The Restructuring of Educational Organizations: From Ceremonial Rules to Technical Ceremonies

CitationYurkofsky, Maxwell M. 2017. The Restructuring of Educational Organizations: From Ceremonial Rules to Technical Ceremonies. Qualifying Paper, Harvard Graduate School of Education.

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The Restructuring of Educational Organizations: From Ceremonial Rules to

Technical Ceremonies

Qualifying Paper

Submitted by

Maxwell Yurkofsky

April, 2017

2

Acknowledgements

This essay began as a final paper I wrote for Ebony Bridwell-Mitchell’s institutional change

class in the Spring of 2014. Throughout that semester, I benefitted tremendously from

conversations with Ebony in office hours where she helped me situate my argument in the

broader field of institutional research in education. Over the past three years, I have

rewritten this essay as a proposal, an outline, a comprehensive literature review, an AERA

paper that focuses explicitly on the case of school choice, and finally, as this qualifying paper.

During this revision process, I received many rounds of high-level feedback from Jal Mehta

and David Cohen that helped to improve the strength and originality of my argument. I

received more in-depth feedback from Jal, David, and Ebony on this final draft of the essay,

particularly around the theory I draw on to frame my argument and the implications of my

argument for research and practice. I have revised the introduction, theoretical framework,

and conclusion as a result of this feedback. Finally, Ebony also helped me in cutting about

3,000 words from this essay.

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Table of Contents

Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 4

Theoretical Framework ........................................................................................................ 7

(Still) Valuing Inputs in an Era of Accountability ................................................................. 9

Clashes with Environmental Pressures, Beliefs, and Technical Demands ........................... 12

Using Imperfect Means to Monitor, Support, and Encourage Adoption ............................ 21

Principal Dilemmas ............................................................................................................ 28

Conclusion ......................................................................................................................... 32

References .......................................................................................................................... 36

4

Introduction

A common theme of school reform efforts over the past many decades is the difficulty of

spurring substantive improvements in teachers’ underlying practice in spite of structural or

organizational changes (Mehta, 2013; Tyack & Tobin, 1994). But organizational theorists

have noted that this quality of schools—though frustrating for reformers and

policymakers—should not be surprising, and actually is key to survival given schools’

surrounding environment and the work educators engage in. Karl Weick (1976) famously

labeled schools as “loosely coupled systems,” where various elements of organizations are

less related to or capable of influencing one another (e.g., administrators influence on

teachers, intentions influence on outcomes, formal structures influence on instructional

practice), arguing that while loose coupling may stifle systemic efforts at changing schools, it

also provides schools with a number of advantages (e.g., stability, autonomy for educators to

adapt to local needs). Meyer and Rowan (1977) also saw decoupling, particularly of formal

structures and instructional activities, as a key mechanism for survival in light of the fact that

schools are subject to a number of pressures from the environment that are not always

consistent with one another or the technical demands of instruction. To remain legitimate in

the eyes of relevant stakeholders (e.g., local, state, and federal government, parents) while

not compromising instructional quality, schools ceremonially conformed to many of these

expectations, intentionally buffering the work of instruction from scrutiny.

New institutional theory emerged from Meyer and Rowan’s (1977) work and has since

prompted educational researchers to pay attention to how various regulative, normative, and

cultural-cognitive institutions in the broader environment (Burch, 2007; Scott, 2013) may

influence organizational and individual action (Coburn, 2004; 2005; Hallett, 2010); how such

5

pressures from the environment might intersect with the technical demands of

organizational work (Rowan, 1990; Oliver, 1991); and the differences between ceremonial

adoption and more substantive implementation of practices in light of these various

pressures (Coburn, 2004; Bromley, Hwang, & Powell, 2012).

However, recent reforms have caused many to question the continued relevance of new

institutional theory to educational contexts. At the time of these early theorizations, most

policies affecting schools focused on educational inputs—such as teacher certification,

student course-taking, and student designations—rather than outputs, and as such legitimacy

often stemmed from looking and feeling like a school rather than actually supporting student

learning (Meyer & Rowan, 1978). Since then, policies have shifted to prioritize educational

outputs (e.g., student achievement, revenue from student enrollment), which has led to

teachers and administrators paying much more attention to educational policies, classroom

practice, and student outcomes (e.g., Spillane et al., 2002; 2011). As a result, many who have

recently applied new institutional theory to educational contexts have argued that ceremonial

adoption and loose coupling no longer characterize educational organizations (Bromley &

Powell, 2012; Spillane, 2002; Spillane & Kenney, 2012), and that such accountability systems

are producing “real conformity” (Rowan, 2006).

Unfortunately, institutional perspectives on educational organizations seem to be changing at

a faster pace than schools themselves. Though schools are certainly more responsive to

educational policies than in the past, there is still a wealth of literature documenting how

these responses often leave underlying instructional practice intact. School leaders competing

for enrollment focus on marketing and cream skimming students over academic

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improvement (Jabbar, 2015; Jennings, 2010); schools facing accountability sanctions invest in

test prep, particularly for “bubble students”, rather than improved teaching (Jennings, 2005),

and schools and districts implementing new standards rarely provide the necessary learning

experiences for teachers to change their practice in the intended ways (Porter, 2016; Swars &

Chestnutt, 2016). Indeed, over the past decade NAEP scores have remained flat, despite this

flurry of new reforms. Without a clear framework for understanding why these kinds of

responsive but subversive actions take place, it will be difficult to design or implement

policies that don’t succumb to the same unintended consequences.

As such, this essay will argue that new institutional theory can, with a more targeted analytic

gaze, provide a helpful lens in understanding why these accountability-oriented reforms are

not inducing the kinds of instructional improvements many hoped for. In particular, I will

argue that what many see as tighter coupling between policy and practice often extends only

to the surface-level aspects of work. In these cases, teachers and school leaders may face

coercive, mimetic, and normative isomorphic pressure (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983) to adopt

those practices that are most visible, while facing less pressure to change below-the-surface

aspects of their behavior. Although such a distinction may seem subtle, this ceremonial

engagement with the technical core of teachers’ work may be difficult to detect and

discouraging for policymakers, administrators, and teachers alike. I will also lay out the

conditions under which these technical ceremonies may arise—when: a) educators face pressure

to adopt specific instructional or organizational practices; b) such practices conflict with i)

other pressures in the environment ii) educators’ beliefs, values, or current approach to their

work or iii) the technical demands of their work; and c) when there is a gap between what is

intended and what is supported, monitored, or enforced. Finally, I will highlight how school

7

leaders may, as a result of increased monitoring and accountability, in particular face

conditions that support implementing environmental demands in ways that discourage

teachers’ substantive engagement.

