Striving for Coherence,Struggling With Incoherence: A Comparative Study of Six Educational Systems Organizing for Instruction

Abstract

This article examines how leaders in public, private, and hybrid educational systems manage competing pressures in their institutional environments. Across all systems, leaders responded to system-specific puzzles by (re)building systemwide educational infrastructures to support instructional coherence and framed these efforts as rooted in concerns about pragmatic organizational legitimacy. These efforts surfaced several challenges related to educational equity; leaders framed their responses to these challenges as tied to both pragmatic and moral organizational legitimacy. To address these challenges, leaders turned to an array of disparate government and nongovernment organizations in their institutional environments to procure and coordinate essential resources. Thus, the press for instructional coherence reinforced their reliance on an incoherent institutional environment.

Keywords

educational policy educational reform comparative education elementary schools instructional design/development qualitative research policy analysis

Introduction

Since the early 1990s, systemic reform has fundamentally shaped education policy in the United States. The notion of “systemic reform” can be traced to Smith and O’Day (1990), who argued that a comprehensive restructuring of U.S. educational environments was paramount to developing schools’ and districts’ capacities to support ambitious, equitable instruction. They argued that developing state standards for student learning would spur the creation of comprehensive, coherent instructional guidance (e.g., coordinated curriculum frameworks, professional development, and accountability assessments) to support school improvement.

Over the past three decades, systemic reform has evolved into a general policy discourse describing comprehensive, coordinated improvement initiatives pressing for technical rationalization in the U.S. education sector. Policy discourses refer to systems of practices, beliefs, and values outlining what is acceptable, “obvious, common sense, and ‘true’” and shape both the development of and sensemaking about policy texts (e.g., government legislation, regulation) and technologies (e.g., student assessments, curriculum; Ball, 2008, p. 5). The discourse of systemic reform has been encoded into several federal and national policies, including No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). These policies aim to improve teaching and learning and reduce racial and socioeconomic disparities in student outcomes by creating a common framework for improvement grounded in academic standards and accountability systems (Cohen et al., 2018). As a policy discourse, systemic reform has also been taken up in state and local policy initiatives that hold schools, districts, and teachers accountable for students’ test scores (Mehta, 2013).

Research on the effects of systemic reform policies, such as NCLB and CCSS, often investigates whether these policies work by focusing on student outcomes typically measured in terms of student achievement (Dee & Jacob, 2011; Wei, 2012; Wong et al., 2018). Other studies focus on the effects on classroom instruction, such as narrowing the curriculum to tested subjects or attention to particular students (Au, 2007; Jennings & Bearak, 2014; Polikoff, 2012). Another policy effect, receiving limited attention until recently, has centered on educational system (re)building: that is, school districts’ efforts at reorganizing around their core educational function—instruction (Austin et al., 2006; Cohen et al., 2013; Hopkins et al., 2013; Johnson et al., 2014; Marsh et al., 2005; Weast, 2014). Educational system (re)building might be thought of as the local-level complement to macro-level systemic reform initially advanced by Smith and O’Day (1990), in that this work involves comprehensive, coordinated improvement initiatives that aim to advance ambitious, equitable instruction school and district-wide.

The discourse of systemic reform continues to hold currency in the United States, so much so that it can be thought of more as a sustaining policy movement than a policy moment that held sway in the early 1990s (Peurach, Cohen, Yurkofsky & Spillane, 2019). This article examines the compounding effects of shifts in policy discourses and texts (e.g., NCLB and CCSS) and other concurrent reform movements pressing rationalization (e.g., evidence-based decision-making and marketization) on educational system building several decades into the systemic reform movement. Within the literature, “educational system” and “school system” are often used interchangeably; however, we distinguish between the two: Whereas school system is mostly used to refer to political and administrative arrangements for governing schooling and providing access to instruction, an educational system takes responsibility for organizing and coordinating instruction for their schools (Peurach, Cohen, Yurkofsky & Spillane, 2019). Educational systems can overlap with or span federal, national, state, or provincial governments and can be public (e.g., local school districts), private (e.g., faith-based systems), or hybrid, wherein a private sector entity operates education subsystems spanning local public schools (e.g., International Baccalaureate). Educational systems support the crafting of instructional coherence by building and mobilizing educational infrastructures—the coordinated resources, roles, and organizational structures that support teaching and learning (Cohen et al., 2013; Hopkins et al., 2013; Peurach, Cohen, Yurkofsky & Spillane, 2019; Peurach & Neumerski, 2015)—and supporting their use in schools.

Drawing on qualitative data from a comparative study of six different educational systems’ efforts to improve instruction in elementary English Language Arts (ELA), we investigate how educational system leaders in the public, private, and hybrid systems make sense of and approach their work while managing multiple, competing pressures in their institutional environments. We investigate how system leaders (a) understand and manage the press for rationalization, standardization, and marketization by (re)building their educational infrastructures to support coherent systemwide visions for instruction, (b) the challenges they grapple with in doing this work, and (c) their efforts to address these challenges.

Our article makes three contributions. First, our account documents how a quarter-century of policy discourses and texts pressing rationalization, standardization, and marketization prompted public, private, and hybrid educational systems to (re)build their educational infrastructures to support systemwide instructional coherence and consistently high-quality instruction. This is a notable development given the incoherence of the U.S. educational sector historically on instructional matters (Cohen & Spillane, 1992). Based on our analysis of interviews with system leaders, we argue that across public, private, and hybrid systems, leaders were responding to system-specific puzzles rooted in concerns about maintaining their system’s organizational legitimacy in a changing institutional environment. This finding contributes new empirical evidence of educational system (re)building in a couple of ways. We show that educational system (re)building is not just a public system phenomenon; rather, it is evident in private and hybrid systems and tied to system leaders’ concerns over organizational legitimacy. Furthermore, we document how different forms of organizational legitimacy emerge in system leaders’ ongoing sensemaking and educational infrastructure building efforts.

Second, we illustrate how system leaders’ educational infrastructure (re)building efforts surfaced concerns about equitable learning opportunities and the socioemotional and physical well-being of students and families, with particular attention to the effects of systemic racism and poverty within and beyond schools. System leaders recognized these as equity challenges—a perspective advanced through policy discourses that move beyond equal educational opportunities for historically marginalized populations and emphasizes “whether a state of affairs is just or unjust” (Dowd & Bensimon, 2015, p. 19). The relationship between equity challenges and forms of organizational legitimacy is a timely contribution to our study, particularly as the press for instructional coherence becomes infused with calls for equity-driven educational reforms (Welton & Zamani-Gallaher, 2018).

Third, and most significantly, we show how system leaders’ efforts to address equity challenges necessitated a taken-for-granted layer of work—bridging (Honig & Hatch, 2004) to a fragmented and incoherent educational sector to procure essential resources and coordinate their use in systemwide practice. While the institutional press for rationalization incentivized educational infrastructure (re)building, leaders’ efforts to do so and address the equity challenges that such efforts surfaced necessitated bridging to numerous disparate government and nongovernment organizations in their environments. Left to figure out how to build educational infrastructures to support instructional coherence and educational equity, these systems, paradoxically, had to cope with a fragmented and incoherent educational sector.

Our article is organized as follows. First, we describe our theoretical and empirical framework by combining insights from the literature on systemic reform, sensemaking, organizational legitimacy, and educational system (re)building. Next, we detail our research approach, and then we elaborate on our findings. We conclude with implications for policy research and practice.

Theoretical and Empirical Background

We draw on insights from the literature across two areas: (a) systemic reform and the press for coherence, and (b) sensemaking and organizational legitimacy. We then use these frameworks to ground our discussion of (re)building infrastructure amid the challenges of crafting instructional coherence and maintaining legitimacy. As shown in Figure 1, changes in the institutional environment (e.g., policy texts and discourses and social shifts) trigger system leaders’ sensemaking and their approaches to educational infrastructure (re)design.

Figure 1.

Institutional environment, sensemaking, and educational infrastructure (re)design.

Changing Institutional Environments: Systemic Reform and the Press for Coherence

As discussed in the introduction, systemic reform proponents argued that creating more coherent policy environments, disaggregating test results by student subgroups, and holding schools responsible for student performance would reduce racial and socioeconomic inequalities in school outcomes (Cohen et al., 2018). These technical and organizational reforms focused on measuring student achievement using standardized test scores rather than attending to the social or affective dimensions of schooling or dismantling structures that reproduce systemic inequalities. However, recent trends—increasing income inequality and economic insecurity, rising child poverty rates, decreasing access to basic social services and health care, and growing populations of students with special needs, immigrants, and students learning English as a new language (ENLs)—press public schools to address the needs of a more racially, culturally, and linguistically diverse, and more economically disadvantaged, student population (Capps et al., 2005; Dudley-Marling & Burns, 2014 ; Horowitz et al., 2020; Hoynes & Schanzenbach, 2018; Koball & Jiang, 2018; Leachman et al., 2017; McFarland et al., 2019; Neumerski & Cohen, 2019).

