Abstract
Federal entitlement policies like Title III and the IDEA help grant multilingual learners (MLs) and students with disabilities (SWDs) access to public schools. Yet they have operated in ways that continue to “other” the very student populations they intend to integrate. Drawing on social network surveys and semi-structured interviews collected from one urban district over 18 months, we ask: To what degree do central office leaders share responsibility for instructional decision-making in literacy and math? And, how did organizational conditions disrupt or perpetuate the “othering” of MLs and SWDs among central office staff? Leveraging a conceptual framework of critical social network analysis and institutional theory, we found that, despite efforts to promote joint-work and shared responsibility across central office departments, regulative, normative, and cultural-cognitive dimensions of the institutional environment continued to “other” special populations leaders from content-area leaders and, thus, the core of instructional decision-making.
Keywords
Public K–12 schools in the United States were not designed for—and indeed once intentionally excluded—non-white students as well as students with disabilities (SWDs) and students identified as English Learners, whom we refer to as “multilingual learners” (MLs). 1 Building on the larger civil rights movement for racial justice and following Brown v. Board of Education (1954), advocates for linguistically diverse children and children with disabilities argued that segregating or excluding these students from a public education was a violation of their Constitutional rights to equal protection and due process, as well as a violation of the Civil Rights Act (Chen, 2018; Harry & Ocasio-Stoutenburg, 2020; Skrentny, 2002; Voulgarides, 2018). Rebuking the then-common belief that these students did not deserve access to, or did not have capacity to engage in, a meaningful, free, and public education, Congress passed the 1975 Education for All Handicapped Children Act which was later reauthorized as the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act or “IDEA,” and the 1968 Bilingual Education Act, which became Title III of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (Harry & Ocasio-Stoutenberg, 2020; Weise & García, 2013).
On the one hand, IDEA and Title III help to grant SWDs and MLs equitable access to public education and draw attention to the unique needs of these student groups (Garver, 2022). On the other hand, these laws are often implemented in ways that continue to “other” the very students they intended to integrate (Ferri & Connor, 2005; Garver, 2022). For example, services for SWDs and MLs are often provided in separate classrooms apart from the general student population, serving to segregate rather than integrate these students (Cruz & López, 2020; Gándara, 2020; Kangas & Cook, 2023). Further, for students dually identified as MLs and SWDs, language- and special education-related services often come into conflict, with one given priority and students being grossly underserved (Kangas, 2018). Complicating the “othering” that occurs when applying externally defined categories, SWDs and MLs are also disproportionately students of color (National Center for Education Statistics [NCES], 2022, 2023; Skiba et al., 2008). This trend is related, at least in part, to educators’ tendencies to perceive students’ dis/abilities and language through a racialized lens (S. A. Annamma et al., 2013; Artiles, 2011; Flores & Rosa, 2015; Hart et al., 2009; Weddle et al., 2024). For example, Latine students have been especially overrepresented within the “specific learning disability” category (NCES, 2022).
These trends suggest that laws meant to support SWDs and MLs instead serve to maintain the racist, ableist, and nativist hierarchies that often exist within US public schools (Garver, 2020; Mueller & Beneke, 2023; Ray, 2019; Tefera et al., 2023). Organizational and institutional theory helps point to how these inequities are reproduced within educational organizations (Bray & Russell, 2018, 2016; Hopkins, 2016; Hopkins & Spillane, 2015; Stelitano et al, 2020). Citing funding, compliance requirements, and other regulatory pressures, special education (SE) and ML departments are often marginalized within district central offices; similarly, SE and ML teachers tend to be isolated within schools (Dove & Honigsfeld, 2017; Gomez-Najarro, 2020; Hernandez, 2013; Hopkins et al., 2015). The organization of districts and schools thus ends up decoupling equity initiatives for SWDs and MLs from content-based learning and the technical core of education (Ray, 2019; Spillane et al., 2019). This decoupling occurs despite research demonstrating how co-teaching and other inclusionary interventions benefit both teachers and students (Banerji & Dailey, 1995; Berry, 2021; Cosier et al., 2013; Hopkins et al., 2015; Huberman et al., 2012). It also divides organizational resources in ways that perpetuate a norm that ML and SE teachers are solely responsible for the education of MLs and SWDs, thus institutionalizing the “othering” of these teachers and their students (Berry, 2021; Dabach, 2014; Garver, 2022; Hernandez, 2013; Hopkins et al, 2019; Hopkins & Spillane, 2015; Ray, 2019; Stelitano et al., 2020).
One commonly proposed solution to these institutionalized inequities is to develop and sustain a sense of shared responsibility for SWDs and MLs. We define shared responsibility as a collective practice where SE, ML, and content-area educators 2 regularly work together, and with parity, to jointly serve SWDs and/or MLs, including sharing their differential and specific knowledge with each other. This collective practice requires shared ownership of and shared accountability for the provision of equitable, high-quality, and rigorous learning opportunities for SWDs and MLs (Fenner, 2013). For instance, when SE, ML, and content-area leaders jointly design district-wide instructional pacing guides for teachers, and equally share their decision-making power, they are practicing shared responsibility. Enacting shared responsibility likely requires upending historically siloed organizational practices, hierarchical structures, and power dynamics that govern educational organizations. Given that educators are not often prepared or incentivized to work in ways that promote shared responsibility (Bryk et al., 2010; Cohen, 2011; Cohen & Ball, 1999), developing and sustaining collaborative relationships among ML, SE, and content-area educators remains a complicated, elusive task that requires intentional leadership (Fenner, 2013; Wong, 2023).
Acknowledging the important intermediary position that school districts hold in the implementation of instructional policies (Cobb et al., 2020; Coburn et al., 2009; Elmore, 1993; Honig, 2013), this paper examines whether and how district central office leaders shared responsibility for instructional decision-making for SWDs and MLs in the core content areas: literacy and mathematics. We selected the Hawthorne School District, a pseudonym, given the efforts of assistant superintendents to redesign existing leadership routines to support cross-departmental collaboration in the planning of teacher professional learning (PL) around the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). These routines represented an opportunity to forge relationships among content-area, SE, and ML leaders, and our study sought to examine whether and how they promoted shared responsibility for SWDs and MLs in literacy and mathematics instructional decision-making.
In the sections that follow, we begin by defining and discussing the literature on shared responsibility and its importance in school district central offices. Then, we present our theoretical framework that brings together critical social network theory and institutional theory. After a discussion of our mixed methods approach, we present our findings. We describe how, despite efforts to redesign central office routines and support cross-departmental collaboration, barriers to shared responsibility were endemic across different facets of the organization. We conclude with a discussion of our study’s findings and the implications for research, practice, and policy.