Theoretical Framework

New institutional theorists examine how organizational survival is dependent not just upon

technical efficiency, but also on legitimacy, which organizations achieve by conforming to

regulative, normative, and cognitive institutions (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983; Scott, 2013).

Organizations may acquiesce to pressures that enhance both efficiency and legitimacy, and

defy or manipulate pressures that do not; when efficiency and legitimacy concerns are in

conflict with one another (i.e., when schools face pressure to adopt practices or structures

that are not seen as efficient), organizations may respond with compromise tactics (i.e.,

balancing, pacifying, and bargaining) or avoidance behaviors such as decoupling (Meyer &

Rowan, 1977)—ceremonially adopting formal structures while intentionally leaving

instructional work to the discretion of teachers (Oliver, 1991). Oliver (1991) provides a

helpful typology for understanding how legitimacy and efficiency concerns, along with eight

other environmental antecedents, predict whether organizations respond to specific

pressures with acquiescence, compromise, avoidance, defiance, or manipulation.

More recently, researchers have taken a more inhabited lens, examining how individuals

making meaning in interaction with one another shape these organizational processes

(DiMaggio, 1988; Hallett & Ventresca, 2006). Educational scholars in this tradition have

begun to investigate how educators make sense of and respond to reforms by drawing on

their existing worldviews and practices (e.g., Coburn, 2004). The inhabited intuitionalism

8

lens also allows for consideration of micropolitical and intraorganizational dynamics: how a

principal responds to a reform may be influenced by the response of teachers (or how a

principal presumes teachers will respond), and how teachers respond to reforms are also

influenced by the decisions made by principals (e.g., Hallett, 2010; Stosich, 2015). Although

less is known about the institutional antecedents of individual, versus organizational

behavior, this essay will follow in the tradition of other work that uses broader organization-

level typologies as a starting point for analyzing individual-level behavior (e.g., Coburn, 2004).

Finally, this essay seeks to move beyond unidimensional descriptions of schools as loose or

tightly coupled, and instead identify the way the institutional environment influences the

patterns of tight and loose couplings in educational organizations (Weick, 1976; Orton &

Weick, 1990). While much of the recent institutional research in education has focused on

the tighter coupling between educational policies and classroom practices (e.g., Coburn,

2004; Spillane et al., 2002), educational research has long noted that surface-level aspects of

teachers’ practice (e.g., materials used, the arrangement of the classroom, the broad structure

of the class, the content covered) are frequently loosely coupled with deeper or “below the

surface” (Spillane & Jennings, 1997) aspects of their practice (e.g., discourse patterns, norms

of social interaction, underlying pedagogical principles, and teachers’ beliefs and mindsets), s

which are often more important to educational improvement (Coburn, 2003). This essay will

draw on research over the past 25 years to discuss the conditions under which policy

changes that have in many cases tightly coupled formal structures with surface-level

components of classroom practice are also likely to change below the surface aspects of

teachers’ work.

9

(Still) Valuing Inputs in an Era of Accountability

Since the original research propagating new institutional theory, the regulatory environment

surrounding schools has shifted to deemphasize compliance and instead provide schools

with incentives to meet performance targets. The reforms put in place by No Child Left

Behind held schools accountable to meeting Adequate Yearly Progress in terms of

standardized test scores for all students and subgroups, but in return cut down on many of

the regulations facing districts (McGuinn, 2005). Policymakers have raised the bar of these

performance targets through the adoption of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS),

and the use of value-added teacher accountability systems have increased the stakes attached

to student test scores. Even school choice reforms rely on this broad theory, though the

outcome metric of interest is the ability for schools to attract and enroll families at a

sustainable cost (Chubb & Moe; 1990). But despite this decline in regulative control of

educational inputs, educators still face a variety of normative pressures (Scott, 2013) around

how they are supposed to meet these performance-oriented objectives. As subsequent

sections will illustrate, this multiplicity of expectations may stifle deeper changes to educators’

work.

Normative pressures have proliferated at all levels of governance as a response to

accountability reforms. At the district level, Mehan Hubbard Datnow (2010) describe how

NCLB provided political cover and motivation for other efforts districts were invested in. At

the school level, principals and teachers that are exposed to strict accountability policies have

experienced pressure not just to improve test scores, but also around specific ways they

should do so. Booher-Jennings (2005, p. 239) discusses how even though Texas’s

accountability system did not prescribe certain methods for raising scores, districts

10

administrators “believed that operating under the auspices of data-driven decision making

and maintaining extensive documentation of student achievement would protect the district

from challenges” thus viewing data-based decision making not simply as a means of

improving test scores, but as a means of increasing legitimacy. As such, the district mandated

that teachers and principals use very specific practices in interpreting and acting upon test

results. Studies from other states have similarly shown how districts responded to

accountability by asking schools utilize new data based technology systems (Burch, 2006),

adopt and use new kinds of formative assessments (Burch, 2006), or to implement specific

instructional strategies that are thought to result in test score gains (Goertz & Massell, 2005;

Gold, Christman, & Herold, 2007), to name just a few examples. In an analysis of the

process of writing school improvement plans, Mintrop and MacLellan (2002, p. 292)

demonstrates the impact of this pressure, finding that plan writers were focused on including

strategies and practices that were “deemed correct or effective by district or state officials.”

But it is not just in the context of accountability that educators face pressure to adopt

specific structures or practices. As states have transitioned to the common core state

standards, many state or district officials have encouraged the use of specific processes or

materials. For example, the Florida DOE sent out requests for proposals from districts to

use Race to the Top (RttT) funds to implement specific projects that support adoption of

the common core state standards, such as lesson study (Akiba & Wilkinson, 2016).

Sometimes, districts have mandated the use of specific instructional trainings and materials

that were designed by the state to serve as supports, rather than requirements (Durand,

Lawson, Wilcox, & Schiller, 2016). Schools within the same district also vary in the extent to

which they mandate the use of particular instructional practices, pacing guides, and other

11

materials, or offer them as supports and guides to be adapted as needed (Bengtson &

Connors, 2014).

Even charter schools, which are founded on the principle of autonomy to respond to

competitive pressures from parents (e.g., Chubb & Moe, 1990), often face a number of

coercive, mimetic, and normative pressures that shape how they respond to competition.

