Abstract
Despite decades of critiques and scores of innovations designed to abolish or weaken it, the school district remains a central institution of the American educational system. Yet, although the district remains the primary agent of local democratic control and serves as the main unit for educational decisions, relatively little attention has been given to the historical evolution of the school district as an institutional form. Reformers and researchers alike often hold misperceptions and inaccurate assumptions about the nature of the school district’s development, precisely because the district has been understudied. The authors of this chapter offer a first step toward correcting that oversight by broadening our attention span, providing a solid historical overview of how the district has developed over the past two centuries, and exploring how scholars have analyzed districts at different points in our past. They focus on how the definition of what constitutes a school district has changed over time and on how perceptions of what it has meant to be a good or effective district has shifted throughout our history. They argue that the district has never been a static institution, that its changing forms and functions deserve greater recognition, and that conflicts regarding school districts often reflect deep and enduring frictions that are endemic to American social structures.
Throughout its long lifespan, the American school district has been praised and lambasted, consolidated and reorganized, centralized, decentralized, and recentralized; yet, despite its many shifts in fortune, it has remained steadfastly in place, altered perhaps, but essentially intact. Scholars and reformers have differed in their appraisals of this longevity. Some critics see it as a sign of the district’s intransigence; others treat it as a testament to its vitality. Several generations of reformers have seen the district as obsolete and ripe for termination; others seek to strengthen it through robust attention to its role in improving instructional practice.
Whatever one’s view, few would deny that the school district has played an important role in our educational past and present. Today, nearly 50 million American children are educated in, at last count, 13,515 “regular” public school districts (Snyder, de Brey, & Dillow, 2016). The district remains the primary platform on which we sort out local educational politics, school building construction, leadership, enrollment, governance, and busing and transportation. Yet, despite widespread recognition of the district’s core duties, explaining the precise nature of the role that the district has played in our educational history has proved challenging, partly because we do not regularly pause to reflect on it. In fact, even though the district often serves as the point of focus for our data collection, as the unit of analysis for political and historical studies, or as the primary agency of local democratic control, it has rarely been a subject of inquiry itself.
Indeed, little attention has been devoted to the historical evolution of the school district as an institutional form. Certainly, researchers have written a great deal about districts, directly and indirectly, but these writings have never been woven into any kind of extended explanatory narrative. While we cannot undertake a complete version of that task here (see Gamson & Hodge, in press), we can highlight some of the biggest thematic shifts. The general goals of this chapter are to take a first step toward providing a solid historical overview of how the school district has developed over time, to explore how scholars have analyzed districts at different points in our past, and to do so in a way that integrates these two strands—the history and the research literature. In other words, we look at the historical and institutional development of local school systems alongside the literature produced about school districts during each historic period. In so doing, we hope to slightly broaden how scholars conceive of the “literature review,” for we suggest that the evolution of school districts can best be understood by blending the stages of scholarship with the historical developments that surrounded them. To our knowledge, no one has taken quite this approach before, and this centennial issue of Review of Research in Education offers an excellent opportunity to look back on the district with this somewhat novel analytic lens.
As most students of American education will immediately recognize, any reflective investigation into school districts can easily expose an array of issues that involve core perceptions about our national educational enterprise. After all, through the district flows a wealth of standard scholarly concerns: power and privilege, expertise and authority, funding and equity, segregation and desegregation, centralization and decentralization, and instruction and community participation, among many others. Alertness to these themes is essential as we catalogue decades of research on school districts. Moreover, as we hope to show, tracing the history of scholarship on districts offers unique insight into the changing nature of education research itself. In fact, as we shall demonstrate, districts have often been directly interconnected with educational scholarship since the earliest investigations of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The sporadic research attention given to districts since then has meant that many of the earlier interconnections between districts and education research have been forgotten or overlooked.
We recognize at the outset that what precisely defines a school district varies significantly depending on perspective. The term district can refer to a school board, a collection of schools, a geographic demarcation, a legal entity, a bargaining unit, a central office, a set of enrollment boundaries—the list goes on. We cannot feasibly incorporate all versions or visions of a district into a short review; rather, we hope to paint with a broad brush the historical treatments of school districts and thereby help inform current and future research discussions.
Most database searches of literature pertaining to American school districts yield thousands of sources—for instance, 62,000 in JSTOR; 112,113 in WorldCat, 1.5 million in Penn State’s LionSearch—far too many to reasonably review or integrate into a cogent essay. Rather than conducting a meta-analysis, we have made a careful selection of significant articles in particular areas of district research. In the process, we developed a multilayered approach to finding, collecting, and discussing the research included herein. Many of the historical studies were identified over a multiyear period of research on the history of school districts (Gamson & Hodge, in press). There is a rich historical tradition of studying the development of individual school districts (R. D. Cohen, 1990; Mirel, 1993; Raftery, 1992; Zilversmit, 1993), and these works helped inform our analysis. However, we did not attempt a review, per se.
We used, as a starting point, seminal research pieces in both education policy and the history of education as a springboard into more thorough investigations of the literature on districts, which brought us to influential examples of primary source material. We drew on several excellent studies and literature reviews that included one or more aspects of district-related reform (Alsbury, 2008; Campbell, Cunningham, Nystrand, & Usdan, 1990; Fuhrman & Elmore, 1990; Hallinger, 2013; Land, 2002; Lopate, Flaxman, Bynum, & Gordon, 1970; MacIver & Farley, 2003; Marsh, 2002; Marsh et al., 2005; Rorrer, Skrla, & Scheurich, 2008; Trujillo, 2013). Finally, our three anonymous reviewers offered healthy lists of suggestions regarding scholars and studies that we had previously overlooked. Taken together, the studies we include offer something of a representative (but by no means complete) sample that illustrates significant analytical perspectives regarding local control and local educational agencies throughout the nation’s educational past.
As a way to focus our discussion, we developed a set of central questions to help guide our approach. First, how has the idea, or definition, of what a school district is changed over time, and why have discussions of districts periodically resulted in controversy? Second, what has it meant to be a good or effective district through history, and how has district quality been assessed, measured, or determined? And, finally, as the district has developed over time, how have researchers and practitioners articulated what they see as its appropriate role?
In addition to our general purpose for this chapter, we also have specific goals. First, we seek to adjust and broaden the usual time span of research on school districts. Recent literature on the subject usually begins with the reforms and writings of the 1980s or 1990s; we believe this restricted time frame robs us of a deeper understanding of how districts have developed in this nation over the past 100—if not 200—years. Second, we suggest that many of the key assumptions researchers make about districts are not informed by the historical record, and thus are unintentionally misinformed, misleading, or both. (We provide a brief synopsis of these perspectives after this introduction.) Third, we attempt to better understand the connections between the school district and instructional improvement, a relationship that many researchers now believe should be the core consideration of school reform efforts. And finally, by examining a longer time period, we hope to highlight how many of the current tensions in education policy and the challenges affecting school districts today echo those faced by districts in the 19th and 20th centuries. We see the current conflicts regarding districts not so much as the result of recent conditions or political divides as they are deep and enduring frictions that are endemic to American social structures and cultural institutions through history.
Historians and other scholars often use the technique of dividing the past into discrete time periods that correspond to changes within their domain of concern. In the case of education, these may be developments in curriculum, in theories of learning, or in testing and assessments. We have developed our own periodization here, identifying four periods between 1816 and the present: 1816 to 1916, 1916 to 1954, 1954 to 1990, and 1990 to 2016. However, our divisions should be understood more as an organizational device than as an analytic taxonomy that seeks to define district development through distinct developmental eras. Our general approach, we recognize, also has a number of limitations, and we wish to offer a preemptive acknowledgment that we have committed multiple sins of omission due to space considerations. However, we hope that a broad, long-term historical vantage point allows us to place in relief many of the struggles that school districts contend with today, even if we are forced to pass over a number of significant concerns that have inhabited the literature, including themes such as local politics or the ongoing role of school boards.
Before we commence on our own chronological survey, we think it worthwhile to summarize some of the standard narratives evident in relatively recent literature about the school district. Although this account essentially leapfrogs ahead of our historical sections by distilling more contemporary views on districts, it is precisely these common current perceptions and research assumptions that motivated our original interest in taking on this essay. Collectively, then, this catalogue of common beliefs provides a necessary foundation to our chapter.
