Paper Summary

School-Central Office Relationships in Evidence Use: Understanding Evidence Use as a Systems Problem

Sat, April 14, 10:35am to 12:05pm, Vancouver Convention Centre, Floor: Second Level, West Room 222

Abstract

Research on evidence use in school districts overwhelmingly focuses on how school staff such as teachers and school principals work with evidence including student performance data, research, and information about teaching quality to inform their practice. While important, this school focus in the research ignores that federal and state policies demand not only that school staff work with evidence but that school district central office administrators likewise engage in evidence-based decision making. This school focus also downplays how complex, social school-level change processes such as evidence use may typically involve central office staff in implementation and vice versa. This paper presents a review of research-use processes in schools and central offices, using ideas from complexity theory as a partial guide. This review reveals that researchers and practitioners should understand evidence use in school districts not solely as a school-level activity but as a “systems problem”-- one that implicates both school and central office-level actions and relationships among the two. In this view, efforts to support evidence-use in school districts by focusing solely within schools are likely to yield limited results.

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