This mixed-method multiple case study investigated nine elementary schools. Six "odds-beating schools," which serve relatively high numbers of economically disadvantaged children, achieved higher than predicted performance on state assessments when compared with three typically performing schools. The overarching research question guiding this study was: What forces, factors, and actors account for odds-beating schools' better outcomes? The trust-communication connection provided one answer. Relational trust in odds-beating schools is an intraorganizational phenomenon, and it is accompanied by interorganizational trust (reciprocal trust). These two kinds of trust are accompanied by intraschool and district officeschool communication mechanisms. Trust and communications are mutually constitutive as innovations are implemented. This connection is also an implementation outcome. When today's innovation implementation initiatives reinforce this trust-communication connection, it becomes an organizational resource for future innovation implementation.

Rural schools play central roles in their communities, and rural education scholars advocate for rural school-community partnerships to support school and community renewal. Across the United States, including in rural areas, formal models for school-community partnerships have been scaled up. The literature on rural principals highlights their roles in developing school-community partnerships, yet questions remain as to how school leaders engage in such partnerships. Using boundary-spanning leadership as a theoretical lens, this descriptive study examines the role of district and school leaders in a regional school-community partnership, including as founding members, champions of collaboration, cheerleaders for the partnership, and amplifiers of often excluded voices.

This case study explored the development of a rural cradle-to-career network with a dual focus on the initial mobilization of network members and subsequent adaptations made to maintain mobilization, while meeting local needs. Data sources included interviews with network members, observations of meetings, and documentary evidence. Network-based social capital facilitated mobilization. Where networks were absent and where distrust and different values were evident, mobilization faltered. Three network adaptations were discovered: Special rural community organizing strategies, district-level action planning, and a theory of action focused on out-of-school factors. All three were attributable to the composition of mobilized stakeholders and this network's rural social geography. These findings illuminate the importance of social geography in the development and advancement of rural cradle-to-career networks.

Scaling up innovation in the instructional core remains a vexing proposition. Such disruptive innovations require teachers to engage in performance adaptation. Schools vary in their capacity to support changes in teachers' daytoday work. By comparing distributed instructional leadership practices of "odds-beating" schools with those at "typically performing schools," this study identified four qualities of distributed instructional leadership that drive teacher performance adaptation: collective goal setting, instructional feedback, collective guided learning, and trusting relationships. These findings reiterate the need for policy to go beyond standards and accountability mandates to focus on the right drivers of change: capacity building, and opportunities for collaboration in tandem with pedagogical improvement.