Local Schooling and Organizational Change: New Insights from the Perspective of Institutional Theory

Abstract

The second half of the twentieth century was marked by a decided movement toward more centralized (and nationalized) policymaking for education than had previously been the norm. Among the major pieces of legislation were the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and its reauthorization, No Child Left Behind, Head Start, and the Education for All Handicapped Children Act. In short, a nation that had long taken pride in a system of public education locally supported and locally controlled found itself responding to a rather wide array of more centralized federal requirements by century's end. The increase in federal funding after the 1970s targeted students from low socioeconomic backgrounds, students with special needs, and migrant students and was in part designed to help "level the playing field" across school districts. Thus far through the 21 st century, however, there has slowly been a notable change in policy emphasis, a movement leaning away somewhat from the centralization of the last half-century. Perhaps pushed, at least in part, by a marked variation in types and choices of schools-where, even in the public domain, the concept of "school" is no longer everywhere the same. "Public schooling" now ranges from neighborhood to chartered, vouchered, for-profit, magnet, virtual or online, home, language immersion, and more. Additionally, the individual school-site has once again come into prominence as a vital center of educational leadership, change, and academic improvement. Interestingly, in 2015, there was again a piece of federal legislation for public education: The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). The stated intent this time, however, was to foster a reduced (less centralized) role at the national level of school governance, along with a correspondingly increased range of policymaking autonomy for individual states and localities. In passing ESSA at the very end of 2015, the general reaction in many parts of the nation was that each state had thereupon been granted added policymaking discretion. Moreover, a further sense was that the states were quite likely to pass at least a fair amount of their added discretion down to local school districts and other local authorities. What is of special interest and significance is that the movement from more to less centralization in school policy is a movement newly shared by a number of those persons studying educational organizations from an institutional perspective. Neo-institutional research has taken on the question of why, even with substantial similarity and stasis in structures, does some variation and change exist (Zucker, 1988). One answer to this question comes from examining how institutional processes unfold at the micro-level given actors' work practices and how agency paradoxically can exist even when actors are embedded in institutional contexts (

Making Catholic Schools Research Relevant: Assessing Contemporary Trends in the Field of Catholic Education

“…In addition, the assumption that the Catholic sector maintained a distinct set of organizational conditions compared to other sectors ran up against developments in institutional and organizational research (e.g., Burch & Crowson, 2020). Even if it were once true that organizational outcomes could be explained by static differences between sectors, educational accountability policy developments induced an ongoing period of adaptation across all schools in the past 40 years in the United States (Mehta, 2013; Scott & Holme, 2016), decreasing pressure toward institutional isomorphism and increasing pressure toward enhancing academic quality in whatever ways work most efficiently and effectively (Peurach et al, 2019; Yurkofsky, 2020, 2022).…”

What Sticks and Why? A MoRe Institutional Framework for Education Research

“…While loose coupling, isomorphism, and macro-level pressures have been the most frequently used institutional concepts in educational research (Burch, 2007;H.-D. Meyer & Rowan, 2006), they are far from the only ones (e.g., Bridwell-Mitchell, 2015;Burch & Crowson, 2020;Coburn, 2003;Crowson & Hinz, 2015;Hallett, 2010;Jaquette, 2013;Kim et al, 2016;Penuel et al, 2013). To make use of institutional theorizing to investigate educational persistence and change, we find that recent work outside the educational realm also offers critical insights.…”