Hiring Under Constraint: How School Administrators Perceive and Respond to Centralized Screening by the District

• In Event: Strategic and Efficient School Staffing

Abstract

School districts have increasingly adopted systems to increase data use in decision-making, including screening systems to capture information about applicant teachers more systematically (Cannata et al., 2017; Engel et al., 2017). However, school leaders may translate policy into practice in ways that either promote or undermine the policy’s goals (Donaldson & Woulfin, 2019). For example, school leaders may maneuver around district-level reforms (Rutledge et al., 2008) or struggle to use district-provided data even when they want to (Grissom et al., 2017), muting reforms’ impacts.

We investigate these issues qualitatively using interviews of 30 school administrators in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). In 2013, LAUSD adopted a district-level screening protocol intended to be more rigorous and to collect more meaningful information on applicant teachers. Applicants must be screened through this system before school principals can hire them. This leaves some discretion in the hands of school-level administrators, but also substantially reduces their autonomy relative to more decentralized alternatives and the status quo ante. To study the dynamics between principals, district policy, and principals’ selection processes we ask three research questions:

1. How do principals perceive the district’s role in their hiring processes?
2. How are principals’ perceptions of district screening processes related to the strategies principals use to hire applicants?
3. How do principals’ perceptions of district screening processes vary by principal characteristics and school characteristics?

We find that principals vary substantially in how they perceive the district’s screening protocols, with perceptions ranging from positive to very negative. Additionally, we distinguish two groups of principals: those who are relatively assertive in pursuing their preferred candidates (e.g., even if this involves hiring strategies unsanctioned by the district) and those who are relatively passive (e.g., taking the candidate pool as largely fixed). Perhaps counterintuitively, those participants who expressed a positive perception of the district’s role in the hiring process in general, and the more rigorous protocols in particular, enacted the most assertive strategies to recruit teachers. Conversely, principals who viewed the district’s role more negatively tended to “play by the rules” and accept the candidates the district offered to them. We do not find evidence that these patterns vary substantially by principals’ characteristics or context.

Our findings make two contributions. First, we advance research on how principal attitudes affect how they implement policy. While principals are known to be sometimes unaware of the leeway they have (Mavrogordato & White, 2019), we show how this unawareness can go in two directions: towards and away from exercising discretion. We also provide novel evidence of a set of “extrabureaucratic maneuvers” (Morris et al., 1982) principals use in hiring to overcome what they perceive to be obstacles to school performance.

Second, we contribute to literature that documents, but does not explain, variation in how principals hire teachers (Grissom et al., 2017; Papa & Baxter, 2008; Rutledge et al., 2008) and draw implications for practice. For example, we highlight how district leaders can adjust their processes to be both more efficient and aligned with principals’ priorities.

Authors

• Jennifer Lauren Nelson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Marisol Jimenez, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Paul Bruno, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign