fault lines: the view from california’s core districts …

FAULT LINES: THE VIEW FROM CALIFORNIA’S CORE DISTRICTS

AS A LOCAL RESPONSE TO FEDERAL ACCOUNTABILITY

ON A SHIFTING EDUCATIONAL POLICY LANDSCAPE

by

Kimberly Noel Bradley

Dissertation Committee:

Professor Sonya Douglass Horsford, Sponsor Professor Jeffrey M. Young

Approved by the Committee on the Degree of Doctor of Education

Date 20 May 2020

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Education in

Teachers College, Columbia University

2020

ABSTRACT

FAULT LINES: THE VIEW FROM CALIFORNIA’S CORE DISTRICTS

AS A LOCAL RESPONSE TO FEDERAL ACCOUNTABILITY

ON A SHIFTING EDUCATIONAL POLICY LANDSCAPE

Kimberly Noel Bradley

The purpose of the study was to describe and examine how the constraints on urban

school districts led to the establishment in 2010 of a consortium of California’s largest

urban school districts that included structures of mutual accountability in response to

neoliberal school reforms and top-down accountability since the implementation of No

Child Left Behind. Using a qualitative case study research design and critical policy

analysis as an analytical framework, this study examined how California’s CORE

districts (i.e., Fresno Unified School District, Long Beach Unified School District, Los

Angeles Unified School District, Oakland Unified School District, San Francisco Unified

School District, and Santa Ana Unified School District) experienced, negotiated, and

responded to the shifting landscape of education policy resulting from the expansion of

privatization and neoliberal school reform.

The expansion of the top-down high-stakes accountability and neoliberal school

reform policies since No Child Left Behind has impeded the work of districts, by

narrowly focusing their work on accountability and limiting their flexibility in

determining how to allocate resources to support improvement. These top-down reform

policies have also limited opportunities for collaboration and diminished ownership and

responsibility at the district level. Urban district leaders not only in California, but in

urban districts across the United States, have felt the impact of competing social,

political, and economic forces, such as the high-stakes, top-down federal accountability

of No Child Left Behind, neoliberalism, and privatization. To better understand the

conditions that led to the creation of the CORE districts and their subsequent impact on

urban school district leaders in California, the following research questions guided the

study:

1. What social, political, and economic forces led to the creation of

California’s CORE districts?

2. What are the governance and leadership models that characterize the

CORE districts?

3. What impact have the CORE districts had on the urban education policy

landscape in California?

An examination of these questions not only helps us understand the circumstances

that led to the establish of the CORE districts, but how their work impacted the policy

landscape in California and supports the learning of other district leaders.

ii

ã Copyright Kimberly Noel Bradley 2020

All Rights Reserved

iii

DEDICATION

To my husband Kevin,

For always believing in me.

To my parents Wayne and Veronica Smith,

For teaching me about hard work and perseverance.

To my nieces and nephews Breken, Emrick, Cambrie, Brendan, and Michaela,

Who inspire me and remind me of my moral imperative.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This dissertation and case study would not have been possible without the support

and guidance of my dissertation sponsor and mentor, Dr. Sonya Douglass Horsford.

Additional dissertation committee members—Dr. Jeffery M. Young, Dr. Jeffrey R.

Henig, and Dr. John P. Allegrante—have generously provided their expertise and

valuable feedback in my growth as a researcher and practitioner. Thank you to the faculty

and staff of the Urban Education Leaders Program (UELP), who have all contributed to

my continued learning as an educational leader. I am also grateful to the members of my

UELP cohort, who have inspired and encouraged me along this journey.

Thank you to my family for your support and encouragement during this long and

challenging journey. There have been obstacles along the way and challenges to

overcome, but my husband Kevin and my parents Wayne and Veronica have always been

patient and consistent in their support. This is also for my grandparents, who are with me

in spirit and impacted my decision to become an educator and pursue my doctorate.

To my colleagues, including teachers, school administrators, and the district and

CORE office leaders who shared their time and insights with me, this is our story. I’m

especially thankful to my former colleagues at Sunnyside High School, who embody the

California Way and remind me to always be proud of who I am and what I represent.

Finally, to my former students, thank you for inspiring me and reminding me of why I

became a teacher and educational leader. K. N. B.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Chapter I—INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................... 1

Statement of the Problem ...................................................................................... 2 Purpose of the Study .............................................................................................. 4 Significance ........................................................................................................... 5 Research Questions ................................................................................................ 7 Research Method ................................................................................................... 8 Summary of Findings ............................................................................................ 9 Role of the Researcher ......................................................................................... 10 Organization of the Study .................................................................................... 11 Definition of Terms ............................................................................................. 13 Conclusion ........................................................................................................... 15

Chapter II—REVIEW OF LITERATURE .................................................................. 17 Introduction... ..................................................................................................... 17 A Shifting Education Policy Landscape ............................................................. 18 High-stakes Federal Accountability ......................................................... 21 Neoliberal School Reform ....................................................................... 24 Urban District-Level Leadership ........................................................................ 29 Governance and Leadership Models ........................................................ 30 The CORE Districts—A Moral Imperative .............................................. 39 Critical Policy Analysis ...................................................................................... 48

Conclusion .......................................................................................................... 51 Chapter III—METHODS ............................................................................................ 53 Research Design: Qualitative Case Study ......................................................... 53 Data Collection .................................................................................................. 54 Data Analysis ..................................................................................................... 57 Delimitations ..................................................................................................... 57 Limitations ......................................................................................................... 58

Conclusion ......................................................................................................... 59 Chapter IV—FINDINGS ............................................................................................. 60 Introduction... .................................................................................................... 60 Context—Setting the Stage ............................................................................... 62 Federal and State Accountability Policies and Structures ...................... 63 Districts Operating in a Vacuum of Support .......................................... 67 Players ............................................................................................................... 75 Establishment of CORE Districts ...................................................................... 76 Work of the CORE Districts .............................................................................. 82 Successes ................................................................................................ 94 Challenges ............................................................................................ 105 Reflecting on the Progress of the CORE Districts ........................................ 117 Conclusion ..................................................................................................... 118

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Chapter V—DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION ................................................... 120 Introduction ................................................................................................... 120 Summary of Findings .................................................................................... 122 Discussion of Findings .................................................................................. 123 Implications and Conclusions ........................................................................ 127 Recommendations ......................................................................................... 128 Conclusion ..................................................................................................... 131 REFERENCES .......................................................................................................... 132 APPENDICES Appendix A—Letter to Participants ........................................................................... 138 Appendix B—Informed Consent ............................................................................... 139 Appendix C—Interview Protocol ............................................................................... 143

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LIST OF TABLES Table Page 1 2018-2019 CORE Districts and Number of Schools .................................. 40 2 2018-2019 K-12 Student Enrollment by Ethnicity in CORE Waiver Districts ................................................................................................................. 41 3 2018-2019 K-12 Student Enrollment by English Learner, Reclassified English Proficient, Special Education and Free and Reduced Price Meals in CORE Waiver Districts ............................................................... 42 4 Selection and Organization of Data Sources .............................................. 55 5 Interview Participants ................................................................................. 56 6 NCLB Program Improvement vs. Quality Improvement System ............ 101

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LIST OF FIGURES

Figure Page 1 CORE Timeline ......................................................................................... 80

2 CORE School Quality Improvement System ............................................ 84

3 School Quality Improvement Index .......................................................... 95

1

Chapter I

INTRODUCTION

Like the multiple fault lines that run throughout California—constantly moving

though not always felt—the state and federal education policy landscape has slowly

shifted over the last 20 years. Since the implementation of No Child Left Behind in 2001,

increased federal accountability for student achievement and school performance and the

expansion of neoliberal school reforms have created a climate of top-down compliance

and competition focused on market forces and private interests resulting in diminishing

local control and competition for limited state and federal resources (Anderson et al.,

2013; Horsford et al., 2019; Lipman, 2011). Over time, these gradual shifts from local

control toward a top-down approach to education reform have impacted the role and

expectations of urban school districts and district leaders across the United States,

resulting in high-stakes accountability systems coupled with a dependence on unstable

and, in some cases, unsustainable revenue sources and fragmented support structures

(Henig, 2013; Knudson & Garibaldi, 2015; Marsh et al., 2016). These shifts have resulted

in frustration for districts and district leaders who feel they can’t rely on these

accountability structures or wait for changes in state or federal reform policies to support

the needs of their students (Knudson & Garibaldi, 2015; Krachman et al., 2016; Marsh

et al., 2016).

2

Statement of the Problem

The expansion of the top-down high stakes accountability and neoliberal school

reform policies since No Child Left Behind has impeded the work of districts narrowly

focusing their work on accountability and limiting their flexibility in determining how to

allocate resources to support improvement. These top-down reform policies have also

limited opportunities for collaboration and diminished ownership and responsibility at the

district level. Urban district leaders not only in California, but in urban districts across the

United States, have felt the impact of competing social, political, and economic forces,

such as the high-stakes, top-down federal accountability of No Child Left Behind,

neoliberalism, and privatization. These forces have impacted the roles, responsibilities,

and expectations of urban education leaders in California, resulting in district leaders

looking for ways to navigate and respond to the shifting landscape of policy reform by

establishing collaborative structures such as the California Office to Reform Education

(CORE).

Most notably, No Child Left Behind (NCLB), signed into law by George W. Bush

in 2002, was not only a reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act

(ESEA) but also marked a significant shift in the level of federal involvement in holding

states and districts accountable for student achievement and progress. Out of concerns

that American students were not prepared to compete in a global economy, through the

passage of NCLB, the federal government shifted its previous focus from inputs and

equity by increasing expenditures in communities where resources had been limited to a

focus on outputs and holding schools, teachers, and students accountable for meeting

measurable standards of academic achievement (Henig, 2013). NCLB included

provisions such as requiring failing schools to offer students supplemental services that

could be provided by outside private providers and that teachers be considered “highly

qualified.”

3

The passage of NCLB at the federal level impacted education policy at the state

level, and in particular urban districts felt the impact of not meeting federal student

achievement goals over multiple years and quickly falling into the category of program

improvement districts. State and district policies were primarily responses to the federal

requirements of NCLB, and improvement plans that outlined how failing districts would

work toward meeting increasing federal accountability requirements were compliance-

driven. There was an increased emphasis on policies that supported the development of

accountability systems to monitor student performance and grounding policy decisions in

the data collected from those systems (Henig, 2013). Schools and districts identified as

failing or program improvement received sanctions, and district leaders were mandated to

spend federal dollars for specific interventions. Urban district leaders in California

became increasingly frustrated with the amount of compliance with these accountability

systems and the lack of flexibility to spend federal dollars as they saw fit, as they had to

meet increasingly unrealistic accountability targets (Knudson & Garibaldi, 2015; Marsh

et al., 2016).

In 2011, the Obama Administration announced a waiver process for states to seek

relief from some of the NCLB requirements and have increased flexibility in the

spending of federal dollars. While the majority of states applied and received waivers,

California was one of the few states that did not receive a waiver primarily due to its

failure to connect teacher evaluations to student academic achievement as measured by

standardized tests, one of the waiver’s application requirements (Henig & Lyon, 2018;

Knudson & Garibaldi, 2015). In response to the shifts in increased federal sanctions and

limited district-level control and flexibility along with fragmented state education

agencies largely focused on technical support (Taylor, 2014) and driven by a moral

imperative (Fullan, 2011) to do what was best for the students in their districts, district

leaders from six of California’s largest urban districts with a combined enrollment of one

million students established a consortium known as the California Office to Reform

4

Education (CORE). The CORE districts—Fresno Unified School District, Long Beach

Unified School District, Los Angeles Unified School District, Oakland Unified School

District, San Francisco Unified School District, and Santa Ana Unified School District—

are the state’s largest urban districts and represent almost 20% of California’s K-12

public school student enrollment. These districts also include a large proportion of the

schools in California receiving sanctions and identified as program improvement under

NCLB. After the state did not receive a NCLB waiver, the leaders of these districts felt

compelled to submit their own waiver application and received one of the few waivers

awarded at the district level by the United States Department of Education in 2013

(Knudson & Garibaldi, 2015; Marsh et al., 2016).

Purpose of the Study






analysis as an analytical framework, this study examined how California’s CORE

districts (i.e., Fresno Unified School District, Long Beach Unified School District, Los

Angeles Unified School District, Oakland Unified School District, San Francisco Unified

School District, and Santa Ana Unified School District) experienced, negotiated, and


privatization and neoliberal school reform.

The work of the CORE districts focuses on the establishment of an accountability

system with a higher level of shared responsibility and mutual accountability with a focus

on local control, a move from compliance to shared responsibility, and capacity-building

5

through peer-to peer collaboration with a focus on data to inform meaningful system

reform. Part of their work focuses on the development and implementation of a district-

level accountability system that includes a measurement system that measures both

academic outcomes along with non-academic measures such as absenteeism,

suspensions/expulsions, school climate and culture, peer-to-peer improvement

interventions, and district-level capacity building (Knudson & Garibaldi, 2015; Marsh

et al., 2016). The CORE district leaders were driven by a moral imperative as described

by Fullan (2011) to find ways to raise the bar for all students and close the achievement

gap for lower-performing groups by providing the higher-order skills and competencies

they would need to be successful world citizens. The CORE district leaders did not see

this moral imperative supported in the fragmented federal and state educational agency

structures and mutually decided to join their districts in a collaborative effort that would

impact not only their districts, but help to move the rest of the state in having a

conversation about the types of systems and structures districts needed to make

meaningful improvements to support student achievement. Their decision to come

together, collaborate, and share their resources to address the challenges of supporting the

academic and social emotional needs of their students and their role as a significant

policy actor in school reform at the federal and state level is important to examine not

only by other district leaders, but by anyone involved with state and federal policy

decisions who need to consider and adapt to the current needs of schools and school

districts (Darling-Hammond et al., 2016; Rorrer et al., 2008).

The establishment of the CORE districts and their approach to the NCLB waiver

process by challenging the status quo and taking their power back in a top-down

accountability environment represent a unique opportunity to learn about the impact of

federal accountability and neoliberal reform on urban district policy and leadership with a

focus on how policy impacts the daily work of urban district leaders and what can happen

when district leaders make courageous leadership decisions not to accept the status quo

6

(Horsford et al., 2019). The work of the CORE districts also can provide insight into the

role districts can play as institutional actors in state- and federal-level educational reform

(Darling-Hammond et al., 2016; Rorrer et al., 2008; Ruiz de Velasco, 2015). Through a

qualitative case study research design that utilizes document analysis and extended

interviews, we gain insight into the experiences of CORE district leaders and tell the

story of CORE districts, including their successes as they advocated for the needs of their

students (Horsford et al., 2019), areas for continued work and the impact of the CORE

districts on state and federal education reform policy as they challenged the status quo of

federal and state accountability systems that did not meaningfully support and inform

their work.

Significance

The study of the establishment and continuing growth of the California CORE

districts and their response to these changes can contribute to our understanding of how

urban districts are resisting, coping, and thriving in the shifting education reform

landscape. Through their experiences of dealing with the impact of shifts of educational

policy reforms and how top-down reform policies have impeded and constrained the

work of districts, the study of the CORE districts and their implementation of structures

such as the School Quality Improvement System and peer accountability can provide

insight into the lessons the participating districts have learned through collaboration

within and across districts and made the work of district leaders less around compliance

and more about cross-district collaboration and mutual success across districts. The

CORE districts are not unlike similar large urban districts throughout the country that are

also under the same pressures and constraints of top-down accountability and have

limited opportunities for collaboration and mutual accountability.

7

Research Questions

When examining the impact of school reform policies and shifts toward a top-down

federal accountability model under NCLB, an important aspect to consider is not just

whether the policy was successful and achieved its intended outcomes of improved

student achievement, but to also consider the contextual and systematic complexities and

the unintended consequences and impact of a top down accountability model on the role

of district leaders as they operate within the local, state, and federal context of school

reform (Diem et al., 2019; Henig, 2013; Horsford et al., 2019). To adapt to these

accountability systems, leaders have moved away from focusing on serving a common

good and a moral imperative through public service to entrepreneurial and competitive

forms of leadership (Anderson et al., 2013; Fullan, 2011; Horsford et al., 2019). The story

of CORE district leaders and how they experienced, negotiated, and responded to these

constraints provides another narrative that leaders don’t have to wait or be constrained by

federal or state policy changes to meaningfully impact system reform and should find

alternative paths to advocate for the needs of their students (Darling-Hammond et al.,

2016). In order to better understand the conditions that led to the creation of the CORE

districts and their subsequent impact on urban school district leaders in California, the

following research questions guided the study:

1. What social, political, and economic forces led to the creation of California’s

CORE districts?

2. What are the governance and leadership models that characterize the CORE

districts?



An examination of these questions not only helps us understand the circumstances that

led to the establish of the CORE districts, but how their work impacted the policy

8

landscape in California and the learnings other district leaders can take from their

experiences.

Research Method

The study employed a qualitative case study research design (Creswell & Poth,

2018; Stake, 1978, 1995, 2003; Yazan, 2015; Yin, 1992) to examine how California’s

CORE districts experienced, negotiated, and responded to the shifting landscape of

education policy resulting from the expansion of neoliberal school reforms and top-down

federal accountability pressures. Incorporating interviews and a selection and analysis of

documents organized by the research questions, this methodology approach allows for a

presentation of the context that led to the establishment of the CORE districts in a

narrative that includes the voices from former and current CORE district leaders and

CORE central office leaders in order to learn about their experiences and how their roles

were impacted by the policy decisions made at the federal level (Creswell & Poth, 2018;

Hochschild, 2009).

Incorporating a critical policy analysis frame versus a more traditional approach to

policy analysis in the analysis of interview notes and documents allowed for a broader

conception of the ways various processes, people, and power play in how education

policy is created, understood, and experienced, especially at the district level, by urban

district leaders (Anderson et al., 2013; Horsford et al., 2019). In particular, critical policy

analysis is based on the following features: challenging the traditional notions of power,

politics, and governance; examining policy as a discourse and political spectacle;

centering the perspectives of the marginalized and oppressed; interrogating the

distribution of power and resources; and holding those in power accountable for policy

outcomes (Horsford et al., 2019). This approach to examining the educational policy

landscape also provides opportunities to identify the contextual and systemic

9

complexities of policies that traditional forms of policy analysis might overlook (Diem

et al., 2019).

The examination of the literature pertaining to the impact of the federal role on

districts, urban district leadership, and the establishment of the CORE districts has

identified gaps in the literature on how urban district leaders and their roles have shifted

as a result of federal policies and that policy implementation and monitoring is not a

linear process and that districts and district leaders can play a key role at institutional

actions in education reform movements (Darling-Hammond et al., 2016; Rorrer et al.,

2008). Understanding the intended and unintended consequences of federal policies on

urban district leaders and how the CORE districts experienced, negotiated, and responded

to this shifting landscape can contribute to the larger research on how to best help urban

district leaders navigate their roles in a shifting policy landscape. (Creswell & Poth,

2018; Horsford et al., 2019).

Summary of Findings

I present the findings of the study by describing the context and circumstances that

led to the decisions made by CORE district leaders and the resulting impact of those

decisions. Guided by Stake’s (1995) and Creswell’s and Poth’s (2018) approach to case

studies and incorporating features of critical policy analysis in the analytical framework I

used, documents and notes from interviews were integrated and analyzed in a holistic

way to identify the key themes that emerged from the findings as well as examine the

contextual and systematic complexities that impacted the educational policy landscape

that the CORE districts were operating within (Diem et al., 2019; Horsford et al., 2019).

These themes included frustration and impatience from the CORE districts around the

lack of support from federal and state agencies that was met with determination from the

CORE district leaders to create their own support structures. In both interview responses

10

and analyzed documents, a sense of urgency paired with a strong sense of their moral

imperative guided the CORE district leaders in taking their power back from a top-down

dysfunctional accountability system and creating their own accountability system that

uses data as a flashlight to inform their improvement work instead of a hammer that

penalizes districts for not meeting accountability targets as defined by top-down

accountability systems. Through the integration and analysis of multiple forms of data,

these key themes emerged in the findings about the work of CORE districts and their

subsequent successes and challenges. My approach to the presentation of the findings is

grounded in Creswell and Poth’s (2018) use of narrative in qualitative case studies as an

approach to highlight the tensions, causal conditions, and turning points that impacted the

decisions made by CORE district leaders.

Using a narrative frame, I first present the context that the CORE districts were

operating within, including the federal and state accountability policies and the vacuum

of support. I next describe key players involved in the case of the CORE districts,

including the federal, state, and CORE central office and district leaders and their

perspectives about the decisions made by the CORE district leaders in their approach to

school reform and system improvement. The chapter concludes with the response of the

CORE districts to the federal and state accountability structures and the outcome of their

response.

Role of the Researcher

As a teacher and administrator born and raised in California and who worked in

one of the CORE districts, I am uniquely positioned to tell the story of the CORE

districts, and this case study can provide insight and lessons for districts looking for

alternative approaches to their work. Regardless of where you might live and the local

context of your work, this case study is not just the story of the CORE districts, but the

11

story of all us who are driven by a moral imperative to reform the fragmented systems

and structures we work within as we look for innovative ways as educational leaders to

best support the needs of our school districts and communities.

Organization of the Study






analysis as an analytical framework, this study explored how California’s CORE districts

(i.e., Fresno Unified School District, Long Beach Unified School District, Los Angeles

Unified School District, Oakland Unified School District, San Francisco Unified School

District, and Santa Ana Unified School District) experienced, negotiated, and responded

to the shifting landscape of education policy resulting from the expansion of privatization

and neoliberal school reform.

Chapter II presents a review of the related literature, beginning with an overview of

the shifting education policy landscape at the federal and state level, including a

discussion of the high-stakes federal accountability systems and neoliberal school

reforms that district leaders found themselves contending with. This includes No Child

Left Behind and the use of top0down accountability systems and the waiver process, the

policy actors involved, and how educational leadership discourse shaped the narrative of

the education policy landscape. Next the chapter examines the nature of urban district-

level leadership, including governance and leadership models, and the circumstances that

led to the establishment of the CORE districts. The chapter then examines the CORE

districts themselves as a response to the shifting education policy landscape, including

12

the history, purpose, and demographics of the CORE districts, the policy context and

landscape, key education policy shifts taking place in California, and the challenges of

high-stakes accountability. The chapter closes with an overview of how a critical policy

analysis framework can provide a structure to analyze how the CORE districts challenged

traditional notions of power, politics, and governance structures and can frame our

understanding of the significance of the CORE districts and their work within the larger

educational policy landscape.

Chapter III presents an overview of how I conducted my study, including the use of

my research questions to select and organize my data, the process of selecting and

interviewing participants, and the selection of a narrative frame to present my findings

based on the themes that emerged from the analysis of the data.

Chapter IV presents the findings, including the context of federal and state

accountability, how districts were operating in a vacuum of support, and the state,

federal, and CORE district and central office players. The chapter also presents findings

about the establishment and work of the CORE districts and the successes and challenges

they have faced so far.

Chapter 5 presents a summary and discussion of the findings and the implications

of district leaders challenging the status quo as they are driven by their moral imperative

to locally impact system reform and use data as a flashlight, not a hammer. The chapter

then presents conclusions and recommendations for other districts leaders or federal and

state policy actors who are looking for similar ways to impact reform policies in a local

context.

The following definitions of key terms provide additional context for this study:

13

Definition of Terms

CORE Districts: California Office to Reform Education. Consortium established in 2010

of the largest urban school districts in California representing over one million

K-12 students (Marsh et al., 2016).

Educational Discourse: Language used in federal and state education policies that tends

to focus on performance and accountability and has shifted from supporting

democratic values and improvement of the individual (Carpenter et al., 2014).

Critical Policy Analysis: Focuses on the factors that would influence development and

implementation, such as power and governance structures, the impact of

discourse, considering multiple perspectives and not only the dominant narrative,

the impact of having access to resources to implement, and how to hold policy

makers accountable for the success of the policy (Horsford et al., 2019).

Direct: A causal chain between federal action and consequences for state education

policies (Henig & Lyon, 2018).

Drivers: Policy and strategy levers that have the least and best chance of driving

successful reform. A wrong driver is a deliberate policy force that has little

chance of achieving the desired result, while a right driver is one that ends up

achieving better measurable results (Fullan, 2011).

Education-specific: Initiatives primarily intended to affect schools (Henig & Lyon, 2018).

ESSA: Every Student Succeeds Act. Federal reauthorization in 2015 of the Elementary

and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). This legislation replaces the No Child Left

Behind Act (NCLB) and gave states greater responsibility in designing and

building their state accountability systems (Darling-Hammond et al., 2016).

Fault Lines: The shifts in educational decision-making, including movement from

traditional single-purpose institutions to more general-purpose government

14

structures, centralization versus decentralization at the federal level, and the

intersection of the public sector and private sector (Henig, 2013).

Federal Accountability: Accountability system of No Child Left Behind (NCLB)

requiring schools and districts to meet increasing proficiency targets each year.

Schools and districts not meeting these targets were identified as failing districts,

received sanctions, and were mandated to develop improvement plans and spend

federal dollars for specific interventions (Henig, 2013).

General Purpose: Federal policies outside of education that can have implications for

education (Henig & Lyon, 2018).