Shared Responsibility Within School District Central Offices
Shared responsibility is often associated with the concept of collective responsibility, defined as shared ownership for all students (Edmonds & Spradlin, 2010) that is demonstrated by educators who share common goals and responsibilities for students’ academic development (Gomez-Najarro, 2020; Jones et al., 2013; Newmann et al., 1996). Specific to special education, Hargreaves and Ainscow (2015) trace the concept of collective responsibility back to observations of the collaborative work that SE and content-area educators engaged in across grade levels to individually and collectively support SWDs in their classrooms. Collective responsibility has also been used to characterize the co-planning that ML and content-area teachers do to provide linguistically rich instructional environments (Back, 2020). Implicit and sometimes explicit within these uses of the term is the belief that teachers can meaningfully improve students’ learning through collaboration (Edmonds & Spradlin, 2010).
Taking a more critical approach, shared responsibility is distinct from collective responsibility in that it includes norms and understandings of professional accountability and emphasizes parity among educators. Beyond sharing differential knowledge and expertise, educators who engage in shared responsibility hold one another accountable for supporting the needs of all students (Berry, 2021; Hopkins et al., 2019; Wong, 2023). Shared responsibility is a collective practice where “every member of an organization jointly shares the responsibility for producing their instructional system. Specifically, each member expects themselves to perform their individual responsibilities well and to interlace their work well with their colleagues,” and their colleagues expect the same of them (Wong, 2023, p. 388).
As an illustrative example, if district administrators from across principal supervision, curriculum and instruction, ML, SE, assessment, and student support services jointly designed and led a systemwide equity initiative, this joint work would represent an instantiation of shared responsibility. Within their interactions, administrators representing different areas of the district’s work would have equal power and authority over instructional decision-making and be viewed as central to the initiative. Indeed, nascent literature examining shared responsibility has found that it can be promoted when educators who work in SE, ML, and content-area instruction have regular opportunities to co-plan and co-facilitate instructional opportunities (Berry, 2021) or to co-develop curricular frameworks (Hopkins et al., 2022a). Still, there is often a power imbalance underlying these interactions that continues to tend to center the needs of “traditional” students and perpetuate the marginalization and institutionalized “othering” of students with “different” learning needs (Garver, 2022; Hopkins et al., 2015). For instance, Wong’s (2023) study of professional learning between special and general educators revealed that, even though professional learning was part of teachers’ regular and ongoing daily work and required joint deliberations and systemwide collaboration, these structures were not enough to disrupt the deeply-embedded, culturally-supported mental maps that isolated SE from general educators. Similarly, Hopkins et al. (2019) found that, although school leaders designed structures to promote shared responsibility, deficit-based orientations toward MLs’ abilities and behaviors thwarted parity in interactions between ML and content-focused teachers. These findings suggest that creating a sense of shared responsibility for SWDs and MLs in such work would likely require an upending of traditional power dynamics (Hopkins et al., 2022b).
Given the robust leadership that is likely needed to address these dynamics, our study sought to identify the organizational conditions needed to enact shared responsibility for SWDs and MLs. While research on collective and shared responsibility has largely focused on schools, we focused our attention on school district leadership because of the important roles central office staff play in establishing supportive systemwide conditions for instructional change (Burch & Spillane, 2005; Honig, 2009; Spillane, 1998; Weiner & Woulfin, 2017). Central office leaders are responsible for interpreting federal and state policies and then creating local instructional policies and directives for schools (Spillane, 1998, 1999). Even though local control politics often afford school leaders autonomy in instructional decision-making (Honig & Rainey, 2012), central office leaders are key designers of instructional policy and articulate the parameters of its implementation. They do so by setting instructional priorities and directives (Weiner & Woulfin, 2017; Wong et al., 2020), offering professional learning opportunities for principals and other school leaders to develop expertise, and spearheading district-wide transformative changes that create deep shifts in instructional work throughout the school district (Honig, 2009).
While central office leaders play critical roles in instructional decision-making, they have received relatively little attention in scholarship on shared responsibility. One exception is a recent study focused on ML education that conceptualized joint work between state and central office leaders as a necessary facet of supporting statewide shared responsibility (Hopkins et al., 2019). Looking inside one school district central office, our study attempts to understand whether and how central office leaders break down silos in ways that meaningfully consider SWDs and MLs in instructional decision-making. Our investigation centers on instructional decision-making in literacy and mathematics because these were the content areas targeted within the Common Core State Standards and therefore the focus of instructional reform efforts within the district at the time of our study. In addition, mathematics and literacy have long-formed the core of K–12 instructional and accountability policy (Klein, 2015); thus, we expected to observe the highest levels of instructional decision-making within the literacy and mathematics departments. The research questions guiding our study were as follows:
To what degree do central office leaders share responsibility for SWDs and MLs as they engage in instructional decision-making related to literacy and math?
How did organizational conditions disrupt or perpetuate the “othering” of MLs and SWDs among central office staff?
Theoretical Framework
To examine whether and how central office leaders across SE, ML, literacy, and math shared responsibility for instructional decision-making we leveraged critical social network theory (Hopkins et al., 2022b) and institutional theory (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983; Scott, 2013). Acknowledging how students—and their educators—with multiple and intersecting identities are often “othered” and separated in and across schools (Mawene & Bal, 2020), critical social network theory affords a lens through which to examine how power dynamics may serve to “other” ML and SE leaders in district-level decision-making (Hopkins et al., 2022b). Institutional theory (Scott, 2013) then serves as a framework for unpacking how different organizational influences contribute to or help alleviate these power differentials.
Critical Social Network Theory
Shared responsibility, as we define it, requires attending to power dynamics that shape interactions among educators. Critical social network theory provides a framework for examining how power manifests in interactions across an organization, centering the perspectives and (lack of) connections of those who have been historically marginalized and, therefore for understanding how social networks enable or constrain access to social resources (Finnigan & Jabbar, 2023; Hopkins et al., 2022b). Social resources, often referred to as social capital (Lin, 2000), include information or knowledge, advice, expertise, and trust. Each of these resources can be mobilized to facilitate individual development or organizational learning and change (e.g., Coburn & Russell, 2008; Finnigan & Daly, 2012; Penuel et al., 2009). More traditional research on social resources within schools has found that teachers’ access to instructional advice and information through their social networks can facilitate changes in their beliefs and practices (e.g., Spillane et al., 2018; Liou & Daly, 2014; Coburn et al., 2012; Parise & Spillane, 2010). Similarly, within central offices, leaders’ uneven access to diverse sources of expertise through their social networks shapes the extent to which they are capable of leading large-scale, complex organizational changes (Daly & Finnigan, 2011; Farrell et al., 2018).
Further, social networks in school districts—like any social network—are shaped by the larger policy context. As previously mentioned, U.S. schools were designed to exclude and long-resisted integrating SWDs and MLs. Critical social network theory requires attention to the context in which school district social networks sit, including how they have been shaped by organizational practices steeped in white supremacy, ableism, and linguicism.
