order of importance of those objectives, or their objectives hierarchies (Winn & Keller, 1999; 2001). These labels appear in each stakeholder box either written out or in abbreviated form to convey that power, legitimacy, and urgency and objectives hierarchies are at work throughout Superintendent Thomas’ stakeholder web.
Following
the decision to make change is a chain of decisions required to implement the
desired change. One of the first of these is how to convey to the affected
schools their role in the change decision. Given the
Figure 2 illustrates the collaboration choice Thomas faced. The basic question underlying the choice, and one that RHUSD dealt with explicitly, is: What type of collaboration decision will best create the desired change? How this question is answered can be described by decisions makers’ assumptions about how implementers (i.e., principals and teachers) will respond. Weick’s conception of loose and tight coupling (1976) corresponds to the types of collaboration described above. Choosing Type 1 or Type 2 indicates beliefs that school site actions are relatively tightly coupled to central office decisions—principals and teachers will understand what is expected and do what they are told to do. Choosing Type 3 or Type 4 is consistent with beliefs that the school sites are relatively loosely coupled to central office decisions and therefore require more participation in making the decision in order to understand and be willing to implement it.
[INSERT FIGURE 2 HERE]
When given a particular message about implementing a change, principals make choices of their own. As indicated in the School Site circle of Figure 2, they can embrace the change, pick and choose aspects of the change that they favor, or ignore the message that change must happen. The choices principals make regarding their approaches to implementation are critical to the transition from change decision into implementation. These choices also indicate the accuracy of the superintendent’s assessment of loose or tight coupling between the central office and school sites.
The conceptual framework we employ is intended to capture the dynamic nature of the transition from strategic change decision into implementation. It also helps to focus data collection and analysis, as we discuss in the next section.
This study employs a mixed-method approach to learn who has influence in decision making, what kind of direction that influence takes based on objectives hierarchies, and how both the change decision and the choice about how to communicate that decision evolve.Data collection is carried out through surveys, participant observation, and interviews.
In the spring of 2005, shortly after implementation of the new RHUSD ELD program, surveys were administered to all teachers, administrators, and staff present in regularly scheduled school-wide meetings in all RHUSD elementary schools. Using Likert-type scales, the survey asks respondents to rate the characteristics of people in specific roles, the respondent’s individual school, and the district as a whole according to descriptors of hierarchy, influence in different types of decision making, willingness to change, and implementation tendencies (i.e., embracing, picking and choosing, or ignoring). Members of the NCLB Team were asked not to complete the survey at this time.
To keep their responses separate, and to avoid double-counting specific respondents, NCLB Team members took the same survey in the summer of 2005. All survey responses were subsequently coded according to whether or not the respondent came from the district as a whole or was a member of the NCLB Team.
As
mentioned above, one of the authors was present during
Using an interview protocol tailored to the work of the NCLB Team, interviews with six of the 10 NCLB Team members were conducted in the fall of 2005 and the spring of 2006. Once transcribed, interviews were sent back to participants for verification of accuracy and to provide opportunities to correct any misstatements.
Interview transcripts are coded based on the conceptual framework. A small number of additional codes were derived from patterns that emerged while reviewing transcripts. Interview data was subsequently sorted by codes to search for clear trends across respondents. Sorted data was also gathered into larger themes that emerged as a result of the coding and sorting processes (Maxwell, 2005).
Both authors coded interviews. In the small proportion of cases in which we disagreed about how text should be coded, we worked through differences so that our differing opinions would not be lost and to allow for pattern emergence during later analysis.
We used frequency distributions from our quantitative data to triangulate NCLB Team and district-wide perceptions of who has influence in decision making. For categories with high response rates and that showed some tendency for NCLB Team and district-wide perceptions to differ, we used Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) to determine the magnitude and statistical significance of perception differences noted through frequencies.
Field notes from
To understand how the initial decision to make change was created begins with identifying those involved in the decision and characterizing their influence. Knowing who the decision makers are in RHUSD is simple because the NCLB Team was established for this purpose. Knowing who inside that process is influential is more subtle. Although the NCLB Team is a collaborative venture, influence within this group plays out in traditionally hierarchical ways.
