Abstract

First-Year Principals' Engagement with Instructional Leadership: The Presence, Pathway, and Power of Institutional Logics

by

Jessica Goodman Rigby

Doctor of Philosophy in Education

Professor Cynthia Coburn, Chair

In the current shifting educational landscape, first-year principals encounter multiple messages about what it means to be instructional leaders. While the concept of instructional leadership has been discussed in academic and practice-based literature for over three decades, there is no consensus on what it means. Moreover, the varied approaches to instructional leadership reflect the changes in the broader educational environment, such as the focus on alternative approaches and models in multiple elements of the education sector such as school types, preparation programs, and curricular approaches. The various notions of instructional leadership, then, serve as an opportunity to examine the multiple ways in which conflicting ideas in the institutional environment influence both leadership and, more broadly, education.

We know that what happens in the institutional environment matters for what happens in organizations, and schools in particular. Yet the majority of research that investigates the connections between the environment and schools focuses on teachers. The literature that studies principals mostly investigates school leaders at the school site; there are few studies that examine the role of the principal as the nexus between ideas in the environment and what happens instructionally in schools. This study fills this gap in the research literature, examining the entirety of the phenomena, first identifying the logics of instructional leadership that exist in the institutional environment, tracing the pathways of the logics to principals, and, finally, understanding how principals make sense of and enact them.

In a cross-case qualitative study, I studied six first-year principals who came to their positions through four distinct principal preparation paths. I first conducted an iterative document analysis to identify the institutional logics of instructional leadership in the environment. Then, using data from interviews and observations from the 2010-2011 school year, I mapped out the principals' informal social networks and compared them to the formal organizational structures they were exposed to. Using this analysis, I explored the influence of the formal organizational structures on the principals' informal networks: when they impacted the shape of the networks and when they did not. I also sought to understand the role of social networks as mechanisms for logics to be carried through the environment. Finally, I explored how principals made sense of and enacted the ideas of instructional leadership that they had access to, especially in relationship to the shape of their informal networks.

I define three notions of leadership in the environment, or institutional logics. I term them the prevailing, entrepreneurial, and social justice logics. I present a typology of these institutional logics of instructional leadership that moves the field towards a stronger conception of what it means for a principal to be an instructional leader. I also found that the institutional logics were carried to individual principals through actors, norms, xx in their informal social networks. When principals received messages imbued with a logic often and from multiple alters, they were both more likely to consider it to be a part of their belief system and to take leadership actions that were associated with the logic.

This research contributes to understanding the relationship between institutional ideas and practice in schools, principal preparation, and professional development by explicating the mechanisms through which the ideas are carried through the institutional environment. It also extends research on social network theory by elucidating the content of interaction in social networks to include beliefs. Finally, this study has practical implications for both the research and implementation of principal preparation programs including the presence, salience, and messaging of distinct notions of instructional leadership.

In an era of increased accountability mandates, school leaders face daunting challenges to improve instruction. Despite the vast research on instructional leadership, little is known about how principals improve teaching and learning in the subject of writing. Leadership content knowledge is the overlap of knowledge of subject matter and instruction in leadership. Using a cross case study format, this study examined the work of three elementary school principals who had different levels of leadership content knowledge in writing. Through observations and interviews, the study focused on how leadership content knowledge in writing influences the work of the principal.

The findings of this study indicate that principal practice is strongly influenced by leadership content knowledge in writing. The greater the leadership content knowledge, the more aspects of instruction the principal attended to, moving beyond surface features of instruction to underlying pedagogy and assessment. The principal with high leadership content knowledge gave more feedback to teachers and that feedback was much more detailed and specific than the feedback given by the principals with developing or moderate content knowledge. Leadership content knowledge also influenced how the principal designed professional learning opportunities for teachers and how they supported individual teachers through differentiation. This study contributes to the research literature by investigating the link between principal's knowledge and principal's practice.

Growing immigrant populations in the United States and Europe have transformed communities in recent years. Immigration brings important changes to everyday life, especially for schools. The integration of immigrants in schools prompts debates about assimilation and multicultural education. It spurs policymakers to respond to language and cultural diversity. And it alters the work of teachers, who are often on the front lines of community responses to immigration. Spain is a newcomer to these issues. Formerly an immigrant-sending country, Spain now has comparable rates of immigration to more traditional immigration countries like the United States, Germany, France and England. Study of the social change these new immigrant populations set in motion is just beginning in Spain. To date, studies mainly focus on policy models or the experiences of immigrants in schools (Agrela et al. 2008; Carrasco, Pàmies, and Ponferrada 2011; Zapata-Barrero and de Witte 2007). Researchers on both sides of the Atlantic have called for more studies of how the host society shapes immigrant integration (Alba 2005; Thomson and Crul 2007). This dissertation study therefore takes up the question of schools as a context shaping immigrant incorporation in Barcelona, Spain. Specifically, I focus on the role of schools in defining what it means for integrate into the cultural mainstream of society.