Indirect: Federal government decisions or non-decisions that do not directly mandate or

incentivize state or local governmental actions, but alter political dynamics

(Henig & Lyon, 2018).

Moral Imperative: The philosophy and theory of action that supports the selection of

particular drivers in service of raising the bar and closing the gap for groups of

students. This philosophy and theory of action should foster intrinsic motivation,

instructional improvement, teamwork, and allness (Fullan, 2011).

NCLB: No Child Left Behind. Federal reauthorization in 2002 of the Elementary and

Secondary Education Act (ESEA). The passage of NCLB marked a significant

shift in the level of federal involvement in holding states and districts accountable

for student achievement and progress (Henig, 2013; McGuinn, 2017).

NCLB Waivers: Process for applying and requesting flexibility within the federal

accountability system and in the use of federal funding to support the local needs

of students (Marsh et al., 2016).

Neoliberalism: The movement from a Keynesian welfare state or regulated capitalism

focused on working for a common good to a free market capitalism model

focused on accountability. This free-market accountability model has been

15

applied to current measurements of student achievement and how we measure

success of districts and educators (Anderson & Cohen, 2018).

Privatization: The act of contracting out or entering into public-private partnerships to

provide public services in response to dissatisfaction with unresponsive and

disinvested public institutions and infrastructure including education (Lipman,

2011).

Traditional Policy Analysis: A linear progression of defining the issue or problem,

adopting and implementing said policy, and then monitoring and evaluating the

effectiveness of the policy (Horsford et al., 2019).

Conclusion

As we get up each day and live our lives, our world and the earth beneath us are

constantly moving and shifting, though not always perceptible to most of us unless we

are scientists or researchers tracking these subtle movements. We tend not to think about

these shifts or plan for how we would prepare or respond until a significant event like an

earthquake, hurricane, or pandemic happens that results in damage and disruptions to our

daily routine and the dramatic loss of life. Many of us may do not pay attention to the

gradual shifts and building of tension along earthquake faults over time that ultimately

result in the release of the tension along those faults and the changes to the physical

landscape or our daily way of living.

When a significant earthquake or other seismic event happens, we question if we

could have predicted it or if we missed the signs it was coming, something scientists and

researchers spend their careers trying to monitor and track. After the tension is released

and there is a brief heightened awareness of the disruptions of our normal lives, there are

immediate reactive responses and calls for improved preparedness and changes in

policies and systems, but we quickly forget as we crave a return to life as we once knew

16

it and work on rebuilding and returning to our daily routines, reluctantly adapting to the

changes caused by these shifts. We are often so busy returning to our routines that we

don’t take the time to critically reflect on how those changes and shifts have changed our

lives, our professional roles, and the new lens we use to view the world around us.

As educational leaders and just like the CORE districts, we are all experiencing,

negotiating, and responding to the shifting landscape of education policy resulting from

the expansion of neoliberal school reforms and top-down federal accountability

pressures. The story of the CORE districts and how they responded to these shifts in the

educational policy landscape is the story of us. Their story provides an opportunity not

only to learn from their experiences, but to also reflect on the impact of these shifts on

our own experiences as educational leaders.

17

Chapter II

REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE

Introduction

The purpose of this study is to describe and examine how the constraints on urban







Unified School District, Oakland Unified School District, San Francisco Unified School

District, and Santa Ana Unified School District) experienced, negotiated, and responded

to the shifting landscape of education policy resulting from the expansion of privatization

and neoliberal school reform.

To frame the context and parameters of my study, it is important to understand the

larger policy landscape at the federal and state level that ultimately led to the actions

taken by the CORE district leaders to establish the CORE districts and determine the

focus of their work. This chapter begins with an overview of the shifting education policy

landscape at the federal and state level, including a discussion of the high-stakes federal

accountability systems and neoliberal school reforms that district leaders found

themselves contending with. This includes No Child Left Behind and the use of top-down

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accountability systems and the waiver process, the policy actors involved, and how

educational leadership discourse shaped the narrative of the education policy landscape.

Next the chapter examines the nature of urban district level leadership, including

governance and leadership models, and the circumstances that led to the establishment of

the CORE districts, including the changing complexities and expectations for urban

school leaders, the beliefs held by school leaders that inform their perspective about the

underlying purpose of their role, how the role of educational leaders has been reframed,

the impact of neoliberalism and the marketization of urban public education on district

leaders, and the common narratives in urban public education about district leadership.

This provides context to understand how the CORE districts worked together to challenge

the fragmented federal and state accountability structures that impeded meaningful

improvement work within and across their districts. Next, the chapter examines the

CORE districts themselves as a response to the shifting education policy landscape,

including the history, purpose, and demographics of the CORE districts, the policy

context and landscape, key education policy shifts taking place in California, and the

challenges of high-stakes accountability. The chapter closes with an examination of

critical policy analysis and challenging of traditional notions of power, politics, and

governance structures that frames our understanding of the significance of the CORE

districts and their work within the larger educational policy landscape.

A Shifting Education Policy Landscape

The recent education policy landscape and the impact of federal and state policies

on local districts since No Child Left Behind can feel jarring and disconnected to those

who deal with the impact of the lack of coherence and transitions from one policy reform

to the next, each with its own purpose and rationale. The federal government, in

particular, can impede or facilitate the work of states through a range of budgetary,

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legislative, and regulatory policies (Henig & Lyon, 2018). Some of these actions can

steer or constrain state actions, such as NCLB, which required states to intervene when

schools and districts failed to make adequate yearly progress. Others can be short-lived

and eliminated by budget cuts or impacted by other agencies outside of the U.S

Department of Education (Henig, 2013; Henig & Lyon, 2018).

Using the metaphor of fault lines and shifting tectonics helps frame current

research in the area of educational policy and school reform and illustrates the constant

movement and tension between federal and state education policy and governance. Three

main fault lines in public education were identified and discussed by Henig (2013) and

McGuinn (2017): centralization versus decentralization, the public sector versus private

sector, and single purpose versus general purpose. In centralization versus

decentralization, Henig (2013) reminds us that public education in the United States has

historically been handled by state and local governments and that the federal government

had limited power over education. Though states had power to make decisions, they

rarely interfered in local politics, and there was a common understanding that decisions

regarding education should be made by educators at the district level. Even state

departments of education and state superintendents of educations had little governing

authority over what was happening at the local level. Over time, this sense of individual

control has moved toward consolidation of school districts and using education as a tool

for economic development, with governors and state legislatures taking more of an

interest in educational policy. At the same time, there was growing interest in education

from the federal government and the release of the seminal report A Nation at Risk

fueling this interest, with modern presidents including George W. Bush and Barack

Obama promoting education platforms through policies such as No Child Left Behind

(NCLB) and the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA).

A second fault line in modern education policy (Henig 2013) lies in the tension

between the authority allocated to the public versus private sector. This tension lies in the

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idea of providing mandatory public education and entities such as non-profit

organizations, charters, communities, and other organizations influencing how education

is provided and supported. Battles around school desegregation have also influenced this

tension, with families refusing to send their children to integrated schools and looking for

alternative educational options, with some claiming that the responsibility for educating

children lies with parents and not the government. Another aspect of this fault line is the

argument that market forces and forcing schools to compete for students would result in

improved levels of innovations and responsiveness. The monopoly of public education

was challenged by the rise of vouchers and charter schools and the perception that

American public education was not preparing students for the global economy.

The third fault line described by Henig (2013) deals with the tension between

general purpose versus single purpose governance. Previously and traditionally, single

purpose institutions, such as departments of education, were created by federal and state

governments to carry out policies that may spill over geographic boundaries of counties,

cities, and states. The rationale for states creating single purpose governments included

being more efficient and focused in their areas of expertise and are less influenced by

partisan politics and can make decisions based on merit and evidence, not political

influence. Single purpose governments also make it clearer who to hold accountable for

decisions versus general purpose governments where it can become challenging to

determine the origin and rationale for particular policies. But the structures of single

purpose governments that often oversee education policy decisions make decisions in a

dysfunctional isolated environment where general purpose governments structures can

help coordinate efforts across various agencies. Educational policy has become so

complex that local agencies such as school districts no longer operate in isolation and

state and federal policies impact their jurisdiction. In Henig’s study of states and their

establishment of single purpose governance, California is most prone to this practice,

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with seven single purpose governance structures for every one general purpose

governance structure (p. 14).

High-stakes Federal Accountability

During the No Child Left Behind era, the federal government attempted to control

and drive student achievement through the use of targets and sanctions tied to a narrow

definition of student success, such as student test scores in reading and math and high

school graduation rates. While graduation rates did improve during this time, concerns

have been raised about test-based accountability and its impact on the narrowing of the

curriculum with a focus on math and reading at the expense of untested subjects such as

science, history, art, and music (Darling-Hammond et al., 2016).

The 2015 reauthorization of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act as

the Every Students Succeeds Act (ESSA) opened up new ways to define student and

school success and, in contrast to NCLB, allowed for more state responsibility in

designing and building their accountability systems and determining supports and

interventions for schools and districts (Darling-Hammond et al., 2016).

Traditionally the focus of school reform has seen schools as the unit of change and

center of reform, with the work of districts considered secondary. Schools are seen as the

vital delivery system and the state the policy setter, with other structures in between seen

as less important. Early education reform efforts in the United States sought mainly to

expand or improve educational inputs, such as longer school days, increased

requirements for graduation, and better teachers, to ensure competency in basic skills.

Other reform movements focused on decentralization, professionalization, and bottom-up

change and an active involvement of those closest to instruction (Darling-Hammond &

Plank, 2015; Rorrer et al., 2008). The most recent trend in school reform focused on a

coherent systemic strategy that emphasized national standards and assessments. In all of

these approaches, the role of local school districts in reform efforts was

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underemphasized, with emphasis directed instead toward the efforts of schools, teachers,

state and federal policymaking bodies, private groups and industries, and university

schools of education (Carpenter et al., 2014; Rorrer et al., 2008).

District instructional leaders generate will by being personally engaged in all

aspects of instruction and instruction-related reforms as well as establishing the vision,

focus, and goals to support instruction. Providing instructional leadership requires more

than simply generating will, and this must be paired with the district’s capacity and

ability to enact its will. Capacity includes the extent that the schools and the district had

the knowledge, skills, personnel, and other resources to carry out decisions (Rorrer et al.,

2008).

Some urban education leaders, in particular, have dealt with the disparities in urban

public schools, such as inequitable allocation of resources, racial segregation,

criminalization, lack of space for genuine involvement from the communities and

cultures most affected, and marginalization of working-class students of color (Anderson

et al., 2013; Lipman, 2011; Marsh et al., 2016). Urban education leaders more than

education leaders in suburban or rural areas have been impacted by the restructuring of

education through forms of top-down punitive accountability, prescriptive standards,

increased business involvement, centralized accountability, and leadership redefined as

corporate managerialism (Anderson et al., 2013; Lipman, 2011). Michael Casserly,

executive director of the Council of Great City Schools, who has participated in

reauthorizations of the Elementary and Secondary Act, concluded that while local school

districts would be natural opponents of a strong federal presence in the oversight of local

schools, some urban school leaders have come to rely on the federal government over the

years as a key partner and ally in pursuing reform and serving poor children and children

of color (Casserly, 2017). Urban districts have borne the brunt of federal sanctions, and

the waiver process launched during the Obama administration was popular in that it

provided relief from having to provide costly and questionably effective supplemental

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services. It allowed some urban districts like the CORE districts in California to pursue

reforms that the state would not support, but urban district leaders were also concerned

that the approval of ESSA represented a fundamental shift toward state autonomy that

threatened to override the strategic alignment of urban schools and federal support for the

nation’s neediest students (Casserly, 2017; Hess & Eden, 2017).

The passage of ESSA and the transition from NCLB marked a move to a more

holistic approach to accountability by encouraging multiple measures of school and

student success and opportunities for local innovation and giving state leaders the

responsibility of designing systems that address inequalities in student learning

opportunities and outcomes (Sampson & Horsford, 2017). While the approach under

NCLB was problematic, its intent was to ensure success for traditionally underserved

students. ESSA also eliminated NCLB’s Annual Yearly Progress (AYP) system that set

unrealistic targets for improving students’ performance based on test scores in two

subjects; the sanctions for failing to reach those targets narrowed schools’ focus to those

two tests at the cost of ignoring other areas. Measurement systems such as the CORE

districts’ School Quality Improvement System (SQIS) measure a more comprehensive set

of indicators that include the range of skills and competencies needed to be successful

upon high school graduation (Darling-Hammond et al., 2016; Henig et al., 2018).

The passage of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in 2002 was not only a

reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) but also marked

a significant shift in the level of federal involvement in holding states and districts

accountable for student achievement and progress. Since the 1950s, federal policymakers

have identified three major arguments for increased federal involvement in education:

racial (fixing the legacy of racial injustice), national security (promoting defense

research), and economic (alleviating poverty). Each of these rationales mutated over time

but continued to provide a justification for federal expansion. The racial rationale shifted

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under George W. Bush from integration and racial access to racial achievement

(McGuinn, 2017).

Out of concerns that American students were not prepared to compete in a global

economy, through the passage of NCLB, the federal government shifted the focus on

inputs and equity by increasing expenditures in communities where resources had been

limited to a focus on outputs and holding schools, teachers, and students accountable for

meeting measurable standards of academic achievement (Darling-Hammond et al., 2016;

Henig, 2013; Ruiz de Velasco, 2015). NCLB included provisions, such as requiring

failing schools to offer students supplemental services that could be provided privately

and that teachers be considered “highly qualified.”

Neoliberal School Reform

As schools and districts under NCLB did not meet their accountability targets and

received sanctions such as mandates on how to spend federal dollars for specific

interventions such as supplemental services and that those services could be privately

provided, education policy actors and philanthropic organizations such as the Bill and

Melinda Gates Foundation, the Susan and Michael Dell Foundation, the Walton

Foundation, Bain Capital, and American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) have

worked to gain influence at the state and federal level over the development of education

policy with the goal of privatizing and marketizing public education and gaining financial

access through a partnership between private corporations and state legislatures, a

strategic alliance for those involved (Anderson et al., 2013; Anderson & Donchik, 2016).

Researchers examining urban education and the history of reform efforts, including

Anderson et al. (2013), have acknowledged the powerful impact that policy insiders have

on the development or influence on policy, including elected officials, staffers, lobbyists,

business and civic leaders, and policy experts. While a few may acknowledge the role of

institutions on perpetuating inequity for groups of students, policy insiders maintain a

25

deficit view of why there continue to be gaps in educational outcomes and that families

of color or working-class families do not value education and ultimately own the blame

for their students’ lack of educational success (Bertrand et al., 2015). How we describe

this inequity impacts the development and implementation of education policy.

The critical discourse of various policy actors, such as state legislators, governors,

state school board members, district-level school board members, urban school

superintendents, and education executives, presenting the narrative that the public

education system is beyond repair and wasteful of public resources is supported by public

policies around neighborhood development and revitalization (Lipman, 2011). The reality

of these new reforms disguises the desire of neoliberals to replicate the patterns of the

past (Lipman, 2011; Wells, 2014). Anderson and Donchik (2016) have examined the

influence of “policy entrepreneurs” that include philanthropists, think tanks, lobbyists,

and advocacy organizations and their impact on the privatization and marketing of public

education. Under the guise of school reform efforts, policy actors such as the Bill and

Melinda Gates Foundation, the Susan and Michael Dell Foundation, the Walton

Foundation, Bain Capital, and ALEC have sought to influence policy developments that

allowed for market control and individual choice that would help those most at

disadvantage, but instead competed with traditional education policy influencers and

makers, such as unions and professional associations. These new policy actors have

helped perpetuate the current view that education is a commodity and should be governed

by the rules of the free market rather than traditional views of the purpose of education to

provide opportunities for all students and prepare an educated citizenry.

Carpenter et al. (2014) have also focused on the shifting language in educational

policy and how this has impacted the expectations of educational leaders. This includes

defining educational purpose, defining effective leaders and the processes for evaluating

them, and determining the boundaries of educational policy. The language around

marketization and choice, management and surveillance, and performance and

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accountability now impacts the language around federal and state education policies; this

has greatly impacted specifically the evaluation of public school leaders, including new

parameters for educational leadership and a narrowed concept of the evaluation of an

effective educational leader. Researchers conclude that commonly held understandings of

education and its purpose have shifted, not just in the United States, but globally, moving

from language supporting democratic values and the improvement of the individual to

language focused on performance and accountability (Carpenter et al., 2014).

In the analysis of current research of the impact of neoliberal education reform

policies, one finds that the discourse of school reform hides the opportunity for those

with power and influence over the domain of the public sector. Under the guise of saving

capitalism, those in power deploy their dominance over largely African American and

Latinx urban communities’ public schools, abolishing elected governance bodies in urban

school districts, thus stripping them of the democratic processes of school governance.

School closings, takeovers by education management organizations, expansion of

privately-run charter schools, and mayoral control of school systems are the order of the

day. To ensure their control, the processes of incarceration, surveillance, and punishment

are used to maintain order (Lipman, 2013). Some educational leaders have fallen into the

leadership model of maintaining order and safety in their schools and districts rather than

developing students academically and are supported by families and the community who

desire educational leaders to operate as a “strict father” rather than a nurturing parent

focused on creating a nurturing environment (Horsford, 2018, p. 7).

These changes in governance structures have contributed to the marketization of

urban public education, the result of federal policies such as No Child Left Behind and

Race to the Top, and the simultaneous development of well-organized advocacy

movements that helped present our current market-oriented education “reforms” as the

ultimate solution for what was perceived as the issues plaguing the public education

system in the United States and shaped the current education discourse (Anderson et al.,

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2013). Those leading these reform efforts sold their plans on the promise that changes in

teacher evaluation systems based on student performance, access to more school choice,

changes in the leadership structure such as mayoral control, and the mass closure of

“failing” schools that would be replaced with new schools and staffs would increase

student performance and narrow the achievement gap based on race and income (Weiss

& Long, 2013).

Researchers such as Lipman (2013) and Trujillo (2012) have examined how urban

school districts and educational leaders are impacted by the expectations of high-stakes

accountability, and how governance structures have shifted from incorporating

democratic processes to more autocratic behavior that involves less influence from

educational leaders. The goals of school leaders around teaching and learning shifted to

competitive and individual means of achievement. The decision-making process and

control regarding instructional and administrative practices shifted and were now

determined centrally, not locally. It is a false narrative that schools and districts are

granted autonomy in return for student achievement results; rather, they actually face a

reduction in local control in urban settings. Privileged communities, in contrast, can

insulate themselves from the high-stakes policies that risk curtailing local control;

however, poorer urban districts have no such protection and are placed at a clear

disadvantage when measured through narrow parameters set at the federal and state level

(Lipman, 2013; Trujillo, 2012).

“A fiction of tolerance and a myth of neutrality” (Riehl, 2000, p. 56) continues to

dominate the public narrative that is still communicated in our formal education

structures, whether in schools of educational leadership in higher education, governing

bodies at the local, state, or federal level, or schools across the country. There is

agreement that the academic discourse and the language we use in various rhetorical

frames dominate and influence how we communicate the purpose of education and

systematically use language to include or exclude specific groups, and educational

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leaders must understand how to best navigate these narratives. A closer examination of

the idealistic narrative we tell in the United States of how we all share the same “vision

of democracy, a democracy that respects every form of honest work, includes people

from every economic and social class, and cultivates a deep understanding of

interdependence” (Glass & Nygreen, 2011, p. 1) contradicts and is in direct opposition to

the reality students face and fails to acknowledge the intentional inequalities in our

educational structure and lack of access for disadvantaged and underrepresented students.

The public discourse surrounding the political ideology around “College for All”

and the promised benefits for racially, culturally, and linguistically diverse students are

often not realized, and businesses and corporations have used this narrative to ensure

their access to an employable workforce. While on one hand, terms like “College for All”

communicate on the surface access for greater opportunity and social mobility, two ideas

that serve as the foundational philosophy of education in the United States, it is argued

that this discourse has in fact continued to allow fundamental structures and systems that

perpetuate inequality within our educational system and society to remain. Those who

sell this narrative to low-income, racially, culturally, and linguistically diverse students

who would most benefit from equal access to higher education fail to prepare these

students for the realities of entering the world of higher education. Thus, the students

most at risk often find the dream of access elusive and are not prepared for the financial

consequences of college loans and other debt incurred to pursue a degree (Glass &

Nygreen, 2011).

Terms such as “College for All” used by educational leaders and policy leaders

also do not define the distinctions between the different levels, types, and quality of

colleges and how underrepresented and disadvantaged students have been

disproportionally taken advantage of by for-profit and non-accredited colleges and trade

schools (Glass & Nygreen, 2011). Researchers have also examined the rhetoric of the

standards, testing, and accountability movement that arose as a response to A Nation at

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Risk and the political concerns that arose from concerns regarding the rising tide of

mediocrity. The “College for All” rhetoric that emerged as a response to closing the

achievement gap countered the earlier movement for increasing accountability for student

performance; this is an example of how educational leaders did not provide a counter-

narrative, but instead implemented the policies around preparing all students for college,

leaving a whole group of students interested in pursuing career options without supports.

Conservative politicians, in particular, could argue they were championing the

improvement of education for the poor without revealing their true intentions of meeting

the needs of global capitalism by privatizing public schools through mechanisms such as

charter schools and vouchers (Glass & Nygreen, 2011). Politicians have also used the

narrative that if all students are held to high standards and high expectations, the gap

between lower performing and higher performing students would be reduced, thus

justifying the need to create high-stakes accountability structures and monitoring of

student performance. The voice of educational leaders in this conversation has not been

fully considered, with most leaders forced into a reactionary rather than a proactive

stance.

Urban District-Level Leadership

As current urban school leaders navigate an increasingly complex environment

impacted by various policy issues, such as who is now involved in the influence and

development of educational policy, they must develop a revised awareness of the

emerging governance structures that now influence the particular policies and reform

movements that impact their daily work in school buildings and districts. Urban

education leaders must adapt to a constantly changing policy discourse and identify the

key players and how they are framing the policy discourse. Examples of this include the

impact of policy decisions on providing educational opportunities and influencing the

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diversity or lack thereof in schools and districts within a policy frame that promotes high-

stakes accountability, resegregation, and privatization (Rice, 2015). These have shifted

the control over education and now represent new competition to traditional forms of

governance and power over education policy, such as local school boards and

professional organizations (Anderson & Donchik, 2016). Educational leaders must now

compete and fight against those who desire to dismantle regulatory policy and social

welfare protections designed to protect those most vulnerable within the education

system.

Governance and Leadership Models

In addition to providing a lens and language that will support educational leaders as

they advocate for their students and schools, educational leaders must also understand the

new governance construct they work within. There has been an increased emphasis by

politicians at both the state and federal level to have a strong association with education

policies, marking a shift from local control by traditional school boards (Henig, 2013). In

addition, some large cities such as New York City and Chicago have seen a consolidation

of power over school systems through mayoral control. Community and housing

development policies that attempt to encourage social mixing and integrated housing

have also impacted the development of new schools and restricting of existing schools,

resulting in competition for limited resources. Students already struggling are impacted

by this in the form of declining enrollment and loss of school funding (Lipman, 2011).

This scenario of free market competition entering the education realm results in

educational leaders forced into positions of marketing and promoting their school in

addition to the pressures around high-stakes accountability, rather than focusing on the

task of educating students.

Districts and district leaders deal, both directly and indirectly, with a fragmented

structure of state agencies primarily focused on providing technical support and

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implementing federal and state policy initiatives (Taylor, 2014). In California, these

agencies include: the California Legislature, the California State Superintendent of Public

Instruction, the California Department of Education, the California State Board of

Education, the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing, the California

Collaborative for Education Excellence, and the County Offices of Education (Taylor,

2014). In response, district leaders throughout the state provided feedback on ways the

state could improve these structures, including breaking away from a compliance

mentality of supporting schools and districts and providing more local flexibility.

At the same time, California was dealing with a fiscal crisis that saw the state’s

per-pupil expenditures, already among the lowest in the nation, drop from $8,952 to

$7,452 between 2006-2007 and 2010-2011. Districts were forced to make drastic layoffs

and program cuts, and this added to the frustration felt by district leaders. The climate of

the fiscal crisis made applying for Race to the Top funding a key priority, and California

submitted an application along with 39 other states. The state finished in 27th place, and

out of frustration, state education leaders at first did not want to submit an application

during the second application phase. They felt that the compromises they had to make

among various stakeholder groups to meet the federal requirements of committing to the

priority areas of standards and assessments, data systems to support instruction, great

teachers and leaders, and turnaround of lowest-achieving schools ultimately undermined

the effectiveness of the application (Knudson & Garibaldi, 2015).

Urban school district leaders in particular have been impacted by the convergence

and intersection of centralization versus decentralization, the public sector versus private

sector, and single purpose versus general purpose, and the shifts among these fault lines

have happened gradually across multiple policy decisions and administrations (Henig,

2013). The experience in California, in particular, can help tell the story of these shifts

and how districts and district leaders have adapted and responded to these changes.

32

2013 proved to be a turning point in this approach in California when two key

policy decisions at the state level responded to the tension between the desire of districts

to regain more local control and the desire to maintain compliance and accountability at

the state and federal level. The first involved the implementation of the Local Control

Funding Formula (LCFF), which transferred to the local level major decision-making

authority over how to allocate resources to meet the needs of students. The second was

the Local Control and Accountability Plan (LCAP) process, which encourages the use of

multiple measures of school performance used locally to support continuous

improvement (March et al., 2016).