Moreover, critical social network theory, in its explicit attention to power dynamics, helps draw our attention to who has influence to shape other district leaders’ opinions and, in turn, to affect district-level instructional policy (Finnigan & Jabbar, 2023). Specific to the education of SWDs and MLs, existing research has shown how ML educators tend to be isolated within district and school social networks, meaning that few, if any, content-area educators interact with them about instructional improvement efforts (Hopkins et al., 2019). This isolation stems from district- and school-level organizational structures and norms. For example, in one district-level study of a suburban district experiencing demographic change and a growing ML population, Hopkins et al. (2019) found that ML educators were tasked with forming their own curriculum committee focused on English as a second language (ESL) and were not invited to sit on content-area curriculum committees like their SE counterparts. This separation of ML instruction persisted within schools, where ML educators had few opportunities to co-plan or co-teach content-area lessons with grade-level teachers (Hopkins et al., 2019). Not only did these power dynamics serve to “other” ML educators within content-area interactions, but they also created organizational contexts in which content-area educators had few, if any, opportunities to learn how to design instruction for MLs. Aligned with critical social network theory, this study not only investigated the nature of the social network—including who was connected to whom—but interrogated how inequities were reproduced and disrupted within this network to create more equitable learning opportunities for historically marginalized students (Finnigan & Jabbar, 2023; Hopkins et al, 2022b).
Considering the power dynamics embedded in social networks, we examined patterns across leaders’ interactions to determine whether and how district SE, ML, and content-area leaders shared responsibility for instructional decision-making. Given that research shows that educators of MLs or SWDs are often marginalized in school systems, we also sought to understand how the school district as an organization functioned to either perpetuate or ameliorate power dynamics between SE, ML, and content-area educators. Importantly, social network theory becomes “critical” when combined with additional theories to interrogate these power dynamics and how broader hegemonic structures create and are perpetuated by social networks (Finnigan & Jabbar, 2023). In this study, we leveraged the three pillars of institutional theory (Scott, 2013; Scott & Davis, 2007) to help examine the relationship between informal networks and formal organizational structures.
Institutional Theory
According to institutional theory (Scott, 2013), institutions shape people’s actions and interactions through systemic power that is embedded in sociocultural systems (Lawrence, 2008). Organizations, such as school systems, embody these institutional constraints in ways that shape how organizational members, in this case educators, think and act (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983). Institutional theory helps us distinguish and understand the regulative, normative, and cultural-cognitive aspects of people’s environments that guide or pressure them to think and act in certain ways (Scott, 2013). Regulative pressures are embedded in formal rules, policies, sanctions or rewards, and formalized compliance monitoring within an organizational system. Normative pressures are embedded in professional or other cultural norms and values that define how things “should be done.” Finally, cultural-cognitive pressures focus on the culturally supported, taken-for-granted beliefs and assumptions embedded in people’s schemas, or scripts, about “how things are done around here” (Meyer & Rowan, 2006), beliefs and assumptions that are typically unquestioned.
In practice, all three types of institutional pressures interact and are constantly present. While we distinguish among regulative, normative, and cultural-cognitive pressures for analytical purposes, the people within a social system are shaped by, draw upon, and may even challenge or rework all three as they produce, reproduce, or change a social system (Hopkins & Spillane, 2015; Scott, 2013; Wong et al., 2020). This paper considers how regulative, normative, and cultural-cognitive pressures interact within a central office to promote or hinder shared responsibility across departments. Thus, drawing on prior research, we use institutional theory to help understand how the institutionalized regulative, normative, and cultural-cognitive pressures in a central office might perpetuate the “othering” of SWDs and MLs and educators in these departments, including isolating SE and ML leaders within district central office social networks. These institutional pressures are the organizational conditions, as we have defined them, that leaders and their colleagues have to contend with, and could perhaps leverage (Wong et al., 2020), to help themselves think and practice in different ways, with the hopes of enacting more just and equitable social systems.
Methods
This study is part of a larger project focused on instructional decision-making in four urban school districts across the United States. These four districts were strategically sampled from a survey of the 30 largest districts in the nation implementing the CCSS to include districts with different patterns of interaction and research use. Although critical social network theory was not a part of the original study’s design, we applied this approach to examine interactions in one of the four districts, which we call Hawthorne. Hawthorne, a district in the Southern United States, serves over 100,000 students in approximately 170 schools. At the time of the study, approximately 65% of the students received free or reduced-price lunch, approximately half were identified by their families as students of color, 10% were identified as MLs, and 12% were identified as SWDs. The district did not provide statistics for the percentage of dually identified students.
Moreover, shared responsibility for SWDs and MLs was not an initial focus of the larger study, but we were intrigued by one district’s senior central office leaders’ attempts to foster shared responsibility across central office leaders. As described previously, we chose to investigate shared responsibility within the Hawthorne district central office because the assistant superintendents of curriculum and instruction and principal supervision had recently redesigned a central office routine around planning quarterly professional learning opportunities for teachers to facilitate more collaborative work among SE, ML, and content-area departments. Since the absence of such structures can “other” SE and ML educators and isolate them from instructional decision-making (Hopkins et al., 2019), we saw this as an opportunity to understand whether and how Quarterly Professional Learning Sessions promoted shared responsibility. Prior to the redesign, Quarterly Professional Learning Sessions were delivered solely by the central office content-area leaders to teachers and instructional coaches across the district. The redesigned routines, however, required content-area leaders to include the SE and ML departments in the co-design and co-facilitation of Quarterly Professional Learning Sessions. Our study examined whether and how these new routines shifted the formal distribution of power and responsibility in their school system.
Positionality
We were drawn to understanding this case because of our own experiences in education as young students, practitioners, and researchers. As a research team of three, we are collectively committed to disrupting the silos that exist within our education system that continue to perpetuate inequities and to specifically disrupt the silos that marginalize MLs and SWDs, as well as the teachers, related service providers, and leaders who support them. In addition, the first and second authors’ identities are shaped by our own experiences as students. The first author navigated her entire educational career as a person with a disability and the second author identifies as an immigrant woman of color who grew up in poverty and is no longer multilingual. Both authors experienced the education system as unfair and non-inclusive; we saw our schools continue to fail students who shared our backgrounds. The third author observed these educational inequities as a bilingual teacher in an English-only policy context, where ML students and families were intentionally marginalized across the school curriculum. Our research, professional, and personal backgrounds drew us to this case in the hopes that the field could learn ways to promote shared responsibility and greater equity for all students and specifically for MLs and SWDs.
Data Collection
Traditional social network analysis often uses quantitative data to examine how the structure or strength of relationships enables or constrains the exchange of resources (Daly et al., 2010; Granovetter, 1973; Reagans & McEvily, 2003; Uzzi, 1997). Critical social network analysis, in contrast, often incorporates qualitative data to add nuance to these more technical findings and to explore how explicit and implicit power dynamics affect which social resources are shared and with whom (Finnigan & Jabbar, 2023; Hopkins et al., 2022b). In line with this approach, we collected and analyzed both quantitative and qualitative data to address our research questions.
