AJE Special Issue: Changing the Grammar of Schooling | Introduction: Institutional Logics in Los Angeles Schools: Do Multiple Models Disrupt the Grammar of Schooling? by Julie A. Marsh, Taylor N. Allbright, Katrina E. Bulkley, Kate Kennedy, Tasminda K. Dhaliwal

Full-length article “Institutional Logics in Los Angeles Schools: Do Multiple Models Disrupt the Grammar of Schooling?” by Marsh, Allbright, Bulkley, Kennedy, and Dhaliwal published by the American Journal of Education available here.

In 1994, David Tyack and William Tobin observed how difficult it is to disrupt the “grammar” of schooling. Yet the structure of U.S. public education is changing. Rather than a system of district-operated, neighborhood schools managed by elected school boards, we are seeing the emergence of systems with different school operators, new schooling options for parents, and in some cases, greater educator control. In one increasingly popular approach, often termed “portfolio” systems, advocates argue that choice, autonomy, and performance-based accountability challenge traditional schooling and foster a diversity of options for students and families (Hill, Campbell, and Gross 2012). Yet there is limited empirical evidence on these claims. As K-12 systems continue to evolve with the explicit goal of providing meaningful choices for families, we must interrogate the nature of these school options and whether system-level changes have led to variations in the grammar of schooling.

To address this gap, we examine the case of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), the second largest school district in the country. LAUSD has experienced significant change in the past 15 years. In the past, LA parents had limited choice and only a handful of schools operated with increased autonomy around budget, personnel, and curricular decisions. Now, the district explicitly touts diverse options for families and has more charter schools than any other district, plus a variety of other district-managed, semi-autonomous schools rarely focused on in prior research—making it a strategic case for research on this topic. To better understand the diversity of school offerings in LAUSD, we draw on the theoretical construct of institutional logics – broader cultural forces, both symbolic and material, that shape collective identities and behaviors of actors within a field or organization (Alford and Friedland 1985; Thornton and Ocasio 2008). We ask: In what ways do the espoused values and reported practices of schools vary among schools in Los Angeles and what explains these patterns? 

Our concurrent mixed-methods study (Creswell and Clark 2011) draws on three sources of data from the 2016-17 school year. System-level interviews (n=31) provide information about the context and policy mechanisms at play at the district level. A survey of all school principals in LAUSD (50% response rate: n=493) asked leaders to identify their school’s most important values (representing symbolic dimensions of institutional logics). To gain an in-depth understanding of school values and reported practices (representing symbolic as well as material enactments of logics), we analyzed interviews (n=71) and documents from six case study schools. These cases represent the diversity of school types in LAUSD: two charter (one standalone, one managed by a charter management organization), two traditional, and two semi-autonomous district-managed schools (a magnet and pilot school).

In the end, our study finds limited evidence of variation across schools and suggests that reforms promoting diverse options may not yield the intended diversity of within-school practices. On surveys, leaders in most schools—regardless of governance model, level, location, student performance, student demographics, and size—reported the same top three values:  supporting “whole child” needs, preparing students for college/career success, and building trusting relationships between teachers, parents and students.

Case study visits provided a deeper understanding of the values and reported practices within a subsample of schools. Consistent with other studies (e.g., Bulkley and Travers 2013; Lubienski and Lee 2016), we found significant consistency in the words, beliefs, and reported practices across cases in the areas of academics (a focus on college/career readiness, foundational academics, and data-driven instruction); whole child (building relationships with students), community (involving families in school), and professionalism (inclusive decision-making).

Yet, we also found some fine-grained differences across schools—a pattern also consistent with prior research (e.g., Davies, Quirke and Aurini 2006; Lubienski 2007). For example, we found niche academic programs in some schools, although accompanied by questions around the depth of the enactment of these programs. In the area of “whole child,” a few cases emphasized social-emotional supports for students, while others focused on positive behavior and discipline. Several schools extended their community focus to include the neighborhood and beyond, and others maintained an internal commitment to building community inside school walls. A few schools emphasized “selling” the school or a compliance orientation, while most others showed little evidence of these logics.

What contributed to the observed fine-grained variation in values and reported practices? We suggest that several interconnected organizational conditions—governance model, perceived threat to survival, leadership, and personnel—helped to drive the take-up of particular logics, and that in turn, these logics may also have shaped the nature of the organizations themselves. For example, a perceived threat to organizational survival based on enrollment pressure, performance pressure, and/or the strength of the choice context appeared to relate to a school’s emphasis on “selling the school” and developing an academic niche. Leaders associated one school’s focus on STEAM and another’s push to be tech-driven and social-justice oriented as ways to “rebrand” and attract families in a competitive environment. Of course, these relationships may also work in the opposite direction. By embracing a niche academic focus or strong commitment to marketing, a school, in turn, may feel less of a sense of threat or pressure because they have established a strong foothold in the market.  