Recent Views on the School District
Standard narratives on the school district have taken a variety of forms; most notable among them are three common perspectives. The first is the belief that district governance and local control serve as an embodiment of educational democracy. Second is the idea that districts have remained organizationally static ever since they were established in their modern form in the early 20th century (another variant of this view is that the district serves as an example of a retrograde institution, given its 19th-century origin). Third is the notion that districts are monolithic bureaucracies that are pathologically flawed and completely incapable of reinvigoration or reinvention. These conceptual categories are not mutually exclusive, and many critics of public education often amalgamate a combination of the three. We recognize that these are simplified representations of standard views: Many researchers and reformers hold more sophisticated and nuanced understandings. Therefore, as we provide some brief illustrations of these common views below, we simultaneously demonstrate how they overlap, intermingle, or conflict. Again, the purpose is to develop an appreciation for some of the more significant shared beliefs about districts.
In the popular imagination, the school district is often seen as the epitome of democratic governance of education, as the “crucible of democracy” (Iannaccone & Lutz, 1995). While scholars have acknowledged the power of this concept, especially in explaining the persistence of local control, they have often taken a critical stance on just how democratic the district truly is, rightly acknowledging the ways in which schools and school districts were organized to privilege White students through testing and tracking (Callahan, 1962; Katz, 1975; Oakes, 1985; Spring, 1972) and how district boundary lines segregated students (Bischoff, 2008). McDermott (1999) argues that districts not only fail to live up to their billing as forums for political participation but also impede pursuit of the educational equity that Americans profess to desire. In other words, the quintessentially democratic educational institution can be employed to achieve distinctly undemocratic ends.
At the advent of the 20th century, as we discuss in more detail later, researchers celebrated the growth of large modern school districts, especially those located in cities, and they presented city school systems as exemplary blueprints for other districts to copy—a deliberate effort to help diffuse innovation (Cubberley, 1916a). By the 1960s, however, the notion of the urban school district as a model for others to emulate had begun to crumble, as scholars, educators, and public intellectuals severely critiqued the urban districts as flawed structures that undermined educational opportunity (Bowles & Gintis, 1975; Gittell, 1965; Greer, 1972; Kozol, 1967; Schrag, 1967), alienated students and teachers alike, and were unresponsive to community concerns (Rogers, 1968). One of the most widely used historical metaphors is Tyack’s (1974) notion of the district as the “one best system,” the organizational model established by “administrative progressive” reformers during the early 20th century. These reformers ultimately established an interlocking directorate of elite educators who convinced locals to replace older forms of governance with centralized school districts that were “professionalized.”
Since the 1970s, many scholars have used the notion of one best system as a way to explain both system and student failure. As Chubb and Moe (1990) put it, “We believe existing institutions cannot solve the problem, because they are the problem—and that the key to better schools is institutional reform” (p. 3). Despite a history of heated conflicts, the authors wrote,
The “one best system” has consistently stood above it all. It has provided the framework of democratic institutions with which demands are expressed, problems identified, solutions explored, and policy responses chosen. It has structured criticism and reform—but it has never been their target. (p. 6)
Others saw district structure as less of a problem, depicting school and district leaders as beleaguered, hamstrung by the emergence of a new array of forces—mandates and regulations that originated outside the district, such as union contracts, federal categorical programs, and state requirements (Ravitch, 1983; Zeigler, Tucker, & Wilson, 1977).
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, and into the 1980s, reformers tended to sidestep the district as a unit of change, and researchers often followed suit, analyzing the role played by the schools, the states, or, increasingly, the federal government. When districts were discussed, researchers depicted them as resistant implementers, adaptive adopters, or mere compliance monitors (Berman & McLaughlin, 1977, 1978, 1979). Although the War on Poverty held great hope for the positive impact of large-scale federal funding through the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, the Coleman report (Coleman et al., 1966), along with the decades of “school effects” literature that followed, cast a great deal of doubt on the ability of educational institutions to enhance the academic achievement of children (Berends & Rand, 2002; Raudenbush & Willms, 1995; Teddlie & Stringfield, 1993).
Given the modest hopes that researchers had for increasing student achievement in poor and minority communities, some scholars were surprised to find that handfuls of schools in poor neighborhoods yielded assessment scores significantly higher than those of other schools located in similar circumstances (Edmonds, 1979). The “effective schools” movement that followed focused on identifying the specific characteristics of the schools that appeared to be inordinately successful. Some researchers tried to extend the lessons learned to create “effective school districts,” but the results were disappointing (Purkey & Smith, 1985). In the 1980s and 1990s, several new types of school reform organizations—the Coalition of Essential Schools, the Accelerated School Project, and Success for All, among others—emerged as an outgrowth of the belief that the most effective unit of change was the school rather than the district (Levin, 1988; McQuillan & Muncey, 1994; Slavin, 1996).
In the 1990s, a variety of systemic reform approaches discounted districts. Advocates of systemic reform suggested that districts should avoid “usurping” the authority of schools or states, and the standards-based reform movement designated the state as the appropriate level of the system to leverage change (Smith & O’Day, 1991). Supporters of charter schools, voucher programs, restructuring, and site-based management all saw avoiding districts as fundamental to success. In an influential 1995 RAND report, Paul Hill asked, “Why has a decade of work on school reform produced so little?” Part of the answer, he said, lay in “school governance.” First, he argued, “The seeds of today’s disappointments were sown when educational reformers of the 19th century defined a public school as an institution financed, owned, and managed by a local agency of government.” Second, “Public management of education has created a governance system divorced from public needs and democratic change, a system incapable of renewing itself” (Hill, 1995, p. ix).
Even researchers who have worked directly with districts, who are sympathetic to their plight, and have distinctive visions for how districts can foster systemwide instructional improvement, nevertheless may kindle misconceptions about what districts have or have not done in the past. As one set of researchers concisely captures the sentiment, “School district central offices have operated for most of their history in ways distinctly different from what efforts to improve teaching and learning across an entire district demand” (Honig, Copland, Rainey, Lorton, & Newton, 2010, p. 8).
To summarize: By the beginning of the 21st century, many (but by no means all) researchers saw school districts as outdated institutions that were no longer capable of adapting to new circumstances or leading their schools toward necessary improvements. Although views have varied quite a bit in recent decades, the American school district has generally been treated with wariness, suspicion, or scorn. When researchers or reformers engage with districts, it is often with a sense of trepidation. We have done our best above to capture some of the mainstream lines of research, sentiment, and argumentation. Of course, this is not the whole story.
1816 to 1916: From District School to School District
The idea of democratic local governance has a long history in our nation, but the policies designed to translate that core notion into practical plans have not always been easy to formalize. Although a few “founding fathers” sketched out plans for the establishment of state school systems, there was little desire among the new American citizens or their legislatures for the additional taxation that would come with such ventures, and none of the early state plans succeeded. As Dewey (1927) later put it: “The imagination of the founders did not travel beyond what could be accomplished and understood in a congeries of self-governing communities.” Between the 1780s and the 1820s, as the states established their constitutions, they slowly began to erect the legal scaffolding of what would become state school systems. It took decades, however, for many of the state legislatures to pass the necessary enabling legislation (Bell, 1853; “Common School Laws . . . ,” 1849; Curtin, 1855; Davidson, 1896; “Statutes of the State of New-York . . . ,” 1847).
The characteristic school of the first decades of the 19th century was known as the “district school,” usually a one-room schoolhouse, organized and controlled by a small locality and financed by a combination of property taxes, tuition, and state aid (Kaestle, 1983). School patrons selected a small group of board members or trustees to hire a teacher and oversee the school building. Each school, in other words, constituted its own district, and it was rare for much thought to go into issues of governance. Although would-be reformers often complained about the wretched quality of instruction, Kaestle (1983) points out that district schools served local communities quite well, as the chief goal was to provide children with rudimentary instruction at a low cost, all under firm community control. Americans have had a tendency to romanticize these early efforts at self-governance, for they evoke images of a different kind of society—close-knit and harmonious—but the historical records demonstrate that harmony was hardly ubiquitous, and schooling was rarely seen as a major local priority throughout much of the century.