Specifically, we drew on surveys and semi-structured interviews conducted with central office leaders in Hawthorne School District between January 2016 and July 2017 as part of a larger study on instructional decision-making. In spring 2017, we sent social network surveys to the 39 central office leaders who worked in the Literacy, Math, ML, and SE departments, or whose work intersected with these areas, including School Improvement and Data and Assessment. The survey asked with whom, since the beginning of the school year, respondents interacted to make decisions related to literacy and mathematics instruction; respondents selected other staff members from a roster. A total of 33 central office leaders responded to the survey (85%), with response rates varying for each department, from 100% for leaders in SE, Math, and School Improvement, to 80% for ML and Literacy, to 67% for Data and Assessment.
We also conducted 47 interviews with 27 central office leaders throughout the 2016–17 school year. Each central office leader was interviewed between one and four times, depending on their availability and level of participation in mathematics and literacy instructional decision-making. These semi-structured interviews (Weiss, 1994) included questions about the participant’s role(s) in instructional decision-making, current instructional initiatives within the district, their role within those initiatives, and how, if at all, they worked with other departments on those initiatives. While the same interview protocols were used for each participant during each round of interviews, researchers followed up or probed more deeply when appropriate, which created some variation in data collection and topics covered between participants.
Quantitative Data Analysis
We conducted three lines of analysis using the quantitative social network data. First, we ran a core-periphery analysis for each network to identify which leaders were included in decisions related to literacy and math instruction, and which leaders may have been excluded. Using Everett and Borgatti’s (1999) conception of a core-periphery network structure as a set of dense, cohesive connections within a core and a set of sparse connections within the periphery , we ran a discrete model to partition network actors into two groups: core and periphery. We assumed that if we observed leaders from content-area departments as well as leaders from ML and SE departments in the network’s core, then silos between departments were bridged in ways that afforded leaders opportunities to share responsibility for instructional decision-making related to that content area. If we did not observe ML or SE leaders within the core, then they may have been “othered” in content-focused instructional decisions.
Second, we calculated an E-I index for each network (Krackhardt & Stern, 1988), which captures the relative prevalence of between- and within-group ties and provided additional evidence related to whether ML and SE leaders had opportunities to collaborate with content-area leaders. After partitioning the network by department (e.g. ML, Mathematics), we calculated the index to examine the density of ties both within and between departments. Density is measured on a scale from 0 to 1 and represents the proportion of ties that are actualized; for example, a density of 0.3 between the Math and SE departments would indicate that 30% of the possible ties between math and SE leaders were realized. These inter- and intra-department densities allowed us to determine the extent to which instructional decision-making in each content area was shared across departments, or whether leaders tended to interact primarily with their own department.
Third and finally, we examined tie reciprocity between departments for each content area. In directed networks, reciprocity indicates the extent to which ties are reciprocated between two actors (Borgatti et al., 2013). We assumed there might be a substantive difference in uni- versus bi-directional ties between leaders across departments. For example, if a leader from the SE department reported interacting with a leader from the Math department, but not vice versa, that might indicate that responsibility is not shared; however, if both leaders reported interacting with each other, then that might be indicative of shared responsibility.
Qualitative Data Analysis
Central to our critical social networks approach, our qualitative analysis allowed us to unpack and add nuance to the power dynamics uncovered by the network data. All interviews were transcribed verbatim and replaced with pseudonyms to preserve the confidentiality of our research participants and district site. We then uploaded all pseudonymized transcripts to NVivo, a qualitative data analysis software. In our first round of deductive descriptive coding, we were guided by our research questions and Miles et al.’s (2014) content coding approach. We began by coding for any mention of collaboration—or attempts at collaboration—between the Literacy or Mathematics departments with the ML or SE departments. We then created memos describing the collaborations, or attempts at collaboration, creating one memo for the nature of interaction between department dyads (e.g., ML and Mathematics departments; SE and Literacy). Our conceptual framework was not explicitly built into our interview protocol; rather, coding was an iterative process. During our analysis, we inductively identified a set of organizational conditions that influenced these collaborations. We then coded these conditions as regulative, normative, and cultural-cognitive per the definitions provided in our theoretical framework. We include descriptions of these codes in our Supplementary Table 1. All authors coded several of the same interviews, compared our coding, and discussed any points of disagreement until we reached consensus. Once we felt we reached consensus, the first author finished all institutional theory-related coding, occasionally bringing any questions she had to the broader team. Finally, we developed memos for each of these dimensions throughout our analysis to develop our findings (Miles et al., 2014).
Findings
We found that despite some central office leaders’ attempts to disrupt siloization by promoting cross-departmental planning for professional learning across the district, the marginalization of MLs and SWDs persisted within the Hawthorne district central office. Though SE and ML leaders participated in these planning sessions, they collaborated without having true shared responsibility. We also found that regulative pressures—including student group accountability policies, funding streams, and divisional separations in the organizational chart—shaped the ways leaders across district departments worked together while cultural-cognitive and normative aspects shaped how leaders worked together and hindered shared responsibility within cross-departmental work.
How Marginalization Persisted Despite Attempts at Disruption
Promoting shared responsibility within the central office requires breaking down the silos that tend to exist between SE, ML, and content-area educators. Hawthorne’s senior leadership attempted to disrupt these silos by redesigning districtwide Quarterly Professional Learning Sessions in ways that encouraged cross-departmental collaboration.
Findings from our social network analyses indicated that, despite district leaders’ attempts to support collaboration, silos persisted with respect to literacy instruction such that SE and ML leaders were marginalized in literacy-related decision-making processes. This marginalization was slightly attenuated for SWDs when it came to mathematics instruction, suggesting that leaders may have begun to share responsibility for SWDs in this content area. These trends can be observed in Figures 1 and 2 below. Figure 1 displays a network diagram of literacy-related instructional decision-making interactions among Hawthorne’s central office leaders; Figure 2 displays the same diagram for mathematics.
Hawthorne Central Office Literacy Instructional Decision-Making Network
Hawthorne Central Office Mathematics Instructional Decision-Making Network
Analyses of interactions in the literacy network suggest that instructional decision-making was not shared across departments. As can be seen in Figure 1, the core of Hawthorne’s literacy network included only leaders from the ML department, indicating that a subset of ML leaders frequently interacted to make decisions about literacy instruction. These ML leaders, however, interacted much less frequently, if at all, with leaders in other departments. Indeed, the ML department had an intra-departmental density of 0.80, indicating that 80% of possible ties between ML leaders were actualized. By contrast, the density of inter-departmental interactions between ML and Literacy was roughly 20%, and 0% of ties between ML and Literacy were reciprocated.
