School–Central Office Relationships in Evidence Use: Understanding Evidence Use as a Systems Problem
Item
Title
School–Central Office Relationships in Evidence Use: Understanding Evidence Use as a Systems Problem
Abstract/Description
Research on evidence use in school districts overwhelmingly focuses within schools on how school staff work with evidence including student performance data, research, and information about teaching quality. While important, this focus on schools reflects a mismatch with federal and state policies that demand not only that school staff work with evidence but that school district central office administrators do as well. This school focus also downplays how complex, social school-level change processes such as evidence use may typically involve central office staff in implementation and vice versa. To what extent do central offices matter to school-level evidence-use processes, and do schools matter to such processes in central offices? We explore these questions with a review of research on evidence use in schools and central offices with a focus on school–central office relationships in the process. We find that central offices and schools influence each other’s evidence-use processes in specific respects. We elaborate what extant research teaches about these relationships and argue that future research should aim to understand how evidence use plays out not solely within schools or central offices but across district systems and through interactions between central office and school staff.
Author/creator
Date
In publication
Volume
118
Issue
2
Pages
199-222
Resource type
Research/Scholarly Media
Resource status/form
Published Text
Scholarship genre
Empirical
Open access/full-text available
No
Peer reviewed
Yes
ISSN
0195-6744
DOI
Citation
Honig, M. I., & Venkateswaran, N. (2012). School–Central Office Relationships in Evidence Use: Understanding Evidence Use as a Systems Problem. American Journal of Education, 118(2), 199–222. https://doi.org/10.1086/663282
Comments
No comment yet! Be the first to add one!