Abstract
The identity of public school systems changed dramatically over the past 25 years, as standards-based reform held schools accountable for more equal and academically demanding education for poorer and more diverse students. We argue that identity also changed in private and hybrid school systems. Drawing on semistructured interviews with 40 school system leaders, we examine the ways in which three different school systems – a Montessori, Center, an urban Catholic system, and the International Baccalaureate – responded to the new conditions that reforms, poverty, and migration brought to the United States. We find that leaders perceived the identity of their systems as changing, as they questioned how much the systems should adapt to the new education sector.
We designed this study to explore the relationship between different kinds of school systems, their environments, and instruction. We wanted to know whether system design was related to work in classrooms, and what effect the environment had on that work, if any. We interviewed leaders in different systems to begin understanding this relationship, and as we expected, they described a relationship between the design of their school systems, the ways in which they managed instruction, and important environmental influences. (We report on these findings elsewhere: see Peurach, Yurkofsky, & Sutherland, this 2019; Spillane, Seelig, Blaushild, Cohen, & Peurach, this 2019.) What we did not expect was that they would describe another critical element to their work in systems: They perceived the identity of their school systems as changing. Leaders across systems asked, “Who are we? What does it mean for us to be a school system?” For some leaders, this question had a sense of urgency, suggesting a crisis of identity. For others, this question was embedded in a desire to redesign their school system. Why were descriptions of identity so prevalent across leaders in different kinds of school systems? What prompted school systems to reconsider the very core of who and what they were?
In this article, we begin to answer these questions by drawing on semistructured interviews with approximately 40 leaders from one private school system—an urban Catholic school system—and two hybrid, public–private systems, 1 a Montessori Center and the International Baccalaureate (IB). We chose these three school systems because each had distinctive identities that had persisted over time. They had well-established ideas about the purposes of schooling. They had coherent instructional programs. They had recruited students and teachers who were committed to their systems, mobilized fiscal and political support, and devised instructional programs that suited clients and supporters. These identities enabled them to prosper in markets for schooling. We wanted to understand how and why leaders in school systems with particularly distinct, well-preserved identities would perceive those identities as changing.
We consulted leaders in the three school systems during 2016-2017, when their environment was changing—new reforms, new students, and new policies. Much of what leaders described was about facing problems of identity that were prompted by these environmental changes. State and federal policies had opened markets for schooling and competition among schools by encouraging charter schools. State and federal policies also held schools accountable for students’ performance and publicized the results. Many school systems saw new students as immigration and other social changes brought more students from poor families and non–English speaking families. The policy changes brought more attention to issues of equity, and that interacted with changes in the students that urban schools served.
These changes brought issues that typically had been pressing for urban public schools into the formerly more protected world of nonpublic education. Each of the three school systems dealt with a different combination of the issues, but all three dealt with issues that brought them closer to matters that previously have been urgent in the public sector. The Montessori Center and IB tried to maintain their established educational identities while improving equity, and the Catholic system tried to figure out how to become educationally competitive while maintaining its Catholic identity.
In this article, we ask two research questions:
In what follows, we report on the three systems’ efforts to make sense of the aforementioned policies and problems, and what did they did in response. We begin by discussing the new environment in which these systems were operating. We describe the concept of identity, drawing on the notion of sensemaking as a way to frame our analysis. We explain how each of the three school systems reconsidered their identity, questioning how much they should adapt to the new education sector under market pressures or remain consistent with their historical identities. We conclude with some comments about the ways in which these school systems attempted to work in a new environment, particularly noting the challenge of developing infrastructure to do a new kind of work.
Identity, Environment, and Infrastructure
When Americans discuss school systems they frequently refer to some aspect of the system’s identity. We note that they are public systems, or suburban systems, or urban systems, or Catholic systems. We may think of these as neutral identifiers, but they reveal a good deal: how systems are funded, who attends, how their mission is defined, and where they fit in the education sector. These are important signifiers of identity, but they are hardly neutral. Suburban systems are where many affluent White families moved to avoid sending their children to school with poor Black and Brown children in central cities, and urban systems are where educators cope with the consequences (Massey & Denton, 1998).
Although aspects of a system’s identity are often vividly conveyed with a single word—Catholic, or Jewish, or Montessori, or suburban—organizational identity is more complex. In fact, the concept of identity is somewhat slippery; it can mean different things to different people. In this article, we draw on the notion of sensemaking as a way to frame our analysis of system identity (Weick, 1995). Rather than using a preconceived definition of organizational identity, we explore leaders’ perceptions about the identity of their organization. Put differently, we analyze how leaders within a school system construe meaning about or “make sense of” their system (Spillane, Reiser, & Reimer, 2002).
It is important to note that while some scholars refer to organizational identity as those characteristics that organizational members believe to be central, distinctive, and enduring about their organization (Albert & Whetten, 1985), we focus our analysis on how leaders perceive the identity of their system as changing. We capture their understanding of their system, not an external definition of their system’s identity. This framing captures the possibility that leaders may change their beliefs about which elements are central and distinctive to their system, and whether those elements endure or change over time.
We also consider identity in relation to the environment. As Spillane, Peurach, & Cohen (2019) wrote, School systems are “open systems,” for their environments “shape, support, and infiltrate” their operation (Scott & Davis, 2007, p. 31) . . . Environments are not only the immediate community of stakeholders that a particular school serves but also the broader technical, institutional, political, cultural, and economic circumstances in which education enterprises operate.
Organizational identities are fashioned in interaction between systems and their environments. We consider these two concepts in relation to one another because identity can change when environments change. For example, in recent decades public schools that do unusually well in educating disadvantaged students have gained attention and recognition, as have schools that were persistently weak. Segregated Black schools that were academically and personally valuable for their students also have been recognized. In these cases, educators’ sense of their schools’ identities were at least partly due to changes in their environment. State and federal policies published evidence on student performance, and schools and systems were rated and held accountable for that performance. That change in the environment enabled educators to acquire a changed sense of their schools’ identities associated with their prowess at boosting students’ performance, or the lack thereof. Developing that prowess required changes in the systems’ educational infrastructure—that is, the roles, structures, and resources used to support and coordinate instruction, maintain instructional quality, and enable instructional improvement (Cohen, Spillane, Peurach, 2018; Cohen, Peurach, Glazer, Gates, & Goldin, 2013; Hopkins, Spillane, Jakopovic, & Heaton, 2013; Peurach & Neumerski, 2015; Cohen & Spillane, 1992).