Isolated from the literacy networks’ core, leaders from the SE department interacted with one another to make decisions about literacy instruction, with an intra-departmental density of 100%. The density of their interactions with literacy leaders, however, was just 7% and, like the ML leaders, there were no reciprocal interactions between the SE and Literacy departments. Given that ML and SE leaders tended to interact only with one another to make literacy-related instructional decisions, one might assume that the literacy leaders also kept to themselves. However, the density of ties within the Literacy department was only 30%, with an examination of the literacy network showing an open, uncentralized intra-departmental network (see Figure 1). The limited interaction among literacy staff may have contributed to the lack of shared responsibility observed in the overall network.
Relatively speaking, there was more inter-departmental decision-making in mathematics among Hawthorne’s central office leadership. Whereas the core of the literacy network included only ML leaders, the core of the math network included leaders from the Math, SE, and ML departments (shown in Figure 2), suggesting a disruption of departmental silos. While both the Math and SE departments were highly dense, with 100% of ties within each department actualized, there were also strong between-department interactions, with 80% of ties between the Math and SE departments actualized and reciprocated. By contrast, interactions within the ML department were sparse, with only 14% of intra-department ties realized and only 18% of potential ties between ML and Math actualized. These findings suggest that responsibility for math instructional decision-making was shared with SE leaders; however, far fewer ML leaders were engaged in math-related decision-making.
Despite a more integrated core in the math instructional decision-making network, our interview findings suggested that, overall, mathematics and literacy leaders continued to drive most instructional decision-making, with ML and SE leaders working at the periphery. Nonetheless, one example of shared responsibility emerged for SWDs, where SE and math leaders equally shared knowledge and expertise. This joint-work was motivated and supported by accountability policies as well as SE and math leaders’ backgrounds and expertise. We explore these nuances below.
Collaboration without Shared Responsibility
Despite the marginalization of ML and SE leaders in the literacy network, and ML leaders in the math network, all the mathematics and literacy leaders we interviewed described collaborating with leaders across the central office to identify district-wide instructional needs, plan Quarterly Professional Learning Sessions, and jointly deliver this professional learning. Carmen, a literacy leader, explained how leaders from across departments, including ML and SE, came together to plan Quarterly Professional Learning Sessions: “We have a resource teacher from the [ML] department. We have a resource teacher from the [SE] department and we have somebody from technology.” Carmen then described how they worked together to identify instructional needs, such as vocabulary, writing, and helping teachers connect the CCSS to their instructional practice. Similarly, Marianne, a mathematics leader with a background in SE, explained how the Math department worked with other central office leaders to develop and deliver mathematics professional learning sessions, “Well, who’s involved is me, Lucille, and Kamal [elementary math leaders]. Then, it’s also a collaborative PL. We have some representatives from the [SE] department, [ML Department], and then our Computer Ed.” The Quarterly Professional Learning Sessions thus offered opportunities for central office leaders to develop connections across departments and to build district-wide instructional practices that drew from diverse sources of expertise. Yet, having an opportunity to come together is necessary but insufficient for promoting true shared responsibility.
Even though the Quarterly Professional Learning Sessions provided a structure for bringing leaders from different departments together, developing shared responsibility requires that power (i.e., authority over decision-making) be distributed equally among leaders and departments. Within the district’s Quarterly Professional Learning work, ML and SE leaders were consistently described as an afterthought to literacy and mathematics instructional decision-making, rather than included throughout the professional learning planning process. As an example, Lucille, a literacy leader, expressed how well she believed departments worked together within their Quarterly Professional Learning co-planning. In her description, though, she cast SE and ML leaders in the role of adapting professional learning to serve the needs of “struggling learners” or “those students”: Our particular [Quarterly Professional Learning Sessions planning], we also have two people from the [SE] department. . . They’re putting their input on the [SE] end of making sure that we’re hitting those strategies to differentiate for those struggling learners. Then we also have our [ML Department], which is those with different languages. . . They also will give their input into ways that we can meet the needs of [ML] students, as well as those [SE] students.
Lucille’s depiction of SE and ML students reflected a cultural-cognitive script indicative of “othering,” which was then present in implicit norms that positioned literacy and math leaders as responsible for setting the direction of Quarterly Professional Learning Sessions and coordinating with ML and SE leaders after the fact. Carmen, a literacy leader, described these norms of interaction in this way: “We have a framework of what we’re doing and then [the ML and SE leaders] would come in and collaborate and see which direction we’re going and how they can participate.” Although ML and SE leaders were part of the collaboration process, the onus was on them to figure out how to participate. Further, ML and SE leaders were expected to adapt to existing frameworks rather than support their initial development or redesign.
While this arrangement was described as productive by math and literacy leaders, ML and SE leaders described feeling marginalized in instructional decision-making. Katrina, the ML staff developer, noted that the ML department only participated in collaborative conversations “if they think of us.” She added, “Honestly, I think it’s, ‘Oh, by the way, we’re doing this. Are you interested?’” rather than having ML leaders “at the table from the very beginning and saying, ‘Okay, what about [a local school]? . . . Well, 50 percent of their kids are MLs, so let’s think about how this is going to affect content.’” Similarly, Uma from the SE department offered, “[I]t would be nice to think about who all needs to be at the table upfront versus the afterthought.” Uma also shared that leaders across the district made assumptions about her knowledge and capabilities: “It’s interesting because the mindset of, ‘Well, she’s special ed’ . . . I think that’s one thing is, ‘How would you know about anything else because you’re this,’ that kind of old-school, archaic thing that happens.” These examples illustrate how the “othering” of ML and SE leaders was instantiated in practice.
Student Group Accountability Policies Can Shift Norms of “Othering”
Despite the cognitive scripts and norms that seemed to limit opportunities for shared responsibility, we found one example of how regulative pressures—in this case accountability policy—promoted shared responsibility. Though aspects of the regulative environment can perpetuate the marginalization of SE and ML staff into separate programs or classrooms (Garver, 2022), we found that federal accountability policies and associated pressures to improve the performance of specific student groups afforded SE leadership leverage to shift norms and support shared responsibility with math leaders. Uma, an SE leader, described how she used state assessment data results, which showed that SWDs were performing especially poorly in math, to forge a partnership with math leaders. She said, “I sought it out. They didn’t come knocking at my door.” She described how SE and math leaders co-developed a new data monitoring system to track student progress and collaboratively engaged in “proactive” conversations with schools based on their joint data analysis. Uma recalled, We didn’t have the data by disability at the district level. [Math leaders] gave good critical feedback about what we need and what we might not need so that I can work with data management to try to set it up. When the new data comes out in the fall, then it will be what they need in order to have conversations with schools. That was . . . last week. We’re tryin’ to be proactive about when we get that data . . . what do we need to have?
