A qualitative study of curriculum and instructional efforts in relation to high stakes federal and district policies in one low-performing elementary school

Issues related to instructional policy have significantly shifted in recent decades, as increased accountability has become a prominent feature of curricular reforms. High stakes policies exert tremendous pressure on districts and schools to improve student performance through incentive systems (Hall & Ryan, 2011; Loeb & Strunk, 2007). These policies send powerful messages about the importance of some subject matters over others – circumscribing skill and knowledge requirements. Literacy and mathematics, in particular, have become central measures by which districts and schools are assessed for their performance level. As a result, district officials and school leaders often employ curricular reform initiatives as a means to raise students’ performance in the subject matters targeted by such policies. Policy thus compels school actors to focus resources on curriculum and assessments, professional development, and data-driven decision-making (Anagnostopoulos & Ruthledge, 2007; Honig & Hatch, 2004; Spillane, Diamond, et al., 2002; Weitz White & Rosenbaum, 2008). This dissertation examines how high stakes policy operates in everyday interactions and practices in schools. More specifically, I analyze the different policy messages conveyed to school leaders and teachers about the ways to bring about substantial changes in curriculum and instruction. I expand the analysis by taking into account the role of district leaders and university partners in shaping which aspects of policy messages are being conveyed, negotiated and/or debated, and the ones that are ignored (Coburn & Woulfin, 2012). Using discourse analysis, I investigate the role of language as constitutive and a medium of school leaders’ and teachers’ social interactions with different stakeholders.  Such analyses imply an in-depth investigation of a limited number of cases. The data for this dissertation were gathered in one elementary school in a mid-West state of the USA, as part of a larger four year longitudinal study that was carried out from 1999 to 2003 (Distributed Leadership Studies, http://www.distributedleadership.org). The dataset I analyzed includes observations of formal meetings –faculty meetings, professional development activities– as well as interviews with district administrators, university partners, school leaders and teachers.  In addition to the introduction/problem statement (chapter 1) and the discussion/conclusion chapter, this dissertation comprises a set of three interrelated, yet independent articles. In the first article (chapter 2), I provide a theoretical and empirical framework on policy implementation and the complexity of local, national, and global interrelationships at play in educational systems. To disentangle this complexity, I pay close attention to school actors’ sense-making as one key dimension of the implementation process of reform initiatives. In the second article (chapter 3), I aim to better understand the social processes that shape school actors’ strategic responses to high stake state and district policies in regards to a mandated curriculum and instruction in mathematics. More specifically, I explore different situations where school leaders and teachers argued about the instructional changes proposed by district leaders and university partners in order to raise test scores in mathematics in a low-performing school. In the third article (chapter 4), to disentangle the complexities of instructional improvement in a high stakes policy environment, I use the interplay of agency and structure to analyze how accountability assumptions and ideas from the policy environment and the day-to-day activities play out in interactions among school leaders and teachers about reading instruction. I explore 1) how high stakes policy shapes which elements of instruction are reproduced and which ones are transformed over time; and 2) how leaders’ understandings of accountability shape which aspects of policy school actors notice through interactions and conversations and how they attend to some policy messages while ignoring others. In the last chapter of the dissertation, I discuss the strengths and limitations of secondary analysis of qualitative data, the implications of the findings for the policy implementation field and future research avenues.

Keyphrases: High stakes policy, Curriculum and instructional reform, School actors, University partners, Rhetorical analysis