To understand the educational change that began in the 1820s and 1830s, it is necessary to recognize that American society began to transform itself rather quickly. Urbanization took place at a faster rate between 1820 and 1860 than in any other period in U.S. history (Tyack, 1974). The household, once the main unit of production, was soon bypassed by a rapidly expanding economy, and self-reliance and voluntary services no longer met the needs or desires of mushrooming villages. Rudimentary academic skills no longer sufficed for the intensified competition of capitalist markets. Descriptions of schools from the 1830s and beyond (in local, state, and national publications) clearly illustrate how both local and state leaders struggled to improve instruction, modernize school buildings, attach more gravitas to the work of school governance, and enhance public support for education.
All this matters because, first, the standard local educational arrangements became less and less tenable as the need for more complex skills increased. Second, as educational leaders began to run up against the limits of their own knowledge and experience, they felt the need to solicit advice from, or simply communicate with, a broader range of school leaders throughout their own states and in others. Published annual reports became one device for this networking, and as the cost of printing dropped throughout the 19th century, educational journals became an increasingly popular mechanism for intellectual engagement. The articles contained in these journals were not necessarily “research” in the sense that we think of it today, but they were certainly scholarly, for they contained the writings and expositions of some of the most notable educators of the day on educational principles, practices, and philosophies. In some states, the state office of education produced a Common Schools Journal (Connecticut) or District School Journal (New York), or something similar.
The American Journal of Education commenced publication in 1826. It captured the spirit of the age in its opening issue by explaining that the fields of science and literature had their own periodicals, already
contributing incalculably to the dissemination of knowledge and taste. But education—a subject of the highest practical importance to every school, every family, and every individual in the community—remains unprovided with one of these popular and useful vehicles of information. (“Prospectus,” 1826, p. 1)
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The journal announced its intention to furnish “a record of facts” (italics in the original) about the past and present state of education, collected through diligent inquiry; to offer a comparison of “the merits of various systems of instruction” in the United States and foreign countries; and to report the results of experimentation alongside discussions tracing the causes of failure or success.
With this new outward-focused, cosmopolitan attitude, the “district school” became more and more a main source of irritation and embarrassment. As one county deputy superintendent in New York State reported, “In almost every instance where a small district is found, we find a backward, ignorant and indolent school, if we find any at all” (Burgess, 1843, p. 89). The school terms lasted only 4 to 6 months, he explained, and the teachers—usually hired on the cheap—were often incompetent and did the children “more hurt than good.” What “little truth they inculcate is so mixed with error” (p. 90), he concluded, that the pupil never quite recovered: “A mind that has been thus filled, seldom sees things in their true light ever afterward; a mist enshrouds the mind which is seldom entirely dissipated” (p. 90).
One finds similarly stinging assessments all the way from the 1830s through the 1890s and beyond. In 1879, the Ohio State Commissioner of the Common Schools listed some of the other states—New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Maine, and Wisconsin among them—that also critiqued the “incubus,” the “wastefulness,” and the “evils” of the district system (Burns, 1879, pp. 52–53). Such a system, complained its detractors, made it virtually impossible to properly and systematically govern, supervise, or improve the schools of any state.
Creating New Institutions
As the late historian Michael Katz (1971) has reminded us, the creation of institutions preoccupied early 19th-century Americans, whether they were building banks, railroads, political parties, factories, hospitals, or schools. Americans confronted the inappropriateness of traditional organizational arrangements, and their attempts to find a suitable fit between the form and context of social life, he says, stimulated a prolonged national debate about what forms these institutions should take. Katz’s analysis is especially helpful in reminding us that there was nothing inevitable about the kind of education system that developed in the United States. His article was written during the years when “revisionist” scholars fiercely debated the core character of American schools: Did schools serve to equalize educational opportunity and enhance social mobility, revisionists asked, or were they racially discriminatory, imposing a class bias on the public schools? (cf. Katz, 1987; Ravitch, 1978). Katz (1971) wrote that Americans had considered four alternative models for the organization of schooling that competed for prominence during the first half of the 19th century. He labeled these models paternalistic voluntarism, democratic localism, corporate voluntarism, and incipient bureaucracy. Because each model represents tendencies that, we suggest, still exist in American thought about educational organizations, we discuss each briefly. Alert readers may recognize remarkable similarities between these long-ago governance efforts and tendencies of school reformers of today.
Paternalistic voluntarism represented the effort by the wealthy to educate the “unchurched poor.” These reformers liked to think of themselves as “humble gleaners in the wide field of benevolence,” volunteers who as unpaid but talented amateurs could guide schooling without the need for an extensive organization or professional staff. Perhaps the best example of this mode of thinking was the Free Public School Society of New York. After running several schools in New York City for some years, the society convinced the New York state legislature to give them control of all New York schools in 1825. As seemingly benevolent as was this form of volunteerism, it still represented a class system of education, for it served as the vehicle enabling one class to civilize the other and thereby ensure that society would remain tolerable, orderly, and safe. The society offered mass education on the cheapest possible scale. This was education for the poor, not for the children of society members. Critics of paternalistic voluntarism believed the local district schools provided a much better option, arguing that the society was “a private corporation,” providing an important governmental function “without a direct and immediate responsibility to the people,” and that it ignored diversity in favor of enforcing a uniformity on all children, no matter their background or religious differences (Katz, 1971, p. 302).
Democratic localism attempted to extend and expand the vision of the district school across states and into urban environments. Advocates wanted to retain an important principle that they believed was transgressed by voluntarists, namely, the operation of schools by local districts in which the “whole control” of education remained “to the free and unrestricted action of the people themselves.” City schools could follow the model by dividing municipalities into wards for the operation of schools block by block, if necessary. Democratic localists were opposed to the creation of state boards or state systems of education; in 1840, one legislative committee in Massachusetts called for the abolition of the new State Board of Education, created just 3 years earlier and presided over by Horace Mann as its secretary, arguing that “the commencement of a system of centralization and monopoly of power in a few hands, [is] contrary in every respect, to the true spirit of our democratical institutions” (as quoted in Katz, 1971, p. 306). Rather than enforcing education on an unwilling people, which would lead only to “reluctance and suspicion” (Katz, 1971, p. 308), democratic localists believed in the power that could be leveraged when communities determined to establish their own schools without external coercion.
Corporate voluntarism was focused on single institutions to be run by self-perpetuating boards of trustees (i.e., not elected) and financed by endowments or tuition. Corporate voluntarism stressed disinterested, enlightened, and continuous management, an approach they believed would keep the schools out of politics. This model was the quintessence of noblesse oblige and tended to be used primarily by private academies and colleges.
Finally, incipient bureaucracy was the model that ultimately triumphed. Democratic localists were the chief hindrance to its rapid adoption, but the localists stumbled over too many obstacles, especially in cities, where small ward districts often led to unnecessary duplications and were thus depicted as inefficient. Moreover, establishing small wards often created visible inequalities across wards in the same geographic area. As state superintendent of the common schools in Connecticut, Henry Barnard argued in 1865 that an “immediate union of all the districts” represented the “first great step” in urban school reform. The hallmarks of incipient bureaucracy were centralization, supervision, and professionalization. City schools also served the purpose of protecting poor children from poverty, vice, and “the temptations of the streets.” Barnard, like many of his contemporaries, saw cities as the breeding ground for “poverty, ignorance, profligacy, and irreligion” (as quoted in Katz, 1971, pp. 309–310) and saw the schools as offering a necessary corrective. The resulting urban school systems thereby took on brand new duties well beyond strict academics, the like of which they had never shouldered before.
Critics of school districts today often incorrectly believe that incipient educational bureaucracies were directly modeled on 19th-century factories or on an imported, rigid Prussian system. Neither conception is accurate, for at least two reasons. First, bureaucracy borrowed one important dimension from the democratic localists by continuing the tradition of local school boards that were publicly elected. Second, the bureaucratic pedagogical approach was meant to be a departure from the rote memorization and recitation that characterized so much of education in the other three models. Educators like Mann and Barnard ultimately wanted students to internalize a love of learning. Classroom instructors, as explained in the journal Massachusetts Teacher in 1848, should endeavor to excite student curiosity; pupils should work “voluntarily, cheerfully, with hope” (Katz, 1971, p. 320–321).