Despite these micro-level variations, the overarching similarities shine through in our analyses. What explains the shared commitments to academics, the whole child, and community and family involvement?  These common logics appear to transcend differences in organizational context and suggest a deeper connection to field-level logics embedded in broader education policy, accountability systems, regulations, and networks. For example, the logics of college/career, foundational academics, and data use share common links to the broader accountability environment of new standards and foundation-supported initiatives. The ideas around building caring relationships and involving families also share ties to the broader education environment, including federal and state policy placing greater attention to measuring non-academic outcomes. This finding aligns well with long-established arguments that in order to remain legitimate, schools adhere to broader norms and standards (e.g., DiMaggio and Powell 1983; Huerta and Zuckerman 2009; Meyer and Rowan 1977). Macro-level societal logics may also be contributing to the patterns we found. For example, the common emphasis on data use reflects not only a field level norm, but also a potential blend of broader professional and state/bureaucratic logics that permeate modern-day society, including ideas around measurement-driven performance and “reinventing government” (e.g., Osborne and Gaebler 1992). 

Ultimately, we argue that the lack of diversity does not appear to challenge the idea of a common grammar of schooling across schools. The dominant pattern of similarity suggests that governance changes at the district level have not resulted in the diversity of school options expected by advocates of portfolio reforms. Of course, there are other plausible interpretations of these findings. While logics were generally common across our case schools, they might represent a departure from the logics and grammar of schooling at the end of the last century. Rather than “batch processing,” “textbook centered” instruction, and teachers operating independently in their classrooms, our data suggest a more tightly-coupled, data-driven approach to supporting students with academic and social-emotional learning and involvement of families in the substantive work of schooling. So while there may be homogeneity across schools, it is a potentially different kind of homogeneity than that of the prior “one best system” and its grammar of schooling.

In the end, these findings raise questions about the assumptions embedded in school system reforms and market-based policies and generate implications for policy, practice, and future research. Leaders overseeing systems promoting choice and diversity of school options might want to think carefully about district and community expectations around those options and whether the level of diversity matches expectations. Given the misalignment we sometimes found between school documents and interviews, school-level leaders also may want to re-examine written mission statements and plans to determine if they still ring true.

Despite our contributions to the literature—using interviews to uncover multiple dimensions of logics often under-examined in extant research—our limited ability to conduct observations suggests even more opportunity for improved depth of understanding of logics, particularly the behavioral dimensions of material practice, the coordination between values and practice, and the extent to which multiple and sometimes conflicting logics provide coherent guidance for practice. Related to the “grammar of schooling,” future studies might examine educational approaches that may go farther in challenging traditional structures and rules, such as community or online/hybrid schools (not included in our study). In addition to examining the cultural symbols and material practices within these schools, scholars might examine the pervasiveness of these approaches, what accounts for their uptake, and their sustainability and spread over time. Future studies should also examine additional types of districts (e.g., might districts in states allowing multiple types of charter authorizers see greater diversity?) and examine patterns over time to better understand what remains constant, what changes, over what period of time, and why.

References

Bulkley, Katrina E.  and Eva Travers, 2013. “Variations on a Theme: The Shift from Distinction to Commonality in Philadelphia’s Diverse Provider Model, 2002–2008,” Journal of School Choice 7: 532–59.

Cresswell, John. W. and Vicki L. Plano Clark 2011. Designing and Conducting Mixed Method Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

Davies, Scott, Linda Quirke, and Janice Aurini. 2006. The New Institutionalism Goes to The Market: The Challenge of Rapid Growth in Private K-12 Education. In H.-D. Meyer and B. Rowan (Eds.), The New Institutionalism in Education (103–122). Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

DiMaggio, Paul and Walter W. Powell. 1983. “The Iron Cage Revisited: Collective Rationality and Institutional Isomorphism in Organizational Fields.” American Sociological Review 48(2): 147–160.

Hill, Paul T., Christine Campbell, and Betheny Gross. 2012. Strife and Progress: Portfolio Strategies for Managing Urban Schools: Brookings Institution Press.

Huerta, Luis A., and Andrew Zuckerman. 2009. “An Institutional Theory Analysis of Charter Schools: Addressing Institutional Challenges to Scale.” Peabody Journal of Education 84(3): 414-431.

Lubienski, Christopher. 2007. “Marketing school: Consumer good and competitive incentives for consumer information.” Education and Urban Society 40: 118-141.

Lubienski, Christopher and Jin Lee. 2016. “Competitive Incentives and the Education Market: How Charter Schools Define Themselves in Metropolitan Detroit.” Peabody Journal of Education 91(1), 64–80. 

Meyer, John. W. and Brian Rowan. 1977. “Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony.” American Journal of Sociology 83(2): 340-363.

Osborne, David, and Ted Gaebler, T. 1992. Reinventing Government: How the Entrepreneurial Spirit Is Transforming the Public Sector. New York: Plume.

Tyack, David and William Tobin. 1994. The “Grammar” of Schooling: Why Has It Been So Hard to Change? American Educational Research Journal 31(3): 453-479.

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Acknowledgements: The authors appreciate the generous support for this research from the Spencer Foundation and the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation.