When and Under What Conditions Do District Leaders Take Up Ideas From External Partners?

• In Event: 56.041 - Theories and Analysis in Relational Governance: Shaping Policy Through Research, Ideas, and Networks

Abstract

Given limited resources and capacity, school districts engage with external partners for assistance in their policy reform efforts (Datnow & Honig, 2008). These actors – vendors, consultants, non-profits, or researchers – bring a set of ideas to support instructional improvement (Rowan, 2002). We know little about when and under what conditions districts take up external guidance in their instructional decision making.

We draw on the concept of absorptive capacity, an organization’s ability to recognize the value of new information, assimilate it, transform it, and apply it in productive ways (Cohen & Levinthal, 1990). In this view, a district engages with partner ideas, and, with sufficient absorptive capacity, transform their own policies. Since districts are not monolithic (Spillane, 1998), we focus on the district subunit as the key unit of analysis.

Research identifies several organizational conditions that foster absorptive capacity. Relevant prior knowledge in a subunit is crucial because knowing something about a given issue enables a subunit to better recognize the value of external knowledge (Cohen & Levinthal, 1990). Communication pathways--formal and informal structures within and between subunits, as measured by social network analysis--can enable people to share and make sense of new ideas (Lane, Koka, & Pathak, 2006). Strategic leadership—a skill at seeking out external knowledge and planning how to synthesize it (Volberda, Foss, & Lyles, 2010) —is also important. The influence of a subunit’s absorptive capacity is mediated by the nature of the interactions between subunit and partner. These interactions have organizational learning consequences, where ideas from external partners are encoded into subunit policies (Feldman & March, 1981; Levitt & March, 1988).

Between 2012-2014, we studied a district’s partnership with an outside research organization. The partner worked with two departments: mathematics and the Improvement Zone, a cluster of schools with separate leadership. We draw on observation data of meetings (n=300 hours); interviews, including survey network items (n=106 interviews, 70 leaders), and artifacts (n=2,824). We analyzed data using a hybrid approach to coding and UCI-net to analyze social networks.

We found the degree to which a district-partner relationship led to incorporation of partner ideas into district policy depended upon the unit’s pre-existing organizational conditions for absorptive capacity and the nature of the department-partner interactions. The Improvement Zone’s sparse internal social networks failed to tap into considerable math expertise in the district, relying more heavily on the external partner to take a central role in unit’s mathematics work but with limited lasting impact on subunit’s policy. By contrast, the mathematics department had robust internal networks that capitalized on its own expertise plus complementary expertise in other subunits in the district. Their multi-level, reciprocal ties to the external partner meant that partners’ ideas were widespread among subunit staff and were brought into subunit policy documents in central ways.

This work advances policy research by documenting the mechanism by which ideas work their way into district policies. For practitioners, this study highlights key points of leverage to increase districts’ ability to engage with external guidance in productive ways.

Authors

• Caitlin Farrell, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Cynthia E. Coburn