Districts and Education Research From the 1880s to 1916
In the decades that followed, educators produced a great deal of writing about matters of educational policy, practice, curriculum, funding, administration, organization, and learning, many of the topics of obvious importance today. However, little of the great bulk of 19th-century writing would be considered research by today’s standards. Indeed, the various societies that were established to address the major educational questions of the day operated according to a different logic. For example, the National Education Association (NEA) served as the major national organization in education, and its National Council on Education, established in 1880, set as its goal the consideration and discussion of educational questions of public importance. A former president of the NEA remarked that the council’s duty would be to establish “correct opinions” and to combat and overthrow “heresies and false notions of education” (“Discussion of Mr. Bicknell’s paper . . . ,” 1880, p. 17). As Wesley (1957) has explained, educators in the 19th century had a naïve faith in the value of intellectual exchange and the efficacy of discussion; thus, they founded a number of organizations dedicated to wringing wisdom from debate and unity from a diversity of ideas.
One example of the kinds of debate captured in the NEA’s proceedings comes from a discussion in 1890 that struck at the heart of what it meant to be a district superintendent. Attendees at the meeting hotly debated whether the role of the superintendent should be primarily that of a business executive or a pedagogical leader. The school chief of Providence, Rhode Island, worried about the dangers of the superintendent’s becoming “a businessman, a manager of affairs, rather than continu[ing] to maintain the attitude of the scholar, and becom[ing] more and more the teacher” (“City School Systems: Discussion,” 1890, p. 463). The superintendent of the Denver schools openly disagreed, arguing that the superintendent’s duties properly focused on expenditures, the construction of schoolhouses, and appropriations for furniture and supplies. He worried that the superintendent would “be incompetent intelligently to participate in the business affairs of the corporation, whose executive officer he is or should be” (“City School Systems: Discussion,” 1890, p. 464). It is worth noting that these discussions took place well before the 1910s, the period when business values suffused educational organizations (Callahan, 1962).
In addition to their grand debates, educators also understood the great value in the collection of information and statistics to better guide some educational decisions and to influence communities and school patrons. Many of the first state superintendents were essentially charged by their legislatures with the collection of statistics; the federal Office of Education, not established until 1867, also collected statistics and disseminated information about practices, innovations, and developments both within and outside the United States. In 1885, Philbrick published the first aggregation of national data on city school systems from throughout the country, which provided a solid foundation for other studies of urban districts in the years that followed.
In the early 1890s, Joseph Rice conducted a novel series of observations in the schools of 36 cities, startling the world of education with his frank descriptions of the rigid, and often inhumane, pedagogical practices he said characterized instruction in many urban systems. Rice described teachers conducting formal recitations with immobile students, an approach he described as “unscientific and mechanical.” Such methods, Rice (1893) said, meant that “the aim of the instruction is limited mainly to drilling facts into the minds of children, and to hearing them recite lessons that they have learned by heart from textbooks” (p. 20). Rice raised the ire of practitioners again later in the decade when he argued that subject matter tests could be used to compare the efficiency of school systems in various cities. Instead of embracing Rice’s proposals, practitioners attacked him for the temerity he demonstrated in presuming to dictate practice through the findings of mere quantitative studies (Wesley, 1957).
It was not until around the turn of the century that data began to make a significant difference in the standard practices of the day. Many urban school systems found themselves with an abundance of older children still stuck in the earlier grades. The surplus of overage students swiftly became a distressing national situation, especially in rapidly growing areas, because year after year, more pupils accumulated in the lower grades, unable to pass their promotion exams. New York City School Superintendent William Maxwell (New York City Public Schools, 1904) was among the first to draw public attention to these concerns, when in 1904 he published city school figures showing that a full 39% of students were above the normal age for their grades. Maxwell’s report sent a jolt through the education world.
In a follow-up investigation into the problem of overage students in some 30 other cities, Ayres (1909) estimated that just over one third of the total elementary school population enrolled in all city school systems was overage—an astonishing finding. This was not at all a problem concerning just a few children, Ayres explained: “It is one affecting most intimately perhaps 6,000,000 children in the United States” (p. 4). The source of the problem, Ayres and others concluded, was that the standard curriculum of the day was too difficult for most students. Researchers across the country began to believe that the solution was to differentiate the curriculum.
1916 to 1954: The Rise of the Professional School District and Education Research
The year 1916 must have been an exciting one for American educators because there was a palpable sense of transformation in the air. In fact, the middle years of the 1910s brought forth significant change, not just in education but across several dimensions of American life. Historian Henry May (1959/1994) depicts the mid-1910s as pivotal years in American culture, marking the Victorian past from the modern present—“the first years of our own time,” he called them. Indeed, the 1910s were one of the most productive periods in 20th-century educational thought, sparking a massive amount of experimentation and investigation; it is not surprising that the American Educational Research Association (AERA) was established during this era, when education research as we now know it began to flourish (Bobbitt, 1913, 1918; Brown, 1915; Deffenbaugh, 1916; Graham, 1967; Hanus, 1913; Judd, 1925; Munro, 1917; Snedden & Allen, 1908; Wiebe, 1967).
Our previous section looked at school districts in their inchoate organizational forms in the 19th century. This section examines the early 20th-century apotheosis of the large urban school district, the components of districts that focused on curriculum and instruction, and the concerns that were raised by observers of districts. It was during this four-decade period when much of the school district as we think of it today was developed, when some of the strengths of that district structure emerged, and when concerns, tensions, and paradoxes about that structure also first appeared.
By the late 19th century, school officials at the local, state, and federal levels had become rather skilled at the collection of data concerning American public schools. They knew, for example, how many teachers were employed in South Carolina and how much they were paid, the number of schoolhouses in California, the enrollment in the schools of Minnesota, and the per-pupil expenditure in the counties of Maine. They could also distinguish between expenditures in White and African American schools in the southern and border states (and some northern states), between the conditions of rural and urban schools, and between the numbers of schools in the far west territories. The collection of data regarding the status of schools, students, and expenses was of incalculable value to understanding the status quo, but it did not yet point the way to the future action, even in places where the differences were extreme. In other words, the 1826 hope of the editor of the American Journal of Education remained unrealized; an accumulated record of facts did not necessarily yield evidence of success and failure, nor did it necessarily yield insightful analyses. In part, this was because academics and school leaders alike still subscribed to the older mode of policy arrived at via discussion. Nevertheless, it was during the 1910s and the years that followed that education research moved well beyond the simple collection of statistics; and much of the new research had to do with districts. As we have seen, Rice, Maxwell, and Ayres had all used the district as their point of departure—especially its incarnation in city school systems.
Education research developed in various directions in the United States, and districts continued to play an integral role in the shifting conceptualizations of research. As described in the previous section, some of the early steps in research were taken by Maxwell in his aggregation of numbers of overage students in New York and by Ayres (1909) in his follow-up study. It is unlikely that individual districts with large numbers of overage students were unaware of enrollment imbalances, yet they did not appear to comprehend the extent of the problem nor did they take immediate action to rectify the situation. The growing size of districts created both serious dilemmas and new opportunities, and the standard approaches to addressing educational conundrums no longer worked.
The year 1916 marked a striking transition, not only for the founding of AERA but for other significant reasons as well. Two exceedingly influential books published in 1916 represented the disparate reactions to the problems that educators perceived in American education: John Dewey’s (1916) Democracy and Education and Ellwood P. Cubberley’s (1916a) Public School Administration. As we know, Dewey has had a remarkable influence on American educational thought over the past century (Westbrook, 1991), but Cubberley’s book clearly had the more immediate impact on day-to-day educational practice in schools and districts (Lagemann, 2000; Zilversmit, 1993).
