Conference Agenda

A shared vision and clear goals are key components of successful school improvement because they help to structure action and motivate educators (Sun & Leithwood, 2015). However, establishing commitment to clear and challenging goals (Locke & Latham, 2002) can be challenging for educators facing conflicting internal and external expectations, insufficient organizational resources and capacities, and limited energy. Research shows that schools serving disadvantaged communities (SSDC) in particular often have unclear goals (Hemmings, 2012; Potter et al., 2002), set low goals, or generally doubt the feasibility of change (Orr et al., 2008). The symposium wants to address what kind of goals SSDC have, how these are related to how people view their school and the students, and how structures and culture affect goal commitment. The symposium comprises four research papers from Austria, Chile, Spain, and the United States, that address different angles of this focus, and different actors in the school. The first two papers zoom in on teachers negotiating between professional ethics to serve students, and restraints they are facing in their work. The third and fourth paper look into goals of leaders and educators as they are facing external contingencies, such as the COVID-19 pandemic and accountability measures.

In societies governed by Public Management (PM) principles teachers are incentivized to reach specific goals measured by student achievement, or face consequences. These demands make unavoidable that teachers face the needs of all their students ensuring they perform. This situation becomes significantly difficult in low-income neighborhoods where students confront socioeconomic adversity. Adversity and external pressure to perform could confront teachers with dilemmas of practice when they try to allocate their effort to serve students. Two presumably “opposite motivational forces” may be in tension in teachers’ minds that can shape their commitment to students. On one hand, teaching poor students requires educators invest significant effort to overcome challenges not encountered in middle-class settings. Here, teacher commitment may be shaped by a traditional ethic of service that characterizes the teacher profession (Ingersoll, 2003; Lortie, 1975). On the other hand, assuming an egoistic human nature (Eisenhardt, 1989), PM governance appeals to teachers’ self-interest in motivating them to fulfill organizational goals requested by policymakers. Research on accountability has shown that teachers do calculate with rewards and sanctions and orient themselves towards specific organizational goals (Finnigan & Gross, 2007). Many educators under the pressure to perform have strategized their teaching to achieve organizational goals, sometimes abdicating their commitment to students (Mintrop & Sunderman, 2013). Is that the case for all teachers? Do teachers with a higher commitment tend to behave in similar ways? What goals orient the work of committed educators? How do they make sense of the tension between self-interest and ethic of service when it comes to respond to organizational goals?

This work reports interview data drawn from an in-depth multiple case study. The sample is composed of 15 teachers who teach from 1st to 8th grade. Teachers were selected from a pool of 47 teachers following three criteria: self-reported narratives, reputation (principal’s opinion), and observational data (classroom observation). All teachers work in low-income and low-performing schools from Santiago, Chile. The schools have over 85% of concentration of poor students.

Results show that the main goals for these teachers are “student learning” or to provide “learning opportunities.” To do so, they address students’ needs beyond the call of duty. Beside learning needs, these teachers show a strong determination to respond to needs for discipline, emotional support, and, even, parenting. They avoid blaming students for their failure and do not engage in deficit-thinking patterns. Instead, students’ academic difficulties are seen as technical challenges. When it comes to the tension between ethic of service and self-interest, these teachers temper their self-interest motives. While they are mindful of accountability demands and the negative repercussions of not meeting them, they fold these demands into concern for students and prioritize student needs over organizational needs. Accountability goals are deemed useful to the extent that they reinforce teachers’ personal values held for their students. In this way, as second-order values, accountability goals reinforce commitment to students. Just in extreme cases when students are far beyond their reach, they put boundaries in front of them to preserve themselves.

Improving schools serving disadvantaged communities has been a major focus for policymakers for many decades in the United States. Evidence from decades of reform efforts points to a basic, but salient, conclusion: School improvement depends upon educators making proactive efforts to strive towards improvement goals that address consequential problems. In other words, improvement depends upon collective agency (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998). In the United States, high-stakes accountability policies presumed that ambitious, clearly defined, and externally-set performance goals tied to strong incentives would foster collective agency. By now, the distorting effects and disappointing outcomes of such policies have become well-known (Mintrop & Sunderman, 2009).

The disappointing results of most of these reform efforts may be due to a tendency to overlook the context of chronic adversity facing schools serving disadvantaged communities. In the United States, schools serving high-poverty communities of color often face resource inadequacies (Bryk et al., 2010), daily struggles to establish basic efficacy (Mintrop & Charles, 2019), and stigma from labels of “failing” (Mintrop & Sunderman, 2009). Meanwhile, schools are expected to meet increasingly ambitious learning standards (Stosich, 2017) which may be far from students’ current levels of learning.

Chronic adversity combined with increasing expectations exacerbates the complexity of problems in education (Mintrop & Zumpe, 2019). However, rarely has research examined how educators in adverse contexts contend with such complexity to foster collective agency. In coping with adverse conditions, educators may develop interaction patterns that interfere with collective goal pursuit, including defensiveness, learned helplessness, and fragmenting conflict (Payne, 2008).

This paper draws upon over 100 hours of participant observation and over 50 reflective conversations in one Californian middle school facing adversity. Over one school year, the analysis traces group interaction processes in four work groups that could contribute to school improvement: the instructional leadership team, the faculty professional development, the English department, and the Hub, a group launched and led by the researcher for teacher improvement projects. Drawing upon literatures about group development (Wheelan, 2005) and work teams (Edmondson, 2012), the analysis traces how each group manages tasks, manages interpersonal dynamics, faces up to problems, and handles problem complexity.