One source of pressure comes from charter authorizers. The application and renewal

process pushes schools to conform to many of the institutionalized classifications around

teacher certification, reporting of data, curricula, and other educational inputs (Bulkley, 1999;

Huerta & Zuckerman, 2009). Charter authorizers have also been found to overregulate in

the name of risk-aversion and quality control, unintentionally privileging charter applicants

that are run by more established charter management organizations (Scott, 2009; Wohlstetter,

Malloy, Hentschke, & Smith, 2004) or use well-established organizational and instructional

strategies at the expense of more innovative but untested approaches (Ascher & Greenberg,

2002; McShane, Hatfield, & English, 2015). Charter schools, like traditional public schools,

are also subject to various federal regulations (e.g., highly qualified teacher requirements) and

the strings that come with many state or federal grants (Donaldson, 2013; Finnigan, 2007), as

well as pressure from non-governmental organizations, foundations, and other schools with

which they compete (Farrell et al., 2012; Hess, 2010; Quinn et al., 2013; Meyerson &

Wernick, 2012; Scott, 2009; Wohlstetter et al., 2011).

The persistence of such pressures in the educational field stems from many endemic qualities

of schooling. First, there is little consensus both within and across groups of educational

stakeholders on the ends of schooling (Ingersoll, 2005). Compounding this normative

12

fragmentation is the causal indeterminacy (Orton & Weick, 1990) that plagues educational

contexts, where the success of any given intervention is often more a result of its fit within a

particular context (e.g., students, teachers, subject matter, preexisting school organization) or

the skill with which teachers implement the intervention, rather than the inherent properties

of the intervention itself (Bryk, Gomez, Grunow, & LeMahieu, 2015; Murnane & Nelson,

2007; Thomas, 2016). As a result, educational reforms are less often refined or replaced

through a meritocratic process, and instead either go in and out of fashion in a cyclical

manner or get layered onto one another, creating an incoherent web of “best practices.”

While this discussion has highlighted why even in a more accountability-oriented

environment, schools may still face pressure to adopt specific structures and practices, not

yet clear is how schools—and the actors within—respond to such pressures. The rest of this

paper will discuss how this environmental context can create conditions that incentivize

responses that relate to the technical core but in a ceremonial manner, and will describe a set

of common circumstances under which this is more likely to take place.

Clashes with Environmental Pressures, Beliefs, and Technical Demands

The widespread set of regulative, normative, and cognitive pressures surrounding even more

accountability-oriented reforms creates a context where educators are more likely to act in

ceremonial—if technically oriented—ways. It is well established that organizations are more

likely to reject or ceremonially adopt structures and practices that conflict with their beliefs,

other pressures they face from the environment, or the technical demands of their work.

Meyer and Rowan (1977) traced the decoupling of technical work from formal structure to

the conflicting and often-unproductive demands that organizations in highly institutionalized

13

environments depend on for legitimacy. In a synthesis of the organizational literature, Oliver

(1991) argued that organizations were more likely to reject or avoid pressures from the

environment that were inconsistent with the organizational goals, in conflict with a multiplicity

of other pressures they face, and inefficient at meeting the organizations’ objectives. This

section will argue that these organization-level theories also apply when we take an inhabited

approach to studying school behavior, and will discuss how the conditions for ceremonial

behavior are still largely upheld in many accountability-oriented contexts.

Specifically, it will develop four main arguments. First, both teachers and school leaders are

more likely to resist or ceremonially adopt reforms that are in conflict with their beliefs,

other environmental pressures, and the technical demands of their work. Second, this

outcome is common even for reforms like the common core state standards, school choice,

and accountability, which attempt to address the problems of incoherence in prior reform

efforts. Third, school leaders have some ability to shape teachers’ likelihood of implementing

reforms, but whether they engage in such practices depends on their own beliefs, technical

considerations, and the other pressures they face. If school leaders face multiple and

conflicting pressures they must attend to, they are less likely to respond to them in

substantive ways, which in turn will result in less intensive and careful support to teachers.

Finally, this section will argue that principals may take into account teachers’ capabilities, the

ambition of reform efforts, and the likelihood of resistance when they assess whether

reforms are likely to improve their school’s performance. In a time where school leaders face

many competing demands, dedicating the resource, time, and energy to respond

substantively to one of those demands may be less appealing than attending to all of these

14

demands, even if in perfunctory ways, particularly if the odds of meaningful change from

teachers are low.

Conflicts with other environmental pressures

One of the consequences of the trend identified in the previous section is that even in more

accountability-focused environments, school leaders and teachers still face many demands

that can conflict with one another, resulting in partial or ceremonial implementation of

initiatives. Coburn (2005) found that teachers experienced more instructional messages from

actors outside of their school system, and often responded to competing instructional

messages by rejecting one set of practices, responding ceremonially, or melding them

together in a way that doesn’t quite capture the underlying purpose of either. In a study of

schools going through a reconstitution process, Malen, Croninger, Muncey, and Redmond-

Jones (2002) similarly found that teachers often responded to the resulting influx of multiple

instructional demands by reverting back to familiar routines and practices in their classrooms.

The persistence of this challenge is evident in efforts to implement the common core state

standards, which were intentionally designed to provide educators across states with

consistent messages around high-quality instruction. But achieving this coherence requires

not just alignment of standards and assessments, but also from the various other actors that

influence teaching practice: professional development providers, textbook publishers,

formative assessment, and administrators, families, and colleagues. The difficulty of ensuring

alignment across all these actors is evident in conflicting instructional messages present in

even “common core-aligned” textbooks, many of which fail to support the cognitive work

15

intended through the new standards (Perry et al, 2015; Polikoff, 2015; Swars & Chestnutt,

2016).

Exacerbating the challenge of achieving instructional coherence is the nature of educational

governance in the United States. For example, in studying the implementation longitudinal

test-based accountability systems, Anagnostopoulos, Rutledge, & Ball (2013) found that

schools, districts, and states contracted with consultants and vendors that spanned across

state boundaries and thus offered services that were not well aligned with state or district-

specific needs. In addition, they found that even divisions within particular state education

agencies implemented test based accountability in different and contradictory ways. Adding

to this complexity is that low-income schools often receive funds that are tied to the

adoption of specific programs, which results in schools attempting to implement multiple,

and at times conflicting, academic or organizational programs concurrently (e.g., Johnson,

2013).

