Education Reformers, Strategic Action, and Their Logics for School Improvement

• In Event: New Evidence on School Effectiveness and School Improvement

Abstract

School reform and improvement are driven by individuals, often working alongside each other. Drawing on in-depth interviews with researchers, philanthropists, and school improvement staff in Chicago, Philadelphia, and NYC, I found that education reformers employed varying logics and strategies even as they worked toward similar goals: Engineers used information, incentives, and interventions to promote technical changes while capacity-builders worked in schools to broker networks and instructional resources for relational changes within the system. More distantly, framers used research to reframe discourse and legitimize reforms while table-setters capitalized on investments and elite networks for systems-level changes. This research contributes to studies of school reform and leadership by suggesting how actors outside schools—with their logics and strategies—impact changes within it.

Author

• Jose Eos Trinidad, University of California - Berkeley
  Presenting Author