How Central Office Leaders Influence School Leaders’ Decision-Making: Unpacking Power Dynamics in Two School-Based Decision-Making Systems

Item

Title

How Central Office Leaders Influence School Leaders’ Decision-Making: Unpacking Power Dynamics in Two School-Based Decision-Making Systems

Abstract/Description

While past studies on school district decentralization found that central office leaders can limit school leaders’ decision-making power, the studies did not examine how they do so. We investigated this in eight elementary schools in two large urban school systems with official policies of school site-based decision-making. We found that even though school leaders had legal authority over most instructional decisions, they overwhelmingly made decisions consistent with central office preferences. The question is why. By examining the micro process of interaction between central office and school leaders, we found that central office leaders in both districts used a range of persuasive strategies to influence school-level decisions. Specifically, they linked their suggestions to institutionalized norms, rules, and shared understandings in the district and profession. By doing so, central office leaders pushed against their decentralization policies. Differences in the combination of strategies that central office leaders used and the amount of interaction they had with school leaders led to (a) greater variability in the degree to which school leaders in one district made decisions aligned with central office preferences; and (b) greater feelings of coercion among school leaders in the second. These findings unpack the dynamics among local education leaders as they implement and sometimes alter the rules within policies through their daily practice.

Author/creator

Wong, Lok-Sze

Coburn, Cynthia E.

Kamel, Ayah

Date

2020

In publication

Peabody Journal of Education

Volume

95

Issue

4

Pages

392-407

Resource type

en Research/Scholarly Media

Resource status/form

en Published Text

Scholarship genre

en Empirical

Keywords

power

decentralization

decision-making

central office leaders

influence

school autonomy

school leaders

Open access/full-text available

en Yes

Peer reviewed

en Yes

ISSN

0161-956X

DOI

10.1080/0161956X.2020.1800175

URL

Official Publisher's Webpage (Taylor & Francis)

Open Access PDF (via ERIC)

Citation

Wong, L.-S., Coburn, C. E., & Kamel, A. (2020). How Central Office Leaders Influence School Leaders’ Decision-Making: Unpacking Power Dynamics in Two School-Based Decision-Making Systems. Peabody Journal of Education, 95(4), 392–407. https://doi.org/10.1080/0161956X.2020.1800175

Cited in

Critical Perspectives on the Contexts of Improvement Research in Education

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