Cubberley, dean of the Stanford University School of Education, and other like-minded academics at the University of Chicago, the University of Wisconsin, Harvard University, and Teachers College have been depicted by historians as quintessential administrative progressives (Ryan, 2011; Tyack, 1974) or as scientific managers and social efficiency experts (Kliebard, 1995), all focused on establishing large, efficient district bureaucracies, systems that ultimately sorted children into differentiated curricular tracks. Scholars assert that these efforts were part of a broad social, political, and economic movement—the Progressive Era—that expected expertise to simultaneously abolish civic corruption, displace ward boards, and professionalize all aspects of public life. At the same time, Cubberley (1909), like many of his White, middle-class contemporaries, held unsavory views on immigrants, believing that the new arrivals from southern Europe were “illiterate, docile, [and] lacking in self-reliance and initiative” (p. 15)—and he argued that Americans should give up the “exceedingly democratic idea that all are equal” (pp. 56–57). Such sentiments caused the administrative progressives to be labeled as discriminatory, racist, and classist by later generations of scholars. Nevertheless, through writings, lectures, teachings, and numerous evaluations, Cubberley (along with other leading scholars in the new field of educational administration) was remarkably successful in convincing local leaders to consolidate smaller wards into single, unified school districts. Cubberley (1916a) believed that these reforms were a continuation of the work of the advocates of incipient bureaucracy, such as Mann and Barnard.
To Cubberley and other prominent academics of the time, such as George Strayer (Teachers College), Charles Judd (University of Chicago), and Lewis Terman (Stanford University), the quality of any district could be judged by how closely it adhered to the organizational structure and administrative ethos of the newly reorganized urban school districts. “Nearly all of the important progress which has been made in education in America in the past quarter century has been made in our cities,” proclaimed Cubberley in 1915 (p. 95). City school systems, he believed, were the true laboratories of progressive educational experimentation. “It is the cities which have perfected their administrative organization and developed an administrative machinery capable of handling educational business on a large scale,” he wrote a year later. “It is in the cities, too, that the large problems of public school organization and administration have been worked out and the fundamental administrative principles we now follow have been established” (Cubberley, 1916b, p. 10). The city, it seemed, offered a fertile environment for realizing the American dream of universal democratic education.
One of the great qualities of the “city school system” (as it was called at the time) was the “unity of the work” (Cubberley, 1916a), the fact that it could be managed as a unit—all essential tasks were run through a small central board and a single administrative office, overseeing budgeting, finance, records and reports, attendance, school facilities, research and testing, curriculum, and the supervision of teachers. Such practices, stressed Cubberley (1916a), conformed to “the best principles of corporation control” (p. 435). Scholars were to make much of these corporate origins later in the century (Bowles & Gintis, 1975; Callahan, 1962). Through the early 20th century, however, the “educational department” of the district had often been relegated to second-class, or merely comparable, status in relation to other district departments. Urged on by the administrative progressives, districts began to merge the educational functions with those of business and finance so that the superintendent had full purview over where and how funds were allotted in the service of instruction and curriculum.
From our vantage point today, it can be tempting to presume that reformers in the early 20th century were rather provincial in their views, that they assigned to the school district old-fashioned top-down administrative edicts, that they failed to foresee the depersonalization that would accompany the growth of corporate and business values, and that they had little savvy or understanding when it came to emphasizing instructional improvement. It is also commonly assumed today that districts were not originally organized to undertake district-wide pedagogical change. But the historical record gives us a different view. Indeed, the district as established in the early 20th century was designed to accomplish a number of tasks, many of them mundanely bureaucratic, to be sure, but others focused directly on curriculum development and instructional improvement (it can be difficult at times to tease apart the curriculum work from work that related directly to the enhancement of instruction). If we are to do justice to early 20th-century educators’ perspectives, we must recognize that progressive educators saw the two dimensions of curriculum and instruction as intertwined. Moreover, a close look at some of their writings demonstrates that their views were a bit more sophisticated, and decidedly less top-down, than we might have imagined. For example, in his commentary about the proper role of the superintendent, Cubberley (1916a) betrayed a remarkable sensitivity to what would later be called “instructional leadership”:
The superintendent who is essentially an office superintendent, who from his office chair promulgates and enforces a uniformity throughout the school system, who inspects rather than supervises, and who controls by rules and regulations rather than by developing initiative and strength on the part of those under him, will in time develop a school system so uniform that progress will become difficult, a supervisory force which lacks initiative and keeps close to old and well-established paths, and a teaching force wanting in personal strength and professional enthusiasm. One type of superintendent produces a live school system; the other a dead one. Regulations “from the office” and the enforcement of the letter of the law kill; it is the spirit and the personal touch which give life. (p. 180)
Cubberley even implored superintendents to encourage a certain self-reliance in the teaching force and to judiciously foster the kind of “personal liberty” that would stimulate individual initiative and personal growth. The fact that these kinds of sentiments never became deeply embedded in the culture of the American school district should not blind us to the fact that instructional improvements—through administrative encouragement and teacher autonomy—were once believed, by those who designed the systems, to be as important as organizational structure.
Not only do the years between 1913 and 1918 seem significant in retrospect, but educators at the time were also aware of the monumental changes afoot. Speaking at the 1925 NEA annual meeting, for example, University of Chicago professor Charles Judd recounted one 1915 session of the American Council of Education—the elite discussion group established by the NEA—that had featured a fierce debate about testing and measurement. According to Judd (1925), the clash at that meeting essentially constituted the last stand of “the forces of conservatism” against the science-minded progressives. And Judd viewed the battle as the culmination of the educational investigations and reformist agitation evident since the 1890s:
There can be no doubt as we look back on that council meeting that one of the revolutions in American education was accomplished by that discussion. Since that day tests and measures have gone quietly on their way, as conquerors should. Tests and measures are to be found in every progressive school in the land. The victory of 1915 slowly prepared during the preceding twenty years was decisive. (pp. 806–807)
Moreover, Judd (1915) had reported immediately after the 1915 meeting how pleased he was to find an active interconnection between research and practice: “The most gratifying result of a year’s work on reading tests is the fact that a variety of different kinds of work along this line has been undertaken by a number of school superintendents and special students of education” (p. 561). Here was the kind of close collaboration between practitioners—teachers and principals—and university-based researchers that educators and policymakers have so often called for. In fact, a close link between researchers and district practitioners characterized much of the work in the early 20th century and was in some ways a continuation of the close contact that university faculty and urban district superintendents had maintained since the latter decades of the 19th century. Importantly, as we look back, there were several avenues for collaboration between researchers and district leaders.
One good, though ultimately misguided, example of how researchers cultivated relationships with districts is the work that Stanford University’s Lewis Terman undertook with districts that were experimenting with intelligence testing in the early 1920s, when he worked directly with the districts. In a contribution to the volume Intelligence Tests and School Reorganization (Terman et al., 1922), Terman asserted that the development of differentiated courses of instruction was “one of the most urgent needs in education today.” The book also demonstrated how quickly districts across the country created a new role in the central office: director of research. For example, it included studies from Oakland and Los Angeles in California, as well as from Des Moines, Iowa, and the small city of Miami, Arizona. In many places, experimentation or implementation of IQ tests drove districts to reorganize their curriculum work across all schools.
The Role of the Central Office in the Improvement of Curriculum and Instruction
Although the early 20th-century adoption of IQ testing and business-oriented practices by school districts has traditionally drawn a good deal of researchers’ attention (Oakes, 1985), these were far from the only reforms that district leaders implemented during the first half of that century. A number of practitioners and researchers pursued the kind of instructional improvement that Cubberley had articulated (albeit briefly) in 1916. In fact, just as discussions about the appropriateness of business attitudes in school leadership predated the scientific management movement, the enhancement of instruction had long been a major topic at many educational association meetings throughout the 19th century; it simply has not been well researched.
