Supporting Undocumented Students via District Policy and Leadership: District Leadership's Intentional Use of Varied Institutional Logics

• In Event: District Leadership Practices to Support Immigrant-Origin Students: Case Studies From Immigrant-Serving Districts Across the United States

Abstract

Objectives
The field of education policy needs expanded empirical understandings of how district leaders enact policy for undocumented students. Within the growing research about and by undocumented people (Abrego & Negrón-Gonzales, 2020), districts are rarely a unit of analysis despite their importance in coordinating support for immigrant youth (Hopkins et al., 2021; Authors, 2021). Here we ask: How do district leaders strategically leverage logics from the policy landscape to enact equitable policy for undocumented students? How are institutional logics (re)combined by district leaders to enact enduring policy support for undocumented immigrants' educational access?

Theoretical Frame
For critical policy analysis (Young & Diem, 2016), our paper draws on institutional theory and institutional logics (Thornton & Ocasio, 2008), previously used to study educational reform (e.g., Authors, 2016). We examine power, privilege, and inequality as related to undocumented students. Through this lens, each policy communicates ideals about the responsibilities of educational institutions to immigrants with varied citizenship statuses. Each logic carries distinct practices, concepts of rationality, and sources of legitimacy, and therefore can contend for primacy within an organization. What merits closer attention is how district leaders blend institutional logics to mediate policy tensions.

Methods and Data Sources
Data come from a mixed-methods study on how six districts mediated immigration policy following the 2016 election. This study highlights one diverse urban district, West City School District (WCSD, a pseudonym), which serves 17,000 students. Using discourse analysis of district policy documents, we adopted a “pattern inducing” approach to surface institutional logics in the two texts (Reay & Jones, 2016). We cross-referenced 20 interviews with 37 district employees and community partners. We then conducted both open and structured thematic analyses across interviews to triangulate findings from the policy texts (Ryan & Bernard, 2003).

Findings
Blended logics were used to communicate organizational approval, as well as its limits, on a range of immigrant-protective practices and potential staff responses in a volatile federal immigration policy climate. For instance, both documents reflect the logic of state, using settled legal controversies - including the Supreme Court ruling in Plyler v. Doe (1982) and the Federal Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) - to rationalize policy guidance. Both documents also use the logic of the profession, invoking the political legitimacy of the state educators’ union and its stance of support for immigrants. The letters diverge in their use of additional logics. The state letter includes a market logic, linking immigrants’ educational rights to their economic contributions. This logic is incongruent for the district, which replaces it with family logic, stressing cultivation of familial networks and trust-based relationships (Fairclough & Micelotta, 2013).

Significance
This paper contributes to scholarship at the intersection of immigration and education by examining how a school district grapples with supporting undocumented youth in a changing policy environment. We highlight an institutional interface critically underrepresented in research: the school district as a mediating entity for immigration policy (Hopkins et al., 2021). It provides an understanding of district leaderships’ use of diverse logics to buffer immigrant students from a volatile federal policy climate.

Authors

• Brian Tauzel, Western Washington University
  Presenting Author

• Dafney Blanca Dabach, University of Washington
  Presenting Author