As these examples reveal, identity is not fixed. In the 1920s, U.S. high schools were seen as “peoples’ colleges”; attendance was selective because so many high school age students went to work rather than school. But by the 1950s, the same schools were mass attended, in good part because the demand for what came to be called “child labor” dropped sharply. What had been “peoples’ colleges” became “common schools” (Powell, Farrar, & Cohen, 1985). The schools’ identities changed even though the schools themselves did nothing more than accept students. In all of these cases, organizational identity refers to “. . . a system of shared meaning” (Cornelissen, Haslam, & Balmer, 2007). 3
Recent changes in policy, the economy, and society had similar effects, creating potential new problems of identity for public school systems. Standards-based reforms held school systems accountable for more equal and academically demanding education. The reforms also helped to create more competition for public schools by supporting charter school networks or systems. They also pressed schools to reduce or eliminate inequality in educational outcomes (Cohen & Spillane, 1992; Cohen, Spillane, & Peurach, 2018; Mehta, 2013; Nichols & Berliner, 2007; Smith & O’Day, 1990). These policies pressed schools and school systems to become something different: more equal, more effective, and more oriented to outcomes. That could affect their sense of identity.
Through those years, public school systems faced serious changes that also affected their identities. Many immigrant and refugee children often entered school with limited English proficiency. Income inequality grew while social, health, and welfare services declined. Students were arguably poorer and more diverse than their predecessors. These changes affected children’s ability to learn, teachers’ efforts to help them learn, and Americans’ sense that their country was on the wrong path. Public school systems were being urged toward a new identity, as demands to solve more social problems and provide more effective education for students from disadvantaged backgrounds had been steadily increasing since the 1960s. Change in their environment could prompt change in their sense of identity.
Public schools are by far the largest part of the K-12 education sector, but they are not all of it. There are nonpublic and hybrid, public–private systems. Many of these school systems serve privileged families and have little experience with poverty and social dislocation. Their identity had shielded them from earlier public policies that urged more equal access, but standards-based reform was more ambitious and broader than previous policies. As several students of organizational identity wrote, the “apparent durability of identity is somewhat illusory . . . we reconceptualize organizational identity as . . . frequently up for redefinition and revision” (Gioia, Schultz, & Corley, 2000, p. 64). That certainly was the case for the nonpublic and hybrid systems we discuss here; changes in their environments prompted them to revise elements of their infrastructure and thus also redefine their identities.
Identity, Reforms, and the Education Sector
As we contend above, organizational identities are created in environments. Although Americans are deeply attached to the notion that identities are individual creations, they are socially made, socially altered, and socially dissolved. Two scholars write that organizational “. . . identities are formed in part through dialogue with external stakeholders and are best construed as relational and comparative” (He & Brown, 2013, p. 6). 4 Thus, it is not surprising that recent reforms and other changes in education raised issues of identity for many schools and school systems. One reason lies in the reforms themselves: Their authors saw them as transformative (Smith & O’Day, 1990). They aimed to change the education sector by holding schools responsible for student performance and dramatically reducing race and class inequality in school outcomes. Another lies with social problems: Increasing numbers of children brought economic, social, and educational problems to school at a time of rapidly rising economic inequality, increasing poverty, growing world problems of famine, mass migration, and tension between the relatively wealthy Global North and relatively impoverished South. If the reforms shook inherited identities in one way, the problems had similar effects by shaking up perceptions about privilege and poverty. Both raised questions about the schools’ responsibilities in an increasingly unequal world.
Standards-based reforms proposed to reorient the sector with two distinct initiatives: pressure for more ambitious academic performance and creating competition among schools and systems (Cohen & Moffit, 2009; Mehta, 2013; Smith & O’Day, 1990; Vinovskis, 2009). These were elements of a new worldview of schooling. Unlike earlier policies, they took all of schooling as their object, rather than one particular feature, like finance or curriculum. The basic unit of analysis now would be the system, not students or schools (Cohen et al., 2018). The system also would be the basic unit of action, for it would be accountable for performance. Systems always had been compared but not formally and officially in terms of student performance. 5 Identity could depend on how schools or systems performed compared to others.
This revised relations among systems within the education sector. First, it legitimated and supported an entirely new sort of school system—charter school systems—that straddled the public–private boundary. This challenged the distinction between public and private schools that had been a constitutive feature of the education sector since the invention of Catholic schools in New York State in the 1840s and 1850s. 6 Second, blurring the line between public and private schools suggested there were identities other than public or private—that there could be hybrid systems. Third, the reforms implied that the sector might be understood as a whole. By promoting competition among public systems and between public and private systems, the reforms implied that action within the sector could cross the public–private boundary. That tended to diminish the significance of that boundary, to suggest that the sector as a whole was a legitimate domain for action, and that systems’ identities might be seen and shaped sector-wide. Fourth, the reforms made students’ test scores the chief criterion of performance, and that implied yet another consequential revision of relations within the sector: The most important criterion for quality in schooling would be student outcomes, not the quantity or quality of educational resources. This would be valid not only for public schools but also for some private schools that chose to participate in testing. That choice drew private schools further toward the public sphere.
The move toward testing had enormous implications. It meant that identity could be more closely tied to outcomes, and it meant that some private schools could be evaluated in the same terms as public schools, held to the same standards, and their identities weighed in the same terms. That tended to further diminish the existing boundaries within the sector, and to encourage efforts to see it and act in it as a whole.
At the same time, that standards-based reform suggested the possibility of a new identity for school systems, so did social problems. As the reforms pushed public and private schools toward evaluation by a common metric, social problems led some to argue that school systems should embrace inclusion and equity. Public schools faced pressures to move toward social service by addressing the needs of a much poorer and more diverse student population. Income inequality had grown steadily over the past 30 years, and as a result, by 2016, 19% of U.S. children were living in poverty; by 2018, that number rose to 21%, a staggering fifteen-million children (Koball & Jiang, 2018; National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. Department of Education, 2018a). Decreased access to adequate social services and health care meant that many children’s basic needs were unmet. As more students faced hunger, unstable housing, inadequate nutrition, and a lack of health care, more adults faced falling social status and economic insecurity (Koball & Jiang, 2018). Awareness of these problems grew as inequality, poverty, and the pain of working- and middle-class Americans who were left behind by growing inequality became front-page news.
Other changes further pressed on the identity of public school systems. The number of students diagnosed with learning disabilities and special needs rose steadily, while their inclusion in regular classes grew (Cook, Cameron, & Tankersley, 2007; Dudley-Marling & Burns, 2014; National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. Department of Education, 2018c). Whenever possible, special education students would be taught with their general education peers rather than in isolation (Cook et al., 2007; Dudley-Marling & Burns, 2014), and as such, between 1988 and 2015 the number of students with disabilities who spent the majority of their school day in general education rose from 28% to 63% (United States Department of Education, 2009, 2017). This was an enormous change for general education teachers, many of whom were not trained to meet the needs of special education students, despite evidence that students would be served better through an inclusion model (Brownell, Adams, Sindelar, Waldron, & Vanhover, 2006; Kilanowski-Press, Foote, & Rinaldo, 2010). The student population also shifted as more English language learners (ELLs) arrived in the United States, hitting 9.5% of all students by 2015 (National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. Department of Education, 2018c). An estimated 13.8% of the ELL students were diagnosed with learning disabilities (National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. Department of Education, 2018b). These students brought rich cultural and linguistic diversity to schools, but they posed a challenge for teachers who were accountable for students’ academic performance under the reforms (Lucas, Villegas, Freedson-Gonzalez, 2008; Miranda, Wells, & Jenkins, 2017).