It can be argued that education leaders have been slow in their response to shifts

within policy discourse and now find themselves at a disadvantage and reacting to the

decisions impacting the operations of districts and schools versus an integral participant

of the policy discourse. We continue to perpetuate a false narrative that all students in the

United States have the right to and are provided access to a free public education that

serves as the great equalizer and provides equal opportunities to students regardless of

where they live or racial background. In reality, the structure we operate in within and

continue to support contradicts the public narrative we present to students, families, and

the public. Using frames such as Critical Policy Analysis to clearly articulate their

concerns and propose solutions, educational leaders can reclaim and redefine their role

within the policymaking process (Diem et al., 2019; Horsford et al, 2019).

Current research supports the need to reframe the role of educational leaders with a

focus on developing activist leadership for current practitioners and those in current

leadership programs (Horsford, 2018). Those in educational leadership roles must not

simply implement policy, but actively defend and promote public education as the

common good in a democratic society and challenge the assumptions that influence

policy development.

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As the country has become more politically polarized, as evidenced in the 2016

presidential election, so too has the conversation around the purpose and aims of public

education, with those with access to financial and political resources influencing the

reframing of the conversation. Through utilizing market forces, they have created

communities and schools in alignment with their educational philosophies, perpetuating

the educational inequities that have long existed in our country. Educational leaders must

resist from within and, as advocates, lead the conversation around systematic change.

American education can no longer focus simply on high-stakes testing and accountability

in an attempt to close the achievement gap, but rather refocus and reflect on the ideals of

American education and how educational leaders supported or undermined those ideals

either intentionally or unintentionally (Horsford, 2018). When education leaders do not

question the soundness and rationale of policies that impact their professional lives, they

unwittingly participate and support the structures that are slowly and systematically

taking away their power to influence and meaningfully participate in larger policy

discussions (Anderson et al., 2013).

The role of education leaders as activists is impacted by the concept of culturally

relevant leadership as described in a framework that outlines the four components that

can assist current and aspiring leaders in incorporating culturally relevant leadership into

their daily work and support their work as activists (Horsford et al., 2011). These include

understanding the political context that governs and influences the educational settings

leaders must function in, including the highly charged and politicized context

surrounding student achievement and school performance. Second, leaders must also

assist their teachers and staff in developing learning environments that value cultural and

ethnic diversity and ensure that teachers understand how those environments can impact

student achievement. The third component involves the leaders’ personal journey growth

in their ability to work with students, families, and communities as they question their

long-held beliefs about students who come from racial, ethnic, economic, or linguistic

34

backgrounds different from their own. The fourth element involves their commitment to

ensuring equity, engagement, and excellence for all students and stakeholders, which

includes the tone and expectations for their school and district community. These four

elements of the framework are essential to the work of culturally relevant leaders. The

Interstate School Leaders Licensure Consortium Standards have recently been updated to

reflect the important role of leaders to promote, understand, appreciate, and use

effectively the communities’ diverse cultural, social, and intellectual resources (Horsford

et al., 2011). These components can help prepare leaders to advocate for changes in

education policy.

Other policy analysts, such as Rice (2015), also describe similar recommendations,

but Rice goes even further in recommending that policymakers and the public should

refocus on the broad goals of public education, including civic responsibility, democratic

values, and social and economic opportunities. Rice also recommends that all schools,

not just a select few, have all the resources needed to support student success, such as

effective teachers, challenging and relevant curricula, and a safe and supportive learning

environment. Policymakers should also expand the scope of schools in high poverty areas

to include a variety of services, such as health clinics, parental education, and other

services, to meet the social, physical, cognitive, and economic needs of students and

families, and educational leaders need to provide a critical role in these conversations.

Rice finally recommends that policymakers develop and promote policies that are

supportive of equal opportunity, such as using achievement testing for formative rather

than high-stakes purposes, avoiding polices that allow for school resegregation, and

renewing a commitment to public education rather than continuing to contradict this

commitment by the continued marketization and privatization of our current educational

structure.

Marketization has impacted how educational leaders are prepared. From non-

traditional preparation programs to alternative credentialing, is it no longer seen by some

35

as a requirement to have previous education experience as a teacher to become an

educational leader. With marketization, the perception of education leaders shifted to that

of chief operation officer, and the roles of principals, superintendents, and chancellors

have been filled by those from the business world (Anderson & Cohen, 2018).

Several factors that hinder the implementation of these recommendations include

the lack of critical examination of the interconnections between class, gender, and race

and its impact on policy discourse (Apple, 2004). There are also shifting educational

policies and practices that educational leaders are not aware of or they lack support in

learning how to navigate the new governance landscape that utilizes discourse described

by Apple as “romantic possibilitarian” rhetoric. This rhetoric of possibility focuses on the

ideal of possibility and not the realities of what is actually needed to change some of our

most pressing issues, such as providing educational opportunities for all students. Within

this discourse, there are competing visions of what is considered legitimate knowledge

and what constitutes a “just” society that are deeply rooted in conflicting views of racial,

class, and gender in our society and these conflicts hinder the adoption of many of these

policy recommendations.

It is also pointed out by some policy analysts that policy actors have lost sight or

choose to ignore the traditional and widely held assumption that the purpose of public

education is to serve the social good. Social entrepreneurs, for example, may espouse that

they choose to enter the policy arena to do what is best for students, but their framing of

the discourse and what plays out on the ground in classrooms and schools are

disconnected and are a contradiction (Rice, 2015). This movement away from the

idealized notion of public education in the United States as the great equalizer, as first

described by Horace Mann, has placed urban educational leaders into a space they may

feel unfamiliar or unprepared to participate in.

In response, educational leaders must find ways to reframe and redefine what it

means to be an educational leader as well as finding ways to navigate these new

36

governance structures and become actively involved with the development and framing

of educational policy versus waiting passively for ill-developed policies to be imposed on

their schools and districts under the misleading guise of supporting student improvement

through addressing the student achievement gap and providing school choice and

opportunity for all students. They must also critically analyze the impact of current and

potential policies and clearly articulate their concerns and challenge policies that do not

truly support what is best for students and are not in alignment with the purpose of public

education. If educational leaders do not find ways to advocate for what is best for their

students and their school, they risk a continued deterioration of their influence on the

development of educational policy and a widening of the opportunity gap for those

students who can least afford it.

During the No Child Left Behind era, the federal government attempted to control

and drive student achievement through the use of targets and sanctions tied to a narrow

definition of student success, such as student test scores in reading and math and high

school graduation rates. While graduation rates did improve during this time, concerns

have been raised about test-based accountability and its impact on the narrowing of the

curriculum with a focus on math and reading at the expense of untested subjects such as

science, history, art, and music (Darling-Hammond et al., 2016).

The 2015 reauthorization of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act as

the Every Students Succeeds Act (ESSA) opened up new ways to define student and

school success and, in contrast to NCLB, allowed for more state responsibility in

designing and building their accountability systems and determining supports and

interventions for schools and districts (Darling-Hammond et al., 2016).

District instructional leaders generate will by being personally engaged in all

aspects of instruction and instructional-related reforms as well as establishing the vision,

focus, and goals to support instruction. Providing instructional leadership requires more

than simply generating will, and this must be paired with the district’s capacity and

37

ability to enact its will. Capacity includes the extent to which the schools and the district

have the knowledge, skills, personal, and other resources to carry out decisions (Rorrer et

al., 2008). Given that districts continue to function as the dominant local governance

structure for schooling the United States, the approach by researchers, practitioners, and

policymakers not to fully acknowledge the nested nature of schools within districts and

the instrumental role of districts in systematic reform is an area to explore further through

examination of district-level reform efforts, such as those taken on by the CORE districts

(Henig, 2013).

According to Hess and Eden (2017), urban education leaders, in particular, have

dealt with the disparities in urban public schools such as inequitable allocation of

resources, racial segregation, criminalization, lack of space for genuine involvement from

the communities and cultures most affected, and marginalization of working-class

students of color (Anderson et al., 2013; Lipman, 2011). Urban education leaders are also

dealing with policy players working not only to impact the development of education

policy, but also to disrupt the established processes and paths followed to develop policy

in a desire to return to a perceived time of a shared culture and higher standards that

involves the preservation of the traditions and status quo of those in control (Apple,

2004). Most are familiar with the traditional forms of wielding influence, such as

lobbyists meeting with state and federal legislatures, but when the United States Supreme

Court ruled in 2010 that corporations have the same freedom of speech rights and that

money is considered a form of free speech, the door was opened to allow not only

influence over bills introduced but also the policy discourse itself surrounding the

construction of policy framing.

Emerging from this are new modalities of governance, such as think tanks, public-

private relationships, aggressive forms of philanthropy, and social entrepreneurialism.

One example was Race to the Top’s strategy of influencing state-level policy change by

encouraging states to compete for federally funded grants in return for changing

38

legislation on charter school caps and implementing new teacher evaluation systems that

were in alignment with the desired outcomes of the federal government (Anderson &

Donchik, 2016).

A specific example of these changes in governing structures and the difference

between modalities and strategies is found in the policies surrounding school choice and

changing student enrollment demographics (Wells, 2014). Wells, in particular, explores

how the educational reforms of accountability and school choice have been framed as

solutions to address the racial achievement gap and the perceived lack of student

performance in public schools at the end of the Civil Rights Era. These policies often use

discourse around “race neutral” or “colorblind” accountability and are based on narrow

definitions of school quality that can and are manipulated by those intimately involved

with in the policy discourse (Khalifa et al., 2016). It is often the case that education

leaders have little to no influence on these policies but directly feel the impact and the

pressure of losing students to competing schools and districts and struggling to find ways

with limited resources to support the students that remain.

As a result of the federal role on the changing governing structures, school leaders,

such as those leading CORE districts, felt a diminished ability to make decisions that

impacted their schools and students at the local level. School leaders learned in this shift

and growing influence of the federal government that they must have a critical self-

awareness of themselves, their values, and their beliefs when it comes to serving

underrepresented and disadvantaged students. Leaders may not have this awareness, but

this is a trait that needs development as education leaders become advocates for the needs

of their schools and districts (Khalifa et al., 2016). Leaders must examine their beliefs

around student learning if they truly believe that all students, and in particular students

with diverse cultural and economic needs, can be academically successful. If school

leaders believe these students deserve access to a high-quality education and that

education is the best hope to break the cycle of oppression and poverty, then how does

39

that belief live in the actions of the leader? Upon an analysis of suspension and expulsion

data, what is the demographic representation of students most often disciplined? In

Advanced Placement and higher math and science courses, are the enrollment processes

for these courses a subtle form of gatekeeping that closes off opportunities to pursue

higher education? The systems and structures one observes in a school building or district

directly reflect on the values of the leader and give a more accurate sense of what that

leader truly holds as most important and not open to negotiation or influence from

internal or external influences (Khalifa et al., 2016).

The CORE Districts—A Moral Imperative

The establishment of the CORE districts represents a collaborative partnership

among the largest and most diverse urban schools in California. According to the

National Center for Education Statistics (2020), urbanized areas and urban clusters are

densely settled “cores” of Census-defined blocks with adjacent densely settled

surrounding areas. Areas with populations of 50,000 or more are designated as urbanized

areas. Based on this definition, 764 of the 13,491 school districts in the United States are

identified as urban districts, and 149 of the 944 districts in California are identified as

urban districts. All CORE districts are considered urban districts and are on the National

Center for Education Statistics list of the nation’s 100 largest school districts based on

number of students and number of schools within each district (see Table 1). At 633,621

students, Los Angeles Unified School District is the largest school district in California

and the second largest in the United States.

40

Table 1. 2018-2019 CORE District Enrollment and Number of Schools

District Enrollment Number of Schools

Fresno Unified School District 73,356 100

Long Beach Unified School District 76,428 84

Los Angeles Unified School District 633,621 785

Oakland Unified School District 49,760 91

San Francisco Unified School District 60,133 114

Santa Ana Unified School District 54,505 56 Source: National Center for Educational Statistics, 2020

The total enrollment of students in the six CORE districts of Fresno Unified School

District, Long Beach Unified School District, Los Angeles Unified School District,

Oakland Unified School District, San Francisco Unified School District, and Santa Ana

Unified School District is almost 1 million students and represents almost 20% of

California’s total K-12 student enrollment (see Table 2). The CORE districts also

represent the diverse subgroups and high percentages of English Learners, Reclassified

English Proficient, Special Education students, and students who qualify for Free and

Reduced- Price Meals (see Table 3). Under NCLB, the CORE districts were measured on

the progress these subgroups made each year on annual assessments and received

sanctions for subgroups not making adequate progress as they worked on closing the

achievement gap. As the CORE districts continued to struggle to meet these proficiency

targets, they were considered by the federal government as program improvement

districts.

41

Tota

l

73,2

49

73,2

21

607,

723

50,2

02

60,3

90

51,4

82

916,

267

6,18

6,27

8

Whi

te

6,73

5

9,13

0

64,7

60

5,17

5

8,62

3

1,31

3

95,7

36

1,41

7,05

5

Two

or

Mor

e R

aces

1,61

5

2,49

5

1,34

4

2,00

0

3,30

7

394

11,1

55

223,

967

Paci

fic

Isla

nder

270

952

1,72

7

457

519

62

3,98

7

28,0

85

Hisp

anic

or

Latin

o

50,1

08

41,9

23

450,

240

23,0

76

19,0

02

47,8

07

632,

156

3,37

4,92

1

Filip

ino

283

2,26

4

11,8

89

443

2,49

3

162

17,5

34

149,

680

Asia

n

7,79

6

5,40

5

24,1

62

6,10

0

18,2

29

1,38

0

63,0

72

573,

925

Am

eric

an

Indi

an

420

131

1,10

4

141

203

130

2,12

9

31,3

58

Afri

can

Am

eric

an

6,00

6

9,15

5

50,5

79

11,8

13

4,91

2

124

82,5

89

334,

652

Fres

no

Long

Be

ach

Los

Ang

eles

Oak

land

San

Fran

cisc

o

Sant

a A

na

CO

RE

Calif

orni

a

Sour

ce: C

alifo

rnia

Dep

artm

ent o

f Edu

catio

n, 2

020

Tabl

e 2.

201

8 -20

19 K

- 12

Stud

ent E

nrol

lmen

t by

Ethn

icity

in C

OR

E W

aive

r Dis

trict

s

42

Table 3. 2018-2019 K-12 Student Enrollment by English Learner, Reclassified English Proficient, Special Education, and Free and Reduced Price Meals in CORE Waiver Districts

English Learner

Reclassified English

Proficient

Special Education

Free and Reduced

Price Meals

Total K-12 Enrollment

Fresno 13,554 14,102 8,690 63,676 73,249

Long Beach 12,381 14,472 10,078 49,915 73,221

Los Angeles 123,579 176,216 84,722 476,628 607,723

Oakland 15,671 9,659 84,722 36,576 50,202

San Francisco 16,960 12,162 7,362 30,998 60,390

Santa Ana 17,438 21,725 6,709 41,535 51,482

California 1,195,998 1,131,092 795,047 3,663,780 6,186,278 Source: California Department of Education, 2020

Prior to the official establishment of the CORE districts, district leaders in

California were already searching out opportunities to build relationships with other

districts across the state where they could communicate and collaborate about their work.

In California, two venues already existed that provided those opportunities. One was the

Urban Education Dialogue (UED), a support structure for large urban school district

superintendents to discuss the challenges and opportunities connected to running K-12

school districts in California (Knudson & Garibaldi, 2015). The superintendents that

eventually brought their districts into CORE attended these semiannual UED meetings

and through their interactions developed personal relationships and a shared

understanding of the similar circumstances each of their districts faced.

In addition to the UED, the California Collaborative on District Reform (California

Collaborative) had established a forum for district leaders and other leaders in education,

including policymakers, researchers, reform support providers, and funders, to work on

problems of practice. This body met three times a year, each time hosted by a member

43

district leader and focusing on the challenges faced by that district. Like the UED, the

California Collaborative provided opportunities for district leaders to collaborate but

went further by exploring the challenges and specific strategies used especially related to

issues of equity and access. District leaders found these experiences of learning from

each other and providing feedback helpful and wanted to build these relationships even

further (Knudson & Garibaldi, 2015; Marsh et al., 2016; Ruiz de Velasco, 2015). Both

UED and the California Collaborative also built strong connections between district

leaders and stakeholders of the K-12 education community, including staff from the

California Department of Education who regularly participated in these meetings and

later lent their support when the CORE districts established a leadership structure for

their work.

Based on their experiences with UED and the California Collaborative, Michael

Hanson, Superintendent of Fresno Unified School District, and Chris Steinhauser,

Superintendent of Long Beach Unified School District, formed the Fresno-Long Beach

Learning Partnership in June 2007, which would later become the CORE districts as

additional district leaders expressed interest in joining in a collaborative approach to

education reforms. In this formal learning partnership, the focus ultimately centered on

four key areas: mathematics instruction, improving outcomes for English Learners,

leadership development, and college and career readiness, with these key areas identified

as those where outcomes could be improved for all students while closing the

achievement gap. This partnership not only brought together the two superintendents, but

also other central office leaders from both districts, leading to deeper cross-district

interactions and resulting in a deepening of evidence-based leadership and building

capacity in developing metrics and sharing of best practices (Knudsen & Garibaldi,

2015). The profile of these two districts was raised at the state level as they pioneered

new ways to learn together, with policymakers and actors viewing them as models in the

education field (Duffy et al., 2010).

44

In a meeting with Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2010, Hanson and

Steinhauser explored a different approach to the second-round waiver application process

that saw local superintendents guiding the application process for the state. In addition to

Fresno Unified School District and Long Beach Unified School District, other districts,

including San Francisco Unified School District, Sacramento City Unified School

District, and Los Angeles Unified School District, joined the application writing team.

The districts met regularly and split up the work of writing each section of the

application. In addition to working with the Governor’s office and the California

Department of Education, district leaders also worked with the consulting firm, the

Parthenon Group, which had assisted a select number of states with their Phase I

applications with funding provided by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In this

new round, the Parthenon Group provided guidance in analyzing other states’

applications and identifying elements of California’s application that would be most

important in improving their score. While California again was not selected, district and

state officials saw a benefit in the collaborative approach taken during the application

process and sought to find opportunities to build on this momentum (Knudson &

Garibaldi, 2015).

Some unique dynamics impacted the approval of the waiver for the CORE districts.

While the state scored high marks on the first two phases of the Race to the Top

application, including the California State Board of Education voting to adopt the

Common Core State Standards and receiving praise on its application’s alignment with

federal priorities, such as using data to improve instruction, improving teacher and

principal training programs, and supporting opportunities for education innovation and

charter schools, the state decided not to move on to phrase three of the application

process (Henig & Lyon, 2018). California was one of the only states not successful in

receiving a flexibility waiver under NCLB, and the denial of the application was

connected to the state’s failure to connect teachers’ evaluations to student academic

45

achievement as measured by standardized tests (Henig & Lyon, 2018). Policymakers in

California believed the Obama administration’s rush to tie teacher evaluation to student

achievement was unrealistic and that the state did not have the capacity to fully

implement the changes required. While the state did not receive a waiver, the federal

government did grant the CORE districts who collectively serve over 1 million students a

waiver when they agreed that they would connect test performance to teacher evaluation

(Henig & Lyon, 2018; Knudson & Garibaldi, 2015). This unique circumstance where

local districts circumvented state-level decisions to pursue alternative opportunities

provided by the federal government presents unique circumstances to explore further.

These policy decisions occurred near the end of No Child Left Behind (NCLB),

and the California Office to Reform Education (CORE) districts received one of the only

district level accountability waivers. These districts—Fresno Unified School District,

Long Beach Unified School District, Los Angeles Unified School District, Oakland

Unified School District, San Francisco Unified School District, and Santa Ana Unified

School District—proposed new institutional arrangements that emphasized a reassertion

of local control and peer collaboration across partnering districts. The passage of the

federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) in 2015 helped to reinforce this sense of

local control and use of multiple measures. Freed from some of their obligations under

NCLB, the CORE districts developed and implemented their own accountability system,

the School Quality Improvement System (SQIS). Key features of SQIS included a

measurement system that focused on academic and non-academic measures of student

success, peer-to-peer school support interventions, and district-level capacity building

(Knudson & Garibaldi, 2015; Marsh et al., 2016).

As part of the waiver under NCLB, the three areas focused on in the CORE

districts’ theory of action included the importance of local control, a move from

compliance to shared responsibility, and capacity building through peer-to-peer

46

collaboration with a focus on data. The CORE districts had initially planned a three-year

rollout, but the passage of ESSA impacted the full implementation of their proposal.

The work and focus of the CORE district leaders is grounded by Fullan’s (2011)

research on whole system reform and his concept of the moral imperative. In order to

impact whole system reform, stakeholders must consider the impact of wrong and right

drivers. A wrong driver is a deliberate policy force that has little chance of achieving the

desired results, while a right driver can impact improvement results for students. The

selection of these drivers should be informed by the moral imperative of raising the bar

and closing the gap for groups of students. The selection of drivers should foster intrinsic

motivation of teachers and students, engage educations and students in continuous

improvement of instruction and learning, inspire collective or teamwork, and affect all

teachers and students (Fullan, 2011). These elements of intrinsic motivation, instructional

improvement, teamwork, and allness are critical factors in impacting whole system

reform. However, many systems not only don’t have these components, but choose

drivers that can make attempts at system reform worse.

The key to success in system-wide reforms is to center the work around educators

and students and align the goals of reform and motivation of stakeholders (Darling-

Hammond & Plank, 2015). Fullan argues that when groups of stakeholders come together

to work purposefully and relentlessly toward a common commitment, long-term and

meaningful systematic change takes place (Duffy et al., 2010; Fullan, 2011).

Stakeholders must feel that their work is meaningful and contributes to a larger team

effort. Policies and strategies that do not foster strong intrinsic motivation or develop

increased capacity are destined to fail. This focus on system reform and improvement

science has been fueled by comparisons of the United States public education system in

comparison to those in other countries. Policymakers in the United States, in their

attempts to address this concern, have been quick to enact reform initiatives that have

resulted in stagnant and limited progress (Darling-Hammond & Plank, 2015; Fullan,

47

2011). In their search for immediate results in their attempts at reform, policymakers are

drawn to the wrong drivers that do not result in improvement. Leaders want immediate

results and are drawn to quick solutions that have appeal on the surface, but ultimately

those drivers do not produce the desired results, will never have the capacity to impact

meaningful change, and in some cases, make matters worse. Four main wrong drivers

include accountability, individual teacher and leadership quality, technology, and

fragmented strategies vs integrated or systematic strategies (Fullan, 2011, p. 5). While

these drivers are important elements to consider as part of system reform efforts, they

should not lead the work. These drivers focus on altering structure, procedures, and other

formal attributes of the system, but do not work directly on changing the culture, such as

the values, norms, skills, practices, and relationships in the system.

Whole-system reforms that result in meaningful change are those that generate

individual and collective motivation and development of the skills needed to transform

the system. It is this approach that the CORE districts employed as they approached their

work in developing whole-system reform and an accountability system that had meaning

for all stakeholders, an approach in stark contrast to the No Child Left Behind and Race

to the Top reform efforts, which focused on structural drivers but did little to motivate or

inspire a moral imperative in those impacted by those drivers (Fullan, 2011). Approaches

that focus on accountability and use standards, assessments, rewards, and punishments

assume that educators will respond to these approaches and make meaningful changes. It

is not the presence of standards and accountability, but the approach and attitude toward

their use are based on the assumption that massive external pressures on a system will

generate intrinsic motivation (Darling-Hammond et al., 2016). Fullan (2011) and

Knudson and Garibaldi (2015) argue that the accountability structures we have seen in

the United States do not build widespread capacity, nor do they increase intrinsic

motivation. Assessment should be used as a strategy for improvement in instruction and

achievement, not just a measure of top-down accountability, and approached with an

48

attitude of capacity building, engagement, and trust building that produces greater mutual

accountability among peers.

Critical Policy Analysis

Examining the impact of a shifting educational policy landscape through a critical

policy analysis framework allows for a more holistic understanding of the complexities of

educational policy from creation to implementation to evaluation (Diem et al., 2019;

Horsford et al., 2019). Using a critical policy analysis framework may help educational

leaders reflect and more clearly define their role as activists and best determine how to

influence the policies that impact their schools and districts by challenging traditional

notions of power, politics, and governance and revisit their purpose and vision for public

education. Traditional policy analysis has tended to follow a linear progression of

defining the issue or problem, such as what is considered academic achievement adopting

and implementing said policy around the defined issue or problem and then monitoring

and evaluating the effectiveness of the policy (Diem et al., 2019; Horsford et al., 2019).

Schools and districts have traditionally been evaluated in this manner, such as the

implementation of new content standards that are done to varying degrees by states and

districts, and that implementation is evaluated by student performance on typical formal

end-of-year assessments. When students have failed to show progress, the tendency is to

implement a new set of standards and new assessments versus reflecting on the

implementation of the standards or the validity of the measurement tool. This traditional

perspective does little to address the complex causes that influence the academic

performance of students and limits the ability of educational leaders to acknowledge the

varying circumstances that impact the implementation of educational policy.

