Using congressional testimony on teacher quality from 2003 to 2015 and analysis of 60 elite interviews, we show how the political economy of knowledge production influences idea uptake in education policy discourse. We develop and assess a conceptual framework showing the organizational and financial infrastructure that links research, ideas, and advocacy in politics. We find that congressional hearing witnesses representing groups that received philanthropic grants are more likely to support teacher evaluation policies, but specific mentions of research in testimony are not a factor. Overall, our study shows that funders and advocacy groups emphasized rapid uptake of ideas to reform teacher evaluation, which effectively influenced policymakers but limited the use of research in teacher evaluation policy discourse.

We show how policy makers converged to support similar reforms on a major educational issue: teacher effectiveness. Our study demonstrates the importance of idea brokers—actors that facilitate connections between preferences in policy networks and promote consensus around new policy ideas. Our study is based on analysis of testimony from 200 Congressional hearings from 2001 to 2015. We use discourse network analysis to examine network ties based on policy preferences expressed in hearings. We visualize policy networks, identify brokers, and estimate exponential random graph models to examine policy changes between the Bush and Obama administrations. We show how idea brokerage is associated with a convergence of policy preferences around teacher effectiveness among a coalition of political actors.

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Background/Context This study contributes to our growing understanding of coaches’ role in district reform by introducing instructional-coach teams as a potentially important concept for understanding coaching activities that support systemic reform. Prior research shows that instructional coaches leverage their position between the district office and schools to coordinate policy implementation. This study builds on that analysis by adding a group dimension to instructional coaching at the district level. No other study to date has focused on the collective behaviors of coaches that facilitate reform efforts. Purpose/Objective/RQ/Focus of Study The purpose of this study is to examine the practices of effective instructional-coach teams and conceptualize the role of coach teams in district reform. Research Design I used cross-case analysis that relied on social-network, questionnaire, interview, and observational methods as sources of evidence to analyze how instructional coaches work together to build capacities for district reform. I identified two successful district-level coach teams with an explicit mandate to support reform efforts that were, however, operating in very different district contexts. The focus of this analysis was to identify and compare the circumstances that present in both cases and help explain why these districts have effective coach teams. Findings My findings describe how coach teams develop institutional capacities that enable districts to respond to policy demands. I find that differences in curriculum policy, district reform context, and professional collaboration are associated with differences in the teams’ relational structures. I link these differences to common process gains resulting from the collective working of coach teams. I found three important process gains: intranet systems, collaborative problem-solving, and collective expertise. Although both teams produced all three, they implemented process gains in very different ways. Conclusions/Recommendations This comparative study demonstrates the conceptual utility of instructional-coach teams for understanding the link between coaching and systemic district reform. More theory and research are needed to better understand the behaviors of teams of educators, and particularly instructional coaches, engaged in collective work to support district reform.

In recent years, education policy scholars have begun to utilize social network concepts and methods to describe contemporary policy changes across P-16 levels. While many insights have emerged from this growing literature base, we argue that a more formal network approach rooted in policy network analysis (PNA) is needed to fulfill its conceptual and analytical ambitions. Policy network analysis integrates concepts from social network analysis with theoretical assumptions developed in the field of political science. Toward this end, we first argue that a more rigorous treatment of policy beliefs is needed to analyze the impact of ideas on the policy agenda. Existing literature on the ideological dimensions of market-based reform movements tends to define them largely within the bounds of neo-liberalism and thus far has failed to systematically explain how policy beliefs emerge and converge in this context. Second, we contend that previous work has generally lacked theoretical grounding in formal policy network analysis (PNA). Although there are clear links between the concepts and findings in traditional PNA literature and educational research – particularly the use of networked governance as a concept for understanding the interconnectedness of educational reform networks – a more diligent application of PNA theory and methods would enable educational policy scholars to gain deeper insights into the explanatory processes of policy change. We pay particular attention to the usefulness of these approaches for examining two-mode network data and for modeling ideological policy change.