Abstract
Public school districts have been operating under a decade’s long press to move beyond functioning as engines of access-oriented mass public schooling to functioning as instructionally focused education systems pursuing educational excellence and equity. This press has researchers developing analytic frameworks useful for examining different ways that districts are responding. Even so, limitations in individual frameworks suggest a need to explore the coordinate use of complementary frameworks to support more comprehensive examinations of districts. This analysis explores the coordinated use of a “coupling framework” and a “systems framework” to analyze efforts in two districts to improve educational quality and to reduce disparities. Findings suggests that the coordinated use of the coupling and systems frameworks supports deeper analyses of instructional organization and management than either framework would on its own, and that further incorporating quality and equity frameworks would support still-deeper analyses. From the perspective of this issue of the Peabody Journal of Education (PJE), the implication is that elaborating new institutional theory to capture micro-level variation in response to macro-level dynamics is but one challenge faced by organizational researchers in education, and that the deeper challenge lies in considering alternative world views—paradigmatic assumptions—underlying the use of singular and complementary analytic frameworks.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 336-355 |
| Number of pages | 20 |
| Journal | Peabody Journal of Education |
| Volume | 95 |
| Issue number | 4 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Aug 7 2020 |
Funding
Work on this analysis was supported by the Spencer Systems Study and the Designing Systems to Support Ambitious Elementary Science Instruction at Northwestern University and University of Michigan. It was funded by grants from the Spencer Foundation (SP0034639-201600066), the National Science Foundation, Directorate for Education and Human Resources, Core Research program (1761129), and the U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, Multidisciplinary Program in Education Sciences (R305B140042). The authors gratefully acknowledge those who shared comments on earlier manuscripts and presentations on which the analysis draws, as well as the members of our research teams: David K. Cohen, Elizabeth Davis, Zena Ellison, Kathryn Gabriele, Christa Haverly, Whitney Hegseth, Angela Lyle, Christine M. Neumerski, Melissa Ortiz, and Jennifer Seelig. All opinions and conclusions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of any funding agency.
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Education
- Developmental and Educational Psychology