In contrast, using a critical policy analysis framework focuses less on a linear

progression of policy adoption and evaluation and more on the factors that would

49

influence development and implementation, such as power and governance structures, the

impact of discourse, considering multiple perspectives and not only the dominant

narrative, the impact of having access to resources to implement, and how to hold

policymakers accountable for the success or failure of the policy (Diem et al., 2019;

Horsford et al., 2019). Using a framework that includes critical policy analysis allows

educational leaders to more authentically reflect on the impact policies have on their

school and district communities as well as navigate the complex policy structures that

currently impact their daily work. Educational leaders have long lamented that policies

come and go, and they often lack the resources to fully implement a policy with any

sense of fidelity as they function along a continuum of resistance and compliance. Some

of the tactics used on this continuum include simulating consent while resisting, taking

actions to meet expectations, or complying in order to buy freedom from other

surveillance (Horsford et al., 2019). The critical policy analysis frame is more closely

aligned to the authentic experiences and challenges educational leaders face and provides

a lens and language for them to clearly define and articulate the barriers and problems

they face with policy implementation.

When examining the topic of urban public education reform policy and its impact

on educational leaders, researchers have considered the multiple and often overlapping

influences at work within the development and implementation of said policies

(Carpenter et al., 2014). Using this type of analytical framework will support the

exploration and analysis of these overlapping influences and their impact on the CORE

districts.

Theories such as Critical Discourse Analysis describe how the language used

around topics such as education can impact and determine if and how structures are

maintained or transformed (Bertrand et al., 2015). Deficit discourses around education

policy are used to justify school segregation policies and limiting access to rigorous

instruction, as well as discouraging public investment in public education and narrowing

50

the opportunity gap (Bertrand et al., 2015). This use of critical discourse and perpetuation

of a deficit model have allowed neoliberals open access to define and control the

narrative around urban public education reform policy.

In the analysis of current research of the impact of neoliberal education reform

policies, one finds that the discourse of school reform hides the opportunity for those

with power and influence over the domain of the public sector. Under the guise of saving

capitalism, those in power deploy their dominance over largely African American and

Latinx urban communities’ public schools and abolish elected governance bodies in

urban school districts, stripping them of the democratic processes of school governance.

School closings, takeovers by education management organizations, expansion of

privately-run charter schools, and mayoral control of school systems are the order of the

day. To ensure their control, the processes of incarceration, surveillance, and punishment

are used to maintain order (Lipman, 2013).

The analysis of data is also a powerful tool in education policy discourse, with the

selective use of information or ignoring of data based on ideology and one assumption

about the purpose of public education and how it should be structured. Politics is about

power and controlling the discourse. Competing interests will try to manipulate data to

support their programs and discredit anyone that opposes them. In this struggle for

personal and structural power, we learn about superintendents, principals, and teachers

feeling pressure to hide or manipulate data to protect their personal interests and not

necessarily the interests of the students they serve (Henig, 2012).

Over the past 30 years, we have seen significant shifts in everything from how

schools and teachers are assessed to the process families use in choosing where their

students will attend school (Lipman, 2011). The current structures now are a free market

system of what school offers the best deal and perks to their students and families and

have forced schools to compete within a market economy they traditionally were not

designed for. This narrative serves as the beginning of the entry point into this large and

51

complex discourse around modern urban education school reform and how educators can

reimagine their role of influence within this larger critical discourse around the future of

urban public education reform policy (Maxwell, 2013; Ravitch & Riggan, 2017).

Conclusion

The analysis of the current research of education policy reforms and the shifts that

have occurred since No Child Left Behind help to illustrate the challenges districts and

district leaders have faced as they have tried to determine the best way to navigate the

loss of local control and the growing influence of educational policy actors that are

primarily outside the field of education. In addition, examining the approaches to system

reform and the approaches taken not only by federal and state agencies provides the

context about the larger circumstances and forces that led to the work of the CORE

districts and informed their approach to system reform.

A gap in the literature and an area for future research is the long-term examination

of what specific districts have done in response to the shifting educational policy

landscape since NCLB and the impact of the waiver process and transition to ESSA. This

is an emerging area of research, and time is needed to conduct studies and publish the

findings of the research, particularly what lessons practitioners can take from the

experiences of other district leaders and apply to their local context. Much has been

written about the deficits in the use of accountability as part of system reform, but there is

a need for district leaders to learn about the experiences of other leaders as they examine

approaches that are outside the accepted reform models that focus on short-term technical

changes, but fail to make long term transformational changes to a system and its

stakeholders. The literature provides the context of the shifting education policy

landscape since No Child Left Behind, including the impact of the high-stakes federal

accountability structures and neoliberal school reforms that limited the flexibility of

52

district leaders in making decisions that best supported the needs of their students and

school communities. Consequently, these restrictions resulted in changes in the role and

expectation of urban district-level leaders as well as an evolution in educational

governance structures that are modeled after corporations driven by competition and

market forces.

While we observe in the literature the negative consequences of these structures on

districts and district leaders, the literature is limited when examining and identifying the

positive ways district and district leaders have challenged the status quo and instead

proactively approached accountability and systematic improvements and the potential of

districts as institutional actors in education reform efforts. By examining how the CORE

districts driven by a moral imperative experienced, negotiated, and responded to this

shifting educational policy landscape, this study can contribute to the larger discourse

about the impact of the shifting educational policy landscape and how districts and

district leaders can be supported in their own response within their local educational

context.

53

Chapter III

METHODS

The purpose of this study was to explore how California’s CORE districts

experienced, negotiated, and responded to the shifting landscape of education policy

resulting from the expansion of neoliberal school reforms and top-down accountability

using a qualitative case study research design and critical policy analysis as an analytical

framework. In order to better understand the conditions that led to the creation of the

CORE districts and their subsequent impact on urban school district leaders in California,

the following research questions guided the study:


CORE districts?


districts?



Research Design: Qualitative Case Study

The study used a qualitative case study research design and critical policy analysis

framework. The study included interviews of current and former CORE district leaders in

addition to CORE central office leaders. The interview questions for participants focused

on the establishment of the CORE districts, governance and leadership of the CORE

54

districts, and the outcomes and impact of the work with the CORE districts. In addition to

the interviews I conducted, I used my research questions to guide my selection and

analysis of policy papers, reports, newspaper articles, and other case studies. I selected

this research design approach to emphasize the voices and experiences of the CORE

district leaders and to integrate my key observations from both my interviews and

analysis of documents to present a narrative of the CORE districts and their experiences

as they navigated the educational policy landscape and how their roles as district leaders

were impacted by the policy decisions made at the federal and state level (Creswell &

Poth, 2018; Stake, 2003).

Creswell and Poth (2018) and Stake (2003) outline the major conceptual

responsibilities of the qualitative case researcher, including the bounding of the case and

conceptualizing the object of the study, selecting the phenomena, themes, or issues the

research questions will emphasize, seeking patterns of data to develop the issues,

integrating key observations and bases for interpretation, the selection of alternative

interpretations to pursue, and the development of assertions or generalizations about the

case study. Qualitative researchers also discuss how their audience or research field will

benefit from their study, while also acknowledging the positionality of the researcher to

the study (Schreiber & Asner-Self, 2011). Researchers may utilize the analysis of

documents or present a case study as a particular method to study a specific impact of

educational policy (Creswell & Poth, 2018).

Data Collection

Data collection included interviews with current and former CORE district leaders

and CORE central office leaders in addition to relevant district and policy documents,

publicly available data, and reports. These included technical reports from the Getting

Down to Facts project, such as Federal Policy Meets the “California Way,” which

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focused on four main areas related to California state education policy—student success,

governance, personnel, and funding; At the Forefront of the New Accountability Era:

Early Implementation Findings from the CORE Waiver Districts, one of several reports

published in partnership between the Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE)

and the California Office to Reform Education (CORE); additional research studies from

the American Institutes for Research; and public data from the California Department of

Education, CORE, United States Department of Education, and National Center for

Educational Statistics. Documents were selected for analysis based on the areas of impact

of the federal role on districts, urban district leadership, and CORE districts and

categorized by each research question (see Table 4). Table 4. Selection and Organization of Data Sources

Research Question Data Sources

1. What social, political, and economic forces led to the creation of California’s CORE districts?

• Newspaper and journal articles • Federal and state education policy

memos • California Department of Education

website • United States Department of

Education website

2. What are the governance and leadership models that characterize the CORE districts?

• Publicly available technical reports • Data from National Center for

Educational Statistics • Publicly released CORE districts

documents and reports

3. What impact have the CORE districts have on the urban education policy landscape in California?

• Interviews with former and current CORE district leaders

• Publicly released CORE districts documents and reports

Over a three-month period, I conducted my interviews over the phone or video

conference. My criteria for selecting and contacting potential interview participants was

based on their experience as a former or current district or CORE central office leader in

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either leading a CORE district or supporting the organization and focus of the

collaboration across the CORE districts. I sent out initial and follow up emails to

participants who met this criteria and scheduled interviews with those who responded and

agreed to an interview. I interviewed both current and former district leaders from the

CORE districts to get perspectives not only from leaders that were part of the

establishment of the CORE districts but to find out from current district leaders why they

continued their collaboration with CORE. I also interviewed leaders from the CORE

central office to learn about their perspective in assisting district leaders and how they

supported districts in navigating the federal and policy landscape (see Table 5). My

questions focused on the establishment of the CORE districts, the governance and

leadership of the CORE districts, and the outcomes and impact of the work of CORE on

their district and on them as a district leader. Table 5. Interview Participants

Title Years with CORE Rationale Interview

Format/Length

Superintendent- CORE District 3 Years New CORE Superintendent

Phone-1 Hour

Former Superintendent- CORE District 12 Years Founding CORE Superintendent

Phone- 45 Minutes

Executive Director- CORE Central Office 7 Years Directly supports CORE districts in their use of data and assessment

Video- 45 Minutes

Executive Director- CORE Central Office 10 Years Helped support the establishment and development of CORE districts

Video- 1 Hour

Multiple interview participants I interviewed referenced documents I had selected

for analysis or recommended additional sources to review, such as the reports published

by Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE), an outside policy agency working

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with CORE to collect data about their progress. Participants also referenced the Getting

Down to Facts project and reports published by the American Institutes for Research.

Data Analysis

For the context of this, study the CORE districts were viewed as one unit of

analysis rather than separate districts. I analyzed the data collected, either from my

interviews or my analysis of documents. I first used my research questions to focus my

selection of documents and then to help organize my analysis of the data and

documentation collected (Creswell & Poth, 2018; Stake, 2013). As I reviewed my

interview notes and documents, I observed that key themes and ideas emerged, including

a willingness to push against the status quo and not having time to wait for the federal or

state government to help them, that leaders were driven by a moral imperative to do what

was best for their students and districts, and a desire to use data in meaningful way to

hold themselves accountable, and this informed the organization of my findings. Based

on my analysis of the data, I chose to present my data by first setting the stage and

providing the context for my findings through a narrative frame. Creswell and Poth

(2018) describe the use of narrative as one approach to presenting case study findings that

provides a frame to highlight the tensions, causal conditions, and turning points that

impacted the decisions made by CORE district leaders (Creswell & Poth, 2018) as well

as examining the contextual and systematic complexities that CORE districts were

operating within (Diem et al., 2019; Horsford et al., 2019).

Delimitations

This study focuses on the six California CORE districts that were part of the 2013

NCLB waiver application and that have played a key role in the development and

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adoption of the waiver language. There are other California school districts involved with

the overall work of the CORE districts but in a limited capacity, such as occasional cross-

district collaboration or involvement with data collaboratives. I chose to delimit my

studies to the six districts that have remained involved since the 2013 waiver application

because of the particular circumstances impacting the collaboration happening within and

across these districts. While there are multiple perspectives about the impact of CORE,

this study focuses specifically on the experiences of district leaders and their particular

perspectives on the impact of CORE on their work as district leaders as they navigate the

federal, state, and local policy landscape.

Limitations

While there are multiple perspectives from various stakeholders within and

outside of the CORE districts, for this study, I chose to focus on the perspectives of

district leaders, whose specific perspectives are not always focused on and are muffled

when combined with the voices of other stakeholders and policy actors. There were also

time and financial constraints, and this study is intended to present a case study and the

unique stories of these particular districts and how they responded to the shifts in the

education reform landscape. Due to the limited number of interviews, which relied on

voluntary participation of the interview subjects, and the focus on CORE district and

CORE central office leaders, not all perspectives are represented in this study; however,

there is still opportunity for continued research on additional perspectives on CORE from

other stakeholders. There is no assumption that the data collected through this study

reflect the experiences of all urban districts in California or other states.

As a former administrator and teacher in one of the CORE districts, I must

acknowledge my positionality to the research topic (Schreiber & Asner-Self, 2011).

While on one hand, this positionality allowed access to interview district leaders and

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informed my understanding of where and how to access publicly accessible documents as

part of my document analysis, I must acknowledge that as the instrument of data

collection and analysis, my bias impacted the decisions I made about which documents to

include in my document analysis and the information included in the presentation of the

case study.

Conclusion

Throughout my data selection, collection, and analysis process, I observed a

willingness and openness from interview participants to share not just about their

successes but also about their challenges and how being part of CORE had pushed their

work as district leaders. This willingness to reflect and to identify areas to work on as a

collaborative group of districts and to hold each other mutually accountable for their

progress also surfaced in my analysis of documents such as policy papers and technical

documents and informed my organization and presentation of the findings in Chapter IV

to best describe how these leaders experienced, negotiated, and responded to a shifting


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Chapter IV

FINDINGS

Introduction

The purpose of this study was to explore how California’s CORE districts

experienced, negotiated, and responded to the shifting landscape of education policy

resulting from the expansion of neoliberal school reforms and top-down accountability

using a qualitative case study research design and critical policy analysis as an analytical

framework. In order to better understand the conditions that led to the creation of the

CORE districts and their subsequent impact on urban school district leaders in California,

the following research questions guided the study:


CORE districts?


districts?



In this chapter, I present the findings of the study by describing the context and

circumstances that led to the decisions made by CORE district leaders and the resulting

impact of those decisions. Guided by Stake’s (1995) and Creswell and Poth’s (2018)

approach to case studies and incorporating features of critical policy analysis in the

analytical framework I used, documents and notes from interviews were integrated and

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analyzed in a holistic way to identify the key themes that emerged from the findings as

well as examine the contextual and systematic complexities that impacted the educational

policy landscape that the CORE district were operating within (Diem et al., 2019;

Horsford et al., 2019). These themes include frustration and impatience from the CORE

districts around the lack of support from federal and state agencies, which was met with

determination from the CORE district leaders to create their own support structures. In

both interview responses and analyzed documents, a sense of urgency paired with a

strong sense of their moral imperative guided the CORE district leaders in taking their

power back from a top-down dysfunctional accountability system and creating their own

accountability system that uses data as a flashlight to inform their improvement work

instead of a hammer that penalizes districts for not meeting accountability targets as

defined by top-down accountability systems. Through the integration and analysis of

multiple forms of data, these key themes emerged in the findings about the work of

CORE districts and their subsequent successes and challenges.

My approach to the presentation of the findings is grounded in Creswell’s use of

narrative in qualitative case studies as an approach to highlight the tensions, causal

conditions, and turning points that impacted the decisions made by CORE district leaders

(Creswell & Poth, 2018). Using this approach may help educational leaders reflect and

more clearly define their role as activists and best determine how to influence the policies

that impact their schools and districts (Horsford et al., 2019). A narrative approach that

incorporates elements of critical policy analysis provides an opportunity to reveal the

authentic experiences and challenges the CORE district leaders faced and provides a

different perspective and language to clearly define and articulate the barriers and

problems district leaders face with policy implementation and governance structures and

how they are responding to their local context (Diem et al., 2019).

Using a narrative to present my findings in this chapter, I first present the context

that the CORE districts were operating within, including the federal and state

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accountability policies and the vacuum of support that the CORE districts were operating

within. I next describe key players involved in the case of the CORE districts, including

the federal, state, and CORE central office and district leaders, and their perspectives

about the decisions made by the CORE district leaders in their approach to school reform

and system improvement. The chapter concludes with the response of the CORE districts

to the federal and state accountability structures and the outcome of their response.

Context—Setting the Stage

An analysis of technical reports, newspaper articles, and interviews with

stakeholders reveals a tension between the needs of large urban districts and the struggle

of California’s state governmental structures to support those needs through financial or

human resources. 2013 serves as a pivotal year for the CORE districts as multiple state

and federal policy decisions would influence the direction of the CORE districts and their

work. Not only did the CORE districts receive their NCLB waiver that year, but the

California state legislature adopted the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF), which

provided additional state funding to districts that enroll large numbers of English learners

and economically disadvantaged students but provided flexibility for districts to

determine how best to allocate their funding. This new funding formula requires each

district to develop a Local Control and Accountability Plan (LCAP) and specify how they

will improve services for high-needs students such as low-income pupils, English

learners, and foster youth. Legislation passed at the end of 2012 required the State Board

of Education to begin work on revising the state’s Academic Performance Index to

include multiple measures as well as adopt evaluation rubrics to assist districts to identify

performance goals and measure student progress for student subgroups across multiple

performance indicators (Marsh et al., 2016; Ruiz de Velasco, 2015). Due to delays and a

lack of agreement between the California Department of Education and the United States

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Department of Education regarding a waiver from the accountability provisions from

NCLB, the CORE districts proceeded with their waiver and development of their own

school accountability and improvement system, which is now used by over 160 systems

across the state, including districts and county offices of education that oversee

educational programs for over two million students. The development of the CORE

school and accountability improvement system also provided early lessons and learners

as the state developed its own accountability system (Ruiz de Velasco, 2015).

Federal and State Accountability Policies and Structures

A 2014 technical report from California’s legislative analyst’s office that reviewed

the California Department of Education (CDE) presented in its executive summary that

the CDE’s responsibilities focused primarily on administering federal and state programs

stemming from federal requirements such as overseeing the compliance of local

education agencies (LEAs) with the conditions placed on federal education grants. The

CDE also performs administrative tasks such as overseeing compliance with state

education programs and collecting and compiling statewide data. Generally, the CDE

does not create education policy or programs and, given the size and diversity of the

LEAs across the state, often relies on county offices of education (COEs) to provide

direct assistance and advice in improving educational programs (Taylor, 2014). The CDE

is supported from three funding sources: federal funding, the state’s general funding, and

money earmarked for specialized activities. Like many public agencies, the CDE was

impacted during the recent economic recession and faced a decline in funding and

personnel to carry out its administrative and oversight role.

Based on its analysis, the legislative analyst’s office found that the CDE in its

current structure could continue to meet its existing responsibilities but had limited

capacity to take on additional workload that may be tasked to either the state legislature

or federal government without additional staff positions or funding. It was also found that

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the CDE could explore ways to make oversight activities more valuable for LEAs beyond

monitoring LEA compliance with federal grants and help align state and federal

accountability systems to avoid duplication of effort. For example, the state legislature

adopted new LEA planning requirements and a system for supporting and intervening in

low-performing LEAs, but many of the new state requirements are similar to activities

associated with federal accountability and could prevent a streamlined and integrated

accountability system that is relevant to LEAs (Taylor, 2014).

Certain reporting requirements that come from the state legislature for the CDE to

prepare formal public reports require considerable time and effort from a limited staff and

pull from their limited resources and capacity to support LEAs. In total there are 54

reporting requirements, with the Legislative Analyst’s Office recommending reducing

that to the 23 reports that continue to provide useful information. There is also a

perception by LEAs of the CDE as reactive and punitive versus collaborative and service-

oriented, and in contrast, COEs and other local entities continue to provide better sources

of professional development, technical assistance, and ground level support to LEAs.

For example, there are major statewide education functions not administered by the

CDE, such as the accreditation of teacher preparation programs and the issuing of teacher

credentials, which is handled by the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing,

academic interventions and supports handled by various county offices of education

across the state, and the participation of LEAs in a K-12 high speed network, which is

overseen by the Imperial County Office of Education. The state also asked COEs to

support statewide roles that are normally handled directly in smaller states, such as

reviewing and approving district budgets and monitoring that districts have sufficient

instructional materials, are staffed with qualified teachers, and maintain adequate faculty

conditions. The legislature plays a key role in continuously reassessing the alignment

across the CDE’s responsibilities, staffing, and funding and determining the scope of the

CDE’s work, especially with the frequent changes resulting from shifting state and

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federal policies (Taylor, 2014). Currently the department’s responsibilities, as outlined by

the legislature, include:

• Creating curriculum frameworks that guide teachers on the Common Core and

other academic standards

• Collecting and managing student data and setting schools’ and districts’

performance indicators through the California School Dashboard

• Overseeing schools and districts that persistently underperform

• Reviewing the goals and performance of county offices of education in their

Local Control and Accountability Plans (LCAPS), which the funding law

requires them to write (Fensterwald, 2018).

Those that monitor the California Department of Education point out that the state

superintendent of public instruction faces challenges in making a case for a bigger role

for the department and reassert the importance of the department after seeing its power,

responsibilities, and resources diminish over the past decade (Fensterwald, 2018). School

district leaders argue that the state has failed to provide support with more data and

information about what is and isn’t working to improve student achievement. Part of the

challenge is to convince the governor and legislature to give the CDE more money to

help districts and county offices of education improve, and this is the overriding goal of

the Local Control Funding Formula. According to the research organization Policy

Analysis for California Education (PACE), the CDE could be an efficient source of

instructional support for schools but currently is not (Fensterwald, 2018). The mechanics

of funding also limit the ability of the CDE to rebuild as a full-service agency. The

passing of Proposition 98 over 30 years ago defines what portion of the budget supports

K-12 education each year and does not fund the operations of the CDE. Instead the

funding comes from the federal government and state’s general fund, forcing the CDE to

compete each year with the multiple needs and interests at the state level or deal with

shifts in federal allocations. Another blow to the CDE came when Governor Jerry Brown

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minimized the role of the department when they shifted the power over money and

decision-making from Sacramento to local districts under the Local Control Funding

Formula. Governor Brown and administrators from the California Department of Finance

doubted that the department could transition from a compliance mentality carrying out

bureaucratic requirements that the federal government and state legislature have imposed

to an approach of guidance and support supported by the new funding formula

(Fensterwald, 2018).

Governor Brown also fought proposals to collect more data than the department

already gathers through the California Longitudinal Pupil Achievement Data System

(CALPADS) because it doesn’t link to preschool or higher education systems and

districts can’t track individual students beyond high school graduation and determine

which programs have been effective. To get around those limitations, district partnerships

were established, such as the CORE District Data Collaborative. Former state

superintendents, such as Bill Honig, have recommended that the CDE prioritize its focus

on helping teachers with the state’s new academic standards, train principals, and expand

the K-12 data capacity to better collect and analyze information, and these policy shifts

provided an opportunity for the CDE to eliminate redundant reporting and reassign job

responsibilities (Fensterwald, 2018).

In 2012, the state legislature directed the State Board of Education to begin

revising the state’s former school Academic Performance Index to include multiple

measures of school performance, limiting academic assessment scores to 60% of the

index and directing that the remaining 40% of the school index include non-test-based

achievement measures, including graduation rates for high schools. Signed into law by

Governor Jerry Brown, the new legislation reflected the goal that California schools

should promote college, career, and civic readiness for all California students (California

Senate Bill 1458, 2012; Ruiz de Velasco, 2015). The actions of the state legislatures

spurred the California Department of Education and other state leaders to have

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conversations with the United States Department of Education about obtaining a waiver

from the accountability provisions of NCLB. State leaders agreed that the federal

accountability approach was no longer consistent with the new state direction on college,

career, and civic readiness, and contained inflexible rules that made it difficult to spend

federal dollars on more innovative efforts to achieve equitable access to deeper learning

opportunities for all students. By 2013, however, it became clear that CDE and the

United States Department of Education could not agree on a path to an NCLB waiver,

leading the CORE districts to apply for a waiver on their own (Ruiz de Velasco, 2015).

The CORE districts were anxious to move quickly to implement a more robust

accountability system that would be better aligned with local efforts to use student

performance data for organizational learning and improvement that could design and

begin testing ahead of the state’s timetable.

Districts Operating in a Vacuum of Support

The role of the CDE and the ability to provide day-to day support are limited. As

part of the Getting Down to Facts study, surveys taken found that teachers and

administrators in school with high numbers of poor children and English learners didn’t

know where to turn for advice on choosing curriculum materials and instructional

support, especially if their county office of education lacked the specific expertise.

Making this more complex is the California Collaborative for Educational Excellence

(CCEE), a state agency that runs independently of the California Department of

Education and established by the state’s funding formula law. Part of the work of the

collaborative includes supporting the work of schools, districts, and county offices of

education and identifying geographic lead counties that can provide expertise and support

to smaller counties in areas such as special education, English learners, and parent

engagement (Fensterwald, 2018). Districts must deal with three separate state

government bodies, the CDE, the collaborative and county offices of education, which

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have a shared mission of helping districts but no clear assignment of responsibilities and

no structure to the system, with the CDE having no authority to direct the other agencies.

