Effective School District Policies and Practices: Synthesizing Theoretical Frameworks and Empirical Findings across Disciplines

Abstract

What guidance does research provide about how to improve school district performance in the United States? Despite over 30 years of inquiry on the topic of effective districts, existing frameworks are relatively narrow in terms of disciplinary focus (primarily educational leadership perspectives) and research design (primarily qualitative case studies). To bridge this gap for researchers, we first review the theoretical literatures on how districts are thought to affect educational outcomes, arguing that an expanded set of disciplinary perspectives—organizational behavior, political science, economics—have distinct theories about the types of district-level policies that might improve district-wide performance. Using these frameworks as a guide, we next conduct a review of quantitative studies that estimate the relationship between district-level inputs and educational outcomes, finding benefits of policies that cross disciplinary perspectives: higher teacher salaries, data use, and school autonomy and parental choice in the context of district-wide turnarounds. Our review also reveals the need for significant additional causal evidence and provides an inter-disciplinary map of theorized pathways through which district-level policies could influence student outcomes that are ripe for rigorous testing.

Keywords:

• District effectiveness
• education policy
• multi-disciplinary
• systematic review

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Appendix  

The specific combination of search terms included: “education” AND “school district” OR “local education agency” OR “local education authority” OR “local government authority” OR “local authority” OR “central office” OR “statewide” AND “student achievement” OR “student test” OR “student outcome” OR “effective” OR “teacher effective” OR “teacher quality” OR “teacher retention” OR “teacher retain” OR “teacher recruit” AND “salary” OR “benefits” OR “hiring” OR “transfer” OR “evaluate” OR “school board” OR “stakeholder engagement” OR “family engagement” OR “community engagement” OR “mayoral control” OR “teacher union” OR “collective bargain” OR “portfolio model” OR “spending” OR “autonomy” OR “instructional leader” OR “data use” OR “curriculum” OR “textbook” OR “professional development” OR “planning time” OR “peer collaboration” OR “formative assessment” OR “personalized learning” OR “technology” OR “alignment” OR “class size” OR “learning time” OR “configuration” OR “wellbeing” OR “support staff” OR “transportation” OR “meal” OR “lunch” OR “discipline” AND “quantitative” OR “regression” OR “difference-in-difference” OR “difference in difference” OR “fixed effect” OR “regression discontinuity” OR “experiment” OR “RCT” or “randomized control.”

Notes

1 Although we tracked effect sizes, we opted against conducting a formal meta-analysis. Such an approach is best suited to pooling estimates of similar interventions that use similar outcome measures, and when research design quality is generally high (Cooper et al., 2019). However, for several policy input categories, our search only reveals a small number of studies. In many cases, these studies rely on different dependent variables, making meta-analytic techniques inappropriate. Further, since a large portion of included studies are observational (i.e., not causal) in nature, we were reluctant to pool effect sizes which could mislead readers about the extent to which the extant literature has the capacity to provide credible causal estimates of district-level interventions.