These changes unsettled some teachers and leaders but opened new opportunities for others. The systems not only had to deal with the reforms but also figure out how to educate a changing student population—as the reforms urged. For systems that enrolled many students with problems and faced troubling social conditions, their work began to seem as much a matter of social service as education. That raised the identity issue in a somewhat different way: Should schools be solving problems that other social agencies were not dealing with, or not dealing with effectively? The reforms implied that society expected them to do so. The expectation was not only that schools would serve all students, but that they would serve all students well. The reforms mandated that they do so or face a series of consequences. Could they do so without becoming a different sort of institution? We explore these issues in three school systems that operated in this new environment.
Method
As part of a larger project comparing school systems and their relationship to instruction, we conducted semistructured interviews of system leaders in 2016-2017 in three school systems. The larger project purposefully sampled school systems to maximize variation on type of system. For this study, we chose three of those systems: a Montessori Center, an urban Catholic Archdiocese, and the IB. 7 We chose these systems because they were private or public–private (hybrid) systems, had long-standing organizational identities, coherent beliefs about the purpose of schooling, and well-defined visions for instruction. These attributes were key in our selection of these systems for a comparative case study; however, they differ along other dimensions, such as size and organization.
We selected leaders from each system through a combination of purposeful and snowball sampling, beginning with an organizational chart through which we identified participants across a range of roles to maximize perspectives on managing and improving instruction. We conducted face-to-face interviews with a total of 40 system leaders for 60 to 90 min during in-person visits to the central office or system-level site. We also collected field notes on 2 to 3 days of professional development for each system, as well as institutional documents.
We were deliberately broad in developing interview questions. We sought leaders’ ideas and experiences related to instruction and instructional improvement, while remaining open to themes that might emerge outside of our conceptual framework. Using a semistructured protocol, we asked questions that would help us understand the ways in which each system defined, managed, and improved instruction. More specifically, we asked about leaders’ roles and responsibilities, vision for improvement, definitions of and approaches to instruction, and challenges, successes, and changes within school systems. We asked about their work as individuals, as well as about their perceptions of the system writ large. Similarly, we observed professional development to document the ways in which managing and improving instruction was embedded in system learning, as well as to identify topics for system improvement that were or were not connected to the conceptual framework. This approach allowed the theme of identity to surface in our discussions with and observations of system leaders.
The research team engaged in an iterative coding process (Corbin & Strauss, 2008; Le Compte & Schensul, 1999), using both grounded theory and inductive and deductive coding (Charmaz, 2014; Corbin & Strauss, 2008; Creswell, 2013; Huberman & Miles, 2002). The team developed an analysis protocol, grounded in the research questions and our conceptual framework (see Cohen et al., 2018), to develop an initial thematic coding scheme. We deductively coded our interview data using three broad codes (e.g., infrastructure, instruction, environment) and 22 subcodes (e.g., recruitment and retention, designing and guiding) developed from our conceptual framework. We then open coded the data, noting various patterns both within and across the systems, and developed memos about findings.
Researchers discussed patterns, as well as disconfirming evidence, both within and across systems. Throughout the coding process researchers wrote additional memos on ideas that were not captured in the initial analysis or with the coding scheme; several memos captured the various ways in which leaders described their systems’ identities. All memos were shared and discussed with the research team to further develop reliability. Memos were considered alongside the coded data during synthesis and analysis of findings (Corbin & Strauss, 2008).
Results
In the following sections, we report on the ways in which three school systems—a Montessori Center, an urban Catholic Archdiocese, and the IB—questioned their identity as organizations as they moved closer to the U.S. public sector. By “moving closer to the public sector,” we mean that these systems became more oriented toward public policy and public sector challenges from which they were previously insulated. They competed with public schools for students, adopted public school curriculum and tests, faced pressure from the Common Core, and dealt with students who had been historically found in public, rather than private, schools.
We begin with an overview of the broader context in which these systems existed at the time of our study; we provide this context to ground the ways in which leaders described the changes their systems faced as they interacted with the new environment. Each system faced pressures of supply and demand that precipitated new kinds of interactions with the public sector—new students and new education reforms—with which they had little experience. In doing so, they struggled to negotiate the tension between fidelity to their historical identities and flexibility in adapting those identities to a new environment. This involved managing tensions around excellence and equity: each negotiated the challenge of developing or maintaining the quality of their educational approach while providing access to that approach for a new demographic of students. We highlight the ways in which the development of new identities involved building new infrastructure, or supports, to manage these dilemmas.
Supply, Demand, and a Move Toward the New Education Sector
Montessori
The Association Montessori Internationale (AMI) long held a clear identity as a system. According to several leaders, AMI’s mission is to foster schools that “preserve the legacy and methods of Dr. Maria Montessori,” thereby advancing human development and encouraging world peace. This transnational organization has done just that, largely through highly standardized, rigorous teacher training programs around the world. Many argue that AMI has been successful, as studies reported positive academic and nonacademic outcomes for children who attend AMI Montessori schools (Lillard & Else-Quest, 2006 ; Lillard et al., 2017).
Yet Montessori also has been criticized as only being accessible to privileged students. Despite originating with very poor children in the slums of Rome, Montessori largely became a system of private schools. AMI is trying to change that. In fact, the majority of AMI leaders in our study discussed this as a priority for the system. One commented, How do we [provide] access to children for whom Montessori was really intended? . . . Dr. Montessori worked in ghettos with kids who were considered uneducatable, and I think schools are getting back to that idea, and I think that we’re trying to follow suit, but we should be doing more. We need to be setting an example for our schools of why we do this work and who we access, and it shouldn’t just be for rich white kids.
At the same time that AMI was questioning how to provide access to Montessori for more children, the demand for Montessori schools was growing tremendously. As several AMI leaders told us, “The demand for [Montessori] . . . it’s seriously off the charts.” Meeting the global demand for Montessori while rethinking access for poor and minority students posed new challenges, as the organization would have to learn to operate in new contexts worldwide. In the United States, this meant a move to include less privileged students and perhaps to serve public schools. But could AMI maintain the quality of Montessori while becoming more of a hybrid system, operating in both private and public schools?
To examine this question, we turn to an AMI training center in the United States that has redesigned itself to provide access to Montessori for ethnically diverse, poor children. We investigate the ways in which this “Center” navigated the public sector to return to Dr. Montessori’s original mission of serving poor students. Would the Center manage to redesign itself as a new kind of hybrid school system while maintaining an historical identity that focused on high-quality Montessori? If so, how would it learn to operate in the very environment from which it had long been closed off?
Catholic
U.S. Catholic schools have historically been tied together by adherence to the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, organized by a regional archdiocese, and led by a parish church pastor. Individual Catholic schools tended to make their own decisions about teaching and learning. Like AMI, Catholic schools in the United States faced new pressures of supply and demand, particularly as enrollment began to decline. We examine the ways in which one urban Catholic school system, or “Archdiocese,” questioned its identity in the face of these new pressures.
The Archdiocese, like many Catholic school systems, had a long-standing identity rooted in a vision that combined moral and ethical development with academic learning. Yet it began to reconsider that identity in response to enrollment challenges. While skyrocketing demand for Montessori placed pressure on AMI to move toward the public sector, decreased demand placed pressure on the Archdiocese to move toward the public sector. As enrollment declined, Catholic schools began to compete for students with public and charter schools; this was the result of public policies and challenges that had been faced by public, but not private, schools, and the system found itself in crisis. The overwhelming majority of leaders in the Archdiocese were concerned about enrollment. As one explained, There was a recognition in the archdiocese that our Catholic schools had an enrollment crisis. That we were losing students very quickly and not replacing them. Charter schools were taking over pieces and people were just going to public schools, other choices, and we were really not a school of choice . . . for our families as much as we wanted to be.
Would the Archdiocese maintain its historical identity as a Catholic school system while redesigning itself to compete with public schools? Could it learn to operate as a Catholic school system if it moved further into the public sector?
IB
The IB also held a long-standing identity as a transnational system, espousing a cohesive vision of its educational aims since its inception in the 1960s. Much like AMI, the IB has been an umbrella organization. It provides professional development, standards, examinations, curricula, and teacher development to schools around the world. Offering a transdisciplinary, international method of education in the elementary and middle years and a rigorous “Diploma Program” in the high school years, the IB is known for its academically demanding approach to teaching and learning.
For most of its existence, the IB developed elite, high-quality schools globally. Unlike AMI, the IB did not seek to change who had access to it, but new types of schools began to adopt IB. In the United States, struggling schools began to adopt IB as a means to improve and perhaps attract more able students. One IB leader explained the expansion of the school system because of demand: “It started in 1997, but the growth has been exponential . . . I think the last couple of years . . . it’s been really, really fast.”
Although IB has grown worldwide, we examine this system’s specific efforts to address demand in the United States, particularly in public schools. Like the Montessori Center and the Archdiocese, this move into an entirely new environment created several challenges. The system recognized that the U.S. context meant that U.S. public IB schools faced a unique set of issues. According to several IB leaders, this school system faces a similar dilemma to that of the Montessori Center: maintaining the quality of its programs while expanding to new contexts: “It’s having growth that’s manageable, that’s sustainable. I think that’s the challenge. How do we do it in a way that’s without impeding quality?” As more public schools adopt IB programs, is the system able to redesign itself in ways that preserve the quality of its education? How does the IB learn to operate in an entirely new environment while maintaining its identity as a historically academically demanding school system?
Rethinking Identity: Excellence and Equity
The question of identity became pressing as each of these school systems moved closer to the U.S. public sector. The Montessori Center and the IB struggled to remain excellent while improving equity; the Archdiocese struggled with how to become excellent while maintaining its commitment to equity. The dilemma for these systems was how to develop or maintain quality educational programs while providing access to a new demographic of students. The tensions around excellence and equity were entwined with identity, as each system considered how to redesign itself around those ideals.
Montessori
The Center’s identity had been one that centered on excellence: It was known as one of the many AMI training centers around the world in which aspiring teachers learned high-quality Montessori. Training occurred through a strict transmission of the original writings of Dr. Montessori; practice with the standardized, Montessori materials; observations of existing classrooms; and rigorous oral and written exams tied tightly to the curriculum. A core group of leaders committed the Center to a new identity, maintaining its historical focus on excellence but adding a new focus on equity. To do this, the Center would return to Dr. Montessori’s original mission of serving all children. One explained that the mission of the Center would be to make “high quality Montessori more accessible to those who cannot afford it, [for] vulnerable children and communities.” She expanded, Montessori in this country tended to gravitate towards more affluent communities. That was not, of course, Dr. Montessori’s vision for humanity . . . A lot of people don’t know that social justice, and opportunity for children, and world peace is really at the heart of Montessori . . . we needed to do more to go back to the roots of Dr. Montessori’s original vision . . . she started in the slums in Italy. Well, first she worked with handicapped children. Then in 1907, she opened Casa de Bambini . . . and all the families were poor . . . That’s when we got the idea of—how could we do that?
This question—“how could we do that?”—became the driving force for the Center’s new identity. The goal was to maintain the excellence in Montessori education that the Center had long been known for while becoming more equitable around who had access to that education. The challenge was how to do both, particularly since this revised mission would force the Center into the very environment from which most Montessori schools had long been insulated. The Center redesigned itself as a hybrid system, opening private preschools and public charter elementary schools that targeted low-income students. The Center was well poised to move closer to the public sector, for its pedagogical methods were originally designed by Dr. Montessori to serve all children, but Center staff had little experience leading schools that served low-income students, let alone in the accountability climate of U.S. school reform.
The Center tried to balance excellence and equity by reinventing the idea of inclusion. To reach many poor families from various racial and ethnic backgrounds, the Center did not just open more schools—that is, by “scaling up.” Instead, it brought Montessori into existing communities. The Center embedded itself in a low-income community, and then opened a charter school in that neighborhood. It began to partner with other low-income communities, bringing Montessori to them. In effect the Center decided to “scale in,” to create or deepen connections with existing organizations.
At the time of this study, the Center had developed seven partners among culturally based, community-embedded organizations that served poor and minority-group families. Each served a different population, ranging from homeless to Hmong immigrants to Native American families to Latino youth. At the core of these partnerships was a belief in providing high-quality Montessori education (i.e., excellence) while reaching new children and preserving their ethnic and linguistic differences (i.e., equity).
Providing access to Montessori for more children would not necessarily be easy; providing access while preserving the quality of Montessori would be harder still. However, Center leaders were emphatic that they would not compromise either. But this meant tackling an enormous challenge that AMI faced more broadly: the lack of diverse, AMI trained teachers worldwide. Center leaders were unanimous in their belief in the importance of community and culturally embedded teachers who reflected the cultures and languages of the families they served. Part of the Center’s mission therefore became recruiting, training, and developing a pool of more diverse Montessori teachers. Inclusion would extend to providing scholarships to low-income adults to become Montessori teachers, and then placing those teachers in the Center’s partnership schools. One leader explained, The priorities . . . are training more guides from communities of color and bilingual guides so that more schools can have adults that look like the families they serve and can really deliver bilingual and culturally responsive and relevant [pedagogy] . . . I think a big barrier for training is, again, financial . . . so really just growing that pool of diverse, AMI-trained adults.
Inclusion meant broadening which students had access to high-quality Montessori education and which adults had access to Montessori teacher training.
With new partnerships and a new demographic of women entering the AMI trained teacher pool, the Center tried to redesign itself as a different kind of Montessori system. But how would this new identity play out in practice? How would the Center support entirely new types of students and teachers in an entirely new environment?