As the state has struggled with fragmented support structures largely focused on

compliance, there is an acknowledgement of the pressing need for high-quality teaching

and educational leadership and finding strategies to address this challenge. In 2012, State

Superintendent of Instruction Tom Torlakson worked with the California Commission on

Teacher Credentialing to create the Task Force on Education Excellence. This task

force—consisting of teachers, parents, superintendents, school employees, leading

academics, and members of the state’s business community—was led by Linda Darling-

Hammond and Chris Steinhauser, Superintendent of Long Beach Unified School District

and one of the CORE district leaders. The task force published the report Greatness by

Design, which included recommendations that the CORE districts would incorporate into

their work (Task Force on Educator Excellence, 2012).

In the task force’s report, the group found that both state and federal investments in

preparation had declined since the 1970s, and while some educators receive excellent

preparation and support, this is uneven, with little financial investment in preparation

institutions and the quality depending largely on what the candidates can afford to spend.

Leadership education is even more uneven, where school leaders in California can skip

coursework and take an exam for a license—the only state that allows this. Most often,

the least prepared teachers and leaders are assigned to the highest need students and

schools.

The report also pointed out that the amount of mentoring for beginning teachers is

decreasing after leading the nation in the design and funding of the Beginning Teacher

Support and Assessment (BTSA) program. Now those funds are no longer protected, and

fewer teachers received support from this program. District and school leaders rarely

receive mentoring, in contrast with other states. Professional development opportunities

for both teachers and leaders are both underfunded. California once provided funding for

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ten professional learning days a year, but that funding has been severely cut or

eliminated; it has been up to districts to find time for professional collaboration or

learning, and leaders have had even less supports. Evaluation of teachers and leaders is

often spotty and is rarely designed or frequent enough to provide the feedback that would

lead to meaningful improvement or inform personnel decisions (Task Force on Educator

Excellence, 2012).

While the task force acknowledges that in some forward-looking districts, teachers

and leaders are provided the supports they need to continue to grow professionally, this is

unfortunately not happening consistently across the state. This, paired with the increasing

needs of students and budget cuts to contend with, directly impacts the education of

students. The report outlines a series of recommendations to address these challenges. It

specifically points out that since the enactment of the Public Schools Accountability Act,

the Academic Performance Index, standardized testing and accountability have served as

the key levers of the state’s school reform agenda. However, the lack of headway in

resolving the persistent achievement gap suggests that high-stakes testing without

investments in school capacity cannot improve education. In fact, this combination has

driven educators out of the profession and caused more harm than good. The task force

cites Richard Elmore (2002), who argues:

With little or no investment in capacity, low-performing schools get worse relative to high-performing schools.… You can’t improve a school’s performance or the performance of any teacher or student in it, without increasing the investment in teachers’ knowledge, pedagogical skills and understanding of students. This work can be influenced by an external accountability system, but it cannot be done by the system. (p. 1)

The task force also cites Fullan (2011), who makes a compelling case that accountability

by itself is the wrong driver to lead reform and that whole system success requires the

commitment that comes from intrinsic motivation and groups of educators working

together purposefully and relentlessly. Fullan also asserts that no system in the world has

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ever achieved whole-system reform by leading with accountability, and it is capacity

building and not accountability that has been the factor in driving educational gains.

In presenting their findings and recommendations, the task force makes

comparisons in their report to lessons learned by American businesses about human

capital and having to move beyond the established management theory that productivity

would improve if an organization could identify the bottom 10% of employees through

performance evaluations and fire them each year. Companies that held to this as their

dominant strategy became less competitive with international businesses that engaged in

team-based, total-quality management approaches that built competence rather than look

for employees to eliminate (Task Force on Educator Excellence, 2012). The best

companies learned to cultivate a positive organization culture that set high goals for a few

major objectives and empowered employees to achieve them through information and

learning opportunities to build capacity. These strategies for integrating empowerment

with accountability became the major approach business leaders used to drive gains in

productivity.

In their report, the task force recommends that California needs to create

empowerment for educators through investments in capacity and the recreation of a

reciprocal accountability system. In this kind of system, educators at every level are

accountable to expectations for high-quality instruction pointed at meaningful learning

goals, while policymakers and education officials ensure that educators have the support

necessary to meet these expectations. The task force outlined three overarching priorities

for reforms: creating a coherent continuum of learning expectations and opportunities for

educators across their entire careers; developing a learning system in California for

educators; and developing a consistent revenue base for high-quality professional

learning from initial preparation and induction through ongoing career development by

creating a category of flexible funding for professional learning.

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Under these three overarching priorities, the task force outlined recommendations

about how best to support them. This includes establishing professional learning

expectations for educators linked to credential renewal and carried out through Individual

Learning Plans that would include job-embedded opportunities such as serving as a

mentor, engaging in professional learning community activities, or participating in

courses or institutes. This also includes the establishment of an aligned infrastructure and

adopting standards and criteria that define effective professional learning, creating a

California Master Plan for Professional Learning, creating an evaluation framework for

state, country, and local boards to evaluate and update their policies around professional

learning opportunities and a voluntary review process that examines the quality of

professional learning systems, identifies and disseminates promising practices, and

provides support for improvement. This also includes revising the educator evaluation

system that currently rarely helps educators improve or clearly distinguishes those who

are succeeding from those who are struggling. A revised evaluation system for both

administrators and teachers would offer useful feedback as well as identifying those who

are struggling, providing intensive assistance and removing those who do not improve.

These evaluation systems should be based on professional standards used to assess

educators’ practices, from pre-service preparation to induction and through the remainder

of the career; combine data from a variety of sources, including valid measures of

educator practice, student learning, and professional contributions that are examined in

relation to one another; and include both formative and summative assessments providing

information to both improve practice and support personnel decisions. This evaluation

system should also tie evaluation to useful feedback and to professional learning

opportunities that are relevant to educators’ goals and needs, differentiate support based

on the educator’s level of experience and individual needs, and are a priority within a

district, with dedicated time, training, and support provided to evaluators and those who

mentor educators needing assistance (Task Force on Educator Excellence, 2012).

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The task force also recommended in its report the development of leadership

throughout the system through redesigned collaborative work organizations. The

conventional ways of leading schools and districts must be approached differently, and

this includes a new vision of how schools are regulated, designed, and led by

policymakers, administrators, and teachers, all of whom will have new leadership roles to

play. This vision should embody the state’s innovative tradition by creating an

educational system that builds capacity for success and inspires motivated and talented

teachers and administrators to lead schools with a sense of urgency and unrelenting focus

on student success.

The implementation of the Task Force’s recommendations requires not only

changes at the state level, but also agreements between labor and management at the

district level. California should also support new leadership roles and promote labor-

management collaboration to enable innovation in educator roles, responsibilities, and

compensation systems. It is recommended that the state should support new leadership

roles for teachers through a framework that describes a continuum of career options and a

range of opportunities for professional growth (Task Force on Educator Excellence,

2012). The state should also promote collaboration and innovation in educator roles and

responsibilities and take concrete steps to provide statewide structures to share innovative

practices that promote cross-district dialogue and support labor-management relations

(Task Force on Educator Excellence, 2012).

Findings from the task force’s report also emphasize the importance of the state’s

key agencies, including the California Department of Education and the Commission on

Teacher Credentialing, on focusing their work on becoming leaders of a learning system

through partnerships with the state’s universities, regional and local agencies, and other

organizations that could share research and expertise with schools and districts

throughout the state. This can be done through documenting and disseminating

information on effective models of preparation, induction, professional learning,

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evaluation, and career development, supporting networks of schools and districts to

engage in shared learning and knowledge production. The CDE and CTC can also

support this work by creating an aligned infrastructure and a master plan that supports

high-quality learning, fosters a culture of professional efficacy through the practice of

continuous, collaborative, and purposeful learning focused on standards for learning and

teaching, and guides those developed by each county, district, and school.

In conjunction with a master plan that supports professional learning and efficacy,

the task force also emphasizes the importance of using both formative and summative

assessment within a reimagined teacher evaluation system that helps improve teaching

and learning. Formative assessments focus on the process of increasing knowledge and

improving professional practice by providing information and feedback to help monitor

and improve a teacher’s learning, practice, and instructional method. These assessments

should guide decisions about professional development opportunities that will enhance

their practice, and the use of these assessment should be seen as part of a continuous

process to monitor the growth of knowledge about instruction based on the needs of

students and the classroom context (Task Force on Educator Excellence, 2012).

In contrast, summative assessments focus on outcomes and summarize the

development of a teacher at a particular point in time; they include multiple pieces of data

and evidence, such as teacher plans and assessments, observations, self-assessments,

student work, portfolios, student surveys, and a range of assessments of student learning.

These summative events should be based on the standards jointly under the collective

bargaining agreement. Evaluations should incorporate both formative and summative

assessments that are used to identify needs for professional learning and goals of the

individual growth plan. Evaluators that conduct the evaluations should be knowledgeable

about instruction and well trained in the evaluation process, including how to give

productive feedback and how to support ongoing learning for teachers. These evaluation

systems should be based on continuous improvement models. Local education agencies

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should be part of the development of the education evaluation system and ensure that

they inform the creation of professional development systems and job-embedded learning

opportunities. These opportunities are typically organized around real problems of

practice, linked to analysis of teaching of student learning, are intensive, sustained, and

continuous over time, supported by coaching and feedback, connected to teachers’

collaborative work in profession learning communities and integrated into school and

classroom planning regarding curriculum, instruction, and assessment (Task Force on

Educator Excellence, 2012).

The findings in Greatness by Design emphasize the importance of policy changes

that must happen at the state level and the need for innovative new agreements between

labor and management at the district level. Some of the most successful educational

reforms have emerged through collaboration between labor and management. The task

force recommends that management and union leaders abandon their long-standing

adversarial relationships and work instead as partners. The state could support this work

by promoting labor-management collaboration to enable innovation in educator roles,

responsibilities, and compensation systems through the convening of a task force

consisting of superintendents, union leaders, and school board leaders to share innovative

practices and promote cross-district dialogue. Co-sponsors should include the California

Department of Education, the California Teachers Association, the California Federation

of Teachers, the Association of California School Administrators, the California

Association of School Business Officials, and the California School Boards Association.

This could be done by developing licensing structures that conceptualize a career

continuum for teachers and administrators to encourage and recognize accomplishment

through the development of new leadership roles and a multi-tiered system that can

provide more possibilities for recognition and support beyond the current two-tiered

system for teachers and administrators that awards an initial license that can become a

professional or “clear” license following induction. Overall, the findings from the task

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force’s report focus on how state agencies can become leaders of a learning system that

supports networks of schools and districts to engage in shared learning and knowledge

production.

Players

The work of the CORE districts has garnered the attention of policymakers at the

state and federal level who were intrigued by the depth of conversation and types of

questions the CORE districts were posing about the methods other than test scores to

determine whether or not students are succeeding. Deborah Delisle, U.S Assistant

Secretary for Elementary and Secondary Education under Secretary Arne Duncan,

attended in 2014 the first meeting of the School Quality Improvement System Oversight

Panel, a 14-member committee overseeing the CORE districts that received the nation’s

only district-level No Child Left Behind waiver. The oversight panel was comprised of

researchers, civil rights advocates, representatives of English learners and special

education communities as well as representatives of the California PTA, the state school

boards, and administrator associations. Noted were the absences from the California

Teachers Association, Governor Jerry Brown, the State Board of Education, and

Superintendent of Instruction Tom Torlakson, who were asked to send representations to

the meeting but didn’t (Fensterwald, 2014). While they later appointed representatives to

the committee, there was lobbying by Torlakson and other state education chiefs behind

the scenes against granting the waiver to the CORE districts, arguing that this was an

encroachment on states’ authority to manage education policy. Secretary Duncan praised

the creative, thoughtful, and innovative proposal from the districts and its distinct

approach. Their plan for the waiver incorporated the three requirements of implementing

the Common Core standards, making sharp academic improvements with the lowest-

performing schools in their districts, and adopting new teacher and principal evaluations.

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Secretary Duncan faced contention in 2013 when he spoke with the Council of

Chief State School Officers over awarding district-level No Child Left Behind waivers

and tried to strike a balance when he acknowledged the anxiety of states and preferred to

work directly with states, but was open to exploring the possibility of district-level

waivers, especially for the CORE districts, which represented a combined enrollment of

one million students and could do productive pilots. California Superintendent Tom

Torlakson expressed anxiety that his department would have to judge CORE districts

differently than other California districts. Other state superintendents argued that district-

level waivers were an affront to the constitutional right states had to oversee the districts

in their state and that the federal government did not have the right to intervene (Ujifusa,

2013). Despite these challenges from state and federal leaders, the CORE district and

central office leaders persisted in their work while maintaining a professional working

relationship with federal and state agencies.

Establishment of CORE Districts

The CORE districts first came together when they decided to collaborate on their

Race to the Top application. One of the first decisions they made as part of the

application process was to identify a fiscal agent to oversee the distribution of the federal

money and execution of their reform plans. The writing team was reluctant to let the CDE

oversee the work because district leaders felt its bureaucracy would prevent the group

from being a collaborative entity and it did not have the capacity to evaluate and assist

the districts to help them meet their goals. In fact, it was their frustrations with the CDE

that influenced their decision to work together in the first place. As an alternative to CDE

oversight, the application required an Implementation Board of Directors that included

representation from several groups, including district leaders, institutions of higher

education, state representatives, and foundations or nonprofits. This legal entity was

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created and named the California Office to Reform Education (CORE) (Knudson et al.,

2015; Krachman et al., 2016; Marsh et al., 2016).

When they did not receive Race to the Top funding and still decided to proceed

with their work, they leveraged the board they had created and adopted its name. Because

the board’s work would not be as expansive as the plans described in the application, the

board was reformed with just the district leaders, the superintendent of public instruction,

and the secretary of education. When the superintendent of public instruction and

secretary of education declined to participate, the governing board became the

participating district leaders, and this structure has remained the same. CORE hired an

executive director that had helped them during his time at the CDE and through the

application process (Knudson et al., 2015).

After officially creating CORE as the entity through which to collaborate, the

districts next determined their areas of focus and their principles for working together.

The CORE mission statement reflects the purpose for why the group came together: “As

a collaboration of districts, we work together to innovate, implement and scale new

strategies and tools that help our students succeed, so that our districts are improved to

meet the challenges of the 21st century.” CORE district leaders had a shared commitment

to equity and meeting the needs of all students, a shared moral purpose that united many

of the district leaders since their early collaborations in the Urban Education Dialogue

and California Collaborative on District Reform. The district leaders identified two areas

to anchor their work. The first area of focus was standards and assessment, called

Standards, Assessment, and Data, later renamed Standards, Assessment, and Instruction.

The second area of focus was on great teachers and leaders, called Talent Management.

Through Standards, Assessment, and Data, the CORE districts developed and piloted new

instructional materials and formative assessments aligned with the Common Core, while

Talent Management focused on issues of teacher quality.

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Early conversations among CORE leaders not only identified shared areas of focus,

but also the principles that guided their work. They believed that district work was

isolating and burdensome and that collaboration helped deal with the risk and reward that

comes with exposure to new approaches and ideas (Knudson et al., 2015). One district

leader commented, “You get so focused when you’re dealing in a district with just your

own issues that sometimes you realize that somebody else might be doing something that

might be better than what you’re doing or might complement what you’re doing.”

Another district leader reflected on the benefits of working together on common

challenges that faced districts:

It is just so important that we’re not doing this work in isolation. The changes, the shifts are too big, are too significant, and are too high stakes to just figure out on our own…. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could share resources, if we could learn from each other, and in doing so each carry a little bit lighter of a burden?

A key component of CORE is that district leaders did not join due to a mandate or

requirement or being matched with other districts by an external agency. They selected

their peers and elected to join the partnership. Participants shared that they determined

the focus of their work and what they believed they could achieve progress on together,

not on areas defined by someone else. They had the freedom to engage with the work and

determine how it added value for them. One of the interview participants shared that as

new district leaders have transitioned from various districts, none of the CORE districts

have withdrawn on the basis of new district leadership, and as those new leaders have

come in, they have renewed their commitment to the work of the CORE districts. At the

end of the 2019-2020 school year, the last remaining founding CORE district leader will

retire.

The CORE districts articulated the following set of design principles that guided

their early work:

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• Upholding an unwavering belief in equity and access for all students

• Maintaining an instructional focus and practice orientation

• Committing infrastructure to be data-driven

• Fostering flexibility and independence with mutual accountability that is

outcomes-focused

• Incorporating local leadership from local communities to be educator-driven

• Upholding clear and accessible language for optimal collaboration,

communication, and implementation of new strategies (Knudson et al., 2015;

Marsh et al., 2016).

The structure of CORE allows not only for collaboration between each

participating district, but also maintains the autonomy and governing structures of each

district, with most headed by a superintendent who works with an elected school

governing board. A clear distinction was established between sharing learning and

implementation, with CORE providing a forum for sharing and learning with one

another, but adapting ideas to local settings, structures, policies, and practices was left to

each district. Districts had the freedom to draw on the work in ways that were appropriate

to their context, and while they would commit their time and energy to their peers in

other districts, they had no obligation to make any specific changes when they returned to

their own districts. This early approach to the work was meant to ensure participation

without reservation and getting districts to buy into this by removing any potential

barriers.

Districts are not required to sign a formal contract but are expected to contribute

financially and agree to participate in regular executive board meetings throughout the

year. Of the districts that began with CORE, some of the smaller, more suburban districts

chose to withdraw, leaving the remaining large urban districts to focus on the unique

needs and challenges that might not face smaller suburban and rural districts in the state.

In some cases, while smaller districts valued the work the CORE districts were taking on,

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they did not have the same capacity that larger districts had to spread the CORE

responsibilities to other staff within the central office, especially during the time of the

waiver application process, and as a result chose to disengage with some of the key

components of CORE’s work (Knudson et al., 2015; Krachman et al., 2016; Marsh et al.,

2016). The timeline highlights some of the key decisions and events that resulted in the

current CORE district structure (see Figure 1). Figure 1. CORE Timeline

Source: Knudson & Garibaldi, 2015

Common interests and priorities helped ground the collective efforts of the

districts. All districts featured a traditionally underserved student population, with the

percentages of African American, Latinx, English learners, and socioeconomically

students who have traditionally struggled in California’s K-12 system matching or

exceeding state averages. District leaders all shared a deep commitment to addressing

issues of equity and access and that all students have opportunities to succeed. While

common interests united the participating districts, other differences made collaboration

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difficult, such as the discrepancies in teacher evaluation across districts, especially the

incorporation of student achievement data. Travel also presented a barrier for districts to

working together, and while technology helped, most of CORE’s work happened face-to-

face. Interview participants acknowledged the challenges of travel but felt the time

traveling was well spent and impacted their work as district leaders.

CORE district leaders described an orientation toward learning and a growth

mindset as critical components of their work together. They indicated that their

interactions were most effective when they focused on the commonalities rather than the

differences that could prevent opportunities for collaboration. Instead of presenting to

each other the successes of their districts, which traditionally happens at conferences or

other professional gatherings, district leaders committed to acknowledge their own

weaknesses and developed group norms, including being completely honest about the

things that were not working well. A sense of mutual respect and sense that everyone

there had something to offer also contributed to the culture that supported the work of the

CORE districts.

Participants pointed out the importance of setting up facilitating structures to move

the districts’ joint work forward. The process of collaborating, planning, and organizing

activities requires careful thought that most district leaders don’t have time to help

organize. By each district agreeing to support a CORE office based in Sacramento and

hiring a staff of facilitators to guide the work, this burden was removed from district

offices. A key piece the interview participants pointed to was the ability of facilitators to

guide the conversation based on the needs identified by district leaders, and because the

work of cross-district collaboration was new territory, facilitators not associated with any

of the districts could help facilitate, but ultimately, the districts are the experts driving the

conversation (Knudson et al., 2015; Krachman et al., 2016; Marsh et al., 2016). Some

district leaders commented that the work also involved navigating the group dynamics

and personalities, especially among superintendents that are accustomed to making final

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decisions on their own within their own organization. Participants spoke highly of the

executive director of CORE, who has managed the internal and external politics

surrounding CORE (Knudson et al., 2015; Krachman et al., 2016; Marsh et al., 2016).

The collaborative structure of the CORE districts created a critical mass and

opportunities to engage in activities that are not possible in the small scale of an

individual district. For example, during the transition to Common Core, CORE had

access to content experts that might not deal with an individual district, but due to its

size—of representing over one million students across the state—CORE districts could

pool their financial resources and influence to create unique and compelling experiences

that districts would not have access to on their own.

Work of the CORE Districts

After receiving their initial waiver in 2013 and building their own school

accountability and improvement model, Congress replaced NCLB with the Every Student

Succeeds Act (ESSA) and turned over to states the job of designing their own school

accountability system using multiple measures of achievement. As the waiver expired, in

2016 the CORE district leaders asked the California State Board of Education for

permission to continue to develop their hybrid design. In letters to the State Board of

Education, the CORE districts requested that their system be designated a research pilot,

providing data and insights to the board as it worked on broadening the state’s

accountability system into areas in which the CORE districts were already doing

innovative work (Fensterwald, 2016). They argued that CORE’s continued efforts would

help the state reach its goal of creating a single coherent state and federal accountability

system. Some of the metrics used by both systems are identical, such as including

suspension, graduation rate, and English learning proficiency measures. Smarter Balance

test results in math and English language arts factor both annual scores and rate of

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progress over time into both systems, with data presented in a dashboard format. There

are some differences in how data are collected in both systems for indicators such as

college and career readiness, which is a state measure, and high school readiness and

social emotional indicators measured by the CORE districts. However, in their request for

an extension of the waiver, CORE districts agreed that it would work to align their

accountability index with state and federal requirements. This would include the

adaptation of state indicators of college and career readiness and addition of social and

emotional measures and high school readiness as local indicators, as allowed by the Local

Control Funding Formula (Fensterwald, 2016).

As part of a series of essays published by EdSource, CORE district leaders and

CORE office executives reflected on their approach to measuring school quality and the

lessons they have learned from their work. Michael Hanson, who was then

Superintendent of Fresno Unified School District and served as president of the CORE

districts’ board of directors, shared his perspective. In his essay, he shared that the term

“accountability” is synonymous with blame or punishment but challenged this notion and

questioned why information can’t instead be used as an ongoing system of continuous

improvement that empowers educators to build the capacity of schools and support

instruction in ways that help all students to learn (Hanson, 2015). Hanson wrote that the

CORE district leaders felt the education expectations under No Child Left Behind were

too narrow and forced districts to chase achievement in a system that did not define

success in a comprehensive or rigorous way. Reflecting on the experience and expertise

of educators and researchers, the CORE district leaders set out to develop a more holistic

and comprehensive accountability model and to redefine educational accountability, a

term that referred to a punitive system that offered schools and districts little or no

assistance. They chose to focus on the right drivers that they believed would collectively

help prepare more students for college and career readiness. This system attempts to

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design a system that assists schools in identifying needs and targeting assistance and

interventions.

The new School Quality Improvement System provides a new model for districts in

California and across the nation to move away from a narrow focus on test scores toward

a broader focus on multiple factors that impact the long-term success of students, such as

high school readiness of students in 8th grade and high school graduation rates, and

including measures of a student’s social and emotional health (see Figure 2). Figure 2. CORE School Quality Improvement System

Source: CORE

The CORE districts made the decision to include a larger number of students in the

accountability system, and CORE districts have agreed to share their data and calculate

Index metrics, such as how many days of school students attend and the number of

suspensions in a given year. Collaboration and shared learning are key to continuous

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growth model which will be developed by the CORE Board of Directors in the 2014-2015 school year. However, if an LEA currently uses or seeks to use another high quality student growth model, the LEA will have the opportunity to apply to the CORE Board for the option to use an alternative method, provided the LEA provides a strong research-based rationale.

A commitment to prepare all students for college and careers and eliminate disparity and disproportionality are the right drivers to create a system that truly supports the entire student community. The districts participating in the School Quality Improvement System share a central belief – that a moral imperative to prepare all students for college and career, as opposed to responding to a narrow accountability model, will increase the quality of instruction for students and increase success in all three domains: academic, social/emotional, and school culture and climate. Once the School Quality Improvement System receives final federal approval, any California district or charter school will be welcome to participate in the School Quality Improvement System as long as they are willing to share their data and expertise, and are willing to take on the hard work of reorienting their systems around the right drivers.

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improvement, and when systems are seen as helping inform and improve education rather

than punishing teachers and schools, Hanson (2015) feels that educations will welcome

accountability and honest conversations, not only about successes, but also failures, as a

way to promote innovation.

Another district leader also discussed the development of the School Quality

Improvement Index and how the district leaders came to a consensus about the metrics

they wanted to include, such as tracking how students performed as they made the

transition from middle to high school, a pivotal time when students leave the system and

are not prepared for the demands of high school or college or career readiness (Wilson,

2015). The CORE district leaders decided to track the persistence rate of 8th graders who

were still enrolled in 10th grade. This seemed like a relatively logical and easy way to

provide valuable information to middle schools about the risk factors linked to dropouts

associated with their school. What the district leaders found, however, is that this piece of

data was not as valuable as they had originally thought, and to their surprise, there was a

relatively high number of students who were still enrolled when they reached 10th grade.

However, many of those students were so deficient in school credits that they were not

truly on track to graduate from high school. The original metric was misleading and did

not raise the red flags to ensure that those students received the needed supports and

interventions for credit accumulation.

