Place and Policy for Mathematics Education: Comparing a Rural and Micropolitan School District

Purpose: Although educational research has increasingly attended to issues of place, the focus has been on large or urban contexts. There are, however, plenty of other settings, and they warrant attention. For example, rural schools districts tend to be smaller, with less personnel specifically charged with supporting mathematics education. This undoubtedly informs how leaders create, interpret, and struggle over policy for the subject. In this study, I combine structural and discursive perspectives of organizations to examine how policy meanings are negotiated across the formal division of labor in two school districts—one small, rural and the other larger and micropolitan. Methods: I conducted a qualitative, comparative case study of two school districts in the same U.S. state, analyzing interviews with educational leaders, observations of policymaking, and policy artifacts. Findings and Implications: Related to differences in location and size, I found that the two districts differed in how they were structurally segmented, which informed how policy meanings for mathematics were discursively struggled over. In the larger, micropolitan district, while vertical and horizontal segmentation facilitated specialized attention to mathematics, infrequent interaction among units fueled discursive struggle over high-quality mathematics instruction between leaders across role groups. By contrast, frequent interactions and collaboration around joint work at the small, rural district facilitated coordination across leaders and buildings and the development of more coherent policy meanings. My findings provide implications for school district leaders as well as research partners regarding the affordances and constraints of different organizational arrangements, and possibilities for (re)organizing around mathematics education.