There is little doubt in RHUSD that some kind of change was needed as 14 of the 15 elementary schools were unable to meet AYP standards. In the traditional hierarchy established by the California Department of Education and reinforced by NCLB, RHUSD was told that student achievement was insufficient. This message has been clear at least from October 2003 when the district started on its journey to change some aspect of instruction through the present when seven elementary schools are in PI status. There is no doubt that this situation has created a sense of urgency within the district—urgency that gradually focused on English language learners.
By engaging in the
To answer our first research question, Which stakeholders influence educational decision making in this district? we begin with the NCLB Team because they are charged by the superintendent to help determine the direction for the district’s effort to improve student achievement. All members of the NCLB Team whom we interviewed agree that this group works together collaboratively. When pressed, however, some members acknowledge that some people on the NCLB Team have greater influence than others.
When
the NCLB Team was first formed, what they would decide was not known. Through
the process facilitated by the
[T]here were ten of us on the team and I think we had about 15 different ideas. ELD showed up more than once, but it took discussion for us to whittle it down. . . . [T]here was a long list of goals that everybody had. So, initially it didn’t take long to get to ELD as the consensus of where we ought to go, but that wasn’t where everybody’s mind was.
The picture of collaboration toward consensus regarding an ELD focus that Superintendent Thomas paints is supported by the impressions of one of the principals on the NCLB Team.
[W]e’re one group united. I don’t feel that it’s been top down or vice versa. . . . I would say . . . as a group we came up with the goal all together. It was like, based on everything that we had jotted down, we came up with one specific target area for our district, and that was the area of English language development.
The collaborative nature of the group is further supported by our observations of their functioning during Leadership Development Center Summer Institutes. We found that all members were invited to contribute to all discussions and most took advantage of this opportunity. Decisions such as the focus on ELD were allowed to evolve slowly over several days and many discussions with no evidence of any one individual overtly pushing a specific agenda.
The overall collaborative nature of the NCLB Team is somewhat nuanced by the fact that different members are named as being more influential than others. Respondents were able to categorize this influence according to power, legitimacy, and urgency that derives from both position and actions within that position. A central office administrator explains:
Well, I always think that the superintendent has more power than others just because he’s the superintendent. . . . Even on the NCLB Team, it’s hard to put that aside. We try to look at every member just as a member of the team . . . . I respect what [the superintendent’s] position is, and so I give him that power. I don’t think I have ever felt like he imposes that power.
Seeing power in the upper echelon district leadership is also characteristic of another central office administrator.
Certainly I think that people look to the superintendent because he’s the boss. So, that would be legitimate in that it’s appropriate for him to be making decisions because he’s at the highest level of the district. . . . [T]here’s Javier who would be next because he’s the assistant superintendent and the boss of most of us that are on the team. . . . [C]ertainly when he [Assistant Superintendent Martinez] says something, we’re probably not going to say, “Oh, no, I don’t think we should do that.” It’s likely that people are going to say, “Ok, well let’s talk about how we’re going to do that.”
Thomas acknowledges that he holds a position of power and he spoke about how he tries to mitigate this when working with the NCLB Team in order to preserve the collaborative nature of the group.
Are there people who have varying levels of influence and who has more influence than others? Well, certainly I do. There’s a culture here of, if the superintendent says it, then we try and do it. So, I have to watch to be sure that I’m not overbearing or over-aggressive or whatever because there’s still that element of fear in the culture that says if the superintendent wants it, we’re going to do it.
Thomas also recognizes that other members of the NCLB Team have influence based on their expertise and actions (what we refer to as legitimacy) and the power of their positions.
I think Emily, who is our con[solidated] app[lication] person who is at large our number one idea person. And the fact that she controls all the resources that people have, for the most part, because she’s the categorical person who has the categorical dollars that people do all the fun and extra things with. There’s certainly influence there. Certainly our union president [Betsy Tambellini] has influence. And fortunately she doesn’t use her influence in a union way, she uses it in a teacher way because she is first and foremost a teacher. . . . And she has influence and power in the group because of the culture around our teachers’ union here and how principals used to get fired if enough teachers rose up in protest.