District leaders also found in their research a connection between students’

persistence in high school and their experience in middle school, and by viewing district-

level data and assessment, they became concerned that middle schools were being

unfairly held accountable. Based on these findings, the CORE district leaders began to

rethink how they could use student persistence rates as part of the school improvement

system. The CORE board voted to change the focus to measures that the data showed

were predictive of high school success and graduation. These included a GPA of 3.0 or

better, scoring at a proficient level on math and English language arts standardized tests,

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an attendance rate of 96% or better, and a history of no suspensions. After further

refinement, they adjusted the GPA to 2.5 and decided against using the standardized test

scores as a measure due to the uncertainty of the correlation between those test results

and success in high school. Instead, they decided to look at the grades in English

language arts and math. But even looking at measures like course grades proved to be a

challenge as different districts had different course names and codes as well as coming up

with shared definitions of which English language arts and math course would be

considered in the data collection process to ensure the data were accurate. The CORE

district leaders began to have conversations about the data metrics they wanted to collect

and discuss the challenges they would face in ensuring a correlation between the data and

what district leaders were trying to measure (Wilson, 2015).

In addition to wanting to measure the progress toward high school graduation and

college and career readiness, CORE district leaders also wanted to find a more accurate

way to measure the growth of their English learners in a meaningful way. Nearly

1.5 million students in California are not fluent in English, and high percentages of these

students are enrolled in the CORE districts. CORE district leaders learned in their

research that students who don’t become fluent within a certain time period would not

have access to a college prep curriculum, be two to three years behind in math and

English language arts, and likely have a GPA lower than 2.0. Because of this huge

achievement gap between native English speakers and English learners, the CORE

district leaders wanted to include an English learner metric (Carranza, 2015). While it

was important to include the rate at which schools and districts reclassify English learners

as proficient and have it easy to implement, implementation was harder than expected.

CORE district leaders found that most school accountability models do not include

reclassification rates at all, and while most districts track the rate as a reported statistic, it

is not included in how schools or districts understand or measure their performance.

District leaders shared that designing a measure that worked across all CORE districts

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while avoiding the unintended consequences of reclassifying students at the wrong time

was not easy. CORE district leaders brought in policy, assessment, and data experts from

across their districts and looked at the English learner classification method used by the

state. District leaders found that California’s rate is determined by looking at the total

number of students to reclassify in a particular year, divided by the total number of

English learners enrolled the in the prior year. What this calculation didn’t include is the

amount of time it takes to reclassify a student, and district leaders agreed the state’s

method of measuring would not work for their districts (Carranza, 2015). Research

indicates that students should develop the skills necessary to be reclassified as Fluent

English Proficient between five to seven years, meaning they no longer need additional

support in the classroom. In California, an English learner is considered a long-term

English learner if they have received six years of public school instruction in the United

States and are still not proficient. After much debate, the CORE district leaders

determined they would use the five-year marker as the point at which English learners

should be reclassified as English proficient. They agreed to these time markers to ensure

that all schools were jointly responsible for this work as students progressed through each

grade. Also, they argued that looking at students at the five-year mark would allow for

earlier intervention before they reached the threshold of falling so far behind that they

could not catch up academically and likely to never be reclassified. The CORE district

leaders agreed to determine the reclassified rate by calculating the number of students

with more than five years of instruction in the United States who are reclassified as fully

proficient English learners, divided by the total number of long-term English learners,

giving credit to schools with any reclassification made in less time than that. This method

also encourages schools to reclassify students in a timely manner without creating

incentives for reclassifying too early. District leaders acknowledge that this metric still

poses challenges as each CORE district uses somewhat different criteria in determining if

a student is ready to be reclassified. But overall, district leaders were proud of the

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conversation and dialogue they had regarding holding themselves accountable for the

timely reclassification. They acknowledged the metric is not perfect, but a work in

progress.

Another metric CORE district leaders wanted to include in their School Quality

Improvement Index was one measuring the social and emotional learning of students.

One of the executive directors from the CORE office shared the thinking of CORE

district leaders and their rationale for developing this metric, which had not been included

in previous accountability systems. District leaders believed adding this metric provides

more information to schools and districts to further understand students and what they

need to learn and succeed. This information can be used to inform and shape strategies to

help students succeed in school and prepare for college and career (Bookman, 2015).

District leaders wanted to move beyond the narrow measures of academic achievement

and measuring indicators such as student attitudes toward personal growth and

effectiveness to offer schools important insight about classroom instruction, classroom

environment, and culture that can inform and guide efforts to improve them. While

district leaders felt that including these social-emotional measures was important,

determining which social-emotional skills to prioritize was challenging. District leaders

spoke of their work with the nonprofit Transforming Education in narrowing down their

focus on skills with the greatest potential to impact student outcomes that were

meaningful, measurable, and actionable.

As they looked at existing tools and questions on surveys, leaders had to consider

how they could be misinterpreted and reference bias, where different groups may rate

themselves differently on the same scale due to a different understanding of given skills.

While no perfect measure exists, they still decided to move forward in including a social-

emotional metric, as socio-emotional skills are complements for other measures like

academic achievement and graduation. The initial set of competencies and definitions the

CORE district leaders agreed to include in the School Quality Improvement Index:

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• Growth Mindset: A belief one’s abilities can grow with effort.

• Self-Efficacy: A belief on one’s own ability to achieve an outcome or reach a

goal.

• Self-Management: The ability to regulate one’s emotions, thoughts, and

behaviors in different situations.

• Social Awareness: The ability to understand others’ perspectives and

emphasize with them (Bookman, 2015).

After agreeing to these shared terms and definitions as well as using common survey-

based measures across all CORE districts, the districts developed a pilot study in 2014 to

address the measurement, communications, and timing of the SEL survey. Eighteen

schools across the CORE districts participated in the pilot, which included 9,000 student

responses and 15,500 teacher responses. The CORE districts partnered with Harvard’s

Center for Education Policy to analyze the survey and responses and found that the

survey as an instrument was measuring distinct skills in a reliable fashion and that social-

emotional skills are related to other outcomes, such as test scores, grades, discipline, and

attendance. The findings were then used to make data-driven decisions about which

measures to use across the CORE districts. The CORE districts continued to make

revisions and conducted a field-wide test in 2015, with over 500,000 students

participating (Bookman, 2015). The CORE districts continue to refine the use of this

instrument, but initial findings show a strong correlation between higher school social-

emotional ratings and higher school-level achievement and lower levels of suspension

and chronic absence. CORE district leaders acknowledge that as they work on including

social-emotional skills as part of their accountability index, they are working on the edge

of innovation, where these indicators are currently seen as secondary considerations

beyond test scores and other academic outcomes that schools have focused on and seen as

something nice to have rather than a must-have in American education.

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As part of their work designing an accountability system responsive to their needs,

CORE district leaders wanted to examine how student attendance was tracked and

analyzed. They believed that that many schools and districts do not have the information

they need to develop effective strategies to improve attendance, as only tracked and

reported average daily attendance is collected. Average daily attendance does not offer

insight into how many or which students are chronically absent. Because schools report

an overall attendance rate that on the surface seems acceptable, this may not show the

large number of students who are chronically absent. It masks critical problems and fails

to identify individual students who may be most at risk (Llamas, 2016). As the CORE

districts work on the elimination of disparities and achievement gaps among students,

student attendance is key. In previous accountability systems, attendance has not been

included as a metric, but the CORE district leaders wanted to hold themselves

accountable for better tracking absenteeism and its impact. District leaders brought

together data, curriculum, and assessment experts to discuss potential approaches to

design a new metric. They established that an individual student’s attendance rate in a

given year is defined as the number of days attended divided by the number of days

enrolled. The next challenge was to determine how many days a student needed to be

absent before being defined as chronically absent. While the CORE districts have tracked

attendance, the method across districts was slightly different. They worked with

Attendance Works, a national organization that helped establish a widely accepted

threshold for chronic absence as students with 90% or lower attendance rate and adopted

this as the standard measurement to use across the districts. They also agreed to calculate

school-wide chronic absenteeism by dividing the number of chronically absent students

by the total number of students. A review of the data across districts showed that these

students had greatly diminished odds of graduating on time. As well as agreeing on a

common metric that would be used across the CORE districts, work is also happening in

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sharing strategies to reduce absenteeism, such as attendance recovery programs (Llamas,

2016).

How graduation rates are determined and calculated is another that the CORE

district leaders wanted to analyze and figure out how to use to assess the overall success

of schools and districts. The overall graduation rate for California students has improved

as well as for subgroups such as Latinos and English learners (Banda, 2016). In

California, graduation rates for counties, districts, and schools are calculated based on a

four-year cohort using the California Longitudinal Pupil Achievement Data System

(CALPADS). While the CORE districts include graduation rates as part of the School

Quality Improvement Index and follow the state’s model for calculating graduation rates,

CORE districts also decided to measure the five- and six-year graduation rates to track

students who graduate but may take longer than the traditional four years. The CORE

districts want to support these students that may need additional time to complete high

school graduation requirements, such as late-entering English language learners who are

learning English along with their academic coursework. CORE districts receive credit on

the School Quality Improvement Index for the work they do to support older students.

One of the challenges school districts face in using graduation rates is the lag in

time receiving results in the spring for students from the prior year’s cohort. CORE

district leaders expressed that they would be interested in collaborating with the state and

other districts to find ways to release preliminary graduation rate data the summer after a

student’s senior year rather than months after the school year is over. Insuring accurate

and timely graduation rates can help schools and districts understand the barriers that

impede students from graduating on time and inform strategies for increasing the number

of students who graduate ready for college and career (Banda, 2016).

As the CORE districts worked on developing metrics that best supported the

monitoring of student progress and data-based decisions, when the question of choosing

between using student proficiency or academic growth to gauge student progress, CORE

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district leaders argued that a school improvement and accountability system can do both.

District leaders shared that they take into account both the number of students meeting

standards and how much academic growth students are making, referring to this as the

“Power of Two” (Miller, 2017). In the CORE districts’ data system, educators have

access to test score measurements that are clear and easy to understand that highlight how

schools are improving student learning. These school reports that highlight academic

growth as well as academic performance and other school progress measures are

available online and shared at the district and county level. These data are reassuring and

motivating to educators who are working with large numbers of traditional underserved

students in California’s public schools.

State- and locally-driven measures of school progress are connected in the CORE

districts’ data system and can better inform what administrators and teachers know about

student achievement. The CORE districts opened their data collaborative to all

educational agencies, and there are now over 160 systems, including districts, county

offices of education, and charter management organizations, that utilize CORE’s data

system, encompassing over two million students.

In order for the CORE districts to evaluate academic growth fairly, they worked

with statistical research partners to ensure that the data system accounted for differences

among individual students. A growth model is intended to gauge whether individual

students grew more or less than what could be expected from students like them or like

peers. Determining what a like peer meant was not easy, but CORE district leaders

decided to take into account the students’ prior test history and their status as

economically disadvantaged, disabled, English learner, homeless, or in foster care. Not

only are the adjustments made at the student level, but also adjustments are made for

concentration of these characteristics within a school. Because of these decisions, schools

with high concentrations of youth in poverty have an equal chance of being viewed as a

high-impact school that is having as great an impact on student learning outcomes as

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those schools with mostly well-off students (Miller, 2017). Previous assessment models

did not allow for schools, such as those with high rates of poverty that had a considerable

impact on learning, because they only looked at prior test scores without considering

other attributes. This decision to consider other attributes did not come easy for the

CORE district leaders as they wrestled with these policy choices. It was particularly

challenging to acknowledge schools for the academic growth their students were making,

even when few students met standards as measured by their scores on the Smarter

Balanced assessments, especially when it came to pervasive achievement gaps in math

for African American and Latinx students across the CORE districts. But because they

were using the “Power of Two” and could highlight both overall proficiency and growth,

they felt it was important to include exceptional progress as measured by improvements

in learning outcomes, even if a school and its students still had a long way to go as

measured simply by the number of students who met the standards.

The growth model highlights the impact of educators at each school in a different

way than scores alone. The “Power of Two” helps identify schools where students are

learning significantly faster or slower than their academic peers, and it provides key

information about which schools need the greatest support and intervention (Miller,

2017). One district leader shared about how the collection of student performance data

informs the decisions they make:

It helps me to know what I need to do to support my 84 schools. It helps my rank and file at the schools—whether they be students, teachers, counselors, administrators, parents , whoever the stakeholder is- to know what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, how we’re spending our money, why we’re spending our money in a particular way.

Another district leader shared how the collection of growth data informs the work and

decisions made in their district:

It fills a huge gap in our understanding of how we’re performing. Primarily it’s understanding where the outliers are. So without the growth data, there could be some key things happening at schools that goes

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undetected. You could have a school that on a proficiency basis looks to be a low performer, but is actually growth significantly year-to-year. And we want to know who those schools are so we can understand what they’re doing.

Successes

CORE district leaders have been encouraged by seeing the California State Board

of Education in discussions about adding a student-level growth measure to the state’s

own school accountability dashboard. CORE district leaders strongly believe that the

“Power of Two” helps capture the true nature of schools’ academic achievement and can

further support the state’s educational mission of continuous improvement for schools

and students. CORE district leaders also argue that this view of student progress through

the lens of equity and access for all students in California, not just in the CORE districts,

is essential to support the progress of all students (Miller, 2017). To support the work of

the CORE districts in their efforts to measure both growth and proficiency, they have

partnered with Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE) and are sharing their

quantitative and qualitative findings with state and federal decision makers to help inform

policy decisions in a more sophisticated way to evaluate the impact of a school on student

progress (Miller, 2017).

The granting of the waiver in 2013 opened the door and allowed the CORE

districts to jump ahead and design a school accountability and improvement system that

might set the standard for equitable access to deeper learning opportunities for the rest of

the state (Ruiz de Velasco, 2015). While districts in other states were looking to their

state superintendents for orders and guidance, the CORE superintendents look to each

other for advice, and board decisions are consensual. CORE’s approach to school

improvements paired schools of distinction or “reward schools” with demographically

similar but lower-performing schools. Most of these pairings occurred within the same

districts, but a third were inter-district collaborations with monthly interactions between

teachers and administrators to share ideas and practices, and design a school

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improvement plan (Fensterwald, 2014). As part of the School Quality Improvement

System, the CORE districts developed the School Quality Improvement Index, a

100-point school rating system to measure student achievement (see Figure 3).

\

Figure 3. School Quality Improvement Index

Source: CORE

The index focuses on three areas: academic achievement, school climate and

culture, and social emotional factors (Fensterwald, 2014). In an executive summary put

together by the CORE office in 2013, the purpose of the School Quality Improvement

System was outlined and any California local education agency (LEA) invited to

participate in the system. The executive summary emphasized that the district leaders that

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designed the School Quality Improvement System did not simply set out to replace the

existing federal accountability rules with a different set of more flexible rules, but rather

wanted to reorient their systems so that student success in multiple dimensions was at the

center of every decision and action (CORE, 2013).

The School Quality Improvement System is rooted in a commitment to prepare all

students for college and career that is achieved through shared learning and collective

responsibility for continual improvement (Darling-Hammond et al., 2015; Ruiz de

Velasco, 2015). Leading policy analysts defined the essential elements of an

accountability system needed to support the task of college, career, and civic readiness

for all and the need for this system to nurture the intrinsic motivation needed by people at

each level of the education system. This new accountability paradigm rests on four

pillars:

• A broad, high-quality curriculum and associated assessments that focus on

deeper learning opportunities

• A commitment to professional capacity building to help new and veteran

teachers, principals, and school support partners to deliver on the promise of

college, career, and civic readiness

• Appropriate and adequate capital resources

• A systematic focus on continuous improvement characterized by data-driven

inquiry at all levels of the organization and directed at continuous improvement

(Darling-Hammond et al., 2015; Ruiz de Velasco, 2015).

The district leaders behind the development of this system committed to design a system

that would advance a culture of data-driven, continuous improvement. Continuous

improvement in the education sector requires a routine that brings individuals from across

the system and allows them to understand the root causes of the problems they face,

develop a collective vision for the entire organization, and build a clear sense of shared

accountability for responsive action. They also wanted to instill a collective and moral

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imperative in all stakeholders to prepare all students for successful futures and be

responsive to the specific needs of California students with a focus on eliminating

disparities between subgroups and adopting the collaborative framework developed by

Michael Fullan. The system is grounded in the concept of moral imperative described in

Fullan’s research and is focused on the choosing the right drivers for whole system

reform (Fullan 2011; Ruiz de Velasco, 2015).

This commitment to a culture of data-driven continuous improvement put the

CORE districts on an organizational path that pushed against the prevalent norms of

state-led accountability, and the concept of systematic continuous improvement, while a

long-established approach in other sectors, such as manufacturing or healthcare, is an

emerging approach in public education. Over the last two decades, the federal and state

accountability systems have centered on a more familiar but very different results-based

approach that focuses on system inputs and population-level outcomes, while spending

less attention to implementation processes. In contrast, educational organizations that

focus on continuous improvement explicitly examine the implementation process and

attempt to improve the critical steps between inputs and the population outcomes (Ruiz

de Velasco, 2015).

This system also incorporated recommendations from the state’s Greatness by

Design report and asserts that, though achieving success for all students hinges on teacher

effectiveness, the responsibility rests with the entire school community (CORE, 2013).

District leaders emphasized that the School Quality Improvement System was not an

escape from accountability, but rather an invitation for a higher level of accountability for

student success and accepting shared responsibility to prepare all students for college and

career. They argued that the federal expectations for meeting students’ needs have been

too narrow for too long and that LEAs were chasing success in a system that did not

define success in a comprehensive or rigorous way, and that true success can only be

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achieved through a holistic approach. The system was built on four goals that were

mutually determined and agreed upon by the CORE district leaders:

• College and career readiness expectations for all students

• A focus on collective responsibility, accountability, and action that emphasizes

capacity-building over accountability

• The development of intrinsic motivation for change through differentiated

recognition, accountability, and support for schools

• Focused capacity-building for effective instruction and leadership (CORE,

2013).

A central tenet of the system is that college and readiness for all students can only

be achieved if disparity and disproportionality are eliminated. As part of the School

Quality Improvement Index, the number of students necessary for inclusion of their

subgroup performance is 20 students in comparison to 100 under the federal

accountability system. This change was not required from the U.S. Department of

Education and was done voluntarily by the CORE districts, thus impacting the reporting

of progress of an additional 200,000 students, a large percentage including African

American, Latinx, English Learners, and students with disabilities (CORE, 2013). In

addition, all participating LEAs are also collecting and sharing data beyond what is

required for federal accountability, such as the factors identified as critical indicators of

the success of students such as pre-k information, middle school transitions, and A-G

completion rates.

The participating LEAs agreed to transparently share the data without the threat of

sanctions, but to break out of traditional silos to work collectively for the betterment of

all students across districts. In the School Quality Improvement System, the federal

government requires annual measurable objectives known as School Quality

Improvement Goals, and all schools are held accountable for increasing graduation rates

and for overall improvement in student achievement, as well as improvement in closing

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achievement gaps among student subgroups. Schools or districts failing to meet their

goals are offered support and technical assistance by partner schools and districts. This is

a paradigm shift away from a compliance-based accountability system to one driven by

the collective and the individual responsibility to adhere to a new set of principles, with

shared responsibilities and support built across districts (CORE, 2013).

Many CORE district leaders had a prior history of working to establish data-

informed improvement practices within their districts and used this experience to inform

their design of the School Quality Improvement System (Ruiz de Velasco, 2015). It was

important to them to uncouple data from bureaucratic compliance. The proposed School

Quality Improvement System and the data collected needed to meet federal results-based

accountability requirements but also enable construction of early warning indicators of

academic disengagement, as well as indicators of social and emotional learning and of

positive school cultures and climate that the CORE district leaders believed were

fundamentally associated with student academic success (Ruiz de Velasco, 2015).

CORE district leaders also wanted to emphasize that data collected and examined

would advance shared goals, but also allow for differentiation and flexibility in use at the

district level to reflect contextually relevant needs and to connect data to individual

district-level intervention strategies. For example, in 2013, CORE district leaders and the

Gardner Center at Stanford University convened principals, teacher leaders, and district

staff for a conference to collaboratively decide on the social and emotional learning

(SEL) constructs they wanted to make part of the school quality system. Participants

agreed to focus on constructs that were:

• aligned and could be connected to local goals for equitable student college,

career, and civic readiness

• measurable given current and prospective data collection practices

• actionable at the classroom, school, and system levels (Ruiz de Velasco, 2015).

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The CORE approach to selecting SEL indicators for inclusion in the School

Quality Improvement System reflects another dimension of data use in supporting adult

learning in the system. CORE participants understood that SEL information would be

context-dependent and have the most meaning when examined against local norms and

applied to gain a deeper understanding of the connection between their practices and

specific school or district learning goals for students. They wanted to capitalize on their

CORE collaboration to explore the potential of developing CORE-wide SEL benchmarks

and to use the data to facilitate cross-district learning. CORE leaders argued that by

allowing local innovation framed within a collaborative approach and high expectations,

each of the CORE districts would get better, more contextually relevant results (Ruiz de

Velasco, 2015). This cross-district approach to system improvement in developing the

skills and strategies required to work across boundaries stretches the capacity of all

stakeholders in service of continuous learning and improvement.

Another component of the School Quality Improvement System is an expectation

that every student deserves an effective teacher, and it is the collective responsibility of

schools and districts to ensure that every teacher and principal is effective. One key

organizational commitment of continuous improvement organizations is the systematic

use of data to inform practice, problem, solution definition, solution identification, and

evidence-based intervention design and redesign. Providing support and assistance and

the School Quality Improvement System incorporated the recommendations from the

California Department of Education’s report, Greatness by Design. The specific way that

teachers and principal effectiveness is measured varies in each participating LEA but

could consider options that look at the discrepancy between professional practice and

student performance or use student growth as a defined percentage. Regardless, schools

that want to participate in the School Quality Improvement System must be willing to

share their data and expertise with colleagues across districts (CORE, 2013). CORE

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districts wanted to ensure that their plan supported the needs of each district as proposed

in the CORE waiver (see Table 6).

Table 6. NCLB Program Improvement vs. School Quality Improvement System

California CORE Waiver

Nature of Interventions

• Interventions are the same for each school and LEA in a given year of Program Improvement

• Required interventions are targeted based upon school needs (e.g. achievement gap, low grad rate)

Support Available

• System is one of top-down compliance and does not include cross-school/LEA collaborations

• LEAs partner with peers to jointly work though implementation of initiatives (e.g. Common Core State Standards, teacher and principal evaluation system

• Priority and Focus schools partner with Reward schools based upon area of focus

Evaluation • Schools and LEAs must progress through PI interventions without the flexibility to assess whether they are working well for their context

• LEA and school partners hold each other accountable, partner to solve targeted problems together and will notify CORE is peer falls out of good standing

Source: CORE

When district leaders were asked about the new measurement system, they

appreciated a more holistic approach to measurement, especially the use of a more

comprehensive set of academic and non-academic measures to assess school

performance. One district leader said, “The social emotional side … needs to play against

the academic piece. If you have one without the other, you’re probably missing

something.” While these types of measurements were not new, having all of these

measurements accessible in one place was. Another district leader explained,

When you can get all of those measurements in one place and they’re measurements that make sense to people who use them, you get better at making decisions about what actions you need to take, how you use your resources, your dollars and your people to do that work and I think if

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anything, that is also linked to what we’re trying to do with the Communities of Practice more at the school level.

District leaders also endorsed the new accountability measures’ emphasis on growth over

status and praised the new system for including measures of growth in student

achievement and the fairness of including this measurement. They appreciated that the

new system allowed for schools and districts to be recognized for progress they were

making that was rarely recognized under a compliance-driven accountability structure. In

particular, lower-performing schools and districts liked the new system’s emphasis on

growth and believed that growth measures leveled the playing field for schools and

districts with underserved student populations and would incentivize educators to focus

more than just on the “bubble kids” or those scoring close to the proficiency cutoff, a

response common during the NCLB era (Knudson et al., 2015; Krachman et al., 2016;

Marsh et al., 2016; Ruiz de Velasco, 2015).

The experiences of the CORE districts have the potential to inform the design and

implementation of other accountability systems currently under development across the

country, including California’s School Dashboard. Based on the demand from other

districts in California that were interested in the accountability system designed by the

CORE districts, over 160 systems in California, including districts and county offices of

education, have opted into CORE’s Data Collaborative, which currently impacts over two

million students. For new data systems to be truly useful for impact, several conditions

are essential. One is the buy-in from educators and leaders. If they are going to take the

time to review and reflect on data, they need to perceive that the data are valid and that

the indicators reflect what they value. District efforts to adapt measurement systems to

reflect local values and needs are important to build local buy-in, but if multiple data

systems are perceived to be misaligned, this can undermine support, and achieving wide-

scale buy-in can be difficult. Even among the CORE districts where leaders created the

system and selected the indicators, there were various levels of buy-in within and across

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districts. While involving educators in the development of the systems is important,

efforts that demonstrate the validity and values of the measures may also be needed

(Knudson et al., 2015; Krachman et al., 2016; Marsh et al., 2016; Ruiz de Velasco, 2015).