Three broad questions guide this study of the symbolic and social ways schools matter for immigrant integration. How do education policies define what it means to integrate immigrants in schools? What does it mean to integrate immigrants at the school level, and how do policies matter? What are teacher beliefs about the meaning of immigrant integration? I investigate these questions in depth in this dissertation study, looking into what it means to belong in schools, the role of language in marking belonging, and assumptions of immigrant change. I also look into why immigrant integration comes to mean what it does at each level of the education system.

I study these issues in Barcelona, Spain, where official bilingualism in Spanish and Catalan, and a large Spanish-speaking immigrant population, complicate questions of immigrant integration. The study employs in-depth case study research methods including open-ended interviews, ethnographic observations, and document analysis. At the policy level, I interviewed 37 policy officials and collected and analyzed policy formation and implementation documents. To understand implementation at the school level, I compared two high schools with similar immigrant populations. I interviewed school leaders, new immigrant classroom teachers, and district coaches. I also did over 160 hours of observations in the two schools, and collected numerous documents. Finally, I interviewed 24 regular subject teachers to understand their beliefs about immigrant integration, belonging, and the mainstream in Barcelona.

The study findings show how history - in this case earlier experiences with immigration, integration, and language issues - influences what integration comes to mean in schools. Specifically, I found that the meaning of integration in Barcelona schools depended on past experiences with diversity and difference. At the policy level, it depended on past versions of integration policies focused on integrating Spanish-speaking people from other parts of Spain. In schools it depended on school history and historical norms for how schools attended to differences in learning needs. And at the individual teacher level, beyond the reach of many policies, the meaning of immigrant integration depended on teachers' own family and professional backgrounds with being different or seeking a unified Catalan identity in Barcelona, Spain. I also found that district coaches played an important intermediary role in shaping policy implementation.

Deregulation advocates have long argued that local educational leaders can make better resource decisions than state and federal policymakers. But viewed from the central state, without regulatory requirements locals will spend too little on underserved students and specific educational reforms. Lacking direct authority over local districts, the California Legislature has frequently used mandates and sanctions, tied to targeted "categorical aid" grant programs, to encourage attentiveness to state reform aims. Categorical aid programs' rules, layered on over time, have produced a range of bureaucratic tasks which have become part of the taken-for-granted fabric of work in the central office, but remain loosely connected to instructional aspects of districts' work. At the same time, tacit cultural conceptions of schooling have come to overlap with some of the educational objectives funded through categorical resources, from providing supplementary dollars for particular kinds of students to reducing class size. Deregulation proponents argue that districts will cut administrative costs, reconsider local fiscal priorities, and deploy resources in ways that boost students' achievement. But little is known about how organizational routines, neoinstitutional conceptions of the district's work, and local political pressures shape how district organizations implement large-scale deregulation. What, then, is the relationship between the institutionalized practices used to manage categorical aid resources inside districts and deregulation?

Conventional politics of education explanations suggest that decentralization expands locally powerful constituents' influence and control over how deregulated resources are used. But neoinstitutional theorists, on the other hand, suggest that pressures from the institutional and technical environment of schooling will shape how deregulation unfolds. Some categorical aid programs, supported by a web of work practices, norms, and cultural expectations, will remain firmly in place while others that are less deeply embedded will be redeployed to address salient institutional and technical pressures.

This study uses a qualitative, comparative case study to investigate how districts responded to 2009 legislation deregulating about 40 state categorical aid programs, commonly referred to as Tier 3 categorical flexibility. At face value, this reform freed up six percent of annual revenues. But it was enacted in the context of mid-year budget cuts and ongoing fiscal austerity. I analyze Tier 3 categorical flexibility implementation in two California districts to investigate the processes used to make decisions about Tier 3 categorical resource reallocation. I examine how these processes connected to tacit conceptions of schooling. I also examine the role of power and constituencies in how discretionary resources came to be distributed. Data include: observations of district budgeting routines; interviews with central office administrators, board members, and stakeholders; and a review of budget materials.

The two study districts reallocated some, but not all, Tier 3 categorical resources. I found that political and cultural pressures influenced how board members and district administrators engaged in resource decision making, and these pressures were constrained and enabled by the formal structure of district positions, relational trust, and the distribution of expertise in district management and operations. These processes did not mirror the rationalized responses of deregulation's theory of action. In particular, I found that districts' resource decision making was shaped by the fiduciary role of the elected school board, a role that has generally been overlooked in research on education policy implementation.

Since the early 1990s, immigrants from Latin America and Asia have been arriving in parts of the United States that have had little recent experience with immigration. How school district leaders respond to these demographic changes has significant consequences for students, families and communities. Yet, there is little research on why and how school district leaders are coming to enact some policies, and not others, in response to their changing demographics. This study examines policymaking in two Midwestern, urban school districts experiencing the arrival of growing numbers of immigrant families, increasing ethnic-racial diversity, and rising levels of poverty. The study offers a unique perspective on school district policymaking by bringing together theoretical insights from urban regime analysis and interpretive policy analysis to connect the economic and political dynamics in school districts with district administrators' on-the-ground policymaking. Drawing on interviews, observation, and archival research, I trace policymaking in each district between 2000 and 2010.