While this example shows how an aspect of the regulative environment was leveraged to support shared responsibility for SE students in mathematics, it was the only such example we found in the interview data. In the next section, we situate the Quarterly Professional Learning planning process in broader district structures, norms, and cultural-cognitive scripts and describe how these organizational conditions contributed to the institutionalization of “othering” students labeled as MLs and/or SWDs.
How the Institutional Environment Perpetuates “Othering”
While the prior findings demonstrated how SE and ML leaders were marginalized in instructional decision-making, in this section, we unpack how the institutional environment contributed to this larger pattern of marginalization. We found that the marginalization of ML and SE leaders appeared to stem from deeply entrenched funding and compliance pressures and exclusionary cultural-cognitive scripts. These institutionalized structures, norms, and understandings worked dynamically to perpetuate “othering” through central office leaders’ daily work in ways that were taken for granted, unquestioned, and seemed innocuous.
Funding and Compliance Requirements Constrained Systems-Building
Funding streams—especially federal sources of funding—and compliance pressures around that funding contributed to creating and maintaining silos that marginalized the ML and SE departments from content-related instructional decisions. Specifically, SE and ML leaders described how compliance pressures around federal funding shaped the work of their departments and their personal responsibilities. For example, Frank described that his role within the district as the Director of MLs was to manage various Title III grants. Frank then built out the infrastructure for these grants and actively managed these grants to run ML programs—all in compliance with different federal requirements—at the elementary, middle, and high school levels.
Frank explained that Hawthorne’s ML office was organized around “four distinct areas” of work that aligned with federal compliance requirements. For example, one distinct area was the ML intake center, which “[works] with our families that are either newly arrived or coming through for the identification of [ML] status.” This area worked entirely separately from another office that helped “coordinate all the translation, interpretation work for the district, either at the school level or for conferences and or district documents.” Further, these areas of the ML Department worked separately from the instructional side, which was managed solely by Katrina, the ML students’ staff developer. These examples highlight that, while dividing responsibilities provides clarity around how funding is used to directly support MLs, it likely left little room to collaborate with other departments. Indeed, ML leaders described how compliance pressures constrained any partnerships they could build across the district. For example, Frank discussed how the regulative pressures around federal funding limited his office’s ability to work with early childhood. Frank explained that, even though many of the families their office will eventually serve “take advantage of preschool,” the ML office is limited in how they can collaborate with early childhood because “Title III funding is really only supposed to be for K through 12.” Relatedly, Uma explained that SE and Curriculum and Instruction (C&I) have different sources of funding that are attached to certain kinds of work and cannot be used for others. She said, “Funding that special education gets for implementation of services is federal and general funds, whereas C&I is state funds. There’s not a lot of federal money unless you get a grant.” She then explained, “You have all this splintered access to money sometimes [and it’s] because of initiatives that are focused in a particular area.”
Additional grants can, but do not always, help solve the challenge of collaboration between departments. For example, Katrina talked about how additional grants have allowed the ML department to hire more school-based ML resource teachers, which provides all ML resource teachers with a bit more time as their caseloads have decreased. With this additional time, they can help plan district-wide professional learning sessions and work with schools to spread and incorporate that professional learning into their instruction, reflecting Katrina’s sentiment that “whether it’s dollars or people, it [can] make things better.” Yet, the central office leaders expressed that they struggle with deciding how much to ask ML resource teachers to participate in district-level collaboration or professional learning session planning because it comes at the expense of their work in schools. Although ML leaders noted that the district benefits from infusing “[MLs’] perspectives” into instruction more broadly, they also recognized that this work can pull them away from their other responsibilities. Consequently, engaging in Quarterly PLs to share their knowledge and expertise came at a cost for these ML-focused leaders.
Divisional Separations Contributed to Fragmentation
Hawthorne’s central office organizational structure separated content-area offices from the ML and SE departments, which provided formal roadblocks to promoting shared responsibility. While the Mathematics and Literacy departments were within C&I Division, the SE and ML departments were within the Academic Services Division. In Katrina’s words, “the district has the ML Department as a separate entity.” Katrina also explained how content-area leaders reported to different assistant superintendents than SE and ML leaders, “The Director of Curriculum and Instruction reports directly to the Chief Academic Officer. Then, all the [content area] specialists are part of that. Then Academic Services is a separate entity. It’s Title I, [SE], [ML], yeah, so separate.” Moreover, the ML and SE departments were in separate buildings from one another as well as from the content area offices.
Respondents talked about how these organizational and physical separations contributed to fragmentation. For instance, Uma noted how these arrangements stymied a sense of shared responsibility for all students, “In general, it should be all of us working together around mathematics. If I’m in Curriculum & Instruction, and I have a mathematics specialist, shouldn’t we be working around math for all kids?” She went on to share how these structures hindered collaborative norms and reified separatist mindsets: Even though we’re in a different academic support group and we have a different assistant superintendent, just because we’re special ed, doesn’t mean we should be the only ones dealing with special ed or growth in math in special ed. Just like those people over in another building for [MLs], you don’t want the mindset that it’s not all of us working together. It just shows the reactive nature versus collaborative proactive in the urban district, I think.
Overall, the way in which the central office was formally organized reinforced the cultural-cognitive belief that SWDs were the sole responsibility of SE, while MLs were the responsibility of the ML department, and so on.
Exclusionary Mindsets Can Shut Down Existing Occurrences of Shared Responsibility
We previously described how math and SE leaders enacted shared responsibility in their efforts to address the underperformance of SWDs on standardized math exams. Though leaders from both the SE and math departments described the importance of this partnership, not everyone at the district saw its value, and some even sought to exclude SWDs from math instructional decision-making. Specifically, resistance from Lauren, the assistant superintendent of C&I, threatened to shut down their collaborative work. Uma, an SE leader, and Bea, a math leader, both discussed how Lauren tried to end the partnership because she did not feel it was an essential part of the math department’s work. Uma shared: I got an email that same evening, and it wasn’t from Bea. It was from Lauren, the assistant superintendent. She broke up with me over email . . . she had explained that they were busy and couldn’t participate in our initiative to work with special [education students], our math initiative anymore . . . it almost was like she was doing us a favor being a part of it.
Uma’s belief that Lauren felt “like she was doing us a favor” by participating in this effort reflects an exclusionary cultural-cognitive script that SWDs were Uma’s, not Bea’s or Lauren’s, responsibility. It also reflects an ableist view of SWDs and their learning potential; if Lauren truly viewed SWDs as capable of learning and making progress in mathematics, she would see working to support them as a responsibility of curriculum and instruction.
The quote above also illustrates implicit norms of C&I’s relative “power” over SE. Lauren exerted her positional authority within the district’s organizational chart to unilaterally end Uma’s partnership with the math department. Further, she communicated this decision via a “breakup email” instead of a conversation. Lauren’s action effectively ended all activities that promoted shared responsibility across SE and mathematics—at least until Bea fought for her collaborative work with the SE department.