The capacity of educators and leaders to use the new data system to drive practice

and improvement is also important. Data alone do not drive and immediately lead to

action without the capacity to interpret and know how to act. While there is a general

capacity to interpret and respond to academic data such as state, benchmark, interim, and

diagnostic assessment results, this capacity needs to be built around the newer academic

and non-academic measures. Educators in the CORE districts conveyed, in particular, the

need for more support around how to use the social-emotional learning data. For

example, guidance around using student achievement data often will link to next steps for

instruction, and a similar process could be put into place for responding to non-academic

data (Knudson et al., 2015; Krachman et al., 2016; Marsh et al., 2016; Ruiz de Velasco,

2015).

With a shift to multiple academic and non-academic measures, educators and

leaders need to learn how to respond to data that may show positive results on some types

of data and negative results on other types. For example, an academically high-achieving

school might find that its school culture or students’ social-emotional outcomes are

relatively low. Educators need to understand the data and what might be the underlying

reasons for lower-than-expected results and find possible ways to address these

underlying causes. This might require networking with experts, support from peers, or

access to research. The complexity also requires greater communication and ways of

helping all stakeholders understand what it means when a school is rated high on some

measures and lower on other measures (Knudson et al., 2015; Krachman et al., 2016;

Marsh et al., 2016; Ruiz de Velasco, 2015).

To respond to data in meaningful ways, educators need the support of colleagues

and a culture that values reflection over compliance and provides opportunities to build

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shared knowledge of the new measures. It is also important to consider how the data in

the new accountability systems might be distorted. Under NCLB, research demonstrated

the ways that educators narrowed their instruction, focused on “bubble kids,” and

emphasized test-taking strategies to meet annual yearly progress (AYP). While the new

accountability systems provide multiple measures and focus on growth, there is still

potential for districts and school to use similar strategies, not to avoid possible sanctions

under NCLB, but to respond to pressures to look good for the public and to attract and

retain students, especially in the context of declining enrollment or school choice.

Schools may still feel pressure to improve the numbers but not the practices in their

district. For example, schools noted that their low results on the new accountability

system made it difficult to attract prospective families. Further sustained work around

changing the culture of data use and accountability will support this shift away from a

lens of compliance (Knudson et al., 2015; Krachman et al., 2016; Marsh et al., 2016).

After the CORE districts determined their initial areas of focus, they then worked

to design the scope of that work. In the area of Standards, Assessment, and Instruction,

the work around Common Core standards, which had been adopted by California in

August 2010, provided a natural common focus of all CORE districts. As part of the Race

to the Top application, district leaders had the opportunity to flesh out their plan for

transitioning to the new standards and wanted to focus on an idea from the federal

proposal—the development of a shared Common Core-aligned item bank for district-

level and interim and formative assessments. Because the standards were finalized only

months before CORE began, each district was in the same place trying to navigate the

implementation process. District leaders imagined that this focused collaboration could

help them identify and develop strategies to help with the transition.

To collaborate on Common Core-related issues, the district leaders created a team

to lead the work, including instructional leaders from across the CORE districts and

consultants from Ed Partners, who assisted with some of CORE’s early work before the

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CORE central office was formally established. This team met on a monthly basis and

focused on developing guiding principles of the Common Core implementation plan.

Through these meetings, trust was built as well as informal and formal connection

between district leaders as they participated in professional learning opportunities and

jointly focused on planning processes, strategies, and progress for implementation in each

district (Knudson et al., 2016).

As this team led the work, CORE was able to leverage its size and influence to

organize training sessions that included Common Core authors and experts such as Phil

Daro, David Coleman, Jason Zimba, Pam Grossman, and Stanley Robinowitz, who

trained the group on the English language arts and mathematics standards and assessment

issues. The original idea of the item bank became not just a resource to help districts

develop their own assessments, but a vehicle to help understand Common Core. Near the

end of 2011, a set of Common Core-aligned online modules that included instruction

guides, curricular resources, and formative assessment and analysis tools was available

for targeted grade levels. Participants felt this work was valuable due to the focused

nature of the work and a tangible product that was useful for all districts. They also

appreciated having a network of people they could reach out to during this time of

implementation (Knudson et al., 2015).

Challenges

In contrast to the work around Standards, Assessment, and Instruction and the

implementation of the Common Core standards, the work around Talent Management

was more challenging to define and ultimately less successful. Like implementing new

standards, CORE wanted to develop great teachers and leaders. When trying to define

what that meant, they turned their attention to teacher evaluation. Teacher evaluation had

been a key component of the Race to the Top application and the final application

commitment to a principal and teacher evaluation system based on multiple measures,

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including at least 30% coming from student achievement growth. A challenge district

leader faced, though, was balancing their belief about teacher quality and the need to

have a competitive application. Though the application was ultimately not approved, this

remained a common area of interest for the CORE districts to address. Like the team that

worked on the implementation of the Common Core, a similar team was put together to

work on teacher quality and evaluation. While there were some discussions with teacher

unions across the CORE districts, they were reluctant to agree to an evaluation system

that incorporated student achievement, and this perspective traced back to the Race to the

Top application.

As the Talent Management team moved ahead, teacher union representation was

not involved with the work, which some say contributed to the lack of a tangible product.

While the team had regular meetings and even commissioned an analysis of collective

bargaining agreements across districts in an attempt to improve teacher improvement

policies, and districts consulted with one another on teacher evaluation issues, it did not

translate into any ongoing specific focus of work. Overall, participants felt that beyond

the parameters of the teacher evaluation system incorporating student achievement data,

districts had different priorities and strategies and the topic of teacher evaluation had

become a hot political topic in California and across the country (Knudson et al., 2015).

As part of their waiver from the NCLB/ESEA requirements, the CORE districts

designed a system of intervention to meet the needs of low-performing schools in their

districts. CORE districts believed that their system would better meet the needs of their

low-performing schools and that the barriers to school improvement and appropriate

interventions were contextually driven and local in nature, meaning that an approach that

worked well in one school might not work well in a school across town. CORE leaders

also believed that practitioners already possess the knowledge and skill to improve and

that schools can improve most quickly when given the autonomy and provided support to

meet, share successful practice, and engage in structured inquiry to guide improvement

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efforts. In the interventions the CORE districts developed, schools were provided a

framework for engaging in inquiry and knowledge sharing, but the ultimate decision-

making and implementation were non-prescriptive in nature in contrast to the sanction

model of intervention under NCLB (Marsh et al., 2016).

During the early implementation of the intervention model, 178 schools across the

CORE districts were identified to engage in two tiers of improvement activities. Priority

schools—those falling in the lowest 5% of all schools, receiving School Improvement

Grants, or having a graduation rate below 60% in the CORE districts—were paired with

reward schools that were high-performing or demonstrated high growth with similar

student populations. In these school pairings, schools were expected to meet several times

over the year, develop a plan with the assistance of a district facilitator, and were

allocated funding to support the pair’s activities. Focus schools—those with low-

performing subgroups or students—were grouped into Communities of Practice. As with

the school pairings, within these Communities of Practice schools were expected to meet

several times per year, develop a plan with the help of a facilitator, and were allocated

funding to support these activities. In some cases, the Communities of Practice and

School Pairings crossed district lines. As described in the waiver, the interventions were

expected to focus on local needs and to leverage the school-site staff aligned with system

reform drivers such as fostering intrinsic motivation, continuous improvement, collective

teamwork and allness (CORE, 2013).

In each of the pairings, it was assumed that the high-performing school leaders

would serve as coaches to guide the improvement process in struggling schools.

According to CORE staff, these structures were launched in the middle of 2013-2014

with light support, as schools were told it was up to them and they were trusted to make

decisions about their work. However, this approach was not successful, and after a

critical review from a U.S. Department of Education audit, the CORE districts reworked

the structures; for the 2014-2015 school year, the CORE central office provided more

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tools, clear guidance, and training to support the work. Priority schools were encouraged

to identify two to three problems of practices, develop an improvement plan based on

ESEA’s seven turnaround principles, develop a structure for collaborative interaction,

meet quarterly, and show evidence of learning and progress. Schools in the Community

of Practice were required to identify problems of practice, come together around shared

problems, meet quarterly, and run quarterly Plan-Do-Study-Act cycles. Currently

collaborative matching, planning, and cycles of inquiry comprise the current

interventions, and after initial training from the CORE central office, school support

structures were run by the districts with annual Peer Review to monitor implementation

(Marsh et al., 2016).

The CORE central office, a nonprofit office with several staff members who were

employed from partner districts prior to joining the office, played a key in supporting and

advancing the work of the member districts. This included facilitating cross-district

collaboration in order to build capacity and to meaningfully engage with the new

measurement system through the organization of formal opportunities for this work to

occur, such as board meetings, quarterly meetings for individuals from different districts

fulfilling similar work roles, and regular phone meetings. Districts were also required to

complete a self-evaluation and peer evaluation process measuring their progress against

planned activities. After their self-evaluation, districts would review one another’s work

and make suggestions about how to improve implementation.

Districts supported the CORE intervention model, recognizing that it was better

suited for school improvement in comparison to NCLB with accountability used “as a

flashlight not a hammer,” but they expressed concerns about implementation. One district

leader explained:

The accountability efforts are less like a hammer and more of a way to improve on our efforts in a more constructive way. And say the word hammer kind of referring to maybe the perception of what NCLB held us accountable at. Looking at standards with a cut-off line and you’re either yay

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or nay. So either one way or another. So this really allows us to look more discretely and closely at groups of students, how they’re doing and what efforts are being put into place to help to support them.

While there was general support for the idea of the CORE intervention model, the

success of these interventions depended on the school-level buy-in and capacity. District

and school leaders acknowledged that the interventions might not see consistently high

results across schools, depending on the extent schools and districts are able to keep it

robust and up and going. One finding that emerged is that those districts involved

primarily in one type of intervention, either the Communities of Practice or School

Pairing, were more positive than districts involved with both. It may be that engaging

with just one intervention or limiting the number of inter-district pairings simplified the

intervention work and buy-in (Marsh et al., 2016).

According to district leaders, CORE interventions were designed to promote

mutual learning, capacity-building, and network development, specifically to encourage

the sharing of ideas and successful practices among schools. District leaders interpreted

the first key purpose of mutual learning as a shift in the overall tone of improvement

efforts and contrasted this mutual learning to prior prescriptive, top-down reforms. One

district leader explained:

In the NCLB days, you had to be determined … you’re bad, you’re in trouble, we’re going to send somebody to fix you, kind of thing, versus a CORE approach of matching schools that have similarity with demographics but dissimilar in their outcomes. How can we help each other? What can I learn from you? What can you learn from me? It is a much more powerful tool. (Marsh et al., 2016)

District leaders also acknowledged the challenges in implementing this vision. While

they sought to emphasize the reciprocal nature of learning by creating a respectful,

mutual learning space, this vision was not always realized.

Other district leaders believed that a second key purpose of the CORE

interventions was to build capacity to engage in continuous improvement activities such

as cycles of improvement. It wasn’t simply about helping schools and districts, but about

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helping them get better, meaning that these interventions could help districts and schools

learn how to solve their problems, rather than learn solutions. By using improvement

protocols paired with a culture of inquiry with access to new ideas and perspectives,

schools have been better prepared to engage in deeper mutual learning. Building capacity

for continuous improvement also involved changing the school culture to a culture of

safety and innovation in which failure is an acceptable and necessary part of progress.

Leaders across the CORE districts expressed that the culture of intervention in

schools should allow teachers to safely practice and give them effective feedback that is

going to change their practice and give them freedom to really try to uncover and

understand the issues that are impacting the school. Through the Plan-Do-Study-Act

cycle, schools were encouraged to identify challenges, search for innovative solutions, try

out new ideas, and assess their effectiveness within the particular school context.

Capacity building promotes trial and error and emphasizes the importance of contextual

fit over the sharing of best practices (Marsh et al., 2016).

A third key purpose of the CORE interventions identified was the building of

relationships or networks through encouraging interaction and learning among schools in

the Communities of Practice, and School Pairs were in themselves a main purpose of the

CORE interventions. These relationships play an important role in facilitating mutual

learning and continuous improvement activities. One district leader shared, “I think

CORE’s mission really is to develop a truly collaborative networked improvement

community that is pushing each other’s ideas, getting each other’s feedback, creating a

space where districts can learn” (Marsh et al., 2016).

Districts varied in the score of their interventions whether they utilized CORE

interventions in all their schools or just CORE identified focus, priority, and reward

schools and the extent to which activities and strategies were adapted at the district level.

Most of the CORE districts already had some type of school grouping within their

schools and district, like Professional Learning Communities or principal supervision

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groups, with the intent of promoting cross-school learning, but the extent that these

structures had encouraged learning prior to the CORE interventions is not clear. When

the CORE interventions were rolled out, districts varied in whether the CORE

interventions were restricted to only CORE-identified schools or integrated with existing

cross-school collaborative and improvement structures.

For example, two districts rolled out the Communities of Practice intervention to

all district schools, grouping schools together and utilizing the Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle.

As one district leader explained, they had a certain number of schools that were identified

as focus schools, and as they thought about it, it made more sense to them to implement

the strategy across all of their schools, not just the focus schools. These districts chose to

utilize the Communities of Practice across all their schools because the CORE

intervention connected to their prior practice and due to strong district-level buy-in for

collaborative improvement efforts. They intentionally used alternative terms, such as

“network” or “cohort,” that made sense to those school communities, but as a result,

those schools had mixed responses about the impact of CORE interventions versus local

interventions because of the different terminology used.

In other districts, Communities of Practices and School Pairing were treated as

distinct from existing district reform efforts. For example, one district grouped schools

regionally and facilitated regular principal meetings as well as cross-school observation,

and the Communities of Practice were considered a separate intervention. Some

administrators expressed concerns with this approach in that the CORE interventions

became increasingly isolated and focused on compliance primarily connected to Title I

spending restrictions, rather than a central part of the school improvement work.

Both the Communities of Practice and School Pairing were similar in that both

required that schools identified based on past performance meet regularly with

collaborating schools, work with a district facilitator to identify a problem of practice and

develop a school improvement plan, and utilize a subset of Title I funds to implement

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those plans. However, the Communities of Practices had a slightly more prescriptive

approach in that these schools were required to engage in a set of three Plan-Do-Study-

Act cycles each year, while Paired Schools were afforded more autonomy to determine

their activities over the year. In contrast, the central CORE office was more centrally

involved in matching Paired Schools than in the grouping of schools in Communities of

Practice, sometimes matching schools across district borders. Due to some of the

challenges in implementing the cross-district School Pairing, a few districts chose instead

to match their priority schools with alternative rewards schools within their district. Most

schools across all CORE districts utilized cross-school walkthroughs such as structured

observations of classroom instruction by personnel from both the host school and the

partnered school as a central part of their improvement plans. This was already a

common practice in all CORE districts and referred to in local terms as instructional

rounds and continuous improvement visits, with these walks intended to promote

reflection, sharing, and mutual learning (Marsh et al., 2016).

District and school leaders identified four main challenges that impacted

implementation. One challenge was the validity of the identification of schools for CORE

intervention. Schools were initially identified as focus, priority, and reward schools, and

while a few new schools were dropped from focus or priority status based on student

performance, few focus and priority schools were identified, and reward schools

remained fixed. Some district leaders had concerns about whether the selected schools

were truly in need of improvement and if reward schools were best positioned to prove

support due to the validity and timeliness of selection criteria.

In the case of priority and focus schools, some districts questioned the use of the

School Improvement Grant (SIG) status as a criterion for CORE inclusion. In some cases,

district leaders felt they had additional schools in need of improvement that were not

identified by CORE because of the relatively large proportion of low-performing schools

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in other districts. Some felt that other schools could have benefitted from School Pairing

and Communities of Practice but were excluded from participation (Marsh et al., 2016).

A second challenge that impacted implementation was the fit in the matching of

schools into the School Pairing and Community of Practice relationships. Priority and

reward schools were primarily matched based on having similar demographics, but some

participants expressed concerns that matched schools had much different contexts,

despite having similar demographics. Participants wanted additional autonomy in

determining pairings, with some district leaders expressing that a forced pairing did not

always resonate and that the context of the pairing mattered. Overall participants in both

Communities of Practice and School Pairing believed that cross-school collaboration

worked best when schools shared not only demographic characteristics and other factors

such as capacity and personality match but were also well matched on school challenges

and successes.

In some districts, leaders felt they would have been better served by selecting their

own collaborative partner schools and targeting a school’s specific area of need.

Overwhelmingly, the participants felt that the pairings were costly, time-consuming, and

ineffective and that the pairing lacked accountability, since the schools were supervised

by different districts. Different geographic and district policy contexts also impeded the

collaborative work in some pairings, where the pairing across districts was costly and

time-consuming due to travel, especially if schools were far apart from each other. Over

time, participants felt that the partnerships were more work than enhancing and

facilitating their growth and improvement. As a result of this, some districts modified

their pairing to provide intradistrict pairings for all priority schools (Marsh et al., 2016).

Reciprocity across schools and districts posed a third challenge to the

implementation of the CORE intervention structures. The intent of the School Pairing

intervention was to allow for two-way, reciprocal learning between the priority and

reward schools. In some cases, the reward principals shared that they learned a great deal

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from their paired priority school and learned about practices they could bring back to

their school communities. In other cases, the expectations were not clear and called into

question. Not all schools were clear about the specific roles of the priority and reward

schools, and in some cases, some schools were resistant to learn from schools that were

poorly performing. This tension resulted in one district changing the terminology from

reward school to partner school, and it is likely that the belief that paired schools were

not equipped to reciprocate feedback and ideas may have interfered with cross-school

mutual learning for improvement.

A fourth challenge faced in the implementation of the CORE intervention

structures was the capacity constraints, such as limited time to engage in collaboration

and inadequate funding to support the work of school improvement since intervention

funds were reserved for trying out new ideas rather than implementing school-wide

programs. Besides time and resources, districts struggled to provide trained facilitators to

push forward the Community of Practice and School Pairing work. The quality of

facilitation varied across districts and was raised as a concern, and most districts

emphasized the need for facilitators to take a more hands-on approach, such as utilizing

Socratic coaching methods, reviewing school plan content with a critical lens, and

following up with schools to ensure that planned collaboration and activities were

realized. Overall, the facilitation was not as substantive as hoped and may not have

optimally facilitated learning among CORE intervention schools. Some districts reported

powerful learning experiences, while others had limited learnings from their collaborative

interventions. Some districts questioned if such a light touch through collaborative

interventions was enough to solve the chronic performance problems in schools. There

were structures in place such as meeting a regular basis throughout the year and

developing plans, but was that enough to impact meaningful change in the long run?

Those who experienced positive learning experiences shared some of their examples,

such as picking up best practices from other schools to facilitate their implementation of

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existing curricula and programs and learning about logistical processes. When it came to

learnings around deeper inquiry, those learnings were more basic, with leaders learning

about the reflective process and learning how to ask each other questions that push their

work. There was shared support for a gradual shift toward inquiry-oriented organizational

learning that might lead to eventual improvement. A district leader shared:

I think the intervention work is helping us hone in on our skill of using a cycle of continuous improvement to look at both the implementation and the impact…. How do we help them identify where those successes are and be really super mindful and explicit about why they think those are happening … how do we help them identify those areas of challenge and help them figure out why those are still areas of challenge … what are the practices that may have had the longevity at their schools?

While the long-term impact of these CORE interventions is yet to be determined, the

impact of this early work points to a shifting focus from quick prescriptive school

turnaround toward gradual, locally led, inquiry-based organizational change (Marsh et al.,

2016).

Similar to the school level collaboration supported through CORE interventions,

district level peer collaboration was another central element of the CORE partnership

intended to build the capacity of districts and schools to engage in CORE’s accountability

system, lead to improvement efforts, and promote professional accountability, mutual

learning, and collaborative inquiry across districts. Through this partnership, people in

similar positions across districts were brought together to help design and implement

CORE’s accountability system. As the system moved into implementation, the

collaborative moved to focus more on professional accountability, learning among

districts, and working together on implementation challenges. The majority of district

leaders supported peer-to-peer collaboration as the primary purpose of the CORE

partnership and an important step in building capacity for continuous improvement

(Marsh et al., 2016).

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District leaders with unique roles and those in smaller districts appreciated the

opportunity to engage with others in similar roles, with one explaining:

You are like the one and only person who does that work in your district and you don’t get to engage and exchange around ideas with other people leading similar work in districts. That was the big like, “There are other people, like me, doing the same stuff and we can talk to each other about what some of these challenges are, and bounce ideas off each other.”

Leaders across districts also supported their enhanced role in designing CORE’s

accountability system and leveraging the CORE partnership to influence state policy. For

many leaders who were typically involved in the implementation of state policy, CORE

provided a valuable opportunity to contribute to policy design. District leaders met on a

regular basis, with CORE staff facilitating discussions of specific data metrics and

implementation successes and challenges. While district leaders participated in formal

administrative activities, they tended to prefer and value more the informal activities. The

majority of district leaders reported reaching out to colleagues to consult on emerging

issues. The overall feedback is that leaders value the informal collaboration over the

formal content of the meetings. In the early years of CORE, some of the work around

designing and implementing CORE’s accountability system may have required more

focused discussion than learning opportunities, and as the districts have now transitioned

to ongoing implementation, future formal collaboration may need to provide more time

for cross-district reflection and learning (Marsh et al., 2016).

Building authentic professional accountability continues to be an area that districts

are working on through structures like the accountability systems and peer review

processes. Districts in groups of three are mandated to complete a thorough self-

evaluation and peer evaluation. In most districts, this peer review process felt more like a

compliance activity with very little conversation. The structure of the peer review process

appeared to hinder mutual learning and professional accountability. Because the districts

were grouped in triads, they were not involved in reviewing all districts in the

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partnership, and some district leaders noted the possibility of inconsistent peer ratings

when they saw the peer review reports from other districts and noted the discrepancy

between ratings. The early focus on compliance was not surprising, but district leaders

wanted to push deeper with the collaboration. CORE districts are now strengthening their

commitment to each other by focusing on a specific measurable goal for cross-district

school improvement and using collective resources as a Networked Improvement

Community (Marsh et al., 2016).

Reflecting on the Progress of the CORE Districts

Prior to forming CORE, most of the participating district leaders were already part

of a learning community supported by the California Collaborative on District Reform

organized by the American Institutes for Research. Through the California Collaborative,

the CORE district leaders met at least three times a year with each other and with

policymakers and researchers to explores particular problems of district practices and

system improvement. Since 2000, both NCLB and the state’s Public School

Accountability Act had been creating policy pressures for school principals and teachers

to improve student performance, but CORE district leaders credit their involvement in the

California Collaborative for advancing their knowledge of how district-level leadership

can create the conditions and organizational structures to help principals and teachers

increase their capacity to respond to policy pressures effectively and creatively (Ruiz de

Velasco, 2015).

District leaders also credit the early partnership between Fresno and Long Beach

for setting the standard for their norms of engagement. In this early CORE prototype,

Fresno and Long Beach set out to create cross-district teams of district administrators and

instructional leaders to focus on mathematics instruction, improving outcomes for

English learning, leadership development, and college, career, and civic readiness. The

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districts met quarterly to discuss these strands of work and put data dashboards at the

forefront of these conversations, allowing key staff to share data practices that

accelerated change. Through this approach, participants across different departments

within and across the districts modeled the use of performance data not only for

accountability, but also to break down organizational silos and shed light on common

challenges in a way that led to identifying shared solutions (Ruiz de Velasco, 2015).

Leveraging this early partnership model, CORE district leaders have established

organizational structures to promote broad engagement across and within their districts to

advance CORE accountability structures such as the school-pairing work and the data

collaborative.

Conclusion

An analysis of the data and notes from interviews with participants revealed some

key themes related to the work of the CORE districts. This included expanded

relationships built by district peers and improvement capacity and increased feelings of

empowerment. Interview respondents expressed that after many years of working within

the confines of an ineffective state system of education, CORE provided an opportunity

to operate outside of those boundaries and give voice to the district perspective (Knudson

& Garibaldi, 2015; Rorrer et al., 2008). While the CORE districts were more successful

in their work developing an assessment system and less so in their work regarding teacher

evaluation, their willingness to collaborate and utilize the recommendations of Fullan

(2011) and the State Superintendent’s Task Force on Educator Excellence (2012) speaks

to the strength of districts leaders coming together around a shared purpose. As one

district leader shared,

Being willing to subject your individual will for the whole gives you the opportunity to bounce ideas off people or to try different test cases. Different districts will take different approaches and then share that for the good of the

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group which is really powerful. You don’t necessarily have the bandwidth to try you know a million different things. So, having the opportunity to do that in a different way is really meaningful and good.

The continued participation in the CORE work around a shared purpose provides a space

for district leaders to collaborate with individuals in job-like positions and to leverage

their connections and knowledge of other districts to impact change in their own systems.

When examining the findings and responses from a Critical Policy Analysis framework,

we find a group of district leaders that made the decision to proactively respond to the

policy landscape shaped by No Child Left Behind and, instead of accepting the confines

of a top-down accountability system, collectively came together to influence policy

development and implementation (Horsford et al., 2019). Instead of just accepting that

No Child Left Behind was an ineffective policy, CORE district leaders proactively

designed an accountability system that was meaningful for their districts.

