Calibrating Policy at the State Level: How State Departments Work Collectively to Support District Success

• In Event: 60.081 - Unpacking Systems Capacity Through SWIFT Schools: Building Coherence

Abstract

Broad scripts about interaction, values, and behavior govern organizational behavior (Burch, 2007). Organizational cultures are porous vessels in which the cultural norms of the communities in which they exist power much of what is valued, as well as define how power and authority are conveyed, and who and what is relegated to the margins. This embedded view of culture at work in educational organizations propels recent scholarship that explores how cultural dynamics evolve as people participate in their daily routines and exchanges. Through interaction and interpretation, people within organizations appropriate and translate policy, often creating new tools and frames that then are instantiated into new policies.
There is mounting evidence that scaling interventions requires scaling implementation capacity. Jerald (2005) summarized by stating: “As thousands of administrators and teachers have discovered too late, implementing an improvement plan – at least any plan worth its salt – really comes down to changing complex organizations in fundamental ways…. Unfortunately, educational researchers, policymakers, and leaders have consistently failed to acknowledge and communicate the importance of [the] crucial implementation stage in the school improvement process. Indeed, given the emphasis on planning – and relative silence about implementation – in many of the guidebooks and tools meant to help with school improvement, schools leaders can easily come away with the impression that if a team gets the plan right, successful implementation of the plan must surely follow” (p 2). Many policies codify technical work in states, districts, and, depending on the state, in schools themselves, identifying what is to be done, by whom, and how. While the intent may be to smooth the efficiency of work, technical policies that prescribe what is to be done, also run the risk of creating friction with local conceptions of what work should look like, and why it should be done. And, by defining the technical aspects of the work, the identities of the practitioners (e.g., teachers, school psychologists, social workers, speech/language therapists, and others) are also shifted to technocrats, commissioned to perform particular tasks in specific patterns and sequences.
By locating culture at the nexus of the vectors of policy development: framing problems, proposing solutions, and building political consensus, it is possible to deepen our strategic and tactical decision making throughout the policy development phase. This kind of careful work strengthens possibilities for “stickiness.” It means that policy makers must consider historical artifacts embedded within notions of how schools and school systems operate.
In this paper, we explore the impact of the SWIFT effort to involve state departments in substantive ways that link them integrally to the work of district transformation, moving them from external watchdogs to capacity builders. In this mode, SWIFT states are redefining the roles of their state personnel in order to scan and link resources in ways that respond to district and school needs. Sharing tools and approaches across states, allows the state agencies to transform their own organizational cultures and identities. Eighteen months of data and tools from the SWIFT work are presented in this paper.

Author

• W. Alan Coulter, Louisiana State University - Health Sciences Center New Orleans