In contrast with Lauren’s exclusionary “othering” of SWDs, Bea took a page from Uma’s book and leveraged accountability pressures and SWDs’ low test scores to justify the partnership to Lauren, as Uma described: Bea talked to Lauren about how important it was that [Math] stay involved, [that] the reason that we were doing it together is because nationally, math is low, [our state] is low, and our district is low. Not only is it low in our district, it’s low for specifically students with disabilities. . .When someone directs you, ‘This is your work’ or ‘[This is] not your work,’ ‘That’s what you’re gonna be doing,’ you have to have the data to support it, and we do. Clearly, it is something that was not understood like we thought it was.
In this quote, Uma suggested that regulative pressures helped Bea push against Lauren’s exclusionary mindsets that reified the marginalization of the SE department, at least temporarily. Uma also described the importance of higher-level leadership support for shared responsibility: “The people who are doing the work realize the value of the work, [but] if the leadership does not support or communicate and allow for the work to continue, it doesn’t have a chance.”
Discussion
Our schools were not designed with the needs of MLs or SWDs in mind. Though federal policies grant access to public schooling for these historically marginalized groups of students and intend to highlight their unique needs, MLs and SWDs are not always well-served (Garver, 2022; Harry & Ocasio-Stoutenburg, 2020; Voulgarides, 2018). Further, SWDs and MLs are often not privileged within instructional reforms.
Shared responsibility has the potential to shift these dynamics, moving instructional decision-making from where it is traditionally housed within content-area departments to being distributed with parity among all central office leaders responsible for instruction. These shifts would enable collaboration such that all leaders share their expertise to support the needs of all students, and establish the expectation that educators should hold themselves and each other accountable for such collaboration.
In this paper, we examined whether and how central office leaders in a large urban district shared responsibility as they engaged in instructional decision-making related to literacy and mathematics. We found that, despite senior leaders’ efforts to support cross-departmental collaboration by redesigning the Quarterly Professional Learning Session planning and delivery process, this structural change was unfortunately not enough to promote shared responsibility. Leveraging a conceptual framework that brought together critical social network theory and institutional theory, our findings revealed how deeply entrenched siloes perpetuated the marginalization of MLs and SWDs and created barriers to shared responsibility. The perpetuation of these siloes was rooted in conceptions of MLs and SWDs as “struggling learners,” who some content-area leaders conceived of as ML and SE leaders’ responsibility and thus were not to be considered in mathematics or literacy instructional decision-making.
Consistent with prior literature (e.g. Garver, 2022; Hopkins et al., 2015), we found that the regulative environment can and often does contribute to the marginalization of SE and ML departments. Specifically, two aspects of the regulatory environment in Hawthorne limited opportunities for shared responsibility. First, federal funding and related compliance pressures bifurcated SE and ML leaders’ work. Second, the central office organizational structure created formal divisions and hierarchies between departments. Despite these regulative influences, we found that federal accountability pressures served as a mechanism to direct content-area leaders’ attention to SWDs and motivated shared responsibility across the SE and Math departments. Although prior research has found that accountability policies do not always lead to instructional changes—including prioritizing particular groups of “underperforming” students (Garver, 2017)—our study suggests that broader regulative influences, when leveraged by district leadership, can attenuate the effects of persistent marginalization, at least temporarily.
Beyond the regulative dimension, our findings also showed how the normative and cultural-cognitive dimensions also affect opportunities to collaborate and the nature of collaboration between departments. Even though the Quarterly Professional Learning process required leaders from the ML, SE, Math, and Literacy departments to collaborate, the interactions leaders described were more indicative of “contrived collegiality” (Hargreaves & Dawe, 1990) than meaningful collaboration. Due to a long-standing norm that curriculum and instruction should be adapted for MLs and SWDs after its initial development, ML and SE leaders in Hawthorne were included in decisions as an afterthought to Quarterly Professional Learning session planning and delivery. Further, exclusionary cultural-cognitive scripts created an “us versus them” mentality that was reflected in whether or not MLs and SWDs were considered “your students” or “our students.” Overall, our findings indicate that the Quarterly Professional Learning initiative failed to promote shared responsibility in part because it did not require the surfacing or rewriting of the norms or cultural-cognitive scripts that othered MLs and SWDs and undergirded central office regulative structures.
Limitations
It is worth noting that much of the evidence we draw on in this manuscript comes from three individuals: Frank, Katrina, and Uma, who are ML and SE leaders. While this may be viewed as a limitation of our study, the absence of data or quotes from content-area leaders is also likely a reflection of how little we heard from content-area leaders about how they shared responsibility for MLs and SWDs. That is, even though content-area leaders described ML and SE leaders as part of instructional decision-making, this work was not grounded in a sense of shared responsibility. Instead of supporting parity in their interactions and leveraging all the sources of expertise and knowledge to design instruction that meets the needs of all students, content-area leaders’ interactions tended to be guided by unchallenged norms and exclusionary cultural-cognitive scripts about whose needs should be prioritized and who had content-relevant expertise. Across interviews, ML and SE leaders expressed a desire to be at the table—and for SWDs and MLs to be considered—from the beginning of instructional decision-making. We found no evidence that this desire was met. Still, as previously mentioned, this investigation came from a larger study, and shared responsibility for SWDs and MLs was not the focus of the larger study; had we started our investigation with these questions from the outset we may have asked different questions and found more evidence of shared responsibility or the marginalization of ML and SE leaders. In addition, we could have learned more about shared responsibility for dually-identified students (i.e., MLs who also receive SE) who need enhanced instructional support (Kangas et al., 2024).
Implications
These findings have implications for research, policy, and practice. Our findings add to the literature on developing and sustaining shared responsibility (Berry, 2021; Collier et al., 2015; Fenner, 2013; Hopkins et al., 2022a; Weddle et al., 2024; Wong, 2023) by investigating shared responsibility within the district central office and across departments. Our investigation also extends prior research on shared responsibility by illuminating additional organizational barriers that educational leaders need to address to support the development of shared responsibility and, thus, ameliorate systemic inequities.
In addition to shifting more easily changed structural aspects of their school systems, there is a need for leaders to attend to more pervasive barriers to systemic change, including cultural-cognitive, normative, and regulative aspects, each of which requires direct and sustained attention. Future research should attend to how the cultural-cognitive and normative dimensions of the institutional environment directly affect central office and school leaders’ beliefs about their own and other leaders’ expertise, the role of partnership work in supporting all students, and the importance of prioritizing SWDs and MLs within instructional decision-making from the outset. Leveraging conversation or discourse analysis (Gee, 2014) to attend to the (often subtle) language and conversational moves that leaders take could be a potentially fruitful line of work. Additionally, the regulative environments for MLs and SWDs do differ. For example, there are different funding streams, and all SWDs are federally required to receive an individualized education program that is specifically targeted to their needs while only some states require individualized language plans for MLs. Future research should attend to how, if at all, differences in the regulative environment for MLs, SWDs, and dual-identified students differentially enable and constrain efforts to promote shared responsibility within the central office. This work could also move beyond literacy and math instruction and investigate other subjects, including science, social studies, the arts, and physical education.
