Urban School District Central Offices and the Implementation of New Small Autonomous Schools Initiatives

VUE 22: Honig Excerpt

New small autonomous schools initiatives have spread to urban districts nationwide. While their designs vary, these initiatives generally aim to convert large public high schools into multiple, smaller, more autonomous schools and to create new small autonomous public schools of various types. Initiative advocates argue, in part, that the sheer diversity of students in urban districts – and, arguably, other mid-sized to large districts – increases the urgency to reinvent schools into newer, smaller, more autonomous units that are more rigorous, caring, and responsive to individual students.

In turn, district central offices would expand student learning districtwide if they helped schools build their capacity for making key decisions about how to support their students, rather than mainly directed schools’ decisions. Such forms of district central office support depart starkly from traditional central office roles as regulators of or non-participants in reform efforts. What, more specifically, do urban school district central offices do when they enable the implementation of new small autonomous schools initiatives?

Educational research has shed little light on this question. For example, many studies of new small autonomous schools initiatives focus on school-level outcomes and implementation processes