Power and Politics in the Adoption of School Reform Models
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
States, districts, and schools are promoting and attempting whole school improvement through the use of externally developed reform designs. This article examines how and why schools adopt reforms and the consequences of those processes for reform implementation and sustainability. Case study data are presented on 22 schools, and three types of reform adoption processes are discussed: (a) districts encouraging schools to choose among a set of reforms; (b) districts pushing schools to adopt a particular reform; and (c) principals bringing reform designs to their schools. In no case did the impetus for reform adoption arise among teachers in these schools. Because a hierarchical approach is evident in each of these reform adoption scenarios, data are analyzed in terms of a micropolitical perspective. Findings show that the power relations surrounding reform adoption often thwarted genuine initial buy-in and interest in change among local educators, as well as in some cases, their subsequent implementation efforts. Educators often also had varying perspectives on how the adoption process occurred, suggesting differences in perspective on the reform itself. Recommendations for how the reform adoption process could be improved are discussed.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it