This study also contributes to research that applies critical social network theory and analysis to study educational (in)equity. In particular, our study demonstrates the affordances of using both quantitative and qualitative approaches. For instance, if we were only to look at our study’s quantitative findings, we would have assumed that there was more shared responsibility within mathematics—at least between special education and mathematics central office leaders—than within literacy within the Hawthorne central office. But, by engaging in a mixed-methods investigation we were better able to understand the nature of the relationships and how organizational conditions enabled and constrained shared responsibility. In doing so, this paper builds on the emerging critical social networks literature (see Finnigan & Jabbar, 2023 and Hopkins et al., 2022b) and illustrates how qualitative analysis is necessary to reveal how power dynamics shape the quality and substance of interactions. Importantly, the social networks in our study represent one moment in time, when Hawthorne was in the midst of trying to integrate ML and SE leaders into math and literacy decision-making. Future research could consider conducting multiple surveys over time to examine changing interaction patterns and to interrogate how power may operate to disrupt or maintain certain patterns.
Our findings also have implications for practice, showing how central office leaders’ decisions shape the curriculum and, thus, students’ daily learning opportunities. In Hawthorne, knowledge related to MLs and SWDs tended to live within certain people, namely ML and SE leaders. This siloization of knowledge is not sufficient to meet the needs of SWDs and MLs, who, on average, spend the majority of their time in general education environments (NCES, 2022). To facilitate shared responsibility, formal opportunities for collaboration, such as routines and structures organized by higher-level administrators, may be necessary, even if not sufficient. SE and ML leaders in our study directly stated that they did not want to be afterthoughts within the district’s work; they wanted their expertise and MLs and SWDs’ needs considered from the outset. Further, while the leaders in our study expressed a desire to be a part of broader instructional and systems-change work, it is entirely possible that other ML and SE leaders may see this work as an improper use of their time, especially if they have had negative experiences working with other central office leaders and given the opportunity costs of doing work in their own departments.
Shifting traditional approaches to instructional decision-making requires upending normative and cultural-cognitive dimensions within central offices—ones that can be steeped in exclusionary views of MLs and SWDs. Without attending to the broader institutional environment, leaders—especially content-area leaders—can perpetuate “othering” within their daily work. While the regulative environment—including federal policies, funding streams, and compliance pressures—contributed to the creation and maintenance of silos, the normative and cultural-cognitive pressures contributed to the marginalization of ML and SE leaders by justifying which district leaders should be at the center and the margins of instructional decision-making. We would like to clearly articulate that we are not trying to claim that some leaders in the Hawthorne central office are bad actors. Rather, these leaders are embedded within organizations in a society where anti-immigrant sentiment, racism, ableism, and linguicism are a part of the air they breathe and entrenched in their organizational practices (McCambly, 2023; Ray, 2019). The broader environment contributes to central office leaders’ socialization getting locked into a limiting change framework. Yet, evidence from a handful of districts suggests that developing an asset-based vision for inclusion and being steadfast in its implementation can help promote better outcomes and experiences for racially and linguistically minoritized students and SWDs (Irby et al., 2022; Santos & Hopkins, 2020; Welton et al., 2019). More research is needed to identify leadership approaches that attend to the institutionalization of othering.
Finally, this paper also has implications for federal education entitlement policies. Federal civil rights and entitlement policies like the IDEA and Title III that govern SE and MLs, respectively, separate SWDs and MLs from their peers (Annamma et al., 2014; Artiles et al., 2016; Ferri & Connor, 2005; Garver, 2020; Weise & García, 2013). Allowing for separate supports that are specific to the needs of SWDs and MLs is critical and creates important protections for these students (Skrentny, 2002; Voulgarides, 2018; Weise & García, 2013). However, the compliance and funding requirements around these laws can also perpetuate inequalities. Developing federal policies that can allow for some additional flexibility may help ensure that MLs and SWDs are protected while also allowing central offices and schools to develop creative and collaborative approaches to better meet the needs of MLs and SWDs.
Supplemental Material
sj-docx-1-ero-10.1177_23328584241298253 – Supplemental material for Toward Dissolving the Institutionalization of “Othering”: Organizational Conditions that Support Shared Responsibility
Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-ero-10.1177_23328584241298253 for Toward Dissolving the Institutionalization of “Othering”: Organizational Conditions that Support Shared Responsibility by Jennifer R. Cowhy, Lok-Sze Wong and Megan Hopkins in AERA Open
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to gratefully acknowledge the research team who contributed to the larger project from which this paper came. We sincerely thank Cynthia Coburn, Jim Spillane, Caitlin Farrell, Anna-Ruth Allen, and Bill Penuel, who led the project. We also thank Angel Bohannon, Abby Beneke, Kristen Davidson, Bethany Ellison, Rachel Feldman, Christopher Harrison, Alice Huguet, Ayah Kamel, Debbie Kim, and Natalie Talbert Jou. These individuals all contributed to the design of this study, data collection, and project management. Several of these individuals also provided feedback on earlier drafts of this paper. We are also deeply appreciative of the anonymous reviewers and editors on earlier versions of this manuscript and audience members from the American Education Research Association’s Districts in Research and Reform SIG and the University Council of Education Administration (UCEA). We have worked hard to incorporate their feedback, and we believe this is a substantially better paper because of their engagement. We also wish to thank the teachers and administrators who contributed their time to this study in the hopes that other educators, policymakers, and reformers could learn from their experiences.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Finally, we thank our funders. This work was supported by the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, through Grant RC305C140008, the William T. Grant Foundation, through Grant 184067, and the Northwestern University School of Education & Social Policy. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not represent the views of the U.S. Department of Education, the William T. Grant Foundation, or the Northwestern University School of Education and Social Policy.
Notes
Authors
JENNIFER R. COWHY is an assistant professor of educational leadership at the University of Arkansas. Her research focuses on policy implementation and leadership with an emphasis on special education and supporting students with disabilities as well as their families and special educators, special education leaders, and related service providers.
LOK-SZE WONG is an assistant professor of educational leadership in the College of Education at the University of North Texas. Her research unpacks how systems (re)produce inequities and how to humanely reform schools and districts as complex social systems.
MEGAN HOPKINS is a professor and chair in the Department of Education Studies at the University of California San Diego. Her research focuses on policy and leadership with a specific emphasis on the education of multilingual learners in the K–12 education system.
References
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