I find school district administrators perceived the need to change their school districts to be responsive to new pupils. While middle-class parents' threat of exiting the districts confined administrators' attempts to do so, some school staff members', parents' and community leaders' organizing efforts created possibilities for district policymaking. Working with these limitations and possibilities, district administrators advanced policies that sought to respond to the new students in their schools. They did so by adding programs to the existing structure of schooling rather than restructuring schooling to meet the needs of new entrants and by framing policies to generate agreement from local stakeholders. The resulting policies were influenced by community actors but also shaped by district leaders' self-interests and particular concerns. This study illuminates school district decision-makers' interpretations of educational problems and policy solutions, their strategic actions, as well as their negotiations and compromises with community actors as central factors in school district policymaking in new immigrant destinations. Furthermore, this study contributes to urban regime analysis by offering greater insight into the processes of framing and interaction between community actors and school district administrators that produce important policy outcomes

Bridging the macro and micro levels, this dissertation uses the case of coaching to investigate how people and ideas affect implementation. I drew on institutional theory and framing theory to reveal that coaches, situated between the district and school levels, serve as intermediaries in the education system. I conducted a qualitative cross-case study of coaching in one urban school district. I collected data on the field of reading instruction, the policy environment, coaches' work, and teachers' classroom practice. To advance our understanding of instructional reform, I determined how reading coaches engaged with logics from the broader environment. I paid particular attention to coaches' political role in persuading teachers to change their practice.

I found that two logics of reading instruction, Accountability First and Just Read, co-existed in an urban school district in California. These logics held conflicting principles about appropriate and effective ways to teach reading. Coaches actively transformed and combined these logics, building them into structures and practices at the district and school-levels while generating rules, instructional materials, and trainings. Thus, coach-developed reading policies were infused with the principles and practices of Accountability First and Just Read. Coaches then actively drew upon logics from the environment to frame reading policy for teachers during implementation. Coaches differentiated their framing to meet the perceived needs of their school and teachers and used socially skilled tactics to motivate change. Ultimately, coaches' framing of the two logics of reading instruction helped influence teachers' adoption of the new reading program by persuading teachers to respond positively to particular specific pedagogical elements of the program. These findings have implications for institutional theory, research on coaching, and the preparation of educational leaders.

Federal initiatives have put great pressure on districts to show student success. Prior research on education reform focused on the school as the unit of change to improve student achievement and implement systemic reform. However, because districts have the responsibility to improve the instructional quality and performance of all their schools, researchers have begun to focus on responsibilities of the district in supporting and implementing systemic reform. Scholars are beginning to investigate how the connections between central offices and schools influence systemic reform. Social networks are a way to investigate the connections between central offices and schools, and how they matter for implementation of educational reform. I conducted a case study of how relationships between the central office and the schools influenced reform efforts in high school mathematics education. My cross case study is of four school sites in a district that was implementing Algebra for All, a reform where all students are placed in an algebra class or higher when they enter high school. I used social capital theory and the four dimensions of ties, trust, access to expertise and the content of interactions to guide my study of how district policy and support influences social interactions and fosters the development of social capital to implement mathematics reform at a school site.

I found that school sites adopted Algebra for All in spite of reservations because they trusted the district. Teachers and schools drew on the assets of social capital and their networks for resources and expertise to assist in implementing the reform. Principals played a key role and acted as boundary spanners to broker resources for their schools. Organizations outside of the district were also sources of support. However, sources of support and expertise from the district and outside resources were not always leveraged due to a lack of ties internally in the school. The teachers did not have congruent and deep discussions about the reform effort but this did not impede implementation. Informal social networks supported implementation and allowed teachers to share resources. The nature of teacher networks including proximity, educational values, longevity of ties and expertise supported the reform Algebra for All. These conclusions have practical implications for educators seeking to understand how districts and schools can work together to implement reform efforts successfully.

The disproportionate suspension and criminalization of black students, referred to in the literature as "disproportionality" "over-representation" and in a nod to the achievement gap, as the "discipline gap," has become the subject of increased concern and analysis in recent years. In this dissertation, I apply concepts from Historical Institutionalism to the formation of exclusionary and criminalizing disciplinary policies in post-war New York City. First, I identify and illuminate how actors, in framing the problem of school disorder, deployed competing logics of discipline. Next I explore how the context, in particular tensions regarding school integration, influenced the framing of school disorder and contributed to the rising salience of logics that individualized school disorder and decontextualized it from the conditions of racism. Finally, I examine how school personnel engaged with and deployed these logics in their participation in the expansion and institutionalization of punitive, exclusionary and criminalizing disciplinary policies. This analysis demonstrates that punitive and criminalizing disciplinary policies were never neutral, but rather emerged out of a context of fraught racial politics that favored policies and actors that individualized, criminalized and racialized school disorder. Ultimately I demonstrate that the policies under-girding contemporary disproportionality in discipline were contested, contingent with pressure for integration and supported by educators and school personnel. This complicates existing explanations for the discipline gap that conceptualize the disproportionate punishment, exclusion and criminalization of black students as “unintended” and “unconscious.” It also highlights the organizational and ideological forces embedded in the institutional environment of schools that may pose challenges to reform efforts.