Meaningful Urban Education Reform: Confronting the Learning Crisis in Mathematics and Science

Chapter 2

27 This chapter presents findings from our research that address the questions that guided our policy study. Specifically, we address the question : What is the role of institutional and individual leadership in systemic reform? By looking critically at the role played by key players at the district and school levels, we are able to achieve a better understanding of the impact of their involvement in policy making on systemic reform. Interviews with these district- and school-level administrators in each of our sites provided important information about the place of the USI initiative in the district’s reform agenda. NSF requires districts to position the reform at the center of all that the district does. The data we gathered through intensive interviews with district staff and principals help us understand the emphasis given to providing resources needed for systemic change, including professional development, school staffing, student grouping arrangements, assessments, and the implementation of challenging curricula in mathematics and science. Although the NSF provided 15 million dollars over four years to each of the urban sites it supported in making systemic change, this amount is relatively small in districts the size of Chicago or Miami-Dade, where annual school budgets range in the billions of dollars. In each of our four sites we found that resource allocations for professional development and 2 The Importance of District and School Leadership curricular materials, including technology such as graphing calculators for students, commanded the bulk of the expenditure to promote systemic changes in mathematics and science. All districts recognized that resources must be directed toward teachers and classrooms to improve student achievement in mathematics and science. However, along with carrying out systemic reform efforts, district and school administrators must negotiate state educational policies , as well as address local school board policies or politics and schoollevel concerns. It is no surprise that these administrators were keenly aware of how their positions within the system affected systemic reform, and that they usually held strong ideas concerning the best way to accomplish it. Policy implementation at the district and local school levels often means translating the aims of instructional reform from the district to principals and teachers. In one of the few studies examining the role of district administrators in implementing systemic reform, Spillane (2002) used qualitative and quantitative methods to investigate the effects of state-mandated instructional policies on mathematics and science instruction in Michigan. His team interviewed 165 district administrators, teachers, parents, and curriculum specialists charged with developing instructional policies. A subsample of forty district administrator interviews was analyzed and the orientations of these administrators to teachers’ professional development explored. Eighty-five percent of these district officials maintained a “quasi-behaviorist” perspective (Spillane, 2002) and assumed that highly prescribed professional development was necessary for teachers to implement mathematics and science reforms. However, their beliefs about professional development did not match the goals of the reforms. Instead, these administrators saw teacher learning from a behavioral perspective requiring adequate training from outside experts with external incentives for teacher participation. In contrast, district change agents who supported a situated or cognitive perspective saw teachers as active agents in their learning who benefited from additional time for reflection. These district officials viewed teachers’ day-to-day practice and student work as major components of the curriculum abetted by teachers’ intrinsic motivation to work as experts and learners in their school communities. District officials who adopt a behaviorist perspective are not effective in supporting teachers’ implementation of standards-based reform in contrast to district-level change agents guided by a situated or cognitive perspective who saw teachers as agents of their own learning in much the same way that standards-led mathematics and science reform views students’ roles in learning requiring their active engagement. 28 MEANINGFUL URBAN EDUCATION REFORM Decision makers in any system are extremely important to effective policy implementation. While organizational change can be initiated from anywhere in the system, those in positions of authority have command of the resources necessary to fuel reform and to influence the direction reforms will take. In this research district administrators were the highest level of decision makers whose perspectives we sought in conjunction with the Urban Systemic Initiative reforms. Their roles in the administration and facilitation of local school policy situated them uniquely between policy mandates and policy implementation. It was this unique status as both planners and implementers of reform that seemed to be a deciding factor in...