In the 1920s, leaders in newly reorganized districts renewed the challenge of instructional improvement by coupling it with curricular modernization. Building on the successful work of curriculum revision in Los Angeles (Bobbitt, 1922), St. Louis (Cocking, 1928), Denver (Cuban, 1993; Newlon & Threlkeld, 1926), and Winnetka, Illinois (Zilversmit, 1993), many other districts undertook district-wide curriculum revision projects that included both administrators and teachers. Although the tenor, quality, and inclusiveness of these efforts varied a great deal across districts, the early developers were remarkably influential in setting off a nationwide effort to modernize curricula across grade levels and subject areas in city after city. These efforts were characterized by focused attention to revising the curriculum so that it might become more “progressive” and child-centered, to folding classroom teachers into the process of remaking the curriculum, and—importantly—to the improving quality of instruction. Here, too, despite beliefs to the contrary, we find concerted efforts to use the leverage of the school district, its schools, and its central office, to simultaneously enhance teaching, learning, and curriculum.
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, many districts across the country established some kind of curriculum revision program; one study (Bruner, 1937) reported that roughly 70% of cities with populations above 25,000 had ongoing revision programs, even during some of the worst years of the Great Depression. Other studies tended to confirm these findings (Trillingham, 1934). Bruner (1937) reported that between approximately 1920 and 1937, some 10,000 general courses of study (district curricula) and roughly 30,000 subject-specific curricula had been produced.
The curriculum revision efforts of districts across the country proved challenging to manage, but Caswell (1950) was clear that the district central office should carry out the bulk of the coordination and leadership as a means to connect curriculum development with instructional improvement. The authors listed a set of principles intended to guide action, whereby they identified a range of areas in which the district leadership should be directly involved. “The central office staff,” the authors explained, “should provide leadership in a continuing analysis of curriculum problems and needs and in the formulation of a comprehensive program to meet them”; they should “foster a sense of group purpose among the instructional workers in a school system [and] stimulate creative leadership among the entire teaching force”; and they should “provide for the coordination of the activities of various instructional workers so that a unified curriculum is developed” (p. 72). Later, follow-up studies by McNally and Passow (1960) reinforced the findings of the Caswell studies and discussed how efforts earlier in the century had “laid the groundwork for the modern curriculum movement in which the local school system play[ed] the lead role” (p. 32).
What Did It Mean to Be a Good School District at Midcentury?
At the same time that the curriculum revision activities were underway, other researchers advocated alternate methods for identifying high-quality school districts. In the 1930s and 1940s, Paul Mort, at Teachers College, along with colleagues, students, and members of the Metropolitan School Study Council, undertook a series of studies on school district administration, ultimately formulating what was considered to be an important measure of the effectiveness of school systems. Mort and Cornell (1941) argued that the quality of school districts could be measured by their “adaptability” to change. Among the variables they identified as indicating the capacity for improvement were curricular innovations, new types of classes, and new classroom structures. Using an “adaptability index,” the researchers found correlations between a district’s adaptability rating and such characteristics as financial policies and district size.
Although scholars have depicted the 1960s as the period when researchers first began to challenge the notion that large school districts were more efficient and effective, we can find warnings embedded in the literature considerably earlier. In 1940, Cillié conducted a study of centralization and decentralization in school districts and argued that immense size—such as that of the New York City school system at the time—was related to inflexibility and powerlessness at all levels of the system.
Mort and Vincent (1946) looked directly at the problems increasingly faced by large city schools systems, the same kind that Cubberley and others had once argued enhanced professionalization and the quality of school districts. According to Mort and Vincent (1946),
Education in many ways is hampered in the large city, . . . because here, as nowhere else among American schools, education is centrally controlled. . . . You have no voice, no control, your questions go unanswered, your demands on the local administrator are parried by: “I’m sorry, but that matter is completely out of my hands; you will have to go to headquarters.” But you can never get close enough to the man at headquarters who makes the decisions, and you give up. (p. 88)
Mort and Cornell (1941) argued that to be maximally effective, districts should include no more than 100,000 students. Later studies by Leggett and Vincent (1947) and a meta-analysis by Ross (1958) confirmed that estimate. In the 1960s, researchers returned to these themes.
It makes sense that we find deliberations about what makes for ideal district size, because the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s marked renewed interest in research attention to district consolidation (cf. Dawson, 1934). During the worst years of the Great Depression, the commissioner of education convened meetings on proper district size and organization, primarily as a way to combat the shrinking educational coffers at every level of the system. Many of these efforts paused during World War II, but after the war researchers returned to the task. In 1946, through joint efforts at the Rural Education Project at the University of Chicago and the NEA, they redoubled their efforts and established the National Commission on School District Reorganization, which issued several reports, among them Your School District (National Commission on School District Reorganization, 1948), with the explicit charge of determining what constituted district quality. A “strong” district has at least 1,200 students, the commission stated, and it identified an enrollment of 10,000 as being a more ideal minimum; a “satisfactory” district had at least one elementary school with sufficient students for at least one teacher per grade (National Commission on School District Reorganization, 1948, p. 10).
Despite studies that questioned the role of size, reformers of the time continued to push for district reorganization and consolidation (National Commission on School District Reorganization, 1948). Although administrative reformers had made some progress during the previous decades, by the late 1940s there still remained some 103,000 local school districts (down from an estimated 200,000) scattered quite unevenly around the country; 15 of those were in Delaware, whereas Illinois had more than 10,000. The commission (National Commission on School District Reorganization, 1948) made several other points that may seem unusual for the time, including the contention that there never had been, nor should be, any kind of one best system. “One thing is perfectly clear: school organization in our country has never been static. Scarcely anyone believes that there is any one kind of local school administration unit that is superior to all other[s]” (p. 14).
Meanwhile, the commission matter-of-factly provided statistics on the supervisors who served counties in states throughout the country, listing the number of White and “Negro” supervisors, without additional comment. In fact, most elite academics, even those writing reports on and conducting surveys of school systems of the South, ignored the segregation that persisted throughout the country. With only a few exceptions (e.g., Washburne’s 1942 survey of Louisiana schools), surveys described in business-like fashion the numeric tables of the inequitable funds that went to African American schools, perhaps along with mentions of the poor conditions of the buildings, statistics on the number of classrooms that were overcrowded, and the lack of proper books or materials.
District Structure, Organization, Reorganization, and Desegregation: 1954 to 1990
Although state-level rationales for district reorganization and consolidation between 1945 and 1960 typically focused on efficiency, local resistance to district reorganization was often influenced by race, not just loss of local control. In the wake of the 1954 Brown school desegregation decision, district reorganization efforts of the 1960s intersected with increasingly forceful Supreme Court desegregation mandates in the Green (1968) and Swann (1971) decisions. Districts in both the North and the South frequently used local control as a rationale to resist district consolidation and desegregation. Desegregation mandates were often treated with open resistance in the South and covert resistance in the North. However, in the South, despite massive resistance, district reorganization resulted in county-wide desegregation of school districts; eventually, the South became the most desegregated region of the country (Boger & Orfield, 2005). In the North, the reorganization and consolidation of small, fragmented districts were also influenced by race, though there was no “massive resistance” as there was in Virginia (Lassiter & Lewis, 1998). For example, Pennsylvania’s School District Reorganization Act of 1963 (Act 299) required each county to consolidate its school districts so that each district would serve at least 4,000 students (Lundin, 1973). However, a study of racial demographics before and after district consolidation in the Pittsburgh, Harrisburg, and Philadelphia metropolitan areas (each containing many small, fragmented districts required to merge with each other) found that, overall, school districts sought out mergers with demographically similar districts—reducing segregation very little if at all (Lundin, 1973).
There was some interest in metropolitan approaches to desegregation and district governance at the federal level—indeed, the 1968 yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education was titled Metropolitanism and focused on metropolitan and regional concepts of school governance, such as education parks and interdistrict transfer plans. However, metropolitan desegregation efforts were hampered by the Milliken v. Bradley (1974) decision, ruling that the outlying suburbs of Detroit had no obligation to remedy the segregation in the city of Detroit, thereby solidifying fragmented district boundary lines in the North. The construction of interstate highways and inner- and outer-ring suburbs also exacerbated between-district segregation by creating more small, fragmented districts (Jackson, 1985; Massey & Denton, 1993).
