Education Research and the Shifting Landscape of the American School District,1816 to 2016

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) ¹

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.

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.

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.

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.