These demographic shifts, along with concurrently evolving policy discourses about educational equity, compel educational systems to center equity and inclusion well beyond closing test score gaps between subgroups of students. Equity-oriented policy discourses include a focus on addressing the cumulative “educational debt” experienced by low-income, students of color in the United States (Ladson-Billings, 2006). This heightened attention to educational equity centers on the “fair, just, and non-discriminatory treatment of all students, the removal of barriers, the provision of resources and supports, and the creation of opportunities with the goal of promoting equitable outcomes” (Grissom et al., 2021, p. 9). Such policy discourses include the push for inclusion of students with disabilities, adopting culturally responsive pedagogy, replacing exclusionary disciplinary practices with restorative and trauma-informed approaches, and addressing students’ socioemotional and physical well-being (Gay, 2002; Ladson-Billings, 1995; Skiba et al., 2014; Thomas et al., 2019; Williamson et al., 2020).

Educational systems, then, face pressures from systemic reform policy texts (e.g., CCSS), and related discourses for instructional coherence and improved academic outcomes, market-oriented reforms pushing school choice, and equity-oriented policy discourses to attend to student well-being, provide differentiated academic programs, and ensure equitable instruction (Cohen et al., 2018; Spillane et al., 2019). These multiple and, at times, competing demands shape how system leaders understand and respond to different demands in their institutional environments.

Sensemaking and Organizational Legitimacy

Policy texts are rarely, if ever, adopted wholesale or whole cloth. Instead, they are understood and implemented through the sensemaking and interactions of local actors, including system leaders (Spillane, 2004). Rather than assuming environmental cues are salient for system leaders, a sensemaking perspective analyzes what individuals notice in their environments and how they frame, interpret, and respond to those cues (Maitlis & Christianson, 2014; Weick, 1995; Weick et al., 2005). Whereas interpretation takes the object (e.g., a policy text, student achievement data, rising inequality) to be a given, sensemaking involves the iterative noticing, bracketing, interpreting, acting, and reflecting of cues; it is as much about “authoring” as it is about “interpretation” (Weick, 1995, p. 8).

Triggered by situations of change, ambiguity, uncertainty, surprise, or discrepancy arising from changes in an organization’s institutional environment and from interruptions to organizational work practice (Weber & Glynn, 2006; Weick et al., 2005), individuals reinterpret and author their situations and use those understandings as springboards for action (Maitlis & Christianson, 2014). Educational systems operate in environments characterized by persistent tensions that arise in response to contending logics (e.g., bureaucratic, market, accountability, equity) in the education sector and the tendencies of diverse stakeholders to project different identities and purposes onto the system (Kraatz, 2009, p. 71). This pluralistic institutional environment complicates leaders’ efforts to demonstrate their system’s organizational legitimacy to a diverse set of stakeholders with competing expectations. Exploring leaders’ sensemaking foregrounds the “localized puzzles” to which they attend while managing their institutional environments (Spillane & Anderson, 2014) and illuminates how leaders engage in responsive practice by addressing localized challenges (McHenry-Sorber & Campbell, 2019).

System leaders’ responses are shaped by organizational legitimacy concerns. Educational systems depend on their environments for students, funds, and political support; furthermore, they work at maintaining their organizational legitimacy by demonstrating their system’s “cultural fitness” to diverse stakeholders, including parents, politicians, community members, unions, and others (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983; Suchman, 1995). Legitimacy refers to “a generalized perception or assumption that actions of an entity are desirable, proper, or appropriate within some socially constructed system of norms, values, beliefs, and definitions” (Suchman, 1995, p. 574). Educational systems “mirror” or “signal” back to their diverse stakeholders their values and expectations for schooling, and the ability to do so is rewarded with recognition and essential resources for sustaining the system. Numerous indicators, such as reports of low-test scores, achievement gaps, low rates of school completion, underprepared teachers, and weak cross-national comparisons, can undermine a school or system’s claims of legitimacy (Crowson & Deal, 2020).

Our analysis concerns two forms of legitimacy—pragmatic and moral (Suchman, 1995), each of which can be deconstructed into subordinate forms of legitimacy. Pragmatic legitimacy refers to the “self-interested calculations” of an organization’s immediate stakeholders involving “a sort of exchange legitimacy” where support for a particular organizational initiative is based on its expected value for, responsiveness to, and/or disposition toward particular stakeholders (p. 578). Pragmatic legitimacy can involve responsiveness to constituents’ larger interests (influential legitimacy) or beliefs that the organization shares constituents’ values or has their best interests at heart (dispositional legitimacy). Moral legitimacy refers to a “positive normative evaluation of the organization and its activities” based on an assessment of whether a particular organization’s activities or initiatives are “the right thing to do” (p. 579). Moral legitimacy can include a focus on outputs (consequential legitimacy), techniques (procedural legitimacy), an organization’s structural arrangements (structural legitimacy), and the qualities of the organization’s leadership (personal legitimacy).¹ Importantly, different forms of legitimacy can emerge in system leaders’ sensemaking (Suchman, 1995).

The “legitimacy imperative” for U.S. schools is more complex than ever before (Crowson & Deal, 2020). Policy texts and discourses of the 1980s, most famously A Nation at Risk (United States, 1983), called the legitimacy of public schooling into question and led to pressures for rationalization in institutional environments. Since then, systemic reform has pressed for improved academic outcomes through the creation of common standards, assessments, and accountability systems and increased competition among schools through market-oriented reforms, such as charter schools, school choice, and vouchers (Cohen & Moffitt, 2009; Mehta, 2013; Schneider & Berkshire, 2020; Smith & O’Day, 1990). Although as originally theorized (Smith & O’Day, 1990) systemic reform involved more than standards and test-based accountability, these two components have dominated in federal/national and state policy discourses and texts.

Crafting Coherence, Maintaining Legitimacy, and (Re)Building Educational Infrastructure

Recent research captures how system leaders have responded to systemic reform policies by engaging in educational system (re)building—that is, creating instructionally focused educational systems that move beyond administrative entities and engage centrally with guiding, supporting, and improving instruction (Austin et al., 2006; Cohen et al., 2018; Johnson et al., 2014; Marsh et al., 2005; Peurach, Cohen, Yurkofsky, & Spillane, 2019; Spillane et al., 2019; Weast, 2014). Regardless of the variation in form, all educational systems organize around a central hub organization that functions as the primary agent for managing instruction, enabling improvement, and maintaining quality: for example, a district office, a charter management organization, a diocesan office, or the international or regional hub of a transnational educational system. Central hubs collaborate with member schools to support a vision for instruction by (re)building and deploying educational infrastructures (Cohen et al., 2018; Johnson et al., 2014; Peurach, Cohen, & Spillane, 2019; Peurach, Cohen, Yurkofsky, & Spillane, 2019).

Inherent in systems’ efforts to become more instructionally focused is the challenge of maintaining legitimacy while working toward instructional coherence. Scholars argue for thinking about coherence as an ongoing process “by which schools use multiple external demands to strengthen students’ opportunities to learn” (Honig & Hatch, 2004, p. 16). Though challenging to achieve in practice, working toward coherence promises to align structures, processes, roles, and systems and to leverage them toward common goals around instructional improvement (Mehta & Fine, 2015). Focusing on the system level, as distinct from the school level, we frame leaders’ efforts to craft systemwide instructional coherence as a process of (re)building their educational infrastructures and supporting their use in practice.

Although the comprehensiveness of educational infrastructure differs among educational systems, it includes formal positions, procedures, routines, materials (e.g., curricula, student assessments), and norms that support instructional improvement, the coordination and alignment of these different elements, and system-wide efforts to support their use in schools (Cohen et al., 2013; Hopkins et al., 2013; Peurach, Cohen, Yurkofsky, & Spillane, 2019; Peurach & Neumerski, 2015). Other core functions of educational infrastructure include recruiting and hiring staff, creating professional learning opportunities, monitoring instructional quality, and leading and managing instruction.

Focusing on educational systems’ efforts to both maintain their organizational legitimacy in a complex institutional environment and become more instructionally focused by (re)building their educational infrastructures, we investigate how system leaders make sense of and approach challenges related to educational system (re)building in their changed and complex institutional environments. To that end, we pose the following research questions:

Research Question 1: How do educational system leaders understand and manage the press for rationalization, standardization, and marketization in their institutional environments?