Despite nominally desegregated districts, district boundary lines that stratified students along the lines of race and class became the norm in the wake of Milliken, with the few exceptions being the controlled choice plans in city-county districts such as Louisville-Jefferson County, Kentucky, and Charlotte-Mecklenburg County, North Carolina (Siegel-Hawley, 2013), and the interdistrict transfer plans in cities such as St. Louis, Missouri (Wells & Crain, 1997), and Rochester, New York (Finnigan et al., 2015). The majority of recent school segregation is due to between-district segregation, rather than within-district segregation (Bischoff, 2008).
From our 21st-century perspective, reorganization seems to be an example of successful reform. After all, the number of school districts in the country plummeted from roughly 130,000 in the 1930s to approximately 55,000 in the mid-1950s, to under 18,000 by the 1970s; but, as always, success is in the eye of the beholder. As with many reform movements, the people most intimately involved with the innovation constantly perceived the distance between that which has been accomplished and that which remained to be done. Many reorganizers were vexed by the lack of local willingness to embrace their seemingly rational reforms. But it was their inability to understand the reasons behind local resistance that was often their undoing.
The second half of the 20th century is the story of states slowly wresting more and more power and responsibility from their local school districts, as standards-based reforms expected state educational agencies not only to administer money and collect data but also to take increasing responsibility for the quality of education (Massell, 1998).
A Renewed Focus on the Role of the District in Instructional Improvement: 1990 to 2016
By the mid-1990s, reformers were paying relatively little attention to the school district as an important factor in policy implementation. In fact, some reformers called for sidestepping the district central office entirely and focusing on the school as the unit of change. For example, the Cross City Campaign for Urban School Reform’s 1995 report, Reinventing Central Office: A Primer for Successful Schools, recommended “a fundamental revision of urban public school systems, one that shifts virtually all funds and most authority to the schools and dismantles centralized, bureaucratic structures” (Berne et al., 1995, p. 3). Because of conceptions like this, education researcher James Spillane (1996) felt compelled to title a study of the implementation of reading policy in Michigan “School Districts Matter.” Flagging how the district had not figured prominently in recent reform proposals, Spillane noted that district administrators’ understandings of policy were critical in how they perceived policy problems and shaped their own solutions. Indeed, during the mid-1990s, much of the policy talk swirled around notions of “bottom-up” (school or classroom) reforms versus “top-down” (state or federal) reforms. School districts were not considered a key part of systemic reform; they did not play a pivotal role in decentralization efforts, and they were not necessarily involved in state efforts to boost the curriculum by means of academic standards.
Similarly, Spillane and Thompson (1997) drew attention to the idea that capacity at the local level means more than the capacity of teachers within the local educational agency (LEA), but also includes the capacity of the LEA itself. In other words, district administrators, coaches, and teacher leaders shape the policy understandings available to teachers. As a consequence, Spillane and Thompson (1997) argue that “LEAs’ capacity to support ambitious instruction consists to a large degree of LEA leaders’ ability to learn new ideas from external policy and professional sources and to help others within the district learn these ideas” (p. 187). These two articles on the role of the school district and the LEA (Spillane, 1996; Spillane & Thompson, 1997) represent a key turning point in the literature on school districts. They offer important new conceptions of the critical role of the school district in instructional improvement, which have inspired and driven a new generation of research literature over the past decade and a half.
Spillane’s work points to the need to focus on district-level implementation and district actors’ understanding of policy to achieve greater coherence across the policy system. Spillane ultimately concludes that districts matter in at least three key ways.
First, when district staff understand policy differently than state policymakers, those inconsistencies can undermine state policymakers’ efforts. Spillane found that when states ignored districts, it did not prevent the districts from getting involved in instructional policymaking; it just made coherence more difficult.
Second, because districts are often responsible for instructional guidance through professional development, curriculum guidelines, and teacher supervision, they have a great deal of influence over the message that school practitioners receive about instructional policy. For example, in Spillane’s study, the notions about teaching reading that were communicated in the districts’ instructional guidance tools varied considerably across districts and were not necessarily consistent with state policymakers’ reform ideas. When, for instance, district central office administrators initiated policies that supported rather traditional notions about instruction, the resources they mobilized limited the opportunities for teachers to comprehend the state-level reform messages.
Third, districts matter because they influence state-level efforts to increase the coherence of the instructional signals that are sent to school practitioners from within the school system. In Spillane’s (1996) study, “the district’s instructional policies conveyed one set of ideas about instruction to teachers, whereas state policy conveyed an altogether different message” (p. 85). Moreover, districts can find and utilize resources outside the traditional state jurisdictions, and these resources may have information similar to or different from that presented by the state.
Spillane’s conclusion that districts matter in these ways is consistent with reform notions that had been building up for years prior to his study. One of those notions was that meaningful and complex policy—the kind that can help improve instruction—departs sharply from existing practice (e.g., D. K. Cohen & Barnes, 1993). Another was the idea of alignment in systemic reform—that instruction can best be accomplished in a coherent policy system with alignment in messages about instruction across levels of the system.
It should be noted, first, that for Spillane and for many of the studies that followed, it was not the district per se that was the focus of inquiry. Rather, the primary concern was how teachers and leaders in any given school or system were able to learn together and pursue ambitious instructional reform, as it was only through the combined effort that improvement could take place. Taken together, these articles (Spillane, 1996; Spillane & Thompson, 1997) offered an alternative viewpoint, in contrast to the literature that called for the abolition of districts or characterized them as befuddled bureaucracies unable to undertake change. Second, these two articles highlighted the necessity of collaborative policymaking—the understanding that educational policymaking is not a zero-sum game and that collaboration is necessary to fundamental change. Third, these articles concentrated attention on instructional improvement, a focus that became more important in the No Child Left Behind decade that followed, as researchers continued to dig deeper into the kinds of environments that provide the necessary conditions for continued educational enhancement at the district level.
Spillane’s focus on the ways that district administrators were making sense of policy ushered in a new wave of research on school districts, with several strands: (a) the critical role of districts in instructional reform, (b) the importance of sense-making by district and other local actors in policy implementation, (c) district administrators’ use of evidence to make decisions, (d) distributed leadership, and (e) the flow of information, trust, and advice through district communication networks.
The Role of Districts in Instructional Reform
Building on Spillane (1996) and Spillane and Thompson’s (1997) findings on the importance of districts as gatekeepers of knowledge about reform, researchers came to a new appreciation of the role of the district in instructional reform. Gradually, school districts—when effectively run—came to be considered sites of powerful instructional change (e.g., MacIver & Farley, 2003), and a great deal of literature focused on identifying the elements of district leadership relevant to instructional improvement. By 2003, Togneri and Anderson’s (2003) report Beyond Islands of Excellence: What Districts Can Do to Improve Instruction and Achievement in All Schools took for granted that districts can and should play a leading role in improving student learning (or at least, student achievement). Togneri and Anderson (2003) studied five high-poverty districts with rapidly improving test scores and narrowed achievement gaps, in order to identify the characteristics of effective districts (as in the effective schools research of the 1970s, but at the district level). These characteristics were sustained reform, data-driven decision making, a focus on instruction, and coherence in district curriculum and professional development. Finally, Togneri and Anderson recommended building principal capacity in instructional leadership while also distributing instructional leadership across content experts and mentor teachers.
Along the same lines, research studying urban districts’ partnerships with intermediary organizations whose work revolved around ambitious instruction also suggested that building the capacity of administrators in district central offices would help create coherence (Marsh et al., 2005). Other research investigating the role of the district in instructional improvement used in-depth, single-district case studies to identify the factors associated with systemwide improvement (e.g., Supovitz, 2006). Building on the theme of the importance of the central office in instructional improvement, the Wallace Foundation sponsored a series of reports on improving school leadership, one of which concluded that “central office transformation” was an essential element of improving instruction in urban schools (Honig et al., 2010). Central office transformation that supports instructional improvement involves processes such as creating strong partnerships between the central office and school principals and reorienting the work of the central office to focus on supporting instruction (Honig et al., 2010).