Catholic
If a driving issue of identity for the Montessori Center was one of equity, an issue for the Archdiocese was competition. Declining enrollment created intense pressure to compete with charter schools, and that led the Archdiocese to rethink what might make its schools attractive to families. Much like the Center, the Archdiocese would need to interact with the public sector in new ways. How to navigate the public sector became entwined with the issue of identity: Every leader we interviewed described the challenge of what it might mean to be a Catholic school system in the 21st century. One explained, What does it mean to be a 21st century Catholic school? And how do we make that argument in a way that isn’t positioning us against public education or charter schools? . . . We cannot make the argument for the continued existence of Catholic schools by saying that we’re better than or different from . . . We need to be able to make an argument that stands on its own about why should Catholic schools continue to exist.
The Archdiocese, like many urban Catholic school systems, had a history of serving all students, not just those from wealthy or Catholic backgrounds. Leaders across the system agreed that equity was an important part of who they were as a system. But they disagreed on how to make the system excellent again—how to make it attractive to new families in ways that would boost student enrollment. Some asserted that excellence was about holding fast to faith-based schooling: They could not become secular or lose their Catholic identity in response to declining enrollment. One explained, “I’m not being melodramatic. I think that if we do not insist that our schools are consciously and intentionally ‘Catholic,’ then we are just a really good private school system.” Another echoed, “I continue to subscribe to the idea that Catholic schools’ primary responsibility is to pass the Faith on to the next generation.” The idea that the Archdiocese could move away from its long-standing identity around faith-based education was contrary to their sense of the system’s identity.
In contrast, other leaders wanted to reframe Catholic schooling as a competitive product in a competitive market. They worried that to hold fast to an old identity could be the system’s demise. They wanted to create a new identity—a product that could be marketed in a competitive environment, attracting new families and increasing enrollment. One explained, I think we have a little bit of a crisis on our hands and we have to decide what we want to be when we grow up . . . we’re at a serious crossroad and I think we have to make some strategic decisions and have a vision about what we’re going to do . . . if we’re going to compete, we have to really understand what it’s going to take to compete and be willing to invest in competing. And if we’re not, then we have to understand what’s happening . . . from a pure marketing perspective . . . we’re exiting the market and so we have to decide if that’s really what we want to do.
Another asked, “Ultimately what is the product that we’re putting out? And if it’s bad then . . . we should close, we should not be open. That’s the bottom line.” These respondents saw the ultimate identity problem—that their schools were in danger of closing—and their responses suggested urgency to redefine the system in a competitive market.
Other leaders believed Catholic schools should be both faith-based and academically rigorous. One offered: “No school can claim to be Catholic unless it is academically excellent. You can’t be Catholic and be mediocre in your academics because one and other, they go together.” Excellence would mean providing both a rigorous, high-quality education and one that was grounded in the Catholic faith.
Whether the Archdiocese can, in fact, decide what it means to be a Catholic school system remains unclear. Can it develop consensus around what its role should be within the new education sector? and Can it do so in ways that increase enrollment despite competition with charter schools?
IB
The question of identity for IB also involved managing a tension between excellence and equity. Much like the Montessori Center, IB’s identity had long been centered around excellence: IB was known for rigorous, internationally focused education. The system ensured a high level of quality in all IB schools through a lengthy authorization process. One leader explained, “the process of becoming an IB school is rigorous and long . . . the process has certain thresholds in terms of training their leadership. They have to train their teachers. They have to think about their school mission . . .” Leaders across the system saw these standards as critical to maintaining the identity of IB, to ensuring its excellence as an education system. They agreed that an IB education was about developing global citizens, “making the world a better place” or a “good education that has a purposeful end.”
Despite agreement about excellence, IB leaders were less sure about equity. The system historically served upper-class, academically ambitious students. But the adoption of IB by high-poverty U.S. public schools raised questions of identity. One leader told us, “If the only IB school you’ve ever known is the International School of Geneva . . . you’re going to be threatened, confused . . . by the inner city of Chicago public school that’s now IB.” Some members of the IB board had trouble seeing how under-resourced public schools could share anything in common with the highly resourced schools that had traditionally adopted IB. She expanded: For some of our long-time members, there, frankly, have been some people who aren’t really happy that we’re in public schools. I think that’s lessening every year, of course, but for a long time there was a core of people who were like, “Why should they be an IB school? They don’t have a world-class library.” No, but they’ve made an agreement with the University of Chicago down the street, and they have a world-class library. I think it’s been a matter of expanding the pictures of what an IB school might be.
At the heart of this concern was the question of identity, that is, what IB schools should look like. It was also a question about equity, that is, who should have access to an IB education. While some leaders did not believe IB belonged in public schools, others were “ambiguous” about promoting IB for high-poverty public schools. One explained, “You look at what it takes to get some schools what it needs to succeed, and how long the journey is, and how far they’re going, it’s hard to stay committed to that.” But his concern ran deeper: It’s not even clear whether we, as an organization, should. Is that our role, position? That’s why I say it’s not easy to figure out . . . It’s like, so who actually does this work? How is the work best done? Do we actually even know what the right work is? How much do we help [schools], and when do we let them figure it out for themselves? When is that right? It’s not easy work.
In contrast, other leaders believed that the system should focus more on access—that equity should be a part of IB’s identity. Yet they worried about how to make IB work in high-poverty public schools, particularly in the policy environment. One lamented, “especially in the United States, where we have such onerous state and national requirements, I think it is just a challenge.” Another commented that it could be difficult to “fit” IB into the testing and accountability climate of public schooling: With all the standardized testing and all of the state requirements that have to be met . . . I think that’s really one of the biggest challenges that schools face is making sure that they’re complying with all of those local responsibilities, and then trying to fit the IB into that.
Some leaders proposed that an answer to that challenge would be for public IB schools to look different than private IB schools, suggesting the possibility of different identities for different IB schools. Another commented that the core of an IB education would not change, but that the ways IB programs could be implemented may vary: “we’re not rethinking what it means to be an IB school,” but we are rethinking “what we ask for in terms of the specifics.” Several questions remain: How much will the system shift its focus toward equity, as new schools and new types of students adopt its programs? and How much should the IB adapt its identity to meet the needs of the public sector?
Rethinking Identity: Fidelity and Flexibility
These three school systems reconsidered their identities as organizations as they faced challenges around supply and demand and negotiated tensions around excellence and equity. But rethinking identity also meant navigating between fidelity to their inherited identities as systems and flexibility around adapting to a new environment. They began to build different types of infrastructure, or supports, to manage these tensions.
Montessori
It was one thing for the Center to commit itself to providing high-quality Montessori to poor children, but it would be another to learn how to realize that identity. In practice, that meant arranging a marriage between fidelity and flexibility. Fidelity involved preserving the legacy of Dr. Montessori by adhering to her pedagogical method, her espoused stages of human development, and her ideal of world peace; these are at the heart of the system’s identity. Flexibility involved determining how adaptable the system should be to meet the needs of new students. As one leader explained, the goal is to “be true to [Dr. Montessori’s] design for schooling while bringing that design to the children for whom she invented it.”
