How Subjects Matter in District Office Practice: Instructionally Relevant Policy in Urban School District Redesign

In recent years, there has been a virtual explosion of research interest in the role of school districts in instructional change (Hightower, Knapp, Marsh & McLaughlin, 2002). The consensus building within the research is that district action is pivotal to whether and how reforms reach classrooms. While drawing attention to how districts mediate instructional practice, most of the research to date tends to be subject-neutral. Specifically, very little of the research considers how subject matter acts as a context for district decision-making and action. Further, policy recommendations for strengthening districts’ roles tend to be instructionally generic, assuming for example that teacher staff development needs are the same regardless of the subject matter focus of the reform. In other words, the view is what works for language arts will also work for mathematics (c.f. Massell, 2000; Porter and Chester, 2002). The tendency of district policy research to overlook subject matter differences is problematic for several reasons. School leaders and teachers conceptualize instruction and efforts to improve it in strikingly different ways depending on the subject matter focus (Burch & Spillane, 2003; Little, 1993; Siskin, 1994). School leaders’ responses to reform reflect fundamental differences in their views about the subject area, not only what counts as knowledge in that subject area but also perceptions about the degree of definition within that subject area. This research points to the importance of subject matter as a context for leadership practice across different levels of schooling. While there is some research on subject matter and leadership at the school level, there has been no attention to whether and how subject matter is an important context for leadership at higher levels of school administration, for example, district, state and regions. Understanding relations between subject matter and district reform strategies has become urgent as state and federal agencies attempt to play a more active role in influencing instruction in specific