Research Question 2: What challenges do systems grapple with as they (re)build their educational infrastructures to support coherent systemwide visions for ELA instruction?

Research Question 3: How do system leaders work to address these challenges?

Research Approach

While policy research often investigates implementation and effects within a few years of a new policy’s introduction, our study takes a longer view. We draw upon data from our qualitative, theory-building study focused on six different U.S. educational systems’ efforts to improve instruction in elementary ELA (Cohen et al., 2018; Neumerski & Cohen, 2019; Peurach et al., 2020; Peurach, Cohen, & Spillane, 2019; Spillane et al., 2019). We explore the compounding effects of several decades of reform efforts pressing instructional coherence and technically rational ideas, including several national (e.g., NCLB, CCSS) and state policies (Mehta, 2013). Moreover, comparative education research largely focuses on cross-national comparisons, and there is surprisingly little work comparing school systems within the United States (Cohen & Spillane, 2019). Situating our study several decades into the systemic reform movement and leveraging more recent work on educational system building, the larger study aimed to understand how a diverse range of educational systems in the United States organize around instructional improvement and interact with their environments in doing so. In keeping with a sensemaking framework, we prompted study participants to tell us about their work on elementary ELA instruction and to identify the relevant issues and ideas in their environments informing that work, such as particular policies, programs, and reform efforts.

Consistent with a theory-building study, we sampled six educational systems to maximize variation in system type, governance arrangement, historical origins, and approaches to managing instruction and selected ones that had enacted or were in the process of enacting systemwide instructional programs. Our focal systems include three public systems: urban, suburban, and charter; one private system: Catholic; and two hybrid, transnational systems: Montessori and the International Baccalaureate (IB). For this study, “Montessori” refers to a decentralized global system of schools and training centers that fall under the umbrella organization of the Association Montessori Internationale (AMI). Our study sample includes leaders from AMI-Global, AMI-USA, and the Montessori Center, which is an AMI teacher training center that has developed a small network of culturally and linguistically embedded Montessori schools. IB refers to the global organization that oversees and accredits IB schools, and our sample focuses specifically on its work in the United States.

Data Collection

Data collection and analysis were closely integrated (Miles & Huberman, 1994), allowing us to adjust our protocols in response to emerging themes. Data collection took place between 2016 and 2018 and involved interviews (n = 95), observations, and document collection. We first reviewed organizational charts for each school system and selected initial system leaders for interviews. Using snowball sampling (Weiss, 1995), we added to our interviewee list, selecting a total of 9 to 19 leaders per system. As Montessori and IB are transnational systems, we interviewed leaders at different levels (e.g., international, national, and regional). We interviewed IB and Montessori leaders at both the international and U.S. offices. We interviewed leaders from AMI-Global, AMI-USA, and a Montessori Center,² which led to a larger sample size for the Montessori system (see the appendix). We included leaders who could speak to the system’s vision for instruction, past and present efforts to improve teaching and learning, student enrollment and services, and district policies. Such accounts can surface the myriad ways that policy discourses from systemic reform and other concurrent movements have become engrained, or not, in system-level priorities, norms, and practices (Spillane et al., 2019).

The research team, composed of three primary investigators, three postdoctoral researchers, and several graduate and undergraduate research assistants, conducted a total of 95 interviews with 71 system-level leaders (e.g., district superintendents, directors of special education, teacher recruitment and development specialists, directors of curriculum, and instruction) about their work related to instructional practice and improvement. In addition, we selected and observed several organizational routines coordinated and facilitated by leaders in each system (e.g., a 3-day principal training program in the Catholic system). Research team members recorded field notes for each session and wrote detailed accounts after the session.

Combined, the research team had approximately 100 years of experience in studying relations between education policy and practice, and more than half of the team had taught in public and/or private schools, including urban, rural, charter, and Catholic schools, in the United States and abroad. These experiences helped researchers build rapport with participants across different system types and bolstered the study’s interpretative validity by helping center and interpret participants’ perspectives on phenomena (Maxwell, 1992). Moreover, weekly team meetings to discuss emerging themes and working hypotheses, as well as the use of standardized data collection and analysis protocols, strengthened our study’s internal validity. Team members also generated memos on data collection processes and researcher positionality alongside system narratives to assess potential researcher bias (Miles & Huberman, 1994).

Data Analysis

Our data analysis involved two phases focused on understanding and interpreting the perspectives of system leaders.

Phase 1

At the beginning of our data collection and analysis process, the research team met weekly to discuss emergent themes from interviews and observations and used our study’s conceptual framework to develop our codebook. The codebook included three families of codes (instruction, educational infrastructure, and managing environments) and 22 subcodes, designed to capture participants’ discussions of specific components of educational infrastructure (e.g., organizational roles and routines, teachers’ practice, and instructional materials), system-driven efforts to improve instruction, and relationships between the system and its broader environment (e.g., recruitment of students and families, policies, and interactions with external agencies). A smaller group of research team members, along with two undergraduate research assistants, established interrater reliability by reading and discussing the same transcripts, memoing, and comparing individual coding until all members reached an agreement. After establishing interrater reliability, the team deductively coded all interview transcripts using NVivo.

Initial analyses of educational systems’ efforts to improve elementary ELA instruction revealed that all six systems were engaging in educational system (re)building efforts in response to the CCSS and that systems pulled in materials and ideas from systemic reform policy discourses and texts when doing so (Peurach et al., 2020; Spillane et al., 2019). Our initial rounds of data collection and analysis also surfaced participants’ heightened attention to increased racial, socioeconomic, and linguistic diversity in their systems and to meeting the specific needs of students with disabilities, ENLs, and students experiencing trauma. To further explore these themes and how they intersected with educational system building, we adjusted our follow-up interview protocols to inquire about system-level efforts to support special populations of students and families and updated our codebook to capture systems’ efforts to support students and families from all backgrounds and challenges and opportunities therein.

Phase 2

In Phase 2, we used sensemaking as an analytic tool to focus on how participants interpreted and rationalized their systems’ educational infrastructure building efforts and to further explore themes from our initial analyses that emerged as salient to leaders across systems. We relied on our deductive codes and queried leaders’ discussions of student demographics and special populations of students (e.g., students with special needs). Then, we inductively coded these data to explore how system leaders made sense of these challenges and shifts and what they discussed as appropriate responses. To preserve our understanding of system leaders’ unique descriptions of challenges and how those overlapped with challenges in other systems, we created a conceptually clustered matrix (Miles et al., 2014) using researcher-assigned categories to compare similar themes across multiple systems. These included recent demographic changes; socioemotional and behavioral needs; academic needs; and family/community needs. We created an additional matrix to analyze system leaders’ sensemaking about their educational infrastructure building efforts and efforts to address the challenges described earlier, noting how leaders framed or diagnosed challenges and how they constructed their responses. Finally, we wrote case narratives to capture the distinct stories of each system and analytic memos on recurring themes across multiple systems. These case narratives were also informed by (a) reviews of the research literature on each system type and (b) media searches on each of the particular systems in our study.

Although participants neither used the term “puzzle” nor “legitimacy” to describe system-level challenges, they raised concerns about their system’s future, demonstrating the system’s worth to parents and other stakeholders, and/or “doing right” by students (particularly, those from historically marginalized backgrounds). We applied Suchman’s (1995) lens of organizational legitimacy to illuminate how system leaders’ sensemaking about challenges reflected, or not, different forms of organizational legitimacy and how, if at all, these concerns underscored system leaders’ responses to these challenges. By iteratively considering theory and emergent themes within each stage of analysis (Bush-Mecenas & Marsh, 2018), we developed our preliminary findings aligned to our research questions and used our case narratives to explore how these findings manifested across different systems. Through this process of iterative explanation building (Yin, 2018), we honed our findings.

Findings

In this section, we elaborate on our findings, which are organized into three sections corresponding to each of our research questions. We first argue that system leaders managed the press for rationalization, standardization, and marketization by (re)building³ educational infrastructures for elementary ELA and that they understood these efforts as tied to their systems’ organizational legitimacy—primarily, pragmatic legitimacy. Second, we show that these efforts surfaced challenges that transcended instructional coherence and encompassed issues of educational equity, which included and reached beyond students’ classroom experiences. We argue that leaders’ understandings of these equity challenges reflected pragmatic and/or moral legitimacy concerns. Finally, to procure essential resources to address these challenges, leaders relied on an array of disparate government and nongovernment agencies scattered across a fragmented educational sector.

