Lost in Translation?
Educational policies can become garbled at local levels

Fall 2004, Volume 26, Number 2

Education policies often become garbled as they trickle down the system from the statehouse to the schoolhouse.

For more than a century, the school district has been the basic unit of school administration, and often, at least in the case of larger school districts, a key education policymaking entity. The advent of greater federal and state involvement in educational policymaking starting in the 1970s has not dampened the local school districts’ policymaking activity. Implementing agents at the school district and school level are often viewed as being resistant to change—and even trying to foil it. This view has grown, especially as the standards-based reform movement, currently exemplified by No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), has taken root in the American educational landscape.

The assumption is that policymaking is a top-down process, and upon reaching the local levels, administrators and teachers either follow them or ignore them. Instead, James Spillane argues the problem is one of human understanding. He is professor of human development and social policy and an IPR faculty fellow. Spillane likens the implementation of national and state policies at local levels to the children’s game of telephone, in which the message becomes more and more distorted as it is passed along.

“The story is morphed as it moves from player to player— characters change, protagonists become antagonists, new plots emerge,” he said. “So by the time the story is retold by the final player, it is very different from the original story.”

Spillane has arrived at these conclusions after studying the implementation of Michigan instructional reforms in math and science over four years. Over the course of his study, Spillane interviewed 50 state-level policymakers, 123 local policymakers, and 32 teachers in nine Michigan school districts. The National Science Foundation provided funding.

His research shows that school districts are critical allies in the struggle to implement state and federal education policies (e.g., NCLB) in the classroom. Because school districts formulate and execute their own policies on teacher development, curricula, and teacher supervision, they can “amplify, drown out, or minimize” such reforms, Spillane said. Without local help, most reforms would be “scuttled to the school reform scrap heap,” he continued.

In fact, Spillane has found that local school districts are more than willing to implement such reforms. But “human sensemaking” can throw up roadblocks, impeding the districts’ understanding of what the policy entails for classrooms and how best to implement these ideas. Different players have different understandings of what each policy entails.

When faced with change, it is human nature for people to latch onto the familiar and filter out the unfamiliar, Spillane pointed out. For example, he found that 83 percent of 46 district policymakers talked about the popular prescription of “hands-on” science activities, but only 13 percent mentioned a less familiar concept of “constructivist learning.”

In another example, a local school superintendent commented about math word problems: “It’s not any different. Story problems and word problems, they’re the same, been around for years.”

“So they misunderstand the new ideas as old ideas,” Spillane said, “and they see the new ideas about classroom instruction as tweaking—but not overhauling—educational practices.”

Thus in the case of word problems, many teachers never reach the idea of framing math problems to encourage the children to look for alternative conjectures to the initial problem posed. The deeper conceptual elements, which would entail fundamental changes in the way they teach, are often missed.

On top of communication problems, resources are lacking, thwarting effective policymaking and implementation at all levels. For example, there were three state coordinators in science and math for 80,000 teachers and 545 school districts in the whole state of Michigan at the time the study was done.

“How can one monitor implementation effectively if this is case?” Spillane pointed out.

Many local school districts formulate their own professional development for teachers and instructional policies, and they often pull in other sources aside from federal and state guidelines when creating these policies and programs. District policies often become “final word”—or at least a highly regarded touchstone for teachers in the classroom.

“Good intentions only go so far,” Spillane remarked. He noted that effective “sensemaking” requires resources that are expensive: human capital (knowledge and skill), social capital (networks and collaboration), and financial resources (materials, staff, and time).

James Spillane is the author of Standards Deviation: How Schools Misunderstand Education Policy (Harvard University Press, 2004).