While school leaders can play a role in helping buffer teachers from distracting

environmental pressures in the hopes of allowing them to focus on key teacher-driven or

school-wide priorities (Rosenholtz, 1985; Rosenholtz & Stimpson, 1990; Spillane &

Anderson, 2014), their ability to do this can also be stifled by a multiplicity of expectations.

Johnson and Fauske (2000) found that principals rely on many different, and often

competing, sources of legitimacy, including students, parents, teachers, district

administrators, as well as the broader educational community, and as a result must

differentiate the scripts they use to maintain legitimacy among enough of these various

audiences on which they depend. In a more recent study of first year principals, Spillane and

16

Anderson (2014, p. 11) similarly found that the “plurality, diversity, and simultaneity of

stakeholder expectations—and the legitimacy and integrity imperative to which those

expectations relate—hold potential to ‘overwhelm’” principals. They also found that leaders

in higher performing schools had more capacity to support teachers in adopting new

initiatives because they have fewer extraneous demands they had to negotiate in order to

build legitimacy with other stakeholders (Spillane & Anderson, 2014). Even leaders of

charter schools, who are intentionally given greater autonomy than traditional public schools

leaders, can face conflicting demands from funders on which they rely to implement specific

instructional or organizational reforms (Farrell, 2015; Wohlstetter, Smith, Farrell, Hentschke,

& Hirman, 2011). Charter schools also sit at the intersection of multiple domains, including

foundations, authorizers, and local, state, and federal regulations, such that even if

foundations provide similar messaging, this may not always align with pressures from other

important stakeholders (Finnigan, 2007).

All this suggests that while school leaders can play a role in buffering teachers from the kinds

of conflicting demands that might yield ceremonial compliance, it may be difficult to play

such a role given the various expectations they too are accountable for enacting in their

school setting.

Conflicts with beliefs and practices

Teachers are also likely to resist or ceremonially adopt practices that conflict with their

underlying beliefs about instruction (Coburn, 2004; Huberman & Miles, 2013; Weiss, 1995).

The impact of this clash of beliefs can be seen in the implementation of accountability

reforms over the past two decades (Mintrop, 2003), as teachers tended to resist test

17

preparation initiatives that conflicted with their discipline-specific practices

(Anagnostopoulos & Rutledge, 2007). Teachers may similarly subvert instructional reforms

due to conflicts between the reform and their disciplinary beliefs (Gregoire, 2003), prior

approach to teaching (Diamond, 2007; Maroulis and Wilensky 2014), or core routines and

underlying assumptions about learning (Kennedy, 2005). Studies have highlighted how

teachers often implement the appealing surface-level aspects of a new instructional initiative

(e.g., the specific activities used) without realizing that their underlying beliefs and

pedagogical approach conflicted with the reform’s deeper intent (e.g., Cohen 1990, Ball

1990).

While charter schools often have more autonomy to hire teachers whose values align with

those of the school or network, teachers in these contexts also encounter divergent messages

that they respond to with avoidance or ceremonial compliance. Teachers in some charter

management organizations who initially had no disagreements with the mission or teaching

practices overtime began to find the instructional expectations placed on them problematic

or constraining (Mehta & Fine, 2015; Torres, 2014), often resulting in them exiting the

system (Miron & Applegate, 2007). Teachers who seek out charter schools with non-

traditional instructional philosophies they believe in have also grown frustrated by the

demands placed on them around student achievement growth by authorizers, families, or

other stakeholders (e.g., Blitz, 2011; Gawlick, 2007).

School leaders can frame reform efforts so that they align with teachers’ values or beliefs,

increasing the odds that they will be substantively implemented. They can utilize language

and draw on expertise that intentionally aligns with teachers’ beliefs (Detert & Pollock, 2008;

18

Woulfin, 2015), strategically deploying praise of teachers’ efforts (Murnane & Cohen, 1986),

and empower teachers to shape implementation of reforms (Hopkins & Spillane, 2015).

There is also evidence that school leaders are more likely to work to implement reforms (or

aspects of reforms) that they personally believe in (Coburn, 2005; Hallett, 2010; Ladd and

Zelli, 2002; Spillane et al, 2011), though few studies have examined in detail what factors

shape leaders’ engagement with particular tactics to garner teacher support for reforms.

Conflict with the technical demands of practice

A number of studies have found that a major determinant of teachers’ adoption of initiatives

is whether they think such reforms will improve their practice (Bridwell-Mitchell, 2015;

Detert & Pollock, 2008; Matsumura, Garnier, & Resnick, 2010; Zhao & Frank, 2003), and

that teachers are more likely to dismiss reforms that they see as a bad fit for their students

(Matsumura et al., 2010), that don’t prove useful in practice (Guskey, 2002; Huberman &

Miles, 2013; Kersten & Pardo, 2007; Woulfin, 2015), that come in the wake of a number of

other unhelpful reforms (Matsumura et al, 2010), or that don’t address a meaningful problem

(Ingram, Seashore Louis, & Schroeder, 2004).

Despite intentions around their design, reforms that have spread in this more accountability-

oriented environment are often perceived as unhelpful to educators in improving valued

student outcomes. For example, moving towards more ambitious, conceptually focused, and

student-centered teaching is difficult, can frustrate teachers, students, and families alike, and

can frequently result in failed lessons, particularly in the short-term and when adequate

support is lacking (Cohen, 1988; 2011). A number of early reports of implementation of the

common core standards have found that successful implementation requires substantial

19

changes to teachers’ instruction that can be both difficult and taxing, particularly for teachers

with students who are not used to more student-centered and conceptually focused

instruction (Bengston & Connors, 2014; Porter, Fusarelli, & Fusarelli, 2015; Swars &

Chestnutt, 2016). This can frustrate even teachers who are broadly in favor of the standards

and agree with the direction they are taking instruction (Perry et al, 2015; Chestnutt, 2016).

Nevertheless, decades of research have illustrated that school and district leaders can shape

the extent to which teachers see a reform as likely to improve their practice. A common

finding from both the professional development and implementation literature is that

teachers are more likely to adopt practices when they have interactive, ongoing, context- and

teacher-specific, and conceptually rich learning opportunities (Ball & Cohen, 1996; Borko,

2004; Coburn, 2004, 2005a; Matsumura et al., 2010; Opfer & Pedder, 2011; Rowan,

Camburn, & Barnes, 2004; Woulfin, 2015). Indeed, through intensive training, coaching, and

support, school leaders can help teachers understand and implement practices in ways that

are more likely to be successful in their context

But whether leaders devote the time and resources necessary for teachers to adequately be

convinced of and learn about new reforms depends on their own assessment of the reform’s

potential. Principals, like teachers, are also more likely to substantively implement reforms

that they see as useful in supporting their practice, which has resulted in more careful

implementation of reforms that help them track teachers’ and students’ progress (e.g.,

Hallett, 2010; Spillane et al, 2011), and more superficial and compliance-oriented

implementation to district initiatives that were not perceived to address real problems

(Hoppey & McLeskey, 2010; Woulfin et al, 2015).