Managing the Press for Rationalization, Standardization, and Marketization

All systems were engaging in efforts to (re)build their educational infrastructures to support a coherent and consistently high-quality instructional program for elementary ELA. System leaders made sense of these efforts as responding to puzzles linked to the rise in rationalization, standardization, and marketization in their institutional environments. Participants described grappling with challenges (e.g., declining student enrollment, declining student achievement, gaps in student achievement by race and class) that they associated with threats to their system’s future, founding mission, and/or “doing right” for students and families. Although these puzzles differed by the educational system, they reflect pragmatic organizational legitimacy concerns, which pressed systems to demonstrate valued outcomes to stakeholders and remain competitive with other systems. Below, we overview each system’s educational infrastructure (re)building efforts and show how they were often linked to leaders’ sensemaking about pragmatic legitimacy.

Public Systems

In the three public systems, NCLB, CCSS, and state accountability systems directly tied legitimacy to the technical core and student outcomes. Thus, concerns over pragmatic legitimacy figured prominently in system leaders’ educational infrastructure (re)building efforts, particularly in the wake of the new CCSS and aligned assessments.

Urban

Located in a mid-sized, industrial city and refugee resettlement zone, the urban public school system (“UPSD”) served students from diverse racial, linguistic, and socioeconomic backgrounds, including students from more than 80 countries. System leaders saw their educational infrastructure rebuilding efforts as essential to recovering from the test score decline associated with the shift to the CCSS and disparities among student subgroups. Leaders framed these data as signaling their failure to adequately prepare students to succeed on college-ready materials. As one system leader explained, “we didn’t have enough rigor in elementary” (E009). Other leaders perceived the low performance on standardized tests as reflecting teachers’ low expectations for students. This system’s legitimacy puzzle focused on raising test scores through improving instruction and setting high academic expectations for all students.

Led by the system’s new instructional-focused superintendent, UPSD redesigned its educational infrastructure to push for greater instructional coherence. This included purchasing reading and writing curricula aligned to the CCSS; creating a systemwide pacing guide; purchasing and compiling district-approved supplemental resources while discouraging the use of teacher-created or teacher-purchased (e.g., Teachers Pay Teachers) resources; providing professional development around these resources; and using the Charlotte Danielson framework and student achievement data in teacher evaluations.

Suburban

The suburban public school district (“SPSD”) historically served a majority White, middle-class student population, but recent demographic shifts led to increased racial and socioeconomic diversity across the system. System leaders spoke of a growing working class, Latinx population, immigrant population, and rising numbers of ENLs.

Like UPSD, suburban leaders’ sensemaking about the push for instructional coherence reflected concerns about pragmatic legitimacy, triggered by a decline in their CCSS test scores as well as disparities in test scores along racial and socioeconomic lines. One leader explained, “Here we are doing our own thing, and now the standards are so [different]. How do we work together to help our kids meet the standard?” He continued, noting that across the system, the “sense of professionalism, the desire for equity, and the disorientation that happened with the standards” led leaders to question “why do we have 25 different ways of teaching reading to second-graders in a district with only 7 elementary schools?” (C005). In response, system leaders redesigned their educational infrastructure by selecting common reading and writing curricula aligned to the CCSS; adopting common instructional strategies (e.g., readers and writers workshop model, focus on accountable talk); using external consultants to provide professional development and coaching to teachers; and applying the Charlotte Danielson framework and student achievement data in teacher evaluations.

Charter

The charter system served predominantly Black and Latinx students from low-income households. Similar to other “no excuses” charter organizations (Golann, 2015), the system maintained highly structured and data-driven academic and behavioral environments across all schools. The charter system’s founding mission was to prepare historically marginalized students to get into and succeed in college and, through students’ test scores, to show that their students could match or outperform students from more affluent schools. Two data points created a legitimacy puzzle for system leaders: (a) a sharp decline in students’ test scores due to the adoption of the CCSS, and (b) data showing that the system’s graduates had weak college completion rates. System leaders described these data points (which they learned about concurrently) as “painful” and “wakeup calls” that threatened their founding mission and organizational legitimacy.

In response, the charter system overhauled its educational infrastructure for tested subjects, aligning all components (e.g., detailed daily lesson resources, structured planning time for teachers, pacing guides, guidance around instructional time, teacher coaching, and looking-at-student-work protocols) to the CCSS and aligned assessments. Viewing the CCSS as the bar for rigorous, college-ready instruction, leaders believed that getting students to succeed on CCSS aligned materials and assessments would also increase their college persistence rates. Moreover, responding to criticism that charter schools push out students with special needs and those who are academically unsuccessful, leaders redesigned their school report cards (a key component in principal evaluations) to include a student attrition indicator. As one leader explained,

We’ve looked at attrition rates and our desire to be a public-policy proof point and say we’re truly doing it with the same kids that the districts are. We now track attrition incredibly closely, look at it on a monthly basis, [and] penalize schools that go over five percent. (D005)

For this system leader, a central aspect of educational infrastructure (re)building involved using metrics, such as test scores and attrition, to demonstrate the system’s pragmatic legitimacy to immediate stakeholders (e.g., parents and funders) and maintain their support.

Private and Hybrid Systems

Pragmatic legitimacy concerns also figured into system leaders’ sensemaking in private and hybrid systems, though for different reasons. Concerned about declining enrollments, Catholic system leaders built an educational infrastructure closely aligned to the CCSS. They hoped to demonstrate to stakeholders, especially students’ families, that their system could produce academic results that were as good as (if not better than) neighboring public or charter schools while also providing a unique and worthwhile alternative. Expanding into U.S. public schools, hybrid system leaders adapted their educational infrastructures and worked to show stakeholders (e.g., parents and public-school educators) how their instructional programs were consistent with CCSS (and other policy requirements) while also demonstrating the unique value of their instructional programs. The instrumental response of leaders in hybrid systems was not surprising considering that their ability to operate in the U.S. public sector depended on demonstrating to public school educators and parents that their programs conformed with the CCSS and produced strong academic outcomes.

Catholic

The Catholic system served a racially and socioeconomically diverse student population enrolled in over a hundred urban elementary schools. Attributing declining student enrollment to increased competition from charter schools and improving neighborhood public schools, Catholic leaders’ concerns were rooted in a crucial pragmatic legitimacy puzzle: their survival as a system. Responding instrumentally, leaders designed an educational infrastructure by purchasing or developing curricula, assessments, and student report cards aligned to the CCSS and mandating their use. These standardization efforts represent a dramatic shift for a system wherein decisions about instruction were historically left to individual schools. Leaders understood these efforts as cultivating instructional coherence and higher quality instruction systemwide and enabling schools to compete with public and charter schools. One remarked,

I think that for us to remain competitive, and to have students be able to achieve at levels that we think were appropriate across both our schools, and then also public schools . . . we thought Common Core made sense. (F002)

Another leader noted, “I’m a big proponent of Common Core. It’s the right way to go. Now [that] we have a new baseline we are starting to see some very significant growth . . . the growth is outpacing public and charter schools around here” (F010). Responding to their main pragmatic legitimacy puzzle, system leaders hoped they could halt declining enrollments by demonstrating to parents (with test score data) that Catholic schools were more successful in raising student achievement than neighboring public and charter schools.

IB and Montessori

Both IB and Montessori are transnational, hybrid educational systems with international governing bodies⁴ and regional entities overseeing U.S. operations. For these systems, educational infrastructure (re)building efforts involved adapting their existing educational infrastructures to meet the demands of operating in U.S. public schools. Both systems, but especially IB, were expanding into U.S. public schools, which entailed serving racially and socioeconomically diverse student populations and complying with federal and state regulations. This created a legitimacy puzzle for system leaders, which involved remaining faithful to their unique academic models while also demonstrating to “new” stakeholders (in this case, public-school educators, leaders, and families) that their models worked in public schools where legitimacy was gauged, in large part, by test scores.

IB system leaders worked to help public schools (a key stakeholder) integrate the IB model with fidelity while also complying with federal and state policies. At the global level, IB created a department focused entirely on U.S. public schools and developed their Primary Years Program (PYP) program for U.S. public schools. Leaders also worked to demonstrate to school districts and schools how their program aligned with the CCSS by creating frameworks and facilitating professional developments around IB and the CCSS. As one leader explained, “we took a look at Common Core, and the IB is really aligned to that . . . We had to take our existing materials and just package them as IB in the Common Core” (B001). Whereas several IB leaders spoke about the complementarity of IB and the CCSS, they recognized the pressures that CCSS placed on school districts and the possibility that districts might abandon IB if it was not aligned with the CCSS. Responding to these pragmatic legitimacy concerns to maintain their partnerships with U.S. public schools, they adapted their existing educational infrastructure to demonstrate alignment with the CCSS.

