Why Do School Districts Matter? An Interdisciplinary and Empirical Review

• In Event: What Makes School Districts Effective?

Abstract

Recent educational reforms have focused on districts as a key lever of change, particularly for instructional improvement. Districts are the primary implementers of teacher evaluation and compensation systems incentivized under the Obama administration (Darling-Hammond, 2009; McGuinn, 2012). Salary schedules and recruitment efforts meant to attract high-quality and diverse teacher candidates often are set at the district level (Lankford, Loeb, & Wyckoff, 2002). School boards typically oversee the adoption of instructional resources, including curricular materials and professional development. Indeed, theory and research suggest that districts are a key mediator of instructional reform by determining the degree of coherence around how resources, standards, and development opportunities are aligned (Carnoy, Elmore, & Siskin, 2003).

Despite interest in district-level policy, research examining whether and how districts affect instruction, student achievement, and the equitable distribution of instructional resources is sparse. To our knowledge, only a handful of studies compare teacher quality gaps across as opposed to within districts, each finding substantial between-district variation (Author, 2015; Goldhaber, Quince, & Theolbald, 2016). Some studies propose theories and present empirical evidence to explain these differences (Leithwood, 2010; Trujillo, 2013). However, this work has tended to occur in disciplinary silos, resulting in the possible omission of important district-level features.

We extend this work by conducting a systematic review of the literature on district effects, beginning with a review of the theoretical literature on district effects from three disciplinary perspectives: organizational behavior, labor economics, and governance. We then conducted a search of the empirical and quantitative evidence across these literatures. We identified over 75 studies that met our inclusion criteria: (i) examines one or more independent variable where the primary source of variation is across districts; (ii) uses a measure of student achievement or teacher quality as the outcome of interest; (iii) focuses on developed countries where local government allocates educational resources (e.g., local education agencies in the United States); and (iv) attempts to limit bias due to self-selection of policies (i.e., experiment, regression discontinuity design, difference-in-differences design, propensity score matching, multiple regression with robust set of controls).

Together, these studies examine a broad range of district-level policies, though with discernible features unique to each of the three disciplinary traditions. Labor economists have focused primarily on the relationship between teacher salary, often finding a strong positive signal. The theoretical literature on district-level governance has identified several policies that could support instructional improvement, including mayoral control, portfolio management models, school/principal autonomy. However, few of these policies have been examined in ways that fit our inclusion criteria. One exception is the district turnaround literature, which highlights positive effects across several locations. The organizational behavior identifies several key features of instructional leadership practices (e.g., curriculum materials, data use, district-wide professional development) that predict stronger instructional quality and student outcomes in some but not all studies. Mixed conclusions likely are due to varying quality of research design. Unlike the economics literature, the instructional leadership literature has been less attuned to causal inference.

Authors

• David Blazar, University of Maryland - College Park

• Beth Schueler, University of Virginia