Running head: LITERATURE REVIEW
Literature Review
Julia Renberg
EDLE 803
George Mason University
May 11, 2014

LITERATURE REVIEW
Abstract
This manuscript offers a synthesis and a critical assessment of published literature dedicated to behaviors of public school systems in response to external stress factors.
Specifically, it provides an account on the organizational dynamics of districts under pressures exerted at the state level. The multi-frame analysis identifies and evaluates major themes emerging from the literature and, in particular, illuminates promising venues for further research concerned with escalating demands mandated in the area of special education and the effects of the local context in the shaping of organizational responses.
Keywords: school district under pressure, state policy, organizational theory.
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Introduction
Survival of complex human organizations in the environment of the postindustrial era of the 21 st
century depends on the creation of new knowledge and the successful transfer of theory into practice (Collinson & Fedoruk Cook, 2007). Educational institutions are viewed as predominantly open systems and thus, improving our understanding of their relationships with their external environment is essential. For example, public schools operate within federal and state legislative boundaries. In the past few decades, however, in response to intensified nationwide expectations to increase academic achievement, states began escalating their own accountability-driven stipulations for public school districts. How do local educational organizations deal with such irrefutable top-instigated new initiatives? How do districts interpret, assess, and respond to new burdens? What factors determine the nature of their reactions? And what are the consequences? Making sense of these phenomena could expand the research dialog on policy implementation at the local level and offer some guidance for educational practitioners and, perhaps, policymakers seeking to increase organizational effectiveness and learning.
While scholars recognize the rising demands of the accountability-driven reform on educational institutions and acknowledge the complexity of translating educational policy into practice, the empirical research focused on the district responses to the pressures exerted by the state appears to be regrettably scarce and inadequate. Even with a recent spike in scholarly interest in this intermediate level of school hierarchy, the contemporary literature seems to be conclusive on one point only - districts do matter for students’ academic achievement (Honig &
Hatch, 2004; Anderson, 2006; Supovitz, 2006;Terry, 2007; Trujillo, 2012; Leithwood &
Seashore, 2012), while still lacking in theoretical depth and coherence, methodological rigor, and adequate contextualizing of findings.

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Literature Overview
School Districts and the External Environment
Much of the current research and theory construction revolves around the relationship between organizations and their peripheral environment. Decentralization and self-management of varying degrees increase the importance of these interactions (Bush, 2003). As a perfect example, state governments in the United States have the ultimate constitutionally-based authority over public education providing structure, legislative and financial support, but most delegate a considerable amount of decision-making powers and the responsibility of overseeing day-to-day operations of individual schools to local districts. Despite an acknowledged substantial variance in the governance, organization, and size of school districts, most of the research treats this step of the educational ladder as a common organizational form. In the literature on school system administration, the term “school district” typically refers to an entity in between government education authorities and local schools that is responsible for managing schools within geographically defined jurisdictions (Anderson, 2013).
Districts are the dominant local authority element for U.S. schooling and yet, educational research used to pay rather negligible and sporadic attention to school systems (Honig & Hatch,
2004; Rorrer, Skrla, & Scheurich, 2008; Leithwood & Seashore, 2012). The past two decades are characterized by an apparent resurgence of inquiry and discussion about the district role in educational change. Additionally, there is a noticeable difference between early and current research due to variation in the policy contexts and change environments in which the research is conducted. The function of districts in the 1970s and the 1980s was generally undertaken in relation to “innovation implementation” (Fullan, 1985), while the 1980s and 1990s delivered the
“effective schools” paradigm with its primary interest in various forms of restructuring, typically