Montessori’s more recent expansion into the U.S. public school market also meant serving more racially and socioeconomically diverse student populations and complying with state and federal policies about special education, standards, and testing. Leaders grappled with how to infuse state and federal requirements, including testing and standards, into public schooling while remaining faithful to the Montessori model, which utilizes a core set of instructional materials to promote student independence and their moral, emotional, and intellectual development. More than 50 AMI teachers, trainers, consultants, and administrators, for example, created a model AMI elementary curriculum that was mapped onto the CCSS. While leaders saw standardized testing as a necessity but not a priority, some used test scores instrumentally to show that disadvantaged students were more successful in Montessori schools than in traditional public schools. One Montessori leader noted,

[For] our underserved population, there’s a score in the new [state] accountability called “on track” for success where they’re looking at proficiency and growth together . . . you want a high percentage of your non-proficient children making high growth. We surpassed everyone in the district in terms of [that] percent. We’ve far surpassed them . . . in some cases double. (A006).

Whereas standardized testing was not central to Montessori, some leaders invoked it instrumentally to demonstrate their success in educating disadvantaged students relative to traditional public schools.

Though reacting to different legitimacy puzzles, all six educational systems were responding similarly to the press for rationalization in their institutional environments by (re)building their educational infrastructures to promote a coherent and consistently high-quality instructional program systemwide. These efforts were anchored in system leaders’ concerns about pragmatic legitimacy as they attempted to demonstrate to various stakeholders that their system could produce high academic outcomes for all. Educational system (re)building was not confined to public systems, as all systems managed environmental pressures to rationalize by promoting more coherent instructional programs. This represents a sharp contrast with the differentiation that has historically characterized schooling in the United States.

Challenges of Crafting Systemwide Instructional Coherence

Educational systems’ efforts to craft systemwide instructional coherence, however, surfaced new challenges. In pressing coherence and consistently high-quality instruction, system leaders recognized that providing all students with access to the same instructional program was insufficient to improving instructional quality for all students. Shifting institutional pressures also pushed leaders to address structural inequalities in students’ opportunities to learn and attend to students’ needs that reached beyond classroom instruction.

Our analysis surfaced two interrelated types of challenges that leaders understood as inhibiting educational equity: (a) students’ access to equitable instruction and outcomes, and (b) the socioemotional and physical well-being of students and families. We describe these as equity challenges in that they moved beyond closing test score gaps and focused on ensuring the nondiscriminatory treatment of students, providing resources and supports, and creating opportunities with the goal of promoting just outcomes (Dowd & Bensimon, 2015; Grissom et al., 2021). While system leaders sometimes connected these challenges to pragmatic legitimacy, they often framed them in ways that surfaced moral legitimacy—a focus on whether the system was “doing what was right” for students and families. Furthermore, they often explicitly linked “doing the right thing” to their understanding of their systems’ central mission. We describe these two interrelated equity challenges below.

Improving Students’ Access to Equitable Instruction and Outcomes

Leaders in all systems noticed disparities in students’ opportunities to access appropriate instruction and in student outcomes, by racial identity, socioeconomic level, and disability status. These challenges included ensuring students’ access to appropriate services (e.g., ENL, special education services) and addressing disparities in disciplinary and special education referrals, particularly for male students of color.

Public systems

In the three public systems, leaders confronted external and internal reports on disparities in student disciplinary and special education referrals. Urban leaders understood student diversity as an asset to cultivate and maintain; as one leader remarked, “we have more diversity in UPSD than [largest urban district in the state] does, and we’re really proud of that. That’s a challenge, the one that we take pride in” (E007). Urban leaders were also responding to citations from the state for their disproportionate suspension rates of Black students and disproportionate referral rates of Black students to special education. These external citations threatened to undermine the system’s pragmatic and moral legitimacy, prompting a multifaceted response focused on system-wide structures and teachers’ instructional practices.

Attributing disparities in disciplinary referral rates to teachers’ practices, urban leaders focused on developing teachers’ capacities to manage their classrooms in ways that minimized special education referrals and suspensions. Partnering with a university, the system conducted a study of teacher referrals to special education and for suspension. As one leader explained,

Drilling down . . . with the data, we may reveal that within a particular school, we may have one or two teachers who are generating all the office discipline referrals which are then leading to boys of color . . . being suspended from a particular grade level. Once we’re able to drill down on that data and have that better understanding, that will then drive us to then make sure that that teacher has a better skill set. (E010)

For urban leaders, pragmatic and moral legitimacy were central as they grappled with doing the right thing for different student subgroups by altering their procedures. Urban leaders used their data-driven approach and partnerships with outside organizations to train teachers in trauma-responsive practices, restorative practices, and de-escalation techniques. These efforts aimed to stem teachers’ use of special education or disciplinary referrals as default responses to students’ externalized behaviors. Noting that many of their students were experiencing trauma from living in poverty and/or immigrating from war-torn countries, urban system leaders worked to shift teachers’ practices to “do the right thing” (procedural moral legitimacy) for students.

Similarly, an internal review of the suburban system’s disciplinary outcomes revealed disproportionate suspension and expulsion rates for special education students, students of color, and ENLs. Suburban leaders attributed uneven academic and disciplinary outcomes related to race and class as stemming, in part, from racial and socioeconomic segregation within the system and teachers’ low expectations for students of color and students living in poverty. A leader noted that on joining SPSD she found, “there’s this buzzword of diversity. ‘SPSD is so diverse. SPSD is so diverse.’ You heard it everywhere” (C003). However, seeing the disparities between schools in different parts of the district, she realized

how everybody from the south [was] trying to get into schools in the north. Nobody wants to be in schools in the [south]. It further defined for me that there’s an issue here, and that deals with race and economics. (C003)

For this leader and others, the suburban system’s moral legitimacy was being challenged by these inequitable practices and outcomes. Seeing the discrepancy between diversity as a “buzzword” and the actual disparities in the system along racial and economic lines called the system’s commitment to equitable education into question. In response, system leaders revised their student code of conduct, shifting toward a more positive and less punitive approach, and worked with teachers and other staff members on building their cultural competencies through a program focused on social justice and understanding personal biases.

In the charter system, leaders focused on an issue they framed as a “gap within the gap,” delivering equitable instruction to students with disabilities and students needing additional behavioral supports, an issue for which some charter schools and networks have come under scrutiny (Rich, 2016; Taylor, 2015). Given the system’s highly structured academic and behavioral environment, leaders wrestled with ensuring that their push for excellence through coherence included students with special needs and ENLs. One leader noted,

We made a big shift to excellence and equity. That, if we weren’t doing it with the same kids that the districts were, the critics were right. That applied to attrition, that applied to widening the range of special-ed kids that we serve. We definitely look at . . . “the gap within the gap.” How are our kids with IPs and 504s and ENLs performing relative to the rest of our kids? We look at that every data cycle. (D001)

Concerned about their system’s failure to produce comparable academic outcomes for special needs and ENL students, a type of moral legitimacy, charter system leaders created a specific program for these students and instituted a co-teaching model in some schools. For these leaders, providing the same opportunities for students was insufficient to redress inequities in some students’ opportunities to learn.

Private and hybrid systems

Private and hybrid system leaders also grappled with equity challenges that leaders frequently framed as “doing the right thing” given their founding missions. Referencing Maria Montessori’s original mission to serve vulnerable populations, Montessori leaders recognized that aspects of their program precluded low-income communities:

We can’t say we want to serve underserved communities if we’re requiring that every classroom have a $30,000 or $40,000 set of materials . . . If the only people who can afford to build AMI schools are wealthy suburban Caucasian communities, then we’re being exclusive. (A002)

Cognizant of Montessori’s founding mission, system leaders framed these challenges in terms of moral legitimacy. While promoting diversity and increasing access for low-income students and students of color, leaders recognized the need to adapt to meet the needs of these communities.

Similarly, IB system leaders recognized new challenges related to equity from expanding into U.S. public schools. One leader explained, “We have very elite, private international schools, which is our roots, but for example, in the United States, 90 percent of our programs are in public schools, many of them in Title I schools” (B001). She argued that IB’s success in low-income schools in the United States presented unique challenges:

We have some IB schools that really are more on the disadvantaged side, and getting teachers the professional development they need and getting buy-in from teachers because it is a lot of work, and then making sure students are prepared. For example, if students are jumping into something like the diploma program, which is very rigorous, if they don’t have the preparation really from an early age, it’s quite challenging. (B001)

System leaders saw addressing these challenges as critical because of IB’s commitment to “inclusivity . . . it’s always been a requirement that the program is offered to all students regardless of ability” (B006). Noting how some U.S. public schools wanted to make the PYP program only available to gifted children, another leader noted how IB refused “because one of our fundamental beliefs is school is about inclusion . . . there are some fundamental values that we’re not willing to give up” (B009).