The NCLB Team in RHUSD collaborates in a manner that allows each member to be heard and to provide his or her input to any issue being considered. But influence within the team is not equal. Based on the perceptions of NCLB Team members, individual influence is varied and somewhat shifting. Individuals who bring greater position power to the NCLB Team (such as the superintendent, assistant superintendent, and union president) are perceived to have greater influence within the group. Noticeably absent from interview responses regarding influence are the principals and the teacher who is not the union president who are members of the NCLB Team. They were active participants during NCLB Team discussions, but they are not mentioned as having influence within the group.
District wide surveys reveal a wider perception of influence consistent with that from inside the NCLB Team. When asked to rate the influence of various positions on change decisions on a Likert-type scale, 86.6% (N = 359) of respondents rated the superintendent 4 or 5 (5 is the most influential and 1 is the least influential). Principals had greater influence attributed them than appears to be the case inside the NCLB Team (60.5% [N = 362] rated principals 4 or 5). Teachers, on the other hand, are perceived to have very little influence (22.6% [N = 367] rated teachers 4 or 5 and 50.7% rated teachers 1 or 2). Perceptions both inside and outside the NCLB Team appear to be that those who hold positions near the top of the RHUSD hierarchy exercise the greatest influence over decision making, but the NCLB Team itself provides evidence of a willingness to engage in some degree of collaboration. This is not unusual for the school district because there are other collaborative committees with a long history, such as the ELD curriculum committee that plays a role in the NCLB Team’s decision making.
In October 2003, the NCLB Team grappled with the decision about where to place their school improvement efforts. Having settled on ELD, in the summer of 2004 they set themselves the tasks of figuring out how the new ELD program should look and how to make the transition from change decision into implementation.
When we asked interview respondents to reflect on their objectives and to place those objectives into priority order, we found that although there was strong agreement regarding the development of a new ELD program, there was wide variation in what members of the NCLB Team hoped would be accomplished through that program. Superintendent Thomas and Director of Curriculum and Instruction, Mary Schultz, when asked about the objectives they brought into the process, identified group processes such as analyzing problems, using the NCLB Team to create and carry out major initiatives, getting the district to move forward in new ways, and achieving consistency throughout the district as being at the top of their objectives hierarchies. Other respondents tended to focus on specific initiatives for ELD. Assistant Superintendent Martinez, Principal Gomez, and Susan Martin, a central office administrator, were much more focused on students making progress through the ELD levels so they could achieve proficiency.
We neither
observed nor heard about much effort to work through the varying objectives
hierarchies to achieve clear and consistent goals. Instead, the NCLB Team
consulted the standing curriculum committee for ELD to determine what the
program should look like. Members of the team agreed that a basic structure
should be put in place at all of the elementary schools and that there would be
some implementation flexibility within that structure. The NCLB Team, using
input from the ELD curriculum committee, decided that all schools would engage
in ELD instruction a minimum of four days per week, a minimum of 30 minutes per
day carved out of the already established two and one half hours of language
arts instruction. Students are to be homogenously grouped by ELD levels (as
determined by the
The ELD curriculum committee, embedded in the Curriculum and Instruction Department and under the supervision of Director Mary Schultz, appears to be a highly influential stakeholder group. The influence derives from the legitimacy bestowed on them by subject matter expertise. The NCLB Team adopted the ELD curriculum committee’s recommended program design and placed students progressing through ELD levels above all other objectives. This latent objective among many others was activated and made pre-eminent because of the boost it received from the ELD committee.
Communicating to schools how the new ELD program should work was a matter of considerable discussion within the NCLB Team. One of the common fears the group identified when they first began in October 2003 was that of follow through. Superintendent Thomas describes how they worked through this when reflecting on their discussion of implementation strategies in the summer of 2004:
For our team, the time that you were with us, we were wrestling mightily with this whole issue. Part of the reason we were wrestling is because this district has historically called itself the Burger King district. Everybody does it their way. . . . And it’s also a district that has had an overlay of fear. Fear of these dire consequences . . . that something bad is going to happen if we mandated something from the top. And yet I felt comfortable with it. . . . My thought was, if we’re on the right track, everybody understands what the issue is, we’ve thought it out carefully, then there’s not gonna be a problem with acceptance of what it is we’re asking or telling people to do.
