Barriers to District Level Educational Reform: A Statewide Study of Minnesota School Superintendents

Written by Thorndale, C., Ingleby, C., & Lazarevic, D. (October 2012). Superintendency; School Reform

Summary

This study attempts to identify and describe Minnesota superintendents’ perceptions of barriers to district level reform as well as compare superintendents’ perceptions of district reform related characteristics. Despite a wealth of literature about the process of educational change (Elmore, 2000; Fullan, 2010; Hall, 1987; Heifetz, 2005; Hord, 1987; Leithwood, 1999; Linsky, 2005; Seashore, 1996; Senge, 1997) reforming education to resolve serious achievement issues continues to be challenging. This research strives to identify factors preventing one state’s district-level leadership from implementing national reform efforts. A foundational lens for this study comes from the Public Educational Leadership Project (PELP) Coherence Framework (Childress, Elmore, Grossman, & Johnson, 2007). A quantitative descriptive approach was utilized to survey all acting superintendents in the state of Minnesota. Using a quantitative self-perception survey, superintendents’ overall perceptions of the barriers to district level educational reforms were compiled. Superintendents’ were surveyed to assess their overall perceptions of their district’s characteristics relating to school-level reform. The study revealed two major findings: superintendents in the state of Minnesota who claimed that their districts had leadership skills to enact school change and knowledge of successful strategies regarding school reform were unrelated to the identification of barriers to district-level reform; and superintendents who claimed that their districts had passive resistance to change and ingrained patterns of behavior to resist change were related to the identification of barriers to district level reform.