Center leaders were unanimous around the importance of maintaining fidelity to the Montessori method; they would not compromise on quality as they began to serve new communities. One offered, “We’re just so completely, 100 percent committed to authentic, high fidelity Montessori.” However, they needed to be flexible enough to bring authentic Montessori to communities that were not historically part of Montessori in the United States. Another explained, . . . there’s a lot of pressure to work with these children, and meet their needs, and get them where they need to be. I’m just adamant that we do that best by sticking to what we know of child development, rather than grabbing at this fad or that fad [and] fit into Montessori. I think just that really firm grounding in the philosophy. Then also paying attention to we are doing something different, and how do we fit that in without ruining the integrity of the program.
One way the Center tried to find a balance was to maintain the educational infrastructure that made AMI schools successful—curricula, teacher education, materials, and standards—while also building new infrastructure. Maintaining existing infrastructure would preserve the flesh and bones of the system’s identity, and assure quality and excellence of Montessori education. Building new infrastructure would enable access and equity for new families. Center leaders believed the key was to build infrastructure around the pedagogical core, that is, to preserve the Montessori method while adding supports for students and teachers.
One move was to add staff not typically found in Montessori schools—special educators, reading specialists, ELL teachers, and counselors—but who were needed for student support. This was a type of capacity-building, as the Center had to learn to work with a poorer, more diverse group of students. One leader noted, We have some really volatile children . . . Some of them are just, frankly, damaged already at a very young age. It’s really sad, which makes it even more important that we’re doing what we’re doing. Because we try really, really hard to meet their needs and to find ways to meet those needs of the whole family . . . It doesn’t work without having all of this [extra support], and this is not typical in many of your affluent, private Montessori schools.
Another explained: “We have a lot of children . . . English is not their first language. We have a lot of children with special needs, and those children need a different kind of help . . .” Leaders emphasized that becoming more flexible was critical to meeting these students’ needs, but the challenge was to do so without compromising the Montessori model: “We are doing something different, and how do we fit that in without ruining the integrity of the program?”
The Center also built new infrastructure to support adults who worked with the new student population—counseling and professional development for teachers to learn about self-care in the face of student trauma. The emphasis here was on sustainability, on helping adults continue to do new and difficult work day after day. One leader explained, “We have an unusual amount of stresses in—because of the families that we’re serving. It’s really difficult. The teachers get so emotionally involved because they care deeply.” Another commented, I think if we’re building a program that’s really centered on child development, we need to say really sensitive to who the children are we’re serving, and what does that mean for preparing an adult? . . . That’s what we’ve been learning, and that’s why we’re putting so much energy around staff care, and understanding the cycle of poverty, and understanding secondary trauma . . .
The Center also built infrastructure by adding support for their partnership organizations—an architect to design Montessori classrooms, discounts on AMI materials, and teacher mentorship. In return, the partnerships committed to high-quality Montessori: We ask them to commit to be an AMI aspiring school, which means that they are going to meet these standards. We’re very engaged in that accreditation process and helping and supporting each of our programs to be able to meet that.
The Center staff sought fidelity to quality Montessori and flexibility to work successfully in a new environment. That meant building new infrastructure to create the new capacity they needed. Teachers would need to know and be able to do different things than those who completed typical AMI teacher training: how to work with children in trauma, those with special needs, those in poverty, and those from linguistically different backgrounds. The partnership organizations would need to learn how to build Montessori programs in their communities. All of this required ongoing support. As the Center navigates the challenge of fidelity to the Montessori method and flexibility to adapt to a new environment, it seeks to become a new type of Montessori system. It remains to be seen how much the Center leaders will continue to rethink the system’s identity as they move forward.
Catholic
One response by the Archdiocese to declining enrollment was to introduce flexibility. Like the Montessori Center, the Archdiocese developed new infrastructure as it moved into a new environment. However, while the Center built infrastructure around its instructional core—a tightly defined approach to teaching and learning—the Archdiocese built infrastructure to create a new instructional core. While the Center insisted the quality of its educational program was not to be compromised, the Archdiocese asked what it could do to improve the quality of its educational programs.
The majority of leaders at the Archdiocese agreed that its schools faced challenges with instruction. As one commented, “Well, so you have charter schools that have moved into all of our neighborhoods, or most of our neighborhoods. They’re free. They have a standard of education that surpasses ours.” Another explained that although the system had improved in some areas, it had yet to improve instruction: We may have fixed the problem, at least, from the finance and governance perspective, which was killing us, but now we’ve got to up the instruction game. We’ve got to do that. We lived off, I think, our laurels for far too long.
Another discussed instruction from a market-based perspective: What we do know from what we’ve done with the first phase of this enrollment is that it’s our product that people are not willing to pay for. So, if you think about what the pieces of the product are, one has to be instruction and test scores . . . we clearly have to improve that.
Under intense pressure to improve, the Archdiocese has been highly flexible. Whereas the Center held fast to many parts of its Montessori identity, the Archdiocese was more flexible in redesigning itself; to do otherwise was to risk closing more schools in the face of competition from charters. One approach was to build new infrastructure—to adopt pieces of the public-school model, that is, to “pull in” parts of the public sector as a strategy to try to improve (Spillane, Seelig, Blaushild, Cohen, & Peurach, 2019). This involved moving closer to the public sector, as the Archdiocese adopted standards-based report cards, assessments aligned with the Common Core, common curricula, and a blended learning instructional approach. For some leaders, the decision to adopt pieces of the public school model was tied to the decision to adopt the Common Core: “I think that it was because we take the [state exam], and there was concern about the test scores and wanted to have a more rigorous curriculum that aligned better to Common Core and to the state test.” One leader explained, We have bought into taking the public school state test . . . If you’re going to participate in this year-end test, you’d better do the curriculum that they’re doing so there’s an alignment and you don’t put the kids at a disadvantage . . . I’m not going to give a Common Core test at the end of the year and not teach Common Core.
Yet even with the move toward a common curriculum, identity could not be decided in one fell swoop at the center. The Archdiocesan schools had been decentralized, so there was considerable variation across the system: “. . . there are still some schools that have 20-year-old textbooks that are still being used . . . And some have more recent-than-that books.”
Leaders also varied in whether they believed the system was taking the right approach. Some believed that because the standards-based report cards and new assessments had been implemented, instruction was improved. Others argued that those pieces of infrastructure were being built without first developing consensus around what good instruction looks like: This is like us trying to put some really concrete language into, this is what we mean when we say skilled teaching. And this is what we mean when we say every teacher in the archdiocese should do these things, so that we all speak the same language, we’re all aligned to this. And then they’ll say, “But we’re doing new report cards and we have a new interim [assessment.].” We’re like, No, no, this isn’t—so it was a struggle to get people to understand.
Although the system recently adopted blended learning, it is unclear how well it is understood. Several leaders commented that some teachers did not know how to implement it. One told us that teachers and leaders imagine that technology will automatically address instructional challenges: “So a lot of people say, ‘Well, we just need to get computers and software and that will solve our problems.’” Another explained, “I feel like we have gone in the wrong order. So we worked on the tool and not on the instruction, and so it’s not going to match what teachers are actually doing in classrooms and how they’re assessing children.”
