Crafting Coherence: How Schools Strategically Manage Multiple, External Demands

School improvement policies converge on urban public schools in ways that paradoxically compromise school improvement—a challenge some have called a heightened state of policy incoherence (Fuhrman, 1993). These schools face a barrage of demands from various sources including federal and state governments, local school boards, unions, and community groups—these demands focus on numerous aspects of schooling including curriculum, uses of time, testing, accountability, management, parental involvement, and professional development (Hill & Celio, 1998). Education policy researchers often frame eliminating policy incoherence as a preferred outcome based on the observation that when multiple external demands converge on schools they compete with each other for funding, time, and attention in ways that have been linked with school mismanagement, poor instruction, teacher turnover, and other measures of weak school performance (Cohen, 1982; Fuhrman, 1999; Shulman, 1983). Even external demands with similar or complementary goals have been associated with these negative results in practice. Some schools respond by adding new positions and programs to handle specific demands, but consequently strain their ability to operate in coordinated and productive ways (Cohen, 1982; Elmore, 1995; Fuhrman, 1999). Researchers have shown that demands converge on frontline workers—teachers, principals, and school staff—who tend to have inadequate resources for managCrafting Coherence: How Schools Strategically Manage Multiple, External Demands