Promoting Ecological Approaches to Educational Issues: Evidence From a Partnership Around Chronic Absenteeism in Detroit

• In Event: Thinking Ecologically in Educational Policy and Research

Abstract

By understanding and producing evidence of the ecological nature of educational issues, researchers can help promote a coordinated set of policies and practices meant to address structural and environmental inequalities at their core. Yet, the dominant logics and existing institutional and organizational arrangements of educational policy and practice create obstacles to ecological approaches. Drawing on three years of interviews, field notes, and artifacts from a partnership around chronic absenteeism in Detroit, we offer evidence of the obstacles to promoting an ecological approach to educational issues. For over three years, we have researched the issue of chronic absenteeism in partnership with a community-based coalition of community organizations working on decreasing chronic absenteeism; and with leaders in a Detroit school system. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the extent to which our partners adopted an ecological approach in response to our research, and the institutional and organizational factors that mediated that adoption.

We use the term “institutional inertia” to refer to the tendency for organizations to resist change to their structure, culture or logics, and practice. In American education, there is a long history of organizing schools and educational systems to address a host of social and economic issues (Labaree, 2008). Yet, there is less precedent for the reverse: expanding “what counts” as educational policy (Anyon, 2014) and marshalling institutions and resources outside of educational systems to respond to the problems of educational opportunity, achievement, and attainment. Thus, a consequence of institutional inertia is that the existing sociocultural and organizational dimensions of schooling are likely to create obstacles to ecosystemic policies and practices. Sources of institutional inertia for schools include existing institutional logics and arrangements at the macro-level (Bridwell-Mitchell, 2013; Spillane et al., 2019); isomorphism in the organizational field and an organization’s capacity for learning at the meso-level, (Farrell et al., 2019; Yurkofsky, 2020); and sensemaking and constraints on individuals at the microlevel (Spillane et al., 2002; Wong et al., 2020). These dynamics can also be seen for intermediary organizations and collective impact coalitions, as reflected in the research on advocacy coalitions (Sabatier, 1993, 1998).

We identified both similarities and differences in how our partners conceived of absenteeism and used research that reflected an ecological framing of the problem. We show how the macro-institutional conditions that create problems in educational ecosystems also influence how and why system leaders take up ecological frames; the form and norms of authority in educational organizations shape how members take up new information and use research conceptually and instrumentally; and how at the micro-level, educators and community leaders working on tough social problems are, like most people, wedded to prior beliefs about the root causes of problems and reluctant to throw over longstanding ideas about how to fix them.

Authors

• Sarah Winchell Lenhoff, Wayne State University

• Jeremy Lee Singer, Wayne State University