When Innovation Dies: Temporal Isomorphism and the Failures of Charter School Reform

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 11:45 am - Gold 3
  In Roundtable Session: Governing Innovation and System Change in an Era of Choice

Abstract

This paper examines the six-year lifecycle of a successful literacy intervention at a Latiné-serving charter school through the lens of temporal isomorphism, a theoretical framework we develop to explain how organizations form similar legitimizing structures at similar times. Drawing on participatory action research and organizational theory, we document how one pedagogically promising design study was abandoned due to a business-industrial institutional logic of school management that demanded quicker improvements to test scores. Our analysis reveals how charter schools' historical imprinting in the neoliberal 1990s, exchanging freedom from bureaucracy for increased accountability, conflicts with the long runway needed for educational innovations to show promise.

Author

• Juddson R. Taube, University of San Francisco