20

School leaders’ conceptions of what is useful in supporting the efficacy of their school also

depends on the valuations of the difficulty of a reform and teachers’ capabilities and

attitudes. School leaders may see a number of tradeoffs to implementing ambitious

instructional initiatives that aim to alter fundamental aspects of teachers’ practice, given the

content knowledge and skill required from designers and facilitators, the ways such programs

need to be tailored to specific teacher learners, and the human and fiscal cost of attempting

to ensure that teachers actually do change their practice (Cohen & Ball, 1999). For example,

even when California invested heavily in professional development to support deeper

changes in teachers’ math instruction, only a small percentage of teachers engaged in the

kind of learner-centered, content rich, and sustained learning activities that helped them

change their practice (Cohen & Hill, 2000). Pushing teachers to understand problems in their

existing practice and make changes can also yield backlash or defensiveness, and such

turmoil can throw school leaders’ legitimacy into question and prevent them from being able

to carry out their work (Johnson & Fauske, 2000; Kraft & Gilmour, 2016). Principals also

may lack the resources and capacity to carry out ambitious reforms in ways that are likely to

support teachers’ faithful implementation. In a review of literature on teacher observation

and evaluation, Woulfin et al (2015) found that principals often lacked the time to

implement teacher observations in substantive ways, did not have the necessary skills to

implement evaluations in an effective manner (and rarely have adequate access to quality

professional development), and did not have the incentive to fully implement teacher

evaluations, since doing so risked alienating or frustrating teachers whose cooperation they

rely on to carry out many school and district-level initiatives.

21

Reports on the implementation of CCSS provide early evidence that some of these

challenges may salient for principals. Seventy six percent of district leaders surveyed in one

report of CCSS implementation indicated that their districts currently did not have the

resources to implement all aspects of the new standards (Kober & Rentner, 2011). This

helps explain why principals felt unprepared to support classroom implementation of the

new standards through the provision of exemplary models for specific practical guidance to

support instructional change (Perry et al, 2015). While 64% of surveyed principals

nevertheless felt prepared to be instructional leaders around the standards, only 48% of

teachers agreed (Perry et al, 2015). In comparison, those districts that have been most

successful in implementing the standards have intentionally taken efforts to roll out the

implementation process in a slow and manageable way (Durand, Lawson, Wilcox, Schiller,

2016).

Using Imprecise Means to Monitor, Support, and Encourage Adoption

So far, I have argued that educators are more likely to substantively implement initiatives

that are encouraged by stakeholders on which they depend, and when such initiatives do not

conflict with their beliefs, technical work, or other obligations. But individuals may still

adopt reforms that they disagree with if there are strong incentives or regulations to do so.

Indeed, research in the organizational literature has supported the contention that

organizations are more likely to adopt practices when doing so is incentivized, either through

legal or financial means (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983; Oliver, 1991). Bromley and Powell

(2012) have argued that in a more accountability-oriented environment, school organizations

are likely to substantively implement practices, even if they depart from their goals. However,

two characteristics of educational organizations may challenge their hypothesis.

22

First, educational outcomes are notoriously difficult to operationalize and measure. As a

result, educational policymakers rely on imperfect substitutes, such as standardized test

scores, that may be symptoms of student learning but do not themselves embody the

qualities policymakers care about most (i.e., we care not whether a student can answer four

specific multiple choice questions about a passage, but rather whether a student can read and

comprehend passages of a particular complexity). Unfortunately, as hypothesized in

Campbell’s law, such measures are therefore subject to corruption when they carry high

stakes (Koretz, 2002).

Drawing on the experiences with high stakes accountability over the past couple decades,

many researchers found evidence that the combination of imperfect measures attached to

high stakes led to unintended and counterproductive instructional and organizational

practices. As a result of accountability reforms, teachers have adjusted their practice to focus

more attention on students who are on the “bubble” of proficiency at the expense of those

struggling most (Booher-Jennings, 2005; Ladd & Lauen, 2010), and narrowed the curriculum

to align to tested material (Au, 2007; Firestone, Mayrowetz, & Fairman, 1998; Jennings,

2012). Schools similarly employed triage practices at the organizational level, intentionally

lowering the quality of interim assessments to resemble state tests (Johnson, 2013),

exempting students from assessments that were likely to bring down test scores (Cullen &

Reback, 2006; Figlio & Getzler, 2002) and devoting less time to non-tested subjects (Reback,

Rockoff, & Schwartz, 2011). Each of these changes may have improved test scores, but

likely had negative impacts on student learning when considering the variety of qualities

educators care about for students.

23

This challenge intersects with a second characteristic of educational organizations, namely

the atomized nature of schools and the difficulty of monitoring or measuring deeper aspects

of teachers’ work. It is more difficult and expensive to monitor whether schools adopt

reforms at deeper levels. Whether a school formally adopts a reform can easily be measured

or monitored by interested stakeholders by reviewing key documents such as school budgets,

staffing, or improvement plans. Assessing whether schools implement a reform at the

surface level of classrooms is more difficult, since it involves actually observing teachers and

classrooms to see if prescribed changes are enacted in practice, though such observations

can be brief. Monitoring whether schools implement reforms in below-the-surface ways is

more difficult still, since it involves observing teachers’ practice for sustained periods of time

to examine more subtle pedagogical changes, such as new discourse patterns or responses to

non-routine events.

Revisiting the case of accountability, the incentive to improve standardized test scores often

resulted in changes to school structures or surface-level practices, but less frequently

influenced below-the-surface aspects of instruction. Booher-Jennings (2005) illustrated how

administrators in the school district felt pressure from the state to adopt data driven

decision-making practices, and thus exerted pressure on schools to embody these practices

as well. While administrators conceptualized these practices in ways that implied deeper

changes in how teachers approach instruction and adjust their work (e.g., one administrator

reflected that data driven decision making meant “finding out what’s wrong, remediating it,

testing it again . . . and if they didn’t [get it], then what am I going to do differently?”), these

intentions were often manifested through the adoption of policies and instructional practices

24

that target “bubble” students or the display of student test scores by teachers. Detert and

Pollock’s (2008) comparative analysis of implementation of a data-driven school

improvement process similarly found that one school’s regulation of teacher behavior and

use of incentives yielded more ceremonial adoption by teachers and inhibited their learning

and changes in beliefs.