The challenge of improving instruction was tied to the challenge of identity. The Center’s fidelity to Montessori enabled it to build new supports around that method as it enrolled new students; the Archdiocese’s crisis of identity meant there was no agreed-upon pedagogical approach around which it could build new supports. One leader explained that she saw the new focus on state standards as misplaced because it had not been developed as part of a shared understanding of mission and identity: It’s not bad to give attention to [standards and assessments] . . . but it’s not given attention in relation to what our mission is . . . Not that the attention to those things is bad—but that it’s immediately in a reactive way, immediately gone to there without a reflection of why and what that means in terms of who we are and what our mission is.
Another noted, “A decision was not made as to what is our vision, so we just fell into that mediocrity.” She further explained, We tend to be in a mode that’s reactive. We react to things. We try to compete with other schools that aren’t us, and so we react and create more programs and more strategies, rather than beginning from the originality of who we are and what our mission is.
Another leader explained, “if you were [asking], . . . ‘What is the academic vision for the Archdiocese?’ I don’t know that I could define it concretely . . .”
Hence it appears that supports are being added in a piecemeal fashion, at least at the time of this study, rather than being aligned to a tightly defined instructional core. The Center started with a pedagogical approach and built infrastructure around it, but the Archdiocese built infrastructure without a clear idea of its pedagogical approach. Infrastructure was added from the outside in rather than from the inside out.
Both systems face questions of fidelity and flexibility. The Montessori Center had the advantage of moving closer to the public sector at its own pace, by its own choice, and after having clearly defined its mission and identity as a new school system. The Archdiocese has not had that luxury: The future of its existence hinges on remaining competitive with the charter sector of public education, and thus it has found itself building infrastructure while simultaneously reconsidering its identity. It has built tremendous flexibility into its model as a means of adapting to the new environment with which it must work. It remains to be seen if the new flexibility will be enough, or if school enrollment will continue to decline. The question of whether those supports can be added to the system without first coming to consensus on identity and instructional vision remains significant.
IB
As IB enrolled more of the schools it had not been designed to serve, it also had to navigate between fidelity and flexibility. It had to learn to support schools with an entirely different student demographic while they tried to meet local, national, and IB’s own requirements. IB sought to keep faithful to its purpose and vision for instruction while recognizing that considerable flexibility would be needed if public IB schools were to succeed. One leader explained, We can no longer, essentially, implement our programs just from that lens of what’s right for private schools. We all know that private schools have lots of freedom to implement any program, any way they like, and hire whoever they wish. To that end, flexibility was really high in terms of priority . . . How do we make it easier for schools, or more flexible for schools, easier for teachers?
The overwhelming majority of leaders at the IB agreed that if schools needed more support, one way to address this was to reorganize. The IB reorganized around types of schools, rather than regions of the world, and this included a new department focused exclusively on the needs of U.S. public schools. One explained, “I think a basic desire to make sure that the IB is being responsive to schools. Geography is not always the thing that’s most in common . . . a small public school in Kansas is quite different than a large international school in Geneva.”
Despite the reorganization, most leaders saw the implementation of IB in U.S public schools as a considerable challenge. One offered: “schools in the U.S. really struggle with taking the national or state curriculum and embedding it within the framework of the [IB].” Another added, With dealing with the Common Core, central standards, and dealing with all the testing that happens . . . the reality there is this teach to the test. Schools are really struggling with [the IB] philosophy because it’s not about teaching to the test. It’s about learner agency and learner co-constructing . . .
One way the system helped public schools navigate the policy environment was to build infrastructure—to help public schools understand the alignment between IB programs and the Common Core. One leader commented, One of the things the IB tries to do is help schools map. For the Common Core, how would that work in an IB context? We . . . send them educators that help them do that so you’re not trying to do two programs. You’re seeing how they can mesh together.
They also designed professional development to help schools understand IB and the Common Core. As one leader described, “In the U.S. here, they wanted more on the Common Core. That was very much U.S.-centric, so we put on—developed that particular sort of professional development just for the Americas.”
Just as the question of instruction was central to infrastructure building for both the Montessori Center and the Archdiocese, it also was critical for the IB. The Center implemented flexibility by reorganizing around its instructional core, and the Archdiocese introduced flexibility by trying to rebuild its instructional core. The IB fell somewhere in between. Like the Center, it wanted to preserve the central philosophy of its instructional approach—the core of its identity—even as it moved into new schools. However, it allowed for more flexibility around the implementation of instruction in different contexts than did the Center. Part of the challenge for the IB was that in the elementary years, teachers and students co-create their curriculum: I think one of the things that makes it so difficult is the expectations that we as an organization place upon the teachers . . . we actually require the teachers to develop their own curriculum . . . Those units of inquiry, it’s not something they can just get off the shelf.
And while this is challenging for any teacher to learn, the IB recognized that it is particularly challenging for U.S. teachers: the majority of the [elementary] schools are . . . in the United States, and they’re public schools. They really needed somebody who . . . could just say, “Wait a minute. What you’re thinking of doing, that’s going to really work well for international schools, but that’s a minority. In the U.S., it won’t work because this is their reality.”
Another commented, “I think we try to be flexible . . . because implementing the PYP in New Zealand versus the United States versus Tanzania, they’re all very different situations.”
Other leaders commented on the challenge of bringing the Diploma Program to high poverty, public schools: “If students are jumping into something like the Diploma Program, which is very rigorous, if they don’t have the preparation really from a pretty early age, it’s quite challenging.” Another explained that the IB did not have proxies to measure the success of some of its public schools, as it did for the private, elite schools: In the more originally traditional IB school, one of the main proxies for a high-quality Diploma Program . . . is how many kids take the exam, how many kids do well on the exam. Some of these public schools, that’s not their main point. They may not even expect most of their kids to take the full IB diploma or the exams. It’s more about the rigor, the conceptual stuff. For us, we need to think about how do we support that different setting, and how do we identify what’s a quality program when they take away our proxy.
Thus the system grappled with “trying to figure out, what’s the magic combination of giving a school enough support” for all types of schools, ranging from elementary to high school. But serving a new kind of school meant not only rethinking the amount of support, but also the measurement of quality programming. This opened up issues of the system’s identity, as the IB grappled with what a successful IB program would consist of in different types of schools.
Summary of Findings
Across these three school systems, leaders perceived the identity of their systems as changing. As they interacted with new reforms and new students, leaders began to rethink what their school systems meant; they began to make sense of their systems in new ways. Doing so involved navigating the tension among two sets of issues: (a) how to become both academically excellent and equitable for all students and (b) how to preserve fidelity to historical system identity while increasing system flexibility. For system leaders, managing these issues involved building new infrastructure, and in turn, reframing their identity as systems.
The Montessori Center was part of an umbrella organization, AMI, that had a long history of academic excellence, but had largely existed in private schools. The Center’s mission was to become more equitable in providing access to high-quality Montessori for low-income children; this meant that leaders were reconceptualizing the system’s identity. Fidelity to the Montessori method was critical but so was flexibility to adapt to poorer, more diverse students, and to the structure and policies of public charter schools. To do so, the Center built infrastructure around its pedagogical core, adding new types of support for students and staff.