To transition from
making a change decision into implementation, the NCLB
Team decided to tell the schools that they are required to implement the specific
structure of the new ELD program. This directive became known in the language
of the NCLB Team as “The Mandate” and is something of a source of pride because
it seems to communicate strength from the central office and an understanding
of the right way to get things done in the district. A central office
administrator describes the importance of using district hierarchy to bolster
implementation:
I think it was very important that it came out from the top. It’s like the first time . . . it ever really happened that way. “You shall do this.” Then people ran with the ball.
Despite the NCLB Team’s support of The Mandate, it appears to have put the NCLB Team in something of an internal contradiction. The group engaged in collaborative processes that Superintendent Thomas and others carefully preserved as Type 3 decision making—all acted as peers for the decisions about where to focus, how the ELD program should be structured, and how the decision should be communicated to the school sites. They clearly value their own group process as a means to making sound choices. But they also achieved consensus to issue The Mandate that prohibits the schools from engaging in similar processes regarding implementation, communicating a Type 1 decision.
Type 1 communication in the form of The Mandate suggests that the NCLB Team perceives the relationship between the central office and the school sites as tightly coupled. The validity of this belief is confirmed in survey data that indicates respondents’ perceptions of how various roles in the district implement change. Respondents were asked to describe how various people in the school system implement change. The response rate for this question was low (just over one fourth of total participants), probably indicating that many respondents did not know how to assess others’ implementation tendencies. Nevertheless, the responses we did receive are quite uniform. The superintendent, principals and teachers are all perceived by more than 85 percent of respondents to implement in a manner that embraces change. Other options on the survey included picking and choosing which aspects of change to implement or ignoring change. These results are also consistent with Superintendent Thomas’ belief quoted above that when given a directive from the superintendent, most district staff will do their best to implement it.
Beliefs about tight coupling notwithstanding, The Mandate choice is a curious outcome for two reasons: a) Leadership Development Center beliefs and processes are all focused on the importance of collaboration for achieving commitment to important strategic decisions; and b) the NCLB Team did not recognize how their own collaborative experiences might enhance site level implementation of the ELD program, an initiative they value above all other current district efforts. Having been careful to balance power, legitimacy, and urgency to foster participation within the NCLB Team, the Mandate communicated the power, legitimacy, and urgency of the superintendent and the central office as supreme in the district with little regard to involving principals and teachers in key decisions that would make the ELD program work.
We turn next to the final research question, How does communication about a change decision affect the transition into implementation? Mandating the ELD program from the central office via the NCLB Team is an essentially bureaucratic approach to program implementation. This is but one of many alternative choices that could have been made in the transition from change decision to implementation. It appears to be driven by both an attempt to overcome the central office’s reputation for being unclear in its expectations and because of a sense of urgency emanating from the situation in general and from the superintendent specifically.
Urgency derives in part from the district’s previous lack of specific, focused attention to ELD instruction. Surprising though it may seem in a district with over half of its student population designated ESOL, RHUSD had no actual ELD program prior to the Mandate. Director of Curriculum and Instruction, Mary Schultz, explains:
Interviewer: In your opinion, was there a need to change the ELD instruction in the district prior to the NCLB [Team’s] taking it on?
Schultz: Um hmm. Definitely there was a need to change. . . . There was a need to have ELD instruction because we didn’t see that ongoing, even though we’ve always had materials and strategies and teachers on special assignment.
Interviewer: Mmm, wow! So you just stated that in the past there wasn’t even instruction happening in ELD for English language learners.
Schultz: Right.
Although it may have been assumed that ELD instruction would take place as appropriate within regular language arts classes, whatever was happening was judged to be inadequate in light of schools being unable to meet AYP criteria with the English language learner subgroup.
A
situation that had been developing for several years as the language minority
population of the school district grew achieved a critical sense of importance by
October 2003. It may have developed on its own, but NCLB and its implementation
by the State of
We are on such an accelerated pace process wise, from initiation of product to testing product to determining outcome of product because of the [requirement that] by the year 2014 in this country all kids will be at a Proficiency or higher level. (central office administrator)
He [Superintendent Thomas] has always mentioned there’s a sense of urgency. We don’t have time to waste and we need to make sure that our English language learners progress. (principal)
[T]he superintendent [conveys] as far as, you know, the urgency. “Ok, we’ve got to move ahead. We have to address the fact that we’re going to be in PI. We have to plan this . . . quickly.” (central office administrator)
Superintendent Thomas verifies the validity of the others’ beliefs about him:
[W]e’re still primarily in the NCLB Team focused on the English language learner issue since . . . if we could resolve our English language learner problem, our test score problems would go away. It still remains the single largest issue for us.