More recently, Marsh and Wohlstetter (2013) picked up the theme of districts as important sites for reform, examining how some traditional school districts (among other nonsystem actors) have pushed back against reforms usually considered to be top-down, or taken the lead in implementing large-scale reforms ahead of states. For instance, Marsh and Wohlstetter point to the “CORE districts” in California, a group of mostly urban districts that independently petitioned the U.S. Department of Education for a waiver from the requirements of No Child Left Behind, as an example of districts taking the lead in shaping policy. The Wallace Foundation similarly acknowledged that school districts’
role has long been underappreciated: bypassed by reformers who believe the antidote to mediocre schools is to free them to manage their own improvement efforts with a minimum of regulatory interference, and scorned by those who regard districts and their employees as money-draining bureaucrats more interested in rules than school renewal. (Mitgang, 2013, p. 8)
However, this report also notes that districts shape principal pipelines, training, and ongoing professional development; thus, partnering with districts to improve principal preparation is an important part of any effort to improve instruction (Mitgang, 2013).
How District and School Administrators Make Sense of Policy
Building on Spillane’s research on how district actors understand policy, a growing body of research began to use conceptual frameworks that integrated cognitive and sociocultural perspectives of policy implementation with organizational theory (e.g., Coburn, Toure, & Yamashita, 2009; Honig, 2003, 2008; Honig & Coburn, 2008). These frameworks differ in the extent to which they place more emphasis on the social aspects of meaning making, on the way that new knowledge is integrated with preexisting beliefs, and on the way that evidence can be used for rhetorical and political purposes. In general, however, this literature demonstrated how central office administrators, like other street-level bureaucrats, actively interpret policy and make decisions in ways that are consistent with their worldviews, backgrounds and experiences, and contexts, in a framework sometimes called sense-making (Coburn, 2005; Spillane, Reiser, & Reimer, 2002). Research using a sense-making perspective has also investigated how school leaders understand and enact policy, and how those understandings shape the policy messages available to teachers (Coburn, 2005; Spillane et al., 2002).
How District Administrators Use Evidence to Make Decisions
One strand of recent district-related research using sociocultural and organizational theories such as sense-making focuses on how central offices and district administrators use evidence to make decisions. For example, Coburn et al. (2009) analyzed a midsize district’s instructional decisions over a 3-year period, finding that central office staff tended to interpret problems in ways consistent with their existing worldviews. Then, district staff marshaled evidence to justify their framing of a particular problem and solution, and to convince others of that solution. Similarly, Honig and Coburn’s (2008) review of research on how district administrators used evidence found that district officials sometimes directly applied evidence to school improvement, but often used evidence to gather political support from different stakeholders for a particular initiative. In other instances, district offices used evidence to systematically examine and improve their own operation. Honig et al. (2010), in a study of three urban districts seeking to transform their central offices, found that one critical dimension was the “use of evidence throughout the central office to support continual improvement of work practices and relationships with schools” (p. ix). Honig and Coburn (2008) also found that although administrators have relied on school-level and student-level data as well as research evidence, they have also frequently relied on practitioner knowledge to make decisions.
How Leadership Responsibilities Are Distributed Across Networks of District Actors
A distinct, though related, strand of literature on district decision making focuses on “distributed leadership,” or how leaders (broadly construed) and others interact in particular situations and contexts (Spillane, 2005; Spillane, Halverson, & Diamond, 2004). While the concept of distributed leadership is commonly invoked to describe how leadership responsibilities can be spread across teachers, coaches, and other individuals, rather than simply principals and superintendents, Spillane (2005) pointed out that distributed leadership is the practice of decision making as a dynamic interaction between leader, follower, and situation. Borrowing from organizational sociology, Spillane (2005) classified key aspects of the situation as structures, routines, and tools. For example, a school leader might create structures like professional learning communities governed by particular routines and protocols, and these communities might use the tool of student assessment data in particular ways that lead toward school improvement (Feldman & Pentland, 2003). Other research on distributed leadership suggests that teacher leaders can play an integral role in supporting district reform because of their personal relationships with other teachers (Firestone & Martinez, 2007).
Trust, Advice, and Information Flow Across Networks of District Actors
A final line of research that builds on sociocultural and organizational views of knowledge about policy and district reform is research using the tools of social network analysis to study district reform. Scholars interested in how policy is translated into practice in districts have increasingly used social network analysis to study how information, trust, and advice flow between actors within a district (e.g., Coburn, Russell, Kaufman, & Stein, 2012; Daly & Finnigan, 2010; Finnigan, Daly, & Che, 2013). Research in this vein often relies on questionnaires filled out by, or interviews with, teachers, coaches, and administrators within a school district, asking them with whom they talk about a policy or whom they perceive as having expertise about a particular reform (Moolenaar, 2012). The questionnaire and interview data can then be used to visually represent the presence or absence of social ties between actors within and between schools and central offices. These studies have emphasized the importance of the relational aspects of instructional improvement, such as trust and school climate (Finnigan & Daly, 2012; Spillane & Kim, 2012). Because individuals are often critical to information flow and policy knowledge, turnover—especially among school and district leaders—can be a significant barrier to sustainability of reform (Daly, Finnigan, & Liou, 2016). As part of the new literature on how districts can support instructional improvement, research using social network analysis finds that district policy can enable reform by providing the conditions that facilitate social interaction, as well as conditions that support consistent understandings of policy across administrators, coaches, and teachers (Coburn et al., 2012; Coburn & Russell, 2008; Daly & Finnigan, 2011).
Conclusion
Although few would consider the American school district a nimble institution, it is, and clearly has been, a dynamic one, changing form and function over the past 200 years. Once the most local of organizations—especially in its initial incarnation as the “district school” in the 19th century—the school district has transformed over time as the general purposes of education have broadened through the past century. Although researchers have become less sanguine than they were a century ago about the ability of the district to assist in educational improvement, we must also recognize that over the same period districts have been asked to devote increasing attention to populations that had previously been ill served or underserved, not only by public schools but also by a whole range of public institutions. Therefore, researchers and reformers alike should continue to look for ways that local districts can proactively adapt to changing circumstances while also fostering the kind of powerful instructional practice that will ensure future student learning, especially for children living in poverty.
We have seen that early 20th-century researchers believed that districts constituted the laboratories of democracy. Therefore, it is striking to observe that, in recent years, certain terms have rarely been associated with districts, such as invent, experiment, propose, innovate, and originate. The absence of an innovative attitude may reflect the many resource constraints on districts today, along with an ongoing history of mandates, compliance issues, and shifts in authority and flexibility. Nevertheless, if we want to enhance and build on the kinds of district-oriented instructional improvement that have engaged researchers and practitioners since the 1990s, we must look for ways to recapture the spirit of innovation that once characterized our school districts.
Based on the twists and turns of education history, we suggest several areas of research that might be productively pursued in the future. First, researchers might once again return to the question of what constitutes an optimal size range for school districts. Recent years have seen an interest in small schools and charter schools, but we know little about what benefits smaller districts might bring.
Second, if districts are no longer the originators of innovative practices and experimentation, researchers might ask where new ideas come from and how to help foster the spirit of innovation that is so critical to productive institutional growth. Is it possible that current efforts at uniformity, through projects like the Common Core State Standards and the associated assessments, have dampened efforts at creative invention?
Third, we might ask, what precisely is it about districts that has allowed them to persist for so long? Are there unrecognized strengths in districts that might be enhanced and developed?
Fourth, what role might teachers continue to play in ongoing district reform? Might the curriculum revision efforts that began in the 1920s offer one model for folding teachers into district-wide improvement efforts? Are there lessons here for how to successfully spread ambitious instructional practices within and across districts?
Finally, if state policymaking is not a zero-sum game (Marsh, 2002), then how might states reconsider the optimal role they can play in developing policies that will foster productive district improvement?
Although researchers are fully aware that districts are embedded within a larger frame of governmental agencies, it can be easy to forget that reality, especially when we are deeply engaged in local district research. Kaestle (1983) reminds us that the history of American federalism is one of constantly evolving relationships between local, state, and federal governments, “conditioned but not mechanically determined by technological, economic, political, constitutional, and cultural changes” (p. 224). We should expect that contestations about power, privilege, and instructional and organizational form will persist, periodically shifting in form and focus but never completely disappearing. Thus, as education researchers, we need to reenvision how the changing nature of the school district might best be harnessed in the service of improving student learning in the future.
