Exploring the Space Between: Social Networks, Trust, and Urban School District Leaders

• In Event: Central Office-School Relationships in Support of School Improvement: Reconceptualizing the Problem and What’s Promising

Abstract

A handful of researchers have begun to take a truly systemic view of reform, examining district central office-school relationships in school improvement processes (e.g. Honig et al. 2010). These studies underscore the importance of such relationships but research with this focus is still limited. For example, various researchers have begun to highlight, bluntly, that social networks and trust across districts are important to school improvement and that they are generally weak between central offices and schools; however, empirical evidence does not yet reveal variations in networks and ties across systems and time—knowledge particularly important to understanding dynamics of urban systems where networks and ties between schools and central offices vary depending on where you sit and the stage of reform implementation. Nor does research explain how networks and trust matter to policy outcomes.

We address those gaps by using social capital theory and social network analytic methods to define and distinguish central office-school relationships as they unfold over time in the implementation of accountability policy among 114 school and central office leaders in one urban district. Our conceptual framework focused us on two dimensions of social capital which we used to analyze such relationships: (1) Structural dimensions or the overall ties and network structure among district school and central office leaders; and (2) Relational dimensions or the norms, values, and expectations shared by leaders (Halpern, 2005; Portes, 1998), measured in this context by assessing trust among leaders (Bryk & Schneider, 2002; Moolenaar, et al. 2009).

Overall, we found the flow of information such as knowledge of best practices was important to school improvement outcomes in this context and that our social networks analysis helped pinpoint where specifically in the district those information flows broke down. For instance we found such information flows were especially low among principals of low-performing schools, suggesting that while accountability policies aim in part to open up such schools to outside assistance, such schools may actually find themselves increasingly isolated. Ties between central office and school leaders tend to be unidirectional—moving either from the central office to schools or vice versa, depending on the part of the system— thereby inhibiting the mutual exchange of information arguably essential to school improvement. Moving beyond the general finding that trust matters, we specify that central office and school leaders have little trust that the other had the capacity to support school improvement; the distribution of trust throughout the system corresponded with other measurable outcomes like the flow of information. Such findings provide a map for district leaders that reveals, for example, where investments in relationship-building between central office and school leaders might be particularly strategic.

This paper contributes to knowledge about central office-school relationships by demonstrating how social network analytic methods and assessments of trust over time in particular contexts shape how implementation unfolds. In so doing, we build knowledge that can help systems move beyond general calls for “coherence” and “alignment” to specify specific parts of a district system that may me particularly incoherent and misaligned.

Authors

• Alan J. Daly, University of California - San Diego

• Kara S. Finnigan, University of Rochester