Similar unintended consequences can result from the regulating or monitoring of surface-

level aspects of teachers’ practice. Research over the past few decades has illustrated how

regulations or mandates—particularly when decoupled from broader support—lead to more

ceremonial adoption of practices by teachers (Anagnostopoulos & Rutledge, 2007; Coburn,

2004; Huberman & Miles, 2013).

Finally, it is both difficult and rare for educators to learn about and engage with deeper

aspects of reforms. Educators are more likely to adopt practices when they receive intensive

and focused messaging and support around using those practices (Coburn, 2004; 2005;

Woulfin, 2015). But designing professional development experiences for teachers that focus

on deeper aspects of instructional practice is a well-documented challenge, given the content

knowledge and skill it requires from designers and facilitators and the ways such programs

need to be tailored to specific skills, knowledge, and beliefs of teacher learners (Ball &

Cohen, 1999). Coburn (2005) found in one study that only 6.5 percent of the messages

teachers received from the school system were of a “high” depth (i.e., wherein teachers are

exposed to the underlying pedagogical principles of a practice), and that when teachers were

exposed to messages without attending to the underlying pedagogical principles, they were

less likely to substantively implement the reform.

25

The difficulty of supporting and incentivizing deeper changes in teachers’ practice can be

seen in efforts to implement the common core state standards. These new standards are

intended to shift teachers’ practice, particularly around the “minute-by-minute decisions [to]

capitalize on teachable moments” (Swars & Chestnutt, 2016, p. 220; citing Griffin and Ward,

2014). Early studies of districts implementing the standards, however, have found that

teachers are primarily exposed to more surface-level aspects of the new standards through

professional development (Porter, 2016, p. 131; Swars & Chestnutt, 2016, p. 215), and that

teachers do not have a deep knowledge about implementing the new standards (Ajayi 2016).

Administrators also frequently evaluate teachers based on more surface-level aspects of their

practice (Bengston & Connors, 2014). Additionally, while part of the motivation behind the

shift to the CCSS was to develop better tests that are less capable of being “gamed” by

schools and teachers, it is not yet clear that teachers yet see these tests as incentive to make

deeper pedagogical shifts to their practice. In light of many state-level policies linking teacher

evaluation to student performance on standardized tests, McDuffie et al (2015) found that

teachers were less inclined to make instructional decisions based on CCSS principles and

student learning progressions, and instead were focused on covering the topics on the new

CCSS-aligned assessments, which served as a “proxy for understanding what to teach from

CCSSM.” (McDuffie, 2015, p. 29).

These outcomes can be traced, at least in part, to the district and state context of schools.

State educational agencies have historically had a role focused on monitoring compliance,

and therefore have less capacity to support learning about deeper aspects of practice

(Anagnostopoulos et al., 2013). District leaders similarly tend to use compliance-based

26

strategies in the implementation even of initiatives that require ongoing learning at the

school level (Durand et al, 2016). Part of the problem is that districts also do not always have

the capacity to monitor or support deeper aspects of implementation of practices, and

therefore may emphasize more surface-level aspects of the reform (e.g., Woulfin, Donaldson

and Gonzales, 2015), and that it can be difficult to communicate complex and nuanced

aspects of a reform to school leaders, particularly in light of the sparse professional and

affective ties between school and district leaders (Finnigan, Daly, & Che, 2013).

Unsurprisingly, many studies have found that principals often do not gain the skills necessary

to implement reforms as they are intended (e.g., Sartain et al, 2011).

Charter schools offer a final illustration of the difficulty of ensuring that the pressures

teachers and leaders face align with the intentions of a reform. For many advocates of

market-based school reforms, competition for students and parents is theorized to

incentivize schools to improve their efficiency and instructional quality (Chubb & Moe,

1990). But when we open up the black box of “competitive pressure” and investigate what

kinds of pressures school leaders actually face in a competitive environment, it becomes

clear very little has to do with below-the-surface aspects of instruction. Research on school

choice in New Orleans has illustrated how competition for enrollment (as manifested in

parental choices and the hunches of school leaders) pushed school leaders (particularly in

failing schools) to focus on non-academic strategies (e.g., increasing marketing, adding

extracurricular programs) over academic improvement (Jabbar, 2015; Harris, Larsen, &

Zimmerman, 2015).

27

Charter school leaders also face pressure from the organizations on which they depend that

are more aligned to formal organizational practices than deeper aspects of instruction. Many

philanthropists, particularly those in the network of “venture philanthropists”, have strong

preferences around the formal administrative practices of charter schools, but are less

involved in deeper issues of instruction and pedagogy (e.g., Hess, 2010; Quinn, Tompkins-

Stange, & Meyerson, 2013; Wohlstetter, Smith, Farrell, Hentschke, & Hirman, 2011). Even

foundations that are less part of the venture philanthropy network often ask that their grants

be used for specific additions to schools’ programs, rather to support or enhance ongoing

instructional improvement (Hess, 2010; Wohlstetter, Smith, Farrell, Hentschke, & Hirman,

2011). In addition, because of the difficulty and expense of monitoring deeper aspects of the

school’s technical work, Blitz (2011) found that authorizers generally rely on the easily

quantifiable measures of progress like standardized test scores and even parental satisfaction

surveys, but had less ability to gather or assess data about the extent to which the school is

living up to the instructional mission laid out in the charter.

In summary, this section has illustrated how educators are more likely to adopt the aspects

of reforms that are measured, supported, or monitored. Additionally, this section has

highlighted the imperfection of most measures of relevant educational outcomes and the

difficulty and cost of monitoring or supporting deeper aspects of classroom practice. As a

result, deeper aspects of reforms are generally less likely to be monitored or supported,

creating a climate where educators may face greater incentive and support around

implementing the more surface-level and visible components of instructional or

organizational initiatives.

