Political and organizational dilemmas of centralized instructional management: Rethinking the coherence model for urban district reform

Today's school district leaders operate under unprecedented centralized constraints. Current high-stakes accountability policies compel them to accept state-determined performance goals and to design tightly coupled, standards-aligned systems to achieve these ends. In California, performance targets, curriculum standards and assessments, and state-approved programs and professional development are intended to create a comprehensive instructional regime that is coherent and aligned. Yet the degree to which district leaders can effectively exploit these state goals in the name of deep instructional change is unknown.;This mixed-methods dissertation examines this phenomenon by focusing on the ways in which administrators in one urban district serving a high poverty, high minority population responded to state improvement pressures by regulating teaching through curricular prescription and instructional standardization. It utilizes concepts from the literature on the politics of education, instructional change, and organizational theory to consider the political, administrative, and instructional tensions at each level of a district - the executive level, central office, schools, and classrooms - whose leaders developed a centralized instructional management system. The main questions that guide this study are: (1) What political and administrative processes transpire when district leaders try to design a centralized instructional management system? (2) What is the relationship between these political and administrative processes and the instructional coherence, depth of change, and adult learning that ensue under centralized instructional management? (3) What instructional outcomes do these centralized instructional management systems promote, suppress, or leave untouched?;Among my most salient findings were that: high-stakes performance goals function as an impetus for district executives to earnestly tighten their span of control over instructional processes; despite district leaders' vigorous embrace of the state's performance goals, normative and ideological resistance to the state's priorities and subsequent alignment efforts created political pressures from multiple constituencies that undermined the changes that leaders promoted; the district's centralized instructional system was potent enough to generate a fairly unified system for managing instruction, though this system focused almost exclusively on principles of coherence and alignment; and finally, this system affected surface features of schools and classrooms, but perhaps at the expense of deeper instructional change and teacher learning.