States can play a powerful role in improving student learning by improving instruction. I know this from my experience working at a state agency and from observing how the districts and schools that partner with my organization, Instruction Partners, orient to the expectations and initiatives of their state agencies.
I also know from those experiences that states can inadvertently hinder the very changes they seek to make. Ask the people who work with them most closely—district leaders—what they think of their state agency, and I bet you’ll hear things like, “too many requirements,” “lots of things to track,” and “not sure how the pieces fit together.” And if you press further into the details of the instructional moves being implemented in schools “because the state told us to,” you’ll find a myriad of disjointed approaches.
Three years ago, after noticing a pattern of our school and district partners being pulled in competing directions by the instructional requirements issued by their states, my team and I began working with state education agencies (SEAs) to take stock of and strengthen coherence across their instructional guidance, support, and accountability measures. Across five states, we reviewed hundreds of guidance documents and worked with leadership teams to (1) get clear on their core instructional strategies and (2) review how aligned the messages they sent to schools and districts were to those core strategies.
Last month, we released a report, “The State of Instructional (In)Coherence,” based on our findings.
Bottom line, we found that:
- States send voluminous and conflicting messages about what instructional strategies schools and systems should pursue to improve student outcomes.
- The burden adds up. In one state, we reviewed 74 guidance documents that detailed 21 required school- and system-level teams, 11 site visits per year, 16 needs assessments, 19 initiatives that provide technical assistance to leaders, and three sets of state coaches.
- School and system leaders believe they have to do everything the state asks them to do at the same time to be in compliance and do right by students—even when trying to do all those things sets them up to do none of them well.
We found that SEAs can take productive steps to improve the coherence of their instructional guidance. And when they do, schools and systems (1) appreciate the flexibility and time back it gives them and (2) take better action, aligned to the state’s guidance.
We had four takeaways about how states can help create more instructional coherence.
1. Leadership has to make it a priority. Few things can make change faster than a chief who is willing to demand action and make hard calls. That said, the source of incoherence is rarely a chief—or any individual. Rather, it is the cumulative effect of unintended mixed signals from offices across the agency, which build up over time. Leadership has to be willing both to set expectations for coherent messaging and to get into the weeds to ensure the details of implementation match the vision.
2. The (productive) team fights come out when discussing money and measurement. Teams can agree on a shared vision and still have very different ideas about what the implementation of that vision will mean in practice. The conversations about what will get funded (and what will not) and what will get measured (and what will not) are the discussions that surface disagreements. For example, many states have multiple rubrics for instruction or needs assessments that school leaders have to complete. When states look to streamline those processes for school leaders, they have to engage with questions like, “if we could only look for ten things, what would we choose?” In our experience, such questions lead to disagreements between teams (and individuals), but negotiating those disagreements is a powerful mechanism to create a clear focus on what the agency is prioritizing as most important.
3. The P’s and Q’s matter. State teams are used to discussing the big ideas together but typically work out the details in silos—and that’s where incoherence comes home to roost. For example, if guidance on multi-tiered systems of support requires an assessment that meets certain criteria and the school improvement guidance requires an assessment that meets different criteria, then schools will end up purchasing and administering two assessments to address those two sets of state requirements. Negotiating the details together or creating processes that give other teams lines of sight and feedback loops on the details of rubrics, reporting requirements, or training materials is not common practice for most teams. When leaders insist that review processes for rubrics and needs assessments includes cross-team review—or even norming to a common glossary to ensure terms are being used consistently across the SEA—it typically involves significant change in how business is done.
4. Articulating what a team is not going to do is as important as articulating what it is going to do. Traditional state strategic planning processes are forward facing. They rarely involve looking back to eliminate old guidance, initiatives, and practices that aren’t aligned with new strategic goals. These forward-facing visioning and planning processes are good at surfacing everything teams want to be happening that’s not currently happening, but they don’t tend to account for what is currently happening. That is, the planning processes teams engage in almost never attend to what could be taken off leaders’ plates. Sometimes budget cuts force resource prioritization, but even then, the spirit of old guidance tends to live on because it’s rare for states to clearly articulate “this can be retired or updated.” In the teams that have done the most to help districts get really clear, we observed that they spent time and effort articulating what they don’t want to see in action or in funding requests and managing implementation of that change.
Unclear and incoherent state instructional guidance has a real cost for system leaders, teachers, and students. Every school and district leader can tell you—with conviction—how wide-ranging state requirements make an already hard job harder; how teachers grappling with ways to make it all work feel the burn, even if they don’t directly trace it back to state guidance; and how students feel it in their classrooms when they get disconnected interventions.
SEAs come by incoherence honestly. As someone who led a fair share of incoherent initiatives in my own state office, I can attest that state leaders themselves are pulled in many directions—from federal requirements to legislative mandates, from research trends to funding restrictions. But because of the unique role that states have in setting their own educational policies and practices, they are the only actors in the American education system with the power to manage and reconcile competing tensions. Because it is time-intensive and counter-culture to the way states traditionally organize efforts, most state leadership teams rarely choose to exercise that power. They may layer on initiatives, but they pass the tensions on to districts and schools. But, if they choose to step into a more active role in driving coherence, they can make an enormous difference for their systems, schools, teachers, and, ultimately, students.
Author’s note: “The State of Instructional (In)Coherence” details how SEA-issued guidance often advances incongruent, competing theories of instructional improvement, creating problems for educators and students. It also outlines steps state leadership teams can take to improve the coherence of the guidance and messages they send to schools and systems.