LITERATURE REVIEW 5 ignoring the role of districts all together or blaming them for ineffective schools (Anderson,
2003). A few researchers of that time attempted to correlate research on effective schools to district matters with intent to duplicate the findings and produce large-scale gains in student performance (Trujillo, 2013).
Standards-based reform of the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB; Pub. L. No. 107-
110) with its arduous, endlessly growing demands to improve academic achievement has created a new frame for education policy, in which both educators and policy makers have an unprecedented need for much better knowledge about teaching, learning, and school improvement (Cohen, Moffitt & Goldin, 2007). And while modern scholars underline that districts do not fit prominently in contemporary educational reform efforts (that focus primarily at the school and classroom levels), numerous researchers assert that these organizational units play an important moderating role in the implementation of policy (McLaughlin & Talbert, 2003;
Spillane, 2004; Leithwood & Seashore, 2012). The findings of their studies demonstrate that districts create conditions that could either support or hinder schools. Undoubtedly, given the amplified pressure on educational systems to increase student performance, district responses to state policies specific to teaching and learning appear to be of the most practical significance
(Honig & Hatch, 2004, 2006; Supovitz, 2006; Terry, 2007; Mourshed et al., 2010). As a result, researchers and practitioners began inquiring into how districts actually react to mandated policies, hoping to “untangle the Gordian knot kinking up the intricate web between planning, policymaking, and educational change” (Terry, 2010, p. 81). Furthermore, the most recent studies not only reflect this renewed interest in school districts as important institutional actors, but go further and speak of a need for problematizing, not taking for granted, the role of these

LITERATURE REVIEW 6 mediating levels on the quality and improvement of schools (Honig, 2009; Trijulo, 2013;
Anderson, 2013).
Conceptualization
An adequate conceptualization of an organization and its operations can broaden the field of vision, bringing into focus important details that have been either indiscernible or taken for granted (Weick, 1976; Ridley & Mendoza, 1993; Andreadis, 2009). One conceptual framework frequently selected by scholars to explore questions related to the behavior of school districts in response to external stress factors is the organizational theory. Burch (2007) believes that while
“more work is needed to understand the areas divergence and convergence between organizational theories and educational research,” constructing new conceptual frames through incorporation of recent contributions to organizational theory may enable educational researchers to understand more clearly the factors that affect the implementation of instructional reforms
(p.91). Knapp (2008) echoes this statement, emphasizing that organizational constructs “can give new and richer meaning to activities in school-district reform involving the nature and flow of information, its interpretation (especially in the face of considerable ambiguity), and how the organization processes its experience of reform events… in response to external policy pressures” (p.529).
The majority of the contemporary system theories view an educational organization as a complex, loosely coupled, integrated whole that is “built to last” (Collins & Porras, 1994) and acts to survive the turbulence of the environmental challenges. Theorists, however, differ in their views on the relationships between school systems and their task environments: proponents of the formal models assert that institutions seek to reduce uncertainty by limiting the number of the external links or by producing rational, bureaucratic outcomes with an emphasis on authority

LITERATURE REVIEW 7 and accountability (Bush, 2003; Terry, 2010); contingency theorists imply that changes in an environment require appropriate changes in the patterns of an organization, and that systems are capable of internal differentiation and integration in response to external stress factors (Derr &
Gabarro, 1972; Honig & Hatch, 2004; Terry, 2010); and, lastly, institutional theorists suggest that a common legal environment forces districts to compete for political power and legitimacy and thus, they tend to incorporate isomorphic institutional elements, becoming increasingly homogeneous (March & Simon, 1958; Meyer & Rowan, 1977; DiMaggio & Powell, 1983).
Karl Weick - one of the pioneers of the open-systems organizational theory, applied the concept of loose coupling to educational organizations demonstrating how systems survive amidst uncertainties and adapt to their environments (Weick, 1976). Loosely connected events and systems, he wrote, are informal and chaotic, yet somehow productive in that they foster perseverance, cultivate high level of sensitivity to environmental changes, localize adaptations and seal off breakdowns, retain a greater number of mutations and novel solutions, increase autonomy and uniqueness, and reduce cost for operations. At the same time, Weick examined dysfunctions of loosely coupled organizations (lack of coordination, absence of regulations, slow feedback times, situations where several means can produce the same result), and concluded that these systems lack in resources for sense making. In his later work, Weick asserted that this framework has the potential to "illuminate the answers to several organizational puzzles that have eluded organization theorists" - such as measurement and interpretation of interpretive systems, and the understanding of organizational structure (Orton & Weick, 1990, p. 216). He advocated for researchers to modifying methodology to serve this theory and suggested using two-variable matrices, contradictory independent variables, and deviation-regulating loops in which variables shift values as the cycle progresses. Weick (year) emphasized that the dialectical