Chapter V presents a summary and discussion of the findings, the implications and

conclusions from the findings, and recommendations for future research and how district

leaders and other policy agents at the federal and state level can use these findings to

inform their system reform work and support student achievement.

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Chapter V

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

Introduction

The purpose of this study is to describe and examine how the constraints on urban







Unified School District, Oakland Unified School District, Santa Ana Unified School

District, and San Francisco Unified School District) experienced, negotiated, and


privatization and neoliberal school reform. In this chapter, I provide a summary of the

dissertation study and a summary and discussion of the findings, followed by

implications, conclusions, and recommendations for research, policy, and practice.

Chapter I presented an overview of the dissertation study, including the statement

of the research problem, purpose for examining the CORE districts as they experienced,

negotiated, and responded to the shifting education policy landscape as a result of

privatization and neoliberal school reform. The chapter also presented the significance of

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the study, the research questions and methods, a summary of the findings, and the

organization of the study.

Chapter II presented a review of the related literature beginning with an overview

of the shifting education policy landscape at the federal and state level, including a

discussion of the high-stakes federal accountability systems and neoliberal school

reforms that district leaders found themselves contending with. This includes No Child

Left Behind and the use of top-down accountability systems and the waiver process, the

policy actors involved, and how educational leadership discourse shaped the narrative of

the education policy landscape. Next the chapter examined the nature of urban district-

level leadership, including governance and leadership models, and the circumstances that

led to the establishment of the CORE districts. The chapter then examined the CORE

districts themselves as a response to the shifting education policy landscape, including

the history, purpose, and demographics of the CORE districts, the policy context and

landscape, key education policy shifts taking place in California, and the challenges of

high stakes accountability. The chapter closed with an overview of how a critical policy

analysis framework can provide a structure to analyze how the CORE districts challenged

traditional notions of power, politics, and governance structures and can frame our

understanding of the significance of the CORE districts and their work within the larger


Chapter III presented an overview of how I conducted my study, including the use

of my research questions to select and organize the data, the process of selecting and

interviewing participants, and the selection of a narrative frame to present my findings

based on the themes that emerged from the analysis of the data.

Chapter IV presented the findings, including the context of federal and state

accountability, how districts were operating in a vacuum of support, and the state,

federal, and CORE district and central office players. The chapter also presented findings

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about the establishment and work of the CORE districts and the successes and challenges

they have faced so far.

Through a qualitative case study research design and critical policy analysis as an

analytical framework, we can see that since the implementation of No Child Left Behind

in 2001, the increased federal accountability for student achievement and school

performance created a climate of top-down compliance and competition focused on

markets and private interests, resulting in diminished local control and competition for

limited state and federal resources that the CORE districts found themselves trying to

navigate (Horsford et al., 2019; Lipman, 2011). The CORE district leaders have also

dealt with a fragmented state support structure focused on technical support that left

CORE district leaders feeling isolated and unsupported (Rorrer et al., 2008) as other

policy actors sought to become involved in educational reform policy (Henig, 2013).

Summary of Findings

The examination of the data reveals three key themes that emerged from the

findings: (1) a willingness of the CORE district leaders to push against the status quo and

not having time to wait for the federal or state government to help them: (2) that CORE

district leaders were driven by a moral imperative to do what was best for their students

and districts; and (3) a desire to use data in meaningful way to hold themselves

accountable. These factors contributed to the formation of the CORE districts. Not only

were the CORE districts impacted by NCLB and its top-down accountability structures,

districts were also navigating a fragmented state support structure consisting of multiple

agencies responsible for primarily technical support of federal and state programs

(Taylor, 2014). Districts and district leaders found this structure of support limiting and

focused on compliance. What drove the CORE districts to come together around a

common purpose came from a shared frustration with the current policies and power

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structures. Districts and district leaders had not been viewed traditionally as key

institutional actors in educational reforms, and the decision of the largest urban districts

to come together to collaborate was a significant shift in how district leaders were seen as

policy actors in California (Knudson & Garibaldi, 2015; Marsh et al., 2016; Rorrer et al.,

2008).

Discussion of Findings

Multiple factors at the federal, state, and district level converged, at the same time

providing both challenges and opportunities that resulted in the establishment of the

CORE districts. Changes in the state funding policies that allowed for more local control

also contributed to an environment that allowed opportunities for collaboration across the

CORE districts. The Greatness by Design report from the State Superintendent’s Task

Force on Educator Excellence also recommended cross-district collaboration as a strategy

to support systemic reforms. What should be noted is that the decision to collaborate

across the CORE districts and implement these recommendations was not mandated or

required from state or federal governance structures but based on the shared needs

identified by the CORE district leaders. It should also be noted that despite turnover in

district leadership, districts have selected to maintain their collaborative relationship with

the other CORE districts.

District leaders expressed that their work of preparing students for success may

appear on the surface as a straightforward goal but done in isolation is “bone crushing

and deeply emotional” (Duffy et al., 2009). California’s example of fragmented structures

that districts turn to for support reveals gaps and a need for structures such as CORE. It

also highlights the unique partnership that formed between Fresno Unified School

District and Long Beach Unified School District, not out of compliance but by a shared

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need identified by two district leaders that grew into the CORE districts’ structure that

exists today (Marsh et al., 2016).

Michael Fullan (2014), who has worked closely with the CORE districts and

supported their reform work, points out that the sheer size of the state—with 1,009 school

districts and 58 county offices of education along with a fragmented system of state- and

federal-level agencies—makes systemwide reform challenging, with district leaders

feeling there is not a clear place for them to turn for support, especially in large urban

districts. But Fullan also believes that with structures such as CORE, there are

opportunities for whole system changes, not only in the CORE districts but across the

state, and examining the work of the CORE districts provides an opportunity to see how

his research is applied by the CORE district leaders to their system reform work.

Fullan (2014) also describes the shift from the wrong drivers to the right drivers in

impacting systematic change and specifically references the state’s move from the

compliance-driven Academic Performance Index to a new accountability system focused

on the state’s eight priorities of student achievement, student engagement, school climate,

basic service, implementation of standards, course access, parent involvement, and other

student outcomes. Leading from the middle can be challenging to the infrastructure of the

State Board of Education and the California Department of Education as new

partnerships form across districts such as the CORE districts or the CORE Data

Collaborative as the state shifts from compliance to a capacity-building relationship with

districts and county offices (Fullan, 2014).

As districts and county offices of education now navigate the new structures of

decentralized resources, such as the local control funding formula and the local control

and accountability plan, it would be easy for districts to once again become stuck in

compliance-driven processes and reports. In contrast, what districts can think about is

how these new structures provide a tool for capacity building and local coherence and

how districts can learn from collaboratives like the CORE districts.

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Several interview participants referred to Fullan’s idea of a moral imperative that

drives their work with the CORE districts and that the work of improving student

learning should be owned by all stakeholders across districts. If a district leader cares

about the progress of the students in their own district, they should also equally care

about the progress of all students in other districts they are collaborating with (Fullan,

2011; Fullan & Quinn, 2016).

A review of previous case studies on the CORE districts and responses from

interview participants also emphasizes the importance of not only having a growth

mindset and being open to sharing what is not working, but also having strong

relationships and a sense of trust to share with counterparts from other districts. The

CORE staff took concrete steps to build connections and trust among participants and

provided opportunities for participants to get to know each other personally and

professionally to form deep relationships, a step that other types of district collaboratives

have skipped to focus on shared work. Consistency in participation was a key component

identified by CORE participants. When district teams feature sustained engagement of

the same group of people, district leaders built a trusting environment and could make

further progress each time they meet. CORE’s work was less successful when the same

team of people did not commit to participating and it felt that the work was starting over

many times. Developing these regular interactions required to build relationships became

an important element of developing conditions for learning (Knudson et al., 2015).

Another key component identified by participants was the need for clarity around

expectations about the reasons why they are collaborating and what their commitments

will entail. District leaders pointed out that collaboration is not the goal, but a tool to get

toward a goal. Collaboration is not just about getting together, but there should be

something that brings everyone together to be very focused on that work. For example,

districts might collaborate most effectively when they work together on shared problems

of practice. The work around developing assessment modules is one example of how

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CORE focused on a shared problem of practice, that is, how to facilitate implementation

of the Common Core by building teacher capacity and monitoring student growth by

creating Common Core aligned assessment modules (Knudson et al., 2015). While the

early work of the CORE districts quickly found a shared focus around the issues of

Common Core implementation, it was much more difficult to find a shared purpose about

teacher evaluation beyond agreeing that all students should have high-quality teachers.

The early CORE experience suggests that effective and sustained collaboration

must first begin with an honest conversation about the commitments each person and

district is making. CORE districts freely chose to participate, and no districts had to meet

any requirements to continue their involvement (Knudson & Garibaldi, 2015; Marsh

et al., 2016). While this flexibility gave districts the freedom to associate with CORE to

the level that made the most sense to them, it also led to a variation in commitment

levels. Participants indicated that collaborative efforts were strongest when groups

participated consistently, and agreeing at the outset of the work what participation entails

will help achieve the consistency that enables a partnership to thrive. The clarity about

the work applies not only to district leaders, but to everyone who contributes to the work.

If the collaborative work is to have an impact on the system beyond the district leader,

then the messaging and communication of purpose and priorities need to extend to all

participants as a consideration for district leaders that bring colleagues into a

collaborative environment (Knudson et al., 2015). Most importantly, the sense of

collaboration and mutual accountability must be meaningful to all stakeholders, which

was not the experience of the CORE district under previous top-down accountability

systems.

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Implications and Conclusions

A potential implication that surfaces about the work of the CORE districts is how

to best measure the ongoing impact of this collaboration, not only on individual districts

and district leaders that are part of the CORE, but the indirect impact on other districts in

California and large policy discussions at the state and federal level around school

improvement. A series of unique dynamics came together, including a need from districts

for support in their improvement work, and the state’s limited capacity to pivot and

address those needs created an environment that made CORE possible. What CORE has

accomplished varies from district to district, and participants have engaged with CORE to

varying degrees. The ways their work has changed may look different from system to

system. One district leader explained:

If a district that’s in CORE says they did all that stuff without being part of CORE, I don’t think that’s true. If CORE says this district is doing this because they’re in CORE, I don’t think that’s true either. I think that it’s the kinds of things that people are gravitating to and … played out and got strengthened by sitting at the table together.

One of the effects described by district leaders is the deepened and expanded

relationships that district leaders developed with their peers. While CORE itself was an

outgrowth of existing relationships, those bonds were strengthened through their work

together. An outgrowth of this was also the relationships formed across other central

office leaders who otherwise would not have had a chance to work with one another.

Several central office leaders shared that they would call their colleagues in other districts

when they had questions or wanted advice. The impact of the districts’ working together

is not simply the activities within CORE, but the way the cross-district collaboration

changed the way education leaders approached their work. Educators were not working

within the traditional silos that have characterized district work, and they created an

environment with more support and information for them to access (Knudson et al., 2015;

Marsh et al., 2016). As CORE districts learned about the work occurring in other

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systems, they could leverage this with their own district work, such as when districts

transitioned from the California Standards Test to the new Common Core-aligned

assessments in their districts.

District leaders reported gaining improved capacity, citing their deeper

understanding of the state’s new standards due to their learning with peers and Common

Core experts. One district leader stated, “I was better positioned to lead in my district

with the knowledge I brought back from my engagement with CORE—from both the

experts as well as my peers from other school districts.” The continued and sustained

participation of CORE districts despite multiple changes in district leadership also speaks

to the value of the work (Knudson & Garibaldi, 2015; Marsh et al., 2016). New district

leaders also spoke positively about having a group of peers to collaborate with, which is

rarely the circumstance for district superintendents. One district leader shared, “It’s really

good as a new superintendent. This is year three for me, but coming into that scenario, I

immediately had a peer group of people to bounce idea off of. A lot of new

superintendents in this world don’t have that luxury.” Other district leaders expressed that

their focus was no longer about just the students in their district succeeding, but the

success of all students across CORE districts.

Recommendations

While the exact conditions and circumstances that resulted in the establishment of

the CORE districts cannot be recreated elsewhere in California or other states, there are

lessons to take away from the work of the CORE districts as cross-district collaboration

continues to grow as an option for system and district improvement. For districts, district

leaders, or federal and state policy actors wanting to support the work of districts, these

are key recommendations to inform their work:

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1. Collaboration must come from the participants and cannot be mandated. As

part of this collaborative process, one component to consider is the selection

of the right districts. Multiple interview participants spoke to having the right

combination of districts and spoke of several characteristics of the CORE

districts that led to the effectiveness of the group’s work. This included

participating by choice and not because of a mandate or requirement. It is

important to emphasize that these districts selected their peers and elected to

join the partnership, and their common interests and priorities also helped the

districts ground their collective interests (Knudson & Garibaldi, 2015; Marsh

et al., 2016).

2. There must be a sense of trust and mutual respect as well as a shared focus

and purpose for collaborating. Participants shared that identifying shared goals

and problems of practice as well as having a sense of trust and mutual respect

in order to have honest conversations about their flaws and struggles that they

can’t have elsewhere is another characteristic that participants referenced

when reflecting on what has made the work of the CORE districts valuable.

3. Participants must have a sustained commitment to the work that is supported

by flexible structures that are meaningful. Participants referenced the

importance of making sustained commitments to the work and having the

structures and flexibility to collaborate. Stakeholders need to have a sense of

ownership and purpose when participating in a collaboration. It is not about

collaborating for the sake of collaborating, but rather feeling a real sense of

purpose (Knudson & Garibaldi, 2015; Marsh et al., 2016).

4. Policy decisions that decentralize resources and authority, such as the Local

Control Funding Formula and the Local Control and Accountability Plan, also

provide opportunities to build local capacity and move away from

compliance-related processes and reports. To do this requires thoughtful

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planning and consideration of how these decisions can be used as a tool for

capacity building and local coherence that impacts engagement and

performance. CORE district leaders shared that this shift from a compliance-

based system to a collaborative model was key in their work to support

continuous improvement (Knudson & Garibaldi, 2015; Marsh et al., 2015).

Those who play a role in the policy decision-making process must move their

thinking away from drivers that are counterproductive and think about the limitations of

the current structures and levers that actually prevent meaningful whole system reform.

Elements such as accountability, individualism, and technology are important elements of

system reforms, but should be seen as parts of larger reform strategy, not as the primary

drivers of reform efforts. When these elements are used on their own or are the primary

focus, there is little or no impact on the system. Selecting the right drivers and pursuing

them as a coherent whole is key in meaningful system reform. Making sure that learning

and teaching are driven by individual and collective intrinsic motivation will result in

permanent changes (Fullan, 2014).

This is a dramatic shift in thinking and decision making that most will find

uncomfortable. Policymakers could make a huge difference in examining ineffective and

redundant accountability and technical support structures and consider what would best

support meaningful change in a shift from individual projects and grants from competing

federal and state offices and the development of policies that support meaningful

partnerships with policymakers across offices and agencies. Educational leaders should

move away from complicated and outdated assessment systems, such as the Academic

Performance Index (API) and Annual Yearly Progress (AYP), and replace them with a

system that measures both academic and social emotional progress of students with the

data used to inform systematic changes (Fullan, 2014). Districts should be leading from

the middle and playing a more significant role as they partner with each other and with

other governmental and professional agencies to drive meaningful change. Leading from

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the middle will continue to challenge the current state infrastructure as the State Board of

Education and California Department of Education work on shifting from a focus on

compliance to a capacity-building relationship with districts. Cross-district collaborative

partnerships, such as those occurring with the CORE districts, are key in building the

capacity to lead from the middle (Fullan, 2014; Rorrer et al., 2008).

Conclusion

The experiences of the CORE districts as they experienced, negotiated, and


privatization and neoliberal school reform help provide insight and lessons about the

power of collaboration around a common goal. The courageous leadership decisions

made by the CORE district leaders who shared a like-minded vision of a system that

would better support their work and did not accept the existing dysfunctional support

structures, demonstrate the power of not accepting the status quo. While the story of the

CORE districts is just beginning and more research is needed on how these systematic

changes are having a meaningful impact on student achievement, their work in pursuing

structures and developing a meaningful accountability system helps to present a counter-

narrative that districts can lead from the middle and can find or create meaningful support

structures beyond the current limited structures of support at the state and federal level.

While circumstances are different across large urban districts across the country, district

leaders should feel empowered by the experiences of the CORE districts to advocate for

what is best for their own students and local school community.

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Appendix A

Letter to Participants

Dear [subject’s name]

I am writing to ask if you would agree to be interviewed for a research study entitled “Fault Lines: The View from California’s CORE Districts as a Local Response to Federal Accountability on a Shifting Education Policy Landscape.” The purpose of this research study is to describe and examine how constraints from a top-down, high-stakes accountability culture led to the establishment of a consortium of California urban school districts. I hope you will be willing to help me with my study.

If you agree to participate, I will interview you for about one hour either face-to-face, over the phone or remotely using an online platform such as Zoom or Skype at a time convenient to you. During the interview, I will ask questions about your experiences as a district leader in a CORE district and how you have dealt with top-down reforms and shifting education policies.

Attached to this email is an informed consent form that is a further explanation of the study and your rights as a subject of research conducted through Teachers College, Columbia University. Please read the material carefully. By signing the informed consent form and agreeing to participate in the study, it is implied that you have read and understand your rights.

I will call you shortly to ask if I may schedule a time to interview you. In the meantime, if you have any questions, feel free to call or email me.

Sincerely, Kimberly Bradley

Educational Doctorate Candidate Urban Education Leaders Program Teachers College, Columbia University 525 West 120th Street New York, NY 10027 email: [email protected] phone: 559-217-0934

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Appendix B

Informed Consent

INFORMED CONSENT

Protocol Title: Fault Lines: The View from California’s CORE Districts as a Local Response to Federal Accountability on a Shifting Education Policy Landscape

Interview Consent Principal Researcher: Kimberly Bradley - Teachers College, Columbia University

559-217-0934, [email protected]

INTRODUCTION You are invited to participate in this research study called “Fault Lines: The View from California’s CORE Districts as a Local Response to Federal Accountability on a Shifting Education Policy Landscape.” You may qualify to take part in this research study because you are a current or former district leader from a California Office to Reform Education (CORE) district. Approximately six people will participate in this study and it will take 1 hour of your time to complete over the course of one day. WHY IS THIS STUDY BEING DONE? This study is being done to determine the social, political and economic forces that led to the creation of the California’s CORE districts. The study is also determining how federal and market-based reforms have shaped the governance and leadership models of these districts as well as the impact the CORE districts have had on the urban education policy landscape in California. WHAT WILL I BE ASKED TO DO IF I AGREE TO TAKE PART IN THIS STUDY? If you decide to participate, the primary researcher will individually interview you. During the individual interview you will be asked to discuss your experience as a current or former district leader in a CORE district and how shifting educational policies have impacted your work as an educational leader. This interview will be audio-recorded. After the audio recording is transcribed by a professional transcriptionist, the audio recording will be deleted. If you do not wish to be audio-recorded, you will still be able to participate. The researcher will just take hand-notes. The interview will take approximately sixty minutes. You will be given a pseudonym or false name in order to keep your identity confidential. The interview will be conducted at a time that is convenient to you and may be conducted face-to-face, or remotely using an online platform such as Zoom or Skype or over the phone. The interview will be audio-recorded. You can choose whether or not you would like to be audio-recorded. If you choose to be audio-recorded, the researcher will notify you when the audio-recorder is started and stopped. If you do not want to be audio-recorded, the researcher will take hand-notes.

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WHAT POSSIBLE RISKS OR DISCOMFORTS CAN I EXPECT FROM TAKING PART IN THIS STUDY? This is a minimal risk study, which means the harms or discomforts that you may experience are not greater than you would ordinarily encounter in daily life while taking routine physical or psychological examinations or tests. However, there are some risks to consider. You might feel embarrassed to discuss problems that you experienced as a current or former district leader in a CORE district. You do not have to answer any questions or share anything you do not want to talk about. You can stop participating in the study at any time without penalty. Your information will be kept confidential. The primary researcher is taking precautions to keep your information confidential and prevent anyone from discovering or guessing your identity, such as using a pseudonym instead of your name and keeping all information on a password protected computer and locked in a file drawer. WHAT POSSIBLE BENEFITS CAN I EXPECT FROM TAKING PART IN THIS STUDY? There is no direct benefit to you for participating in this study. Participation may benefit the field of education leadership to support current or future education leaders who may wish to undertake similar work. WILL I BE PAID FOR BEING IN THIS STUDY? You will not be paid to participate. There are no costs to you for taking part in this study. WHEN IS THE STUDY OVER? CAN I LEAVE THE STUDY BEFORE IT ENDS? The study is over when you have completed the individual interview. However, you can leave the study at any time even if you have not finished. PROTECTION OF YOUR CONFIDENTIALITY The primary researcher will keep all written materials locked in a desk drawer in a locked office. Any electronic or digital information including audio recordings will be stored on a computer that is password protected. What is on the audio recording will be professionally transcribed and the audio recording will then be destroyed to maintain your confidentiality. There will be no record matching your real name with your pseudonym. For quality assurance, the study team, the study sponsor, and/or members of the Teachers College Institutional Review Board (IRB) may review the data collected from you as part of this study. Otherwise, all information obtained from your participation in this study will be held strictly confidential and will be disclosed only with your permission or as required by U.S. or State law. HOW WILL THE RESULTS BE USED? The results of this study will be published in journals and presented at academic conferences. Your identity will be removed from any data you provide before publication or use for educational purposes. Your name or any identifying information about you will not be published. This study is being conducted as part of the dissertation of the primary researcher.

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CONSENT FOR AUDIO RECORDING Audio recording is part of this research study. You can choose whether to give permission to be recorded. If you decide that you don’t wish to be recorded, you will still be able to participate in this research study. ______I give my consent to be recorded ________________________________________________________________________

Signature ______I do not consent to be recorded ________________________________________________________________________

Signature WHO MAY VIEW MY PARTICIPATION IN THIS STUDY ___I consent to allow written and/or audio-recorded materials viewed at an educational setting or at a conference outside of Teachers College, Columbia University ________________________________________________________________________

Signature

___I do not consent to allow written and/or audio-recorded materials viewed outside of Teachers College, Columbia University ________________________________________________________________________

Signature OPTIONAL CONSENT FOR FUTURE CONTACT The researcher may contact me in the future for information relating to this current study: Yes ________________________ No_______________________ Initial Initial WHO CAN ANSWER MY QUESTIONS ABOUT THIS STUDY? If you have any questions about taking part in this research study, you should contact the primary researcher, Kimberly Bradley, at 559-217-0934 or at [email protected]. You can also contact the faculty advisor, Dr. Sonya Douglass Horsford at 212-678-3921 or at [email protected]. If you have questions or concerns about your rights as a research subject, you should contact the Institutional Review Board (IRB) (the human research ethics committee) at 212-678-4105 or email [email protected] or you can write to the IRB at Teachers College, Columbia University, 525 W. 120th Street, New York, NY 10027, Box 151. The IRB is the committee that oversees human research protection for Teachers College, Columbia University.

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PARTICIPANT’S RIGHTS

• I have read the Informed Consent Form and have been offered the opportunity to discuss the form with the researcher.

• I have had ample opportunity to ask questions about the purposes, procedures, risks and benefits regarding this research study.

• I understand that my participation is voluntary. I may refuse to participate or withdraw participation at any time without penalty.

• The researcher may withdraw me from the research at the researcher’s professional discretion.

• If, during the course of the study, significant new information that has been developed becomes available which may relate to my willingness to continue my participation, the researcher will provide this information to me.

• Any information derived from the research study that personally identifies me will not be voluntarily released or disclosed without my separate consent, except as specifically required by law.

• Your data will not be used in further research studies. • I should receive a copy of the Informed Consent Form document.

My signature means that I agree to participate in this study: Print name: _____________________________________________________________ Date: ______________________ Signature: ________________________________________________________________________

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Appendix C

Interview Protocol

Fault Lines: The View from California’s CORE Districts as a Local Response to Federal Accountability on a Shifting Education Policy Landscape

Kimberly Bradley

Teachers College, Columbia University

November 2019-March 2020

Interview Protocol Establishment of CORE Districts Consortium

1. In your own words, tell me about the CORE districts consortium. Who and what are they and how was their collaborative agreement established?

2. Could you describe the larger context of what was going on at the time of the formation of the CORE districts consortium? Demographic shifts, economic climate, political issues and debates affecting education?

3. How did NCLB and market-based reforms impact the CORE districts consortium? Their leaders?

4. Where were you working at the time of the establishment of the CORE districts consortium? What was your role? What motivated you to join or maintain your district’s participation in the CORE districts consortium?

Governance and Leadership

5. How is the CORE consortium structured and managed? 6. What is the process to join or withdraw from the CORE? 7. What are the goals and outcomes for the CORE districts consortium? 8. Describe the decision-making process of the consortium. 9. What commitments are made by the CORE districts when they join the

consortium? 10. What are the expectations for participating districts in the CORE?

Outcomes and Impact

11. What have been your experiences leading a CORE district? 12. To what extent has your district’s involvement in CORE impacted the work in

your district? Impacted students? How do you know?

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13. What are you most proud of in your work with the CORE districts? What has tested you as a leader?

14. Do you want the work of the CORE districts to continue? Is this work sustainable? Why or why not?

15. What advice would you give to another district or state who wanted to take on similar work?