For these system leaders, excluding some students within a school from the PYP was not the right thing to do as it would undermine IB’s commitment to inclusion and potentially threaten their legitimacy as a system. Specifically, concerns about moral legitimacy surfaced in system leaders’ sensemaking of inclusivity as a fundamental principle of IB’s mission and one they were not prepared to abandon as they grappled with demands from some U.S. public schools to make the IB program exclusive rather than inclusive.

For Catholic system leaders, educational infrastructure (re)building also raised equity challenges and concerns about moral legitimacy. In discussing equity challenges, several leaders referred to Catholic schools’ historical mission of serving poor, urban immigrant families:

My strongest desire was to try to make our schools better for our most vulnerable kids . . . [and] to make sure that there was a place for urban Catholic schools and that we didn’t just become a suburban system for middle-class or upper-class families that could afford it but really were living up to the legacy of serving the urban poor. (F001)

For this leader and most others in the system, “living up to the legacy” of Catholic schools meant responding to a “call” to serve immigrants, high-poverty and “vulnerable” students, and students with special needs.

Several Catholic system leaders openly worried that “doing the right thing” as a Catholic system (i.e., moral legitimacy) was in tension with building a systemwide educational infrastructure to compete with charter schools (i.e., pragmatic legitimacy). They were concerned about losing their Catholic mission and commitment to serving the vulnerable. One system leader explained, “I think that if we do not insist that our schools are consciously and intentionally ‘Catholic’, then we are just a really good private school system” (F005). Another leader described preparing principals to field concerns from parents that the standards-based report card and CCSS “aren’t Catholic” and that Catholic schools are “becoming public schools” (F001). Yet another leader noted, “we’re at a serious crossroad and I think we have to make some strategic decisions and have a vision about what we’re going to do.” Recognizing the tension between moral and pragmatic and moral legitimacy, some leaders attempted to merge them: “We are first and foremost a Catholic school system . . . but ultimately what is the product that we’re putting out? And if it’s bad then we should not be, we should close” (F002).

Students’ and Families’ Socioemotional and Physical Wellbeing

In all systems, efforts to craft instructional coherence systemwide also surfaced challenges related to socioemotional and other essential needs of students and families. For system leaders, shifting student demographics, particularly an increase in students living in poverty and relatedly, students experiencing trauma, contributed to these challenges. Below, we use the IB and urban systems to capture how leaders experienced and addressed these challenges.

Urban

Framing student diversity as an asset, urban system leaders focused on addressing the socioemotional and other needs of students and families that they saw resulting from immigration, refugee resettlement, and economic instability and inequality. For these leaders, addressing these challenges was necessary to ensure equitable access to quality instruction for all students. One leader explained that these efforts involved

Making sure that when we look at the very individualistic needs of our students, we can look at the needs of our new American students who are refugee students. We can look at the needs of our African American students or our Latino students. Or, look at the needs of males of color. (E010)

Beyond recognizing different student needs, this leader also suggested that the school system should work to support families’ basic needs: “We provide advocacy support, in the event that a parent is struggling financially and, as a result, they find themselves evicted. It’s important to us that they have access to free legal advice” (E010).

Urban leaders realized that addressing students’ and families’ essential needs was critical to engaging students in the classroom and supporting their learning. To this end, urban leaders implemented a “community schools” model in select schools to provide a range of services for students, parents, and community members. One urban leader described this initiative as a way of retaining students in the system and as a support network for developing healthy communities:

On Saturdays, parents, children, toddlers, senior citizens, community members get to come in our building and learn how to swim. They do physical fitness activities in the gymnasium. They do arts and crafts in our rooms. We’re just launching an age two to age four to create a literate home session for parents . . . where they’ll learn how to work with their toddlers and create a literate environment and how to read with your toddler. (E004)

Supplemented by partnerships with local organizations, these community schools offered after-school and weekend programming in which parental education was an integral component. Another urban leader explained that these “parent centers” provide

Learning opportunities for our parents to really engage in developing their capacity as parents and as first teachers to our students. We see this as a way of making sure that we’re surrounding the student, not only with social and emotional support but also academic supports. (E010)

Through the community school initiative, the urban system worked to enhance students’ opportunities to learn by addressing parents’ needs and aiding their efforts to support their children’s learning at home. In this way, these efforts were tied to both pragmatic legitimacy (retaining students) and moral legitimacy (developing healthy communities and families).

IB

In IB, leaders noted how demographic shifts in the student population related to required engaging with issues of student poverty, immigration, and refugee resettlement, especially as they expanded programming into more U.S. schools. IB leaders worked to help U.S. schools, many of them Title I, implement the IB program. However, integrating into public school systems in the United States also meant encountering increasing numbers of students living in poverty. Leaders grappled with how the IB system could support both educational access and the additional needs of low-income students and families, which could include washing students’ uniforms in school basements or at an educator’s home, feeding families, or doing home visits. Even if IB were to increase access to the IB program, leaders wrestled with how to reorganize their infrastructure to allocate additional resources and provide support to these students:

When you look at what it takes to get some schools what it needs to succeed, and how long the journey is . . . it’s hard to stay committed to that. It’s not even clear whether we, as an organization, should do. Is that our role, position? That’s why I say it’s not easy to figure out. It’s kind of like, well, so who’s supposed to wash their uniforms? . . . It’s like, so who actually does this work? How is the work best done? (B004)

This leader surfaced a dilemma for educational systems in general—the extent to which they could take on other social service responsibilities to support students and families living in poverty. Given the IB system’s status as a transnational system pushing into the public sector, this system leader articulated a key challenge of constructing instructional coherence—recognizing that improving access to an instructional model requires resources and attention above and beyond curricula, standards, and pedagogy.

For public, hybrid, and private system leaders, these equity challenges went beyond crafting coherence centered on instructional programs to realizing equitable student outcomes by addressing structural injustices (e.g., health care and food access) that limited the opportunities of some students to learn. These challenges necessitated not only differentiating the instructional program to address the needs of particular students but also providing programming for students and families outside school. For system leaders, maintaining both moral and pragmatic legitimacy necessitated attending to essential socio-emotional and physical needs of students and families. Attempting to address these equity-related challenges, system leaders turned outward to their institutional environments.

Managing an Incoherent Institutional Environment

To both (re)build their educational infrastructures and address equity-related challenges, educational system leaders bridged (Honig & Hatch, 2004) an array of disparate government and nongovernment organizations (NGOs) scattered across a fragmented and weakly regulated U.S. educational sector. As shown in Figure 2, the number of organizations that system leaders relied on ranged from 10 in the case of IB to 25 for AMI and the urban system.

Figure 2.

System leaders’ mentions of different government and nongovernment organizations.

No single organization, whether government or NGO, provided the necessary resources nor coordinated their distribution and use, for the six educational systems. Instead, system leaders searched their environments for resources and coordinated the use of those resources in practice, some of which necessitated complying with the requirements of government agencies and NGOs. As illustrated in Table 1, leaders turned to several separate federal, state, and local government organizations and an array of NGOs for essential resources to address both education (re)building and equity challenges.

Table 1

System Leaders’ Mentions of Organization Types

Organization	AMI	Catholic	Charter	IB	Suburban	Urban
Government
Federal				X	X	X
State	X	X	X		X	X
Local		X	X		X	X
Nongovernment
Business/Consulting			X		X
Community/Nonprofit	X		X	X	X	X
Education Consulting/Publishing	X	X	X		X	X
Education/Professional	X	X			X	X
Educator Unions		X	X	X	X	X
Media/Public Relations	X		X		X	X
Other School Systems		X	X	X	X
Philanthropy	X	X	X	X		X
Political/Advocacy	X		X		X
Religious		X			X
School Boards		X			X	X
University/Research	X	X	X	X	X	X

Note. This table depicts the different types of government and nongovernment organizations mentioned by system leaders in their discussions of educational infrastructure building and addressing challenges related to equity. We did not ask system leaders directly about what organizations they relied on but identified these different organization types throughout our analysis of system leader interviews. AMI = Association Montessori Internationale; IB = international baccalaureate.

Coordinating Resources From Government Agencies

Public, private, and hybrid systems received significant federal and state (and sometimes local government) funds to attend to the educational needs of particular students (e.g., students with disabilities, students living in poverty). These funds were typically organized through separate government programs that contributed to the fragmentation of the institutional environment and the internal differentiation of public systems (Cohen et al., 2018; Peurach, Cohen, & Spillane, 2019). While leaders in all six systems focused on coordinating various government programs, we use examples from both the public urban system and the private Catholic systems to capture this pattern.