The study finds that, amid daily challenges reach their students, collective agency emerged in all work groups when they avoided or downshifted complex improvement goals and instead focused on simple and manageable goals. Such goals—tied to advancing students’ basic skills or teachers’ basic classroom management—were insufficient to strive towards fulfilling ambitious learning standards. However, amid daily challenges to establish basic collegial connection and efficacy, attempts to focus on complex goals produced experiences of overwhelm and invited defensive avoidance, helpless inaction, and fragmenting conflict that quashed collective agency.

The findings suggest that, in schools facing adversity, ambitious goals may overtax existing capacity and create experiences that shut down collective agency. Instead, such fostering collective agency in such schools may require an initial focus on simpler goals to establish efficacy and incrementally building capacity for addressing more complex goals over time.

Performance-based accountability (PBA) policies in education are the cornerstone of teaching reforms that have been adopted worldwide in recent decades. In countries with different regulatory regimes, standardized tests are increasingly used to hold teachers and schools accountable for students’ results. The program ontology of PBA expects that performance data will be used at the school level to promote educational change and school improvement, aligning instructional practices with externally-defined learning standards. However, existing research suggests that schools and teachers tend to respond to accountability mandates with different responses and even with undesired practices (e.g., teaching to the test, curriculum narrowing, or cheating). Recent research also suggests that, under PBA frameworks, disadvantaged schools are more likely to adopt instrumental responses than schools with a more heterogeneous SES composition. Still, little is known about why such instrumental practices tend to emerge and how they are sustained in the discourses and narratives of principals and teachers.

This investigation explores the enactment of PBA in disadvantaged school contexts. Specifically, our research aims to revisit school actors’ interpretations to unpack the different components of principals’ and teachers’ goals and discourses on PBA policies to better understand the rationale behind the adoption of pedagogical and organizational practices as well as the factors that favor policy decoupling. This study is based on a comparative analysis focusing on the cases of Spain and Chile. These countries have been chosen because they combine high levels of marketization with variegated policy designs of PBA.

Theoretically speaking, the research combines sense-making (Coburn et al. 2016) and policy enactment theory (Ball et al. 2011). From this perspective, we stand that conventional policy implementation theories have tended to omit the mediating role of school context and teachers’ perceptions in the enactment of educational policies. Conventional approaches to policy implementation tend to analyze policy change as a linear process. In contrast, policy enactment theory combines material and structural contexts with elements of material, cognitive, and relational nature. Specifically, we investigate the role of meaning-making processes and school context as key variables to understanding schools’ vision and their responses to PBA in marginalized school contexts.

The study relies on a qualitative comparative design based on the cases of Chile and Spain. We conducted semi-structured interviews with principals (n=19) and teachers (n=20) working in 13 vulnerable schools to analyze how schools negotiate and recontextualize PBA in disadvantaged environments. The analysis followed a flexible coding strategy (Deterding & Waters, 2021).

The findings suggest a set of organizational factors and collective dispositions that explain the adoption of instrumental or expressive responses to PBA in disadvantaged contexts and highlight the crucial role of schools’ vision and meaning-making processes in the enactment of variegated school practices. Despite similar school contexts, the research shows that disadvantaged schools can respond to PBA pressures in variegated and creative ways that go from policy appropriation to cosmetic and instrumental responses.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, schools worldwide switched from face-to-face to distance learning, which necessitated educators to find ways to sustain academic learning, without interacting with the students in the classroom, and despite the uncertainties that both students and teachers were facing in their everyday live. Sustaining academic standards for students from disadvantaged communities, however, was framed as an incredibly difficult and challenging task in both the public and the scientific discourse in Austria.

Studies from the educational sector show that goal setting is a relevant strategy that principals adopt to successfully lead their schools through times of challenge and adversity (Leithwood et al., 2004). Referring to goal setting theory (Latham & Locke, 1991), we can assume that what efforts and strategies schools serving disadvantaged communities took to sustain academic learning was contingent on whether principals viewed this as an important goal for their school during distance learning. This, in turn, was dependent on their subjective interpretation of the situational factors of their school, as well as personal factors affecting their work (Hollenbeck & Klein, 1987). The goal of sustaining academic learning for schools serving disadvantaged communities was framed as incredibly difficult, was addressed inconsistently by the authorities in Austria, and its attainment was therefore highly contingent on the organizational capacities of individual schools. Drawing on previous research, we can therefore assume that the principals’ commitment to sustaining academic learning was affected, for instance, by their subjective expectancy that the goal could be achieved, whether they believed to have an influence on that goal, how much choice they had with regard to strategies, the support they received, how they viewed their own role in their school, their view of the innovativeness of their staff, and other aspects.

Against this background, the paper seeks to analyze the extent to which the commitment to sustaining academic learning during the first phase of distance learning differed between principals at schools serving disadvantaged communities and principals at schools serving more privileged communities in Austria, and what factors affected the principals’ commitment to that goal. To do so, we analyzed quantitative data from a survey carried out with 416 principals in Austria during the first phase of distance learning in 2020.

The data showed that principals at schools serving disadvantaged communities indeed reported a significantly lower commitment to sustaining academic learning during distance learning. This was mediated by their expectation towards students’ ability to learn at home. Moreover, whether principals were committed to that goal was contingent on their improvement orientation with regard to their own role, as well as their assessment of the innovativeness of their staff.

Our findings suggest that if students from disadvantaged communities in Austria were ‘left behind’ in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and distance learning, it was not only because they had fewer resources and more challenging home environments, but also because schools with a higher number of these students were less likely to be committed to sustaining academic learning.