We suspect that it was the underlying sense of urgency that motivated the NCLB team to take the bureaucratic approach of The Mandate. This helped them to feel more confident that implementation would be taken seriously and that English language learners’ instructional needs would be addressed. The strategic choices embedded in The Mandate, appear to have some unanticipated consequences, however. Implementation barriers encountered by RHUSD help to elaborate our answer to the third research question.
Two of The Mandate’s three central provisions could be carried out without any support from outside the school site—30 minutes of ELD instruction at least four days per week and sorting students for ELD instruction according to their level as determined by the CELDT. Some foot dragging at some sites created situations in which the routines of moving students into homogenous groups for 30 minutes of instruction were not well planned, but logistical problems were relatively simple to resolve. This was not the case, however, with classroom materials and professional development.
One aspect of The Mandate to which the NCLB Team agreed was that all schools would use materials currently in the district for ELD instruction. This choice was driven by the fact that the state was in the process of adopting new series for ELD instruction and the district did not want to “jump the gun” and buy a series that might not make the state approved list. Waiting to see what the state would adopt exacerbated a shortage of student materials created by student population growth and the recent opening of a new elementary school. A central office administrator explains the classroom materials issue in detail:
[W]e were waiting
for an approved list by the State of
Recognizing that prior to November 2004 there had been no district-wide ELD instruction, providing professional development to teachers seems to be a logical early step in the implementation process. Members of the NCLB Team disagree to some extent in their perspectives on what has happened with regard to professional development, but they tend to agree that teachers have not received adequate discussion, training, and feedback opportunities to assist them in their implementation of the new ELD program. One of the participating principals perceives a high need for professional development for both teachers and administrators in order to achieve successful implementation, but she does not see the NCLB Team or central office departments following through to meet this need. Emily Harris’ perspective is a little different in that she believes professional development has been available, but that it was a flaw to conduct it at the central office. She has attempted to compensate for missing materials and low participation in professional development by developing a website that explains to teachers how to use one of the available language arts series to meet English language learners’ needs at various levels.
Perhaps the most substantial barriers to implementation are time and attention. Using a bureaucratic model for district functioning means that The Mandate requires careful monitoring and inspection in order to be fully implemented. This need is foreshadowed in survey data indicating that the district is perceived to operate in a hierarchical manner with over half of respondents giving the district the two most hierarchical ratings. But NCLB Team members are themselves aware that administrators must inspect teachers’ work to be certain that The Mandate is being implemented.
Interviewer: Who do you see as the key players for implementing the ELD program?
Assistant Superintendent Martinez: Administrators.
Interviewer: Why is that?
Principal Gomez agrees with
[T]hey have set
times that they have decided as a grade level. . . . They’ve given me the times.
They’ve given me what levels they have . . . . I have their times and it says
A central office administrator speaks to the difficulty of sustaining adequate monitoring over time.
As far a the nitty gritty, folks getting into classrooms, seeing how it’s actually going, spending a lot of time looking at data and that type of thing, we haven’t gotten to that point yet. I think we have made some major strides. Sometimes I think it’s one of those priorities that goes away and comes back and goes away and comes back.
The need for monitoring is also emphasized through some evidence of frustration in the fall of 2005 as the second academic year of implementation began.
Steve was a little upset because . . . [he would] just assume that you did leveling last year . . . as soon as you’re ready and you get your groups ready, you’re going to start leveling again. Well, some people were saying, “Well, what’s the date?” He [Superintendent Thomas] was saying, “Well, what do you mean, date?” “Well, what’s the date you want us to start?” Well, it’s not about that. (Mary Schultz)
In addition to the need for principals to monitor how implementation is proceeding at their sites, members of the NCLB Team believe that the Team needs to follow through to be sure the ELD priority does not fizzle. Harris has visited each of the elementary schools and engaged faculties in discussions about the ELD program, but other forms of follow through appear to be hit or miss. Coordination of the monitoring function may be falling apart as the NCLB Team finds it more and more difficult to meet. Each researcher visit to RHUSD in the fall of 2005 and the spring of 2006 revealed evidence that monthly NCLB Team meetings were being cancelled because of other meetings pre-empting them and/or because key members were unable to attend.
