Theorizing the Implementation Gap: An Equity Framework

• In Event: 21.039 - From Policy to Practice: Exploring the "Implementation Gap" in Early Childhood Education

Abstract

Purpose
This paper proposes a conceptual framework for analyzing and understanding educators’ experiences as they attempt to interpret and implement universalizing policy mandates in local contexts, classrooms and schools.

Perspective
Attention to “gaps” in policy-to-practice highlights the complexities that educators must negotiate when putting education policies, initiatives, and mandates into practice at the school and classroom level. As an open space, the “gap” metaphor allows researchers and practitioners to think through complex relationships regarding how early childhood teachers, educational leaders, and pre-service teachers understand, rework, and implement policies on standards, academic rigor, assessment and curriculum in context-specific ways.

Methods/Data sources
“Implementation gap” as a framework for understanding schooling inequities emerged from a research study with early childhood educators (Author, 2018), which revealed education policies and discourses to be fragmented, contradictory, and often misaligned with local teaching contexts.

Substantiated conclusions
Understanding “implementation gaps” as possibilities for change may encourage educators to act on “unscripted” opportunities to act autonomously, drawing on various funds of professional and local knowledge to create more equitable learning spaces.

Scholarly significance
Attention to the theoretical underpinnings of the overall framework of the session lays the groundwork for understanding various affordances and constraints of policy implementation gaps in the subsequent papers in the symposium as well as in future research.

Author

• Leslee Grey, Queens College - CUNY