To support a coherent systemwide ELA instructional vision and meet the needs of ENLs, urban system leaders navigated an array of separate state and federal programs for resources. Overseeing the multilingual education for more than 6,000 students, one leader explained her work of ensuring system compliance with 10 components of a state regulation regarding multilingual education. These responsibilities included identifying, assessing, and tracking ENLs to ensure they receive appropriate services; communicating with parents in their native language; providing professional development to ENL teachers and general educators to support students on CCSS-aligned materials; and meeting students’ socioemotional needs, especially for recent immigrants and refugees. Indeed, this leader was recently promoted to a cabinet-level position in the system’s central office due, in part, to the coordination work required by this role and the dramatic increase of ENLs in the system. Facing a shortage of ENL and bilingual teachers, the urban system relied on its partnerships with local universities that created a (state-funded) tuition-free program for teachers to receive their ENL certification.

In the Catholic system, government programs figured as prominently in leaders’ discussions of working with external agencies. One leader explained,

I also have all of the federal and state-run Title programs . . . and all the associated policy implications with . . . state and city-funded programs . . . We have a very robust support of our schools through these vehicles of government. So, transportation, bussing, for example . . . we get textbook money per student. We get hardware money for technology. We get software money. We get library funds in addition, and that is at the state level. Then at the city level we also get nursing . . . in some of our schools we actually have the [city school district’s] lunch program operating. (F002)

For this leader, coordinating with various local, state, and federal government agencies was necessary for obtaining funds to provide programs essential for serving all students and thereby delivering the system’s vision for ELA education.

These coordination efforts were also paramount to the Catholic system’s efforts to support a growing population of pre-kindergarten (pre-k) students resulting from partnering with the local public district’s universal pre-k program. The Catholic system provided space for pre-k students and hoped this might subsequently increase enrollment. However, this partnership brought the system into contact with more students needing special education and behavioral support. To address these needs, leaders created a support team to evaluate students, provide them with services, educate parents on how to help and advocate for their students, and provide professional development for teachers. A leader explained,

We used the [Independent School] as a provider. And so, through our Title monies we had coaches who went into schools . . . they were working with the principal, they were working with the teacher. They were coaching, they were modeling. They were doing differentiated instruction. And they were trying to show that this is what you’re doing, and here are other accommodations. (F003)

This leader described using resources from various government programs and coordinating with an NGO (independent school) to provide equitable educational opportunities for students with special needs and to prepare teachers to work with these students. Ensuring compliance with each separate program, leaders had to coordinate and allocate the various resources in ways that both met the requirements of those programs while also supporting their systemwide press for instructional coherence and efforts to address equity challenges.

Hybrid systems also procured resources from various local, state, and federal government programs to address challenges related to educational inequities. The two hybrid systems—IB and Montessori—interacted with various government agencies as they expanded into U.S. public schools and grappled with meeting the needs of students. Given IB’s unique arrangement of cohabitating in public schools, the system benefited from an array of government and grant funding as well as having the public school system help with coordinating these.

Procuring and Coordinating Resources From NGOs

For all systems, NGOs featured more prominently than government organizations (see Figure 1). Systems depended on an array of NGOs, operating mostly with limited government oversight, including universities, publishers, for-profit and nonprofit organizations, and community organizations that provided resources such as funding, professional development, materials, coaching, knowledge, and teacher preparation (see Table 1). The prevalence of NGOs is striking given that different educational systems in the U.S. rely on various outside organizations to support their provision of a public good—education.

Consider the IB system by way of example. In addition to government agencies, system leaders relied on several NGOs including private foundations (see Table 1). Grants from the Dell and Gates foundations provided support to the system’s expansion initiative called “Access,” which was intended to assist IB schools in working with low-income or historically underserved student populations. Given the fragmentation of the U.S. educational sector, IB also found itself playing an intermediary role in helping schools to coordinate and access funding and resources. As one leader explained,

There’s not a United States. There are 58 separate school systems with different levels of requirements for public schools in terms of graduation and curriculum and state assessments, so we’re working to help the schools navigate that process. The same thing with school funding, support for economically disadvantaged kids in particular, but all programs, and working with getting schools connected to Title IV money. The government keeps changing their funding streams, so the idea is we have a role to help schools connect to those resources for this purpose. (B012)

To address this challenge, IB created processes at the system level to ensure that someone would be in contact with every school and help them connect and coordinate resources that could help with IB implementation and authorization and support schools serving students in poverty.

In summary, bridging to government and NGOs to find and procure essential resources for (re)building their educational infrastructures and addressing equity challenges, system leaders had to ensure compliance with different federal, state, and local government programs (e.g., IDEA and Title I) and partner with a larger ecosystem of NGOs. Thus, to find essential resources for crafting instructional coherence and addressing equity challenges, system leaders had to manage a fragmented and incoherent educational sector.

Discussion

Our account captures how the push for rationalization, standardization, and marketization over the past quarter-century prompted public, private, and hybrid educational systems to work toward systemwide instructional coherence and consistently high-quality instruction by (re)building their educational infrastructures. Though responding to system-specific puzzles, we argue that leaders’ educational infrastructure (re)building efforts similarly reflected concerns about pragmatic legitimacy. Leaders’ ongoing sensemaking about these efforts surfaced equity challenges related to students’ access to learning opportunities, as well as students’ and families’ socioemotional and physical wellbeing. For leaders, equity challenges were primed by concerns about both pragmatic and moral legitimacy. Institutional pressures for rationalization and addressing inequities were layered on top of a fragmented education sector, in which government organizations and NGOs provided separate, discrete, and specialized offerings. Thus, to (re)build educational infrastructure and address equity challenges, leaders had to find and coordinate essential resources from an array of external organizations, further complicating issues of legitimacy as system leaders manage a diverse array of stakeholders essential to their work. The press for instructional coherence, then, did nothing to inoculate educational systems from institutional incoherence.

Our findings make several contributions. First, building on Suchman’s (1995) theorizing about organizational legitimacy, we show how relevant forms of legitimacy can differ across system leaders’ sensemaking about their work and their institutional environments. Whereas pragmatic legitimacy figured prominently in priming system leaders’ educational infrastructure building, their attention to equity challenges was anchored in concerns about both pragmatic and moral legitimacy. It is not surprising that policy discourses and texts that press rationalization through standardization and marketization primed leaders’ concerns about pragmatic legitimacy, especially given the reliance on performance metrics to drive change. Systemic reform, at least as operationalized in the United States, has promoted the use of performance metrics (e.g., student achievement data and student attendance) that our analysis suggests foreground concerns about pragmatic legitimacy for system leaders. The pervasiveness of these metrics is not only a function of the stakes that federal and state policymakers have attached to them but also their widespread appeal to multiple stakeholders (Colyvas, 2012). At the same time, our analysis also documents moral legitimacy in system leaders’ grappling with equity challenges and how “equity” has moved from a pragmatic concern (e.g., reduce achievement gaps) to a moral concern (e.g., a matter of doing the right thing or social justice).

Second, and relatedly, research on educational system building has illustrated how systems are engaging in efforts to build educational infrastructure (Cohen & Bhatt, 2012; Cohen & Moffitt, 2009; Mehta & Fine, 2015; Peurach, Cohen, Yurkofsky, & Spillane, 2019; Peurach & Neumerski, 2015; Peurach et al., 2020; Spillane et al., 2019; Woulfin & Gabriel, 2020) or instructional guidance systems (Bryk et al., 2009) to craft instructional coherence and improve student learning outcomes. Some studies have begun to take up the tension between crafting instructional coherence systemwide and creating equitable educational systems, which surfaces the need to build educational infrastructures to specifically support ENL students (Hopkins et al., 2015) or develop teachers’ capacities to differentiate instruction amid systemwide educational (re)building efforts (Blaushild, 2019). Our account shows how system leaders attended to equity concerns in tandem with concerns about instructional coherence. Thus, regardless of system type or location, educational infrastructure (re)building did not occur in a color-evasive (Annamma et al., 2017) vacuum but within the increasingly majority-minority student population. Across systems, leaders noticed and allocated resources and personnel to attend to these challenges. Future studies might probe further into the intersection of educational infrastructure (re)building and colorblind managerialism (Turner, 2020) to explore whether equity-centered systemic change can be coupled with the press for instructional coherence.