The critical bureaucratic choice to issue The Mandate appears to have triggered bureaucratic responses from many principals and teachers, based on the vignettes revealed in interviews. The benefits of this choice are rapid implementation at most sites, but they come with a cost. Principal and teacher responses to being told what to do for ELD instruction tend to be to wait to be told what to do in the face of unforeseen difficulties or even just a new school year. Once again RHUSD finds itself struggling with follow through as central office personnel fret over inconsistent monitoring of implementation.
RHUSD made a critical decision about how to teach English language learners under intense accountability pressure. District leadership collaboratively decided the instructional focus, program design, and how to communicate the change to schools. The result is a central office mandate for uniform ELD instruction in all of the district’s elementary schools. As the change decision and transition into implementation unfolded, those in formal leadership positions had the greatest influence on decision making, leaders were persuaded by ELD curriculum committee members regarding the best structure for the ELD program, and the NCLB Team achieved consensus that the change would be communicated to all elementary schools as a central office mandate.
Leading school districts and schools is a tricky balancing act in which superintendents, principals, and teacher leaders find themselves compromising among accountability to outside authorities, improved student achievement, involving multiple stakeholders in decision making processes, and the need to implement change effectively. All are worthy of attention, but each factor can contradict one or more of the others. In Rolling Hills, accountability to state and federal authorities appears to have motivated a hard look at how ESOL students were being taught. The search for improved instruction was collaborative and deliberate, and took into account the views of the ELD curriculum committee. But the search was constrained by the urgency imposed by accountability and resulted in a mandate that generated implementation barriers. The structure is simple—a minimum of 30 minutes at least four times per week of ELD instruction in homogenous groups—but what happens in that designated time was somewhat unclear at the outset of implementation because of a lack of materials and professional development. Based on the most recent visit to RHUSD, the materials appears to have been addressed, but professional development remains sporadic. Critical to The Mandate is monitoring implementation, an issue that appears not to have been thoroughly anticipated and one that continues to lack clear answers. RHUSD may not have the manpower or other resources necessary to follow through as they would like.
Multiple stakeholder input is valued in RHUSD, but only as far as official committees are concerned. The transition choice of The Mandate shut down implementation options that might have mitigated the materials and professional development problems that surfaced in the first year. Data from the first year of implementation suggest that adjustment in the program is needed because all but one of the elementary schools had fewer students improve by one or more CELDT levels in the first year of implementation than they did in the previous year.
Districts similar to RHUSD that serve challenging student populations face a difficult dilemma as they strive to meet accountability demands. On the one hand, the value of collaboration to achieve the most appropriate change and sensible program design is commonly understood. On the other hand, districts such as RHUSD do not have time to spend in long deliberations because NCLB benchmarks keep coming in anticipation of all students achieving proficiency by 2014. When districts compromise the conflicting demands of this dilemma as RHUSD has, they appear likely to end up with potentially good instructional choices that are weakly implemented because of time and resource constraints. Despite their best efforts, they may end up no further ahead on meeting state standards and NCLB demands.
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Research that remains to be done, and that we anticipate conducting in RHUSD and other districts, includes learning more about principals’ and teachers’ actual implementation modes. We wish to learn if they are indeed embracing the ELD program, or if their implementation shows signs of picking and choosing and/or ignoring. Furthermore, whatever the implementation profile, we anticipate tracking student achievement progress to determine if ELD students are moving up the levels as hoped for in many participants’ stated objectives.
Close scrutiny of decision making processes and outcomes yields helpful information to education researchers and leaders alike. As more is learned about how decisions evolve in educational contexts, researchers will be better able to predict results from various choices. Using the RHUSD example, collaboration at the NCLB Team level appears to have created a strong commitment by all members to the ELD program they had a hand in crafting. But that commitment was greatly diluted by the choice to issue The Mandate that precluded the development of a similar commitment by principals and teachers. By identifying RHUSD’s transition choice as an essentially bureaucratic one and by pointing out the bureaucratic responses at school sites, district leaders are able to analyze the degree to which their choices yield the outcomes they desire. If not, then the conceptual framework and empirical results we present suggest decision making points where leaders could make adjustments that might yield different outcomes.
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