Leading and Learning at the Intersection of Equity and Improvement Science

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Thursday 5:25 pm Four Seasons Ballroom 2-3
  In Roundtable Session: Improvement Network Development: Exploring the Promise of Collaboration Among Schools to Support Educational Improvement (Table 11)

Abstract

Objectives:
This paper draws from a longitudinal mixed methods study of over 40 networks for school improvement (NSIs) funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to improve outcomes for traditionally underserved students. Here, we leverage longitudinal data on network leaders’ strategies for integrating equity in NSIs over time to explore how leaders navigated shifting environmental signals related to educational equity.

Theoretical framework:
As open systems, NSIs are subject to multiple demands from environmental stakeholders that include funders, district leaders and staff, school leaders and educators, students and their families, and local community members. One key function of hub leaders, who are responsible for developing the social and technical infrastructure that undergirds NSIs, is navigating this environmental complexity (Peurach et al., forthcoming; Russell et al., forthcoming). As agents working in complex inter-institutional systems, network leaders strategically filter multiple external pressures and integrate and adapt those signals within NSIs’ work (Diehl & Golann, 2023).

From 2018-2023, the period in which the hub leaders in our sample were launching and developing their NSIs, environmental signals pertaining to equity were particularly urgent and turbulent. Changing, and at times, contradictory equity signals forced network leaders to grapple with the role of equity in their hub organizations and their networks more broadly. Previous research on equity in NSIs suggests considerable variation in how hub leaders have interpreted and responded to equity pressures in their environment (Authors, forthcoming). In this paper, we use institutional theory to unpack the organizational and environmental factors that mediated hub leaders’ equity approaches over time.

Methods and data sources:
In this longitudinal comparative case study, we leverage archival documentation produced by hub leaders through their involvement in the NSI initiative (2018-2023) to analyze leaders’ descriptions of equity approaches over time. Coding and memos focused on leaders’ descriptions of tools, strategies, and data sources NSI leveraged to advance equity in their work as well as the organizational and environmental factors that mediated leaders’ attention to equity over time.

Results:
Initial analyses suggest two key findings. First, we find that within the NSI initiative, the conceptualization of equity in networked improvement evolved. An initial focus on equity in student outcomes expanded to include attention to equity in network processes–an evolution that was evident in both how the foundation supported and evaluated NSI. Second, hub leaders across nearly all NSIs described more consistent and expansive equity strategies as their networks developed, suggesting leaders were learning and adapting their equity approaches over time. However, we find considerable variation in the equity strategies hub leaders prioritized over time suggesting leaders’ responses were mediated by both the hub organization’s equity capacity and equity policies in their district contexts, some of which sought to explicitly ban practices intended to explicitly address educational equity.

Significance:
This study contributes to our understanding of how network leaders learn and adapt organizational strategies, tools, and routines in response to rapidly shifting institutional pressures and provides further insights into how leaders worked to integrate the press for equity within existing networked improvement processes.

Authors

• Megan Duff, UNC Chapel Hill

• Jennifer Zoltners Sherer, University of Pittsburgh

• Anna Elisabeth Premo, ETH Zürich