Third, while the systemic reform movement envisioned building macro-level coherence across the educational sector (e.g., Smith & O’Day, 1990), it never fully materialized, confined mostly to standards and assessments in a handful of subjects. Instead, the policy texts associated with the movement contributed to the further proliferation of government and NGOs in the educational sector and, thereby, fragmentation and incoherence in the institutional environment (Burch, 2009; Marsh & Wohlstetter, 2013; Sunderman, 2010). While pressing educational systems to engage in crafting systemwide instructional coherence, these same federal and state initiatives have done little to reduce, streamline, and coordinate the organizations in the educational sector that education systems rely on for essential resources (Burch, 2009; Cohen et al., 2018). Whereas the fragmentation of the U.S. educational sector is well documented (Cohen & Spillane, 1992), the ramifications of this have mainly been considered for policy formulation rather than policy implementation (McDonnell & Weatherford, 2016). Even less attention has been paid to the implications of fragmentation for the organizational infrastructure needed to implement policy and support instructional improvement broadly. We begin to address this omission by documenting the taken-for-granted layers of work of finding, procuring, and coordinating essential resources.

Implications and Conclusion

This research has implications for both policymaking and policy research, which we consider together. The first involves a rethinking of roles and responsibilities for both educational system leaders and education policymakers. In reframing school districts, charter networks, private, and hybrid systems as educational systems, our account argues for moving beyond an implementation perspective when analyzing the role of these organizations vis-à-vis federal and state educational policymaking in the United States. While some have argued for thinking about the relationship between state/federal government policy and local school districts as “interactive policymaking” rather than policy implementing (Spillane, 1996), our analysis argues for framing the work these entities do as educational system building. Beyond serving as implementing agencies, educational systems design instructional programs for students, support the development and enactment of these programs in classrooms, and work to manage and monitor the success of these efforts. Researchers might then reconsider the conventional ways of framing local school districts or charter networks as implementing agencies and focus on their roles as educational system builders (Peurach et al., 2021). Embracing the work of educational system building and understanding the skills system leaders need to do this work is essential.

Following this reframing, we can critically appraise how federal and state policy discourses and texts primed educational system building in the U.S. education sector. Beyond defining standards and developing aligned assessments and accountability mechanisms, federal and state instructional policy initiatives have done relatively little to support the work of educational system building. This work could include both supporting the development of different components of educational infrastructure (e.g., curricula, professional development, instructional coaching, and organizational routines) and, importantly, working to help educational systems coordinate and align those different elements to support high-quality instruction. Our study showed the extent to which system leaders turned to a variety of external sources (e.g., publishers, other school systems, consultants) to build educational infrastructures to improve teaching and learning, thus complicating their efforts to support instructional coherence. We argue that policymakers might rethink their roles vis-à-vis educational systems and work to not only prime system building but also consider how they might support this work by taking on the coordination and alignment of educational infrastructure or by funding and supporting other organizations in the education sector to do so. For example, the Boards of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES) are intermediary organizations that provide shared educational programs and a range of instructional (e.g., professional development and services for students with disabilities) and noninstructional support services (e.g., transportation and administrative) to school districts across New York State (BOCES, 2017). While such intermediary organizations may take different forms depending on the state, they could take responsibility for supporting school districts in their efforts to build educational infrastructure.

Second, and relatedly, the demographic shifts and broader social changes noticed by system leaders in our study have likely been exacerbated by increasing income inequality and a shrinking social safety net over the past few decades (Horowitz et al., 2020; Hoynes & Schanzenbach, 2018) and, more recently, during the COVID-19 crisis. A recent study found that many public systems (suburban, urban, and charter) across the United States have increased their provision of nonacademic services for the 2021–2022 school year, including summer programming, mental health services, tutoring, and distributing technology to students (Schwartz & Diliberti, 2021). This demonstrates how educational systems are taking on responsibilities beyond their traditional brief and their expertise. Considering this system-level activity, we argue that policymakers and policy researchers should examine how educational systems not only manage educational policies but also how they engage with social policies and social issues more broadly. In demonstrating how a broad set of social needs have fallen on these systems, we argue for research on the consequences of these additional responsibilities on systems’ budgeting, personnel, time use, expertise, and, ultimately, their organizational legitimacy (Pondiscio, 2021). Such research would further investigate these system-level activities and could help identify strategies to support system leaders in doing this work.

Third, our account raises issues for education policymakers and for policy scholars about priming educational system (re)building in educational systems to focus on instructional coherence and equity. Whereas our analysis documents how pragmatic legitimacy figured most prominently in systems’ educational infrastructure (re)building efforts, both pragmatic and moral legitimacy surfaced in leaders’ efforts to redress equity challenges. Our analysis suggests that policymakers might rethink their overreliance on performance metrics to prime educational system building and consider how they might design policies to tap into educational system leaders’ sensemaking as it relates to moral legitimacy. Specifically, we argue for designing policy texts that prime system leaders to engage in equity-focused educational system building, which could include attention to culturally responsive and trauma-response practices and cultivating parental and community engagement (Ishimaru, 2019). Such work would involve reframing equity from both pragmatic and moral perspectives; for example, framing the equity challenge in terms of social justice rather than closing achievement gaps. The challenge here goes beyond redesign to focus more broadly on how to shift policy discourses in ways that foreground moral legitimacy.

Fourth, our account underscores the affordances of analyzing educational systems as distinct from the school or classroom, and the need to research diverse types of systems. Some scholars have recently critiqued education research for its inattention to suburban schools that increasingly enroll students of color, immigrants, and students living in poverty (Diamond & Posey-Maddox, 2020). This suggests the need to examine suburban education systems as a unique (and under-researched) context for educational system building and the challenge of addressing inequities. Considering that our account documents how educational system building surfaces equity challenges in public, private, and hybrid educational systems, we argue that education policy research should move beyond a near-exclusive focus on public systems.

Finally, education policy scholars might also expand their methodological repertoire to employ “imaginative” approaches by drawing on literature and social theory to explore alternative possible futures (Levitas, 2013). Some of the research questions raised by our account, such as how policy might be designed to tap into moral legitimacy, could benefit from these methods, especially considering how taken for granted standardization and marketization have become in the U.S. education sector. As Nasir and colleagues (2021) argue, the pandemic and national reckoning on racial injustice have created opportunities to “imagine something new,” seeing as, for the first time in recent history, some policymakers are discussing the importance of balancing testing and accountability with strengthening the teaching profession, encouraging greater variety in school models and educational pathways, and valuing students’ achievement and their socio-emotional, mental, and physical well-being (Nasir et al., 2021).

Overall, the movement beyond access-oriented school systems to instructionally focused educational systems is one of the most important and under-appreciated artifacts of systemic reform and one into which researchers are only beginning to dig more deeply. As we have strived to show, focusing on educational systems’ efforts to become both instructionally focused and equitable, opens up a new landscape of issues, questions, and dilemmas for education policymaking. Education professionals, policymakers, and researchers must confront these questions to address society’s expanding pragmatic and moral expectations for public and private education in our nation.

Footnotes

Appendix

Acknowledgements

The authors dedicate the article to the memory of David K. Cohen, a member of the research team, and also acknowledge other research team members, Daniella Hall Sutherland, Max Yurkofsky, Jonathan Sun, Rongzhen Zhou, Carolina Laguna, Katherine Senseman, and those who provided feedback on earlier drafts including three anonymous reviewers. Opinions and conclusions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of any funding agency.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/ or publication of this article: Work on this essay was supported by the Spencer School Systems Study at Northwestern University and the University of Michigan, funded by a research Grant from the Spencer Foundation (SP0034639- 201600066) and by a Grant from the U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, Multidisciplinary Program in Education Sciences (R305B140042).

ORCID iDs

Naomi L. Blaushild

Donald J. Peurach

Notes

Authors

JAMES P. SPILLANE is the Spencer T. and Ann W. Olin Professor in Learning and Organizational Change at the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University. His research focuses on issues of education policy, policy implementation, school reform, and school leadership.

NAOMI L. BLAUSHILD is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Learning Partnership in Chicago, IL. Her research focuses on teachers’ practice and career decisions, school leadership, and education policy implementation.

CHRISTINE M. NEUMERSKI is a senior research fellow in the College of Education at the University of Maryland. She studies instructional leadership, urban school and school system reform, and the relationship between policy and classroom practice. At the core of her work is a focus on improving instruction for marginalized student populations.

JENNIFER L. SEELIG is a K–12 research scientist in Education and Child Development with NORC at the University of Chicago. She applies critical theory and qualitative methods to examine spatial in/equity in education policy and practice. Her areas of expertise include rural education, school-community relations, and teacher recruitment and retention.

DONALD J. PEURACH is a professor of Educational Policy, Leadership, and Innovation at the University of Michigan’s School of Education. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. His research, teaching, and outreach focus on the organization and management of education systems, with a particular focus on network-based continuous improvement.

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