28

Principal Dilemmas

Taken together, the preceding sections suggest school leaders in districts responsive to these

accountability-oriented reforms may find themselves in a difficult situation. From above,

they are dependent upon a number of external stakeholders for legitimacy, and as a whole

these stakeholders tend to value the implementation of many overlapping and at times

conflicting initiatives. Additionally, these stakeholders typically monitor, incentivize, and

support the adoption of these various initiatives at the formal organizational or surface level

of practice. From below, school leaders are reliant upon teachers to implement many of

these reforms. Teacher implementation of reforms is difficult to guarantee, and requires that

school leaders frame the reform so that it is aligned with teachers’ values, buffer teachers

from competing initiatives that might pull them in different directions, and provide them

with meaningful learning experiences around the reforms. But doing this for any one

initiative takes away time and resources to support even superficial adoption of the other

reforms that are more likely to garner legitimacy for the school and leader. School leaders in

these circumstances will therefore face pressure to respond by emphasizing surface-level

implementation of many of these reforms at the expense of deeper implementation of any

one reform. As a result, teachers in these settings are unlikely to receive the kind of support

and training they need to substantively adopt a reform, and thus are likely to also respond

with more ceremonial compliance that may influences their surface-level practice but not

deeper aspects of their instruction.

Though very little research has directly evaluated this hypothesis, a few studies have

highlighted how multiple formal and surface-level pressures encourage school leaders to

emphasize surface-level adoption of reforms by teachers, even at the expense of more

29

substantive implementation. In one study of the writing and enactment of school

improvement plans, Mintrop and MacLellan (2002) found that school and teacher leaders

wrote school improvement plans with much more attention to external expectations of

relevant stakeholders than to internal challenges and capabilities, and that, in practice, faculty

generally espoused compliance with the plans despite limited knowledge of their contents.

The authors concluded that the plans ended up being “comprehensive to a fault and only

loosely tailored to internal faculty capacity, perhaps creating a condition of change overload

rather than strategic focus, that is, if all intended activities were implemented faithfully” and

that in most cases “teachers ignore the plan despite professed compliance.” Mintrop (2003)

has also studied how the implementation of ambitious standards and high stakes assessments

without complementary capacity-building encouraged administrators to focus on monitoring

of surveillable behavior, the silencing of critical teacher voices, and an avoidance of more

honest self-evaluation. In a study of implementation of improvement processes in two

schools, Detert and Pollock (2008) illustrate how, as a result of a more demanding

institutional environment, one school implemented the reform in a regulative and high

pressure way that yielded higher levels of compliance but less buy-in and real learning about

the process. Johnson (2013) similarly found that a mix of high stakes assessments, multiple

and weakly implemented grant-funded initiatives (e.g., around ESL support), and a lack of

support infrastructure from administrators and coaches together resulted in school leaders

regulating the surface-level implementation of many instructional reforms (e.g., the posters

teachers hang on their walls, or the use of specific instructional practices during

observations) in ways that actually detracted from teachers’ improvements in practice.

30

Spillane and Anderson (2014) have even located some of this behavior in the tradeoffs

between efficiency and legitimacy school leaders face. They found that principals facing

more acute institutional demands (e.g., due to declining enrollment or test scores) struggled

to repair legitimacy in the eyes various stakeholders who were each looking for specific

things (e.g., parents looking for specific classroom features or a level of cleanliness, districts

looking for improvements in enrollment, attendance, scores, graduation, etc.), while still

working to improve the overall cohesion and integrity of the school.

Though there is less research to date on the decision making process of charter school

leaders responding to competition, early evidence suggests that they are making a similar

compromise. For example, as a result of competition, school leaders have enhanced outreach

and marketing (Jabbar, 2015; Kasman & Loeb, 2013), have sought out students who are

more likely to have high test scores (DiMartino & Jessen, 2014; Jabbar, 2015; Jennings, 2010),

and are more likely to engage in these strategies than in instructional improvement efforts

(Jabbar, 2015; Kasman & Loeb, 2013). While no studies to date have assessed how these

responses to competition are influenced by the broader institutional pressures charter school

leaders face, these actions are consistent with the hypothesis that legitimacy-enhancing

organizational and surface-level responses may crowd out more systemic efforts at

instructional improvement.

It is also the case that systems that are able to spur deeper changes to teachers’ practice do

so in part by dramatically shaping the surrounding environment. A number of charter

systems, for example, have developed a comprehensive infrastructure to overcome many of

the constraining conditions discussed in this essay in order to support teachers in

31

implementing specific instructional and organizational practices (e.g., Furgeson et al, 2012;

Lake, Dusseault, Bowen, Demeritt, & Hill, 2010). Many charter systems, for example, devote

resources to recruiting and selecting teachers and leaders who are more aligned with (or have

the willingness to adapt to) the particular instructional and organizational vision of the

school, and then extensively training and coaching them to use the system’s instructional

methods (Chadwick et al., 2011; DeArmond et al., 2012; Mehta & Fine, 2015; Rosenberg,

2012). The most successful of these systems have also developed mechanisms (e.g.,

continuous assessments, curricula and lesson plans, displays of students work) to ensure that

“administrative leaders, teachers, and students share a highly developed picture of what they

think good instruction looks like, and that this picture serves as the anchor for much of what

happens at these schools” (Mehta & Fine, forthcoming). Finally, many of these systems rely

on more intensive coaching, team teaching or apprenticeship, and observation so that these

deeper aspects of instruction are monitored and supported (e.g., Lake, et al., 2010; Mehta &

Fine, forthcoming). Other comparative research that identifies schools or districts that are

implementing new instructional practices have similarly identified mechanisms for

communicating, supporting, and monitoring deep visions of instruction as critical for

ensuring that teachers make substantive changes to their practice (e.g., Cohen & Hill, 2000;

Glazer & Peurach, 2015; Hopkins & Spillane, 2015).

These examples illustrate that the paradoxical position of school leaders torn between

enhancing legitimacy by doing many things in a surface-level way and improving quality by

doing a couple of things in a substantive way is not inevitable; still, they remain outliers, and

this tension is likely to persist in schools that are not embedded in such carefully designed

and comprehensive systems. Take the case of CMOs. While a number of studies have

32

documented how a substantial proportion of charter networks have been able to develop

many aspects of this infrastructure (e.g., Furgeson et al, 2012; Lake et al, 2010), Mehta &

Fine’s (forthcoming) comparative study suggests that these systems may be more rare in

practice than they seem on paper. Despite intentionally sampling for those schools or

networks that are considered by their peers as most promising in achieving consistent,

rigorous teaching, Mehta & Fine found very few schools where teaching practice was

consistently lived up to the espoused instructional philosophy.

