Educational System Building

From its beginning, we saw this as a study of the relationship between the organization of school systems and instruction—between organization and structure on one hand and what happened in classrooms on the other. Although the study on which we report in this special issue took several years of back and forth among the three of us (Cohen, Peurach, & Spillane) to set under way, from the outset we saw it as comparative. There are many different sorts of school systems in the United States, they are structured differently, and we thought that the relations between systems and classroom work might vary. Hence, in conceptualizing and designing the study—we now refer to as the Spencer Systems study—we identified six systems, two public, one not, and three at various places on the border between public and private. We refer to these systems as Urban, Suburban, Charter, Montessori, International Baccalaureate (IB), and Catholic. We were a bit amazed to find that with one exception we could find no comparative studies of school systems within the U.S. Comparative research seemed to mean comparing schooling among nations (Haertel, James, & Levin, 1987; James & Levin, 1988).

Our research questions were as follows: How, in what ways, or if at all, do school systems’ organization and structure influence instruction? And why? We wanted systems whose aims, organization, and structures varied—and the six we settled on nicely filled the bill. We were clear that the relationship between system structure and classrooms was important and we had an inkling, in part because all three of us were vociferous consumers of institutional theory, that environments mattered. We also conjectured that that relationship was likely to be mediated by the systems’ educational infrastructure. That term refers to the instruments that systems can use to connect structure and organization to classrooms—assessments and curricula chief among them. It also includes the practices, ideas, and other things that systems can use to influence the nature and use of those instruments—that is, are they designed for use, for coherence, do they recruit teachers to their educational mission, system norms, and so on. All school systems had these instruments and practices, but our preliminary work showed that they designed and used them very differently. We thought that the differences could affect classroom work. So, a second set of questions that animate our work might be put as follows: What are the different sorts of school systems, what are the key differences, and how do they manifest in classrooms? Oddly, although Americans have lived with school systems since the 1830s, few researchers ever asked these questions.

And, few, if any, even asked whether and how school systems worked on educational system building, let alone how they engaged in it now. All this was a kind of within-system take on things, and we knew that that was much too limited. The system–classroom relationship was likely to vary depending on the systems’ environments, which includes everything from local community to national policy and much in between, so we were keen to attend to that.

Despite that, one of the most significant things we learned is just how important the interaction between systems and their environments is, consistent with institutional theory. The papers in this special issue have a lot to say about that; to prepare readers though, it is a complex interaction: First, systems enact and, in some respects, construct their environments, as well as being influenced by them. Second, the environments are complex, not unified; so systems interact with varied elements of what we casually refer to as the environment. The first three papers in this special issue capture that complexity as they document how different systems inhabit their environments similarly and differently, and in doing so engage another important research question: What is the relationship between environments on one hand and the system–instruction connection on the other?

One other important point about systems and their environments is that the relationship changed dramatically beginning in the last decade of the 20th century. The most important changes include pressure for equality in schooling, pressure for inclusion, pressure for improved outcomes and for more coherence in systems’ efforts to influence instruction, and the creation of state-sponsored markets and choice in public education. For most of our history, such pressures were weak or nonexistent. There were no state-sponsored markets, and choice in public education was chiefly a matter of whether families had the money to afford housing in advantaged neighborhoods or communities. There was little or no pressure for outcomes or coherence. And pressure for equality was intermittent and specific to particular programs, including desegregation and Title I of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA).

School systems organized accordingly. They tended to be internally fragmented. They gave more attention to processes like grade promotion than to academic outcomes. They were decentralized, with decisions about instruction delegated to schools and teachers rather than managed at the system level. And there was little evidence of quality control or improvement; judgments about schools’ quality were tied to inputs like money and teacher certification rather than to evidence of instructional quality.

Our studies are situated at the site of an historic collision between the inherited organization we just sketched and recent policies that sought to turn mass public schooling into systems that were more intentionally educational for students. You will read a good deal about this collision in the pages that follow, but one key point is this: As the systems we worked with responded to changing environments, they did so in that collision. Hence, they acted in seemingly paradoxical ways. They drew on ideas, materials, and resources from the inherited systems, for that is what they knew and had at hand. Yet they also invented new resources as they worked the boundary between what they inherited from their past and what they imagined for their future. They could not avoid the former but they could not make much progress without the latter.

That mix of inheritance and innovation is one reason we often found a seemingly contradictory combination of older practices and new ideas. Some systems used inherited central command-and-control management to stimulate local school and classroom initiative. Some used tests that were not designed to assess schools’ or students’ progress. One question we learned to ask is whether systems developed ways to learn their ways through this unavoidable paradox. As readers will see in the fourth paper, we hope to ask this question of more school systems, in and outside the United States, as they try to improve instruction.