The Archdiocese’s identity also shifted, as its leaders considered what it meant to be a Catholic school system in an era of declining enrollment and competition with charter schools. They also had to develop new infrastructure, but did so by adopting elements of public schools in an effort to become more academically excellent and competitive. They maintained a focus on equity, but increased their flexibility to the changing environment around them.
Similarly, leaders at IB began to rethink their system’s identity as more public schools adopted IB programs. Like Montessori, IB had begun in private schools, and the move into public schools brought new challenges around how much flexibility was needed to satisfy accountability requirements and to meet the needs of high-poverty students. Leaders wrestled with how to maintain the academic excellence for which IB had long been known while becoming more equitable in serving poorer and more diverse students.
Discussion and Conclusion
Each of the three systems had a well-established identity that was tied to private or hybrid status, yet leaders in each had to make sense of major changes in their environment—education reforms, social policies, and changing student populations. Markets and policies pushed the systems closer to what had been seen as the public side of the education sector, as each grappled with supply and demand in different ways. As they tried to figure out how to adapt to unfamiliar circumstances, they reconsidered the identity of their systems. Leaders in each system asked, “Who are we—what does it mean for us to be a school system in an era of migration, poverty, markets, and changing social policy?” Each answered the question differently, yet leaders in each system sought to redesign it as they tried to make sense of and adapt to major changes. As we noted earlier, organizational “. . . identities are formed in part through dialogue with external stakeholders and are best construed as relational and comparative” (He & Brown, 2013, p. 6). 4 And the “apparent durability of identity is somewhat illusory . . . we reconceptualize organizational identity as . . . frequently up for redefinition and revision” (Gioia et al., 2000, p. 64). We found that leaders across the three systems were redefining and revising the identity of their organizations.
The reasons for the changes in the environment were mixed. The reforms were intentionally sector wide, unlike more partial earlier reforms. Political, economic, and social change confronted educators with questions of their social responsibility as they faced growing inequality, poverty, and changing populations. In response some reconsidered their obligations and pushed for system change. The reforms also put systems in competition with each other and pushed them to orient their competitive position and thus their identities to students’ scores on state tests.
But changing a school system’s identity is not simply a matter of its “mission” or “vision” or “aims.” It is, in the current education sector in the United States, a matter also of what the systems are able to do educationally. Changing identity—to serve Hmong children with Montessori, or poor children with IB—requires different educational and social capacity, capacity that these systems did not have before they tried to take up the new assignments. To change identity as these systems are trying to do is to change the systems’ interiors, not just their announced intentions. It is to change the hearts and minds and know-how of the people who make these systems work and thus, to be a bit figurative, to change the souls of these systems.
Such changes affect how leaders see the relationship between what their system has been and what it is trying to become. Those changes affect the ways in which leaders make sense of their system’s identity. Because each of the systems was private or hybrid, they were matters of choice; educators joined because they identified with what the system was and did, and how it did it. Many leaders had been with these systems for years—they had signed on to an earlier system identity, and that was important. Hence, those in Montessori were at pains to insist that their system’s identity was not changing—it would do new things but it would do them in ways that were entirely consistent with the system’s previous identity. That is understandable in a system with such intense focus and detailed specification, but we saw and heard reports of this Montessori Center doing things that were unfamiliar and novel. The commitment to traditional Montessori is clear and impressive, but so is the determination to do things that have been rare or nonexistent in Montessori. The puzzle is whether the second determination can be realized without changing the first. It remains to be seen how much change the new initiatives and capacities will bring, and how it will affect leaders’ perceptions of the Center’s identity.
The U.S. International Baccalaureate schools face a similar situation. This system has a well-defined identity that was tied to academically ambitious studies, a reputation for rigor and excellence, and a top social position in education. Yet changes in politics and markets led many high-poverty public schools to adopt IB to improve themselves and their appeal to potential students. But IB was not designed for such schools. Can traditional IB become an effective vehicle for much improved high-poverty schools, or must a different version of IB be created? IB and the schools are wrestling with this problem, and much remains to be seen.
These two systems’ identities were deeply rooted in their existing educational infrastructures, which created reference points as they responded to reforms and social change that unfolded around them. In contrast, the Archdiocese’s identity was tied much more closely to its schools’ religious character than to their academic programs. This left Catholic leaders free to be flexible in responding to the reforms but lacking the strong common infrastructure with which to respond. Here too, the story is far from over.
Organizational identity is not the most tidy concept in social research, and our account highlights part of the explanation: The identities of these systems were shaped by a complex array of influences. One was conflict over the supply of and demand for schools. Another was tension between policy and public pressures for academic excellence and public and political pressures for equity. Another was conflict between systems’ efforts to adapt and be flexible and their efforts to be faithful to their sources. Organizational identities are not only subject to change and socially constructed, but they are created and recreated under pressure from competing and often conflicting sources. They were created and recreated as members of those organizations made sense of changes in the environments. At least in education in the early 21st century, little is tidy.
Our account frames relationships between large changes in education and society on one hand and schools and systems on the other. The boundaries between public and private systems blurred as standards-based reform reached far into the education sector. That was reflected in private and hybrid systems’ awareness of and response to standards and accountability. Growing social problems and changing social policies also reached further into the education sector than before. That was reflected in private and hybrid systems’ efforts to take responsibility for social problem-solving.
These large changes and the systems’ efforts to respond prompted shifts in the three school systems’ deeply held identities. Montessori, Catholic, and IB school systems were previously remote from much public policy and many social problems, as they catered to particular clienteles—both students and staff—with particular values, beliefs, and for two of the systems, social privilege. They now seem less remote, closer to and interacting with public policies and social problems.
But this account caught developments at a moment in time. It remains to be seen how much the systems’ identities will change as they adapt to a new context, and whether the systems will change the environment.
Why is this worth noticing—what does it matter if school systems’ identities change in response to their environment? School reform is about improvement, and organizational identity is entwined with improvement. How systems respond to pressure for improvement depends in part on their inherited identities because they provide leverage and justifications for change at the same time as they limit what might be changed. Hence, even reforms that press for uniform responses are quite likely to play out differently.
Finally, the study has significant limitations. This report is one modest part of a multilevel study of six U.S. school systems, in which we probed relationships among classrooms, schools, systems, and their environments. Our account is situated at two of these four levels—the school systems and their environments—for we rely chiefly on interviews with system leaders and evidence about the systems’ environments. It does not include evidence at the school and classroom levels, about the experience and perceptions of teachers and school leaders. An important next step and a central purpose of the larger study will be to explore relationships among the four levels.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The authors acknowledge members of the research team: Whitney Hegseth, Donald Peurach, Jennifer L. Seelig, James P. Spillane, Daniella Hall Sutherland, and Max Yurkofsky.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Work on this essay was supported by the Spencer School Systems Study at Northwestern University and the University of Michigan, funded by a research grant from the Spencer Foundation. Opinions and conclusions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of any funding agency.