Conclusion

This essay has argued that although the institutional environment surrounding schools has

certainly organized more around the outputs of education, there remains a vast array of

coercive, normative, and mimetic pressures supporting the use of particular formal structures

and surface level practices as a way of maintaining legitimacy (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983);

but rarely is there isomorphic pressure around below-the-surface aspects of teachers’

practice. Leaders in such environments are therefore still likely to experience a variety of

contradictory pressures from important stakeholders around how to improve outcomes, but

while they used to resolve this tension through buffering teachers from a chaotic

environment, the increased attention to monitoring and accountability over the past two

decades may push many to implement the most visible and measurable aspects of these

various reforms, even at the expense of more substantive implementation. In these cases,

teachers are likely to experience pressure to implement an array of instructional and

organizational initiatives, at least at surface levels, but in many cases without the incentives

or necessary support to substantively engage with them at deeper levels.

33

A nuanced but impactful revision to the existing literature on educational organizations may

therefore be necessary. While scholars have moved from predicting that school leaders

engage in avoidance tactics (e.g., buffering, decoupling) to more traditional acquiescence to

institutional demands (e.g., Bromley & Powell, 2012; Spillane et al., 2002; 2011), the

implication of this essay is that as a result of greater levels of monitoring and accountability

of diverse institutional demands, school leaders are likely to engage in compromise behaviors

(Oliver, 1991), where they balance multiple constituent pressures by implementing the most

visible elements of each. This in turn decreases the likelihood that leaders can create the

conditions for teachers to substantively implement any given reform or initiative. As a result,

teachers will either more strategically implement the aspects of reforms that preserve

legitimacy while avoiding deeper changes to their practice, or they will engage in in good

faith but imperfect attempts to implement reforms despite suboptimal levels of training and

support. Thus, leaders, and in some cases teachers, will engage in technical ceremonies to the

extent that they do make adjustments to the technical core of their work, but with at least one

eye focused on external legitimacy, privileging what is visible to stakeholders on whom they

depend over longer-term quality.

This argument has a number of implications for research and theory. First, it suggests that

that the problems of school reform stem not only from the technical challenges endemic to

the (all but) impossible task of human improvement (Cohen, 1988) under conditions of

overwhelming and imperfect information (Cohen, March, & Olsen, 1972), but also from the

intersection of these challenges with legitimacy concerns. It may therefore be fruitful to take

a field-level perspective (Burch, 2007), and research how the environmental context and the

various actors that confer legitimacy influence educators’ choices. For example, Orton &

34

Weick (1990) argued that loose coupling stems from causal indeterminacy, as well as

fragmentation in both the external and internal environment of organizations. While a

number of recent reforms, such as the proliferation of “evidence-based” structures and

practices; the alignment of standards, curriculum, and assessments; and the use of

organizational routines to connect school structures to organizational practices have sought

to overcome these conditions, this essay has illustrated how fragmentation and causal

indeterminacy still persist, and can contribute to looser coupling of policies and deeper

aspects of instructional practice.

Second, in line with Weick’s (1976) initial theorization, this essay suggests that instead of

examining whether or not policy and practice is decoupled, we should seek to uncover the

patterns of tight and loose coupling as educational organizations respond to more

accountability-oriented reforms. The evidence presented in this essay suggests that as

schools more tightly couple policy and surface-level practices, they may inadvertently loosen

the coupling with deeper aspects of instructional practice (e.g., discourse patters, pedagogical

beliefs). Researchers who study implementation may therefore miss evidence of resistance or

ceremonial compliance by collecting data only on teachers’ surface level practices. One

approach to resolving this challenge is taking on Oliver’s (1991) framework and assessing the

extent to which educators engage in acquiescence, compromise, avoidance, defiance, or

manipulation. Focusing on avoidance behaviors (concealment, buffering, escape), for

example, rather than decoupling of policy and practice, allows for a wider lens in examining

how institutional context may influence educators’ behavior.

35

Third, this research emphasizes the importance of research that examines how school

leaders respond to the policy environment, and the reciprocal ways leaders’ choices may

influence, and be influenced by, their perceptions of teachers’ capacity and likelihood of

changing practice. Spillane and his colleagues (2002) have already spearheaded much of this

research, and use the phrase managing in the middle to capture the pressures school leaders

need to negotiate from both above and below. While they have a generally optimistic take on

how principals negotiate these competing interests, this essay lays out conditions under

which school leaders might reconcile this tension in ways that actually subvert the intentions

of many recent accountability-oriented reforms.

This argument also has number of implications for practice. First, many of the

implementation challenges noted in the literature (e.g., Cohen, 1990; Cohen & Ball, 1999) are

not just technical in nature: that we need to just provide better learning experiences for

teachers in order for them to meaningfully implement reforms. While this may help, a deeper

problem is rooted in the environment surrounding schools: educators gain legitimacy not

through long-term incremental improvement, nor through deep and focused engagement

with key problems, but rather by adopting the variety of practices and strategies that external

stakeholders care about and can monitor. Thus, the active and dynamic educational sector,

with actors that range from local, state, and federal government to NGOs, philanthropists,

universities, think tanks, and other intermediary organizations may unintentionally contribute

to the proliferation of surface-level pressures that can keep principals from focusing on

building organizational coherence (e.g., Reckhow & Snyder, 2014). Solving at scale what

appears to be the most technical of problems may therefore require a shift in how the

various actors involved in the field of education support, monitor, and evaluate schools.

36

Finally, this essay provides support for the recent emphasis on understanding the role of

educational infrastructure in supporting improvement in educational systems (Cohen &

Moffitt, 2010; Cohen, Peurach, & Spillane, under review; Mehta & Fine, forthcoming). In

particular, such infrastructure can play an important role in resolving some of the paradoxes

discussed in this essay by communicating consistent messages and support to teachers and

school leaders about deeper aspects of an instructional initiative or vision. However,

research on these efforts would benefit from a more institutional lens, particularly one that

explores how broader institutional pressures influence the process of building and sustaining

infrastructure, and in turn the patterns of tight and loose coupling around system policies,

surface-level practices, and deeper aspects of instructional work. Distinguishing between

systems that support deeper changes to instructional practice from those that garner only

surface-level changes (e.g., Mehta & Fine, Forthcoming)—and understanding what factors

enable the former over the latter—will be a critical task for both researchers and

practitioners over the next decade.

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