LITERATURE REVIEW 8 interpretation of loose coupling can be strengthened through examination of the processes within systems, purposeful disregard of apparent connectedness, and exploitation of the concept as the starting point of the discussion.
Recently, as applied to educational matters, the concept of loose coupling is seemingly undergoing bipolar transformation. A number of studies attempt to further “loosen” and broaden the original framework by merging it with the theories of chaos and self-organizing systems of hard sciences (Dodds Stanford, 1996; Lichtenstein, 1997; Wertheimer & Zinga, 1998; Rorrer et al., 2008). Developments in the nonlinear sciences, as well as in biology and in physics, have transformed the subject. Much of the work coming out of research centers, such as the Santa Fe
Institute in New Mexico with its emphasis on emergence and far-from-equilibrium phenomena, has radically different implications for how we approach complex organizational processes than the research of three decades ago (Boisot & Child, 1999). For example, Dodds Stanford (1996) is cautiously optimistic in terms of the usefulness of the self-organizing systems paradigm.
Nevertheless, she claims that this theoretical model could make it possible for a new relationship between science and the humanities due to its numerous appealing characteristics: the action of balancing and reinforcing feedback loops; the capacity to take in tremendous disruptions, resisting a change, and to transition when the environmental stress factors are too great for a system to absorb. Lichtenstein (1997) cautions about metaphorical nature of the “chaotic logic” ideas, emphasizing that they were confirmed empirically only in a small handful of studies.
Nevertheless, he notes a growing movement of practitioners and theorists who are interested in providing “tools and levers to increase the probability of lasting organizational change, at a time when such changes are needed both economically and throughout our chaotically changing society as a whole” (p. 408). Rorrer et al. (2008) use the processes described by Weick to enact a

LITERATURE REVIEW 9 theory of districts as institutional actors, explicating the variability in coupling, nonlinearity, and complexity of organizational behavior. For future research, these authors recommend to use a longitudinal, contextual and comparative in nature mixed-methods design, and suggest that for probing macro-level changes caused by external factors of districts’ environment, organizations should be viewed as open dynamic systems of adaptation.
At the same time, many scholars propose that due to the influx of rigid changes in the educational systems’ external environment, as well as the rapid development of social networking, loose linkages of these complex human organizations are becoming tighter (Lutz,
1982; Coburn & Russell, 2008; Fusarelli, 2002; Finnigan, Daly, & Che, 2013). For example,
Fusarelli (2002) argues that not only educational institutions exhibit a mix of tight and loose coupling, but the nature of these connections is shifting. The author refers to multiple studies that demonstrate how within the past few decades, educational reformers at the federal and state governments have been seeking to tighten centralized control and create more effective and coherent command structures, exerting ever-greater power over the educational processes. For example, Mazzoni (1995) notes that “states, more than ever, have become de facto as well as de jure policy makers for the schools” (p. 53). Murphy and Hill (2011) assert that states in the future must shift from their historically passive role of compliance to playing a much more active role in managing the performance of schools, while the paper produced by the Data Quality
Campaign (2011) calls attention to states’ focus and already found ability to collect robust longitudinal data galvanized and fueled by federal policy and grant dollars. Fusarelli also suggests that the significant coupling forces that bind components of a loose system together, preventing its descent into chaos, reduce variety and increase all three forms of institutional isomorphism - coercive, normative, and mimetic (DiMaggio & Powell, 1991). In addition to the

LITERATURE REVIEW 10 slow erosion of the local control over education due to the emergence of new powerful institutional actors, the increase of the external environmental pressures, and ongoing isomorphic transformations, the author speaks on the topic of budding institutional capacity. He asserts that newly created infrastructures and internal dynamics produce greater impetus on organizational change, tying together previously fragmented elements of the educational systems.
Finally, special attention in recent publications is paid to the role of connectivism connectedness? and social networking - a novelty of the digital age associated with a strongly interconnected “digital interaction among users without a participant limit” (Yuzer & Kurubacak,
2011) and the diffusion of innovation and information between and within organizational units
(Rogers, 2003; Knapp, 2008; Honig and Coburn, 2008; Daly & Finnigan, 2011; Finnigan, Daly,
& Che, 2013; Daly, Liou, Tran & Park, 2013). Finnigan et al. (2013) explain that both external and internal linkages of networking can influence the flow of information and produce an organizational transformation. However, there seems to be a limited understanding of how to interpret the directionality of this effect. On one hand, creation of additional associations among the elements should tighten and increase the number of coupling bonds within a system. On the other, at the core of connectivism lies a combined effect of loosening variables depicted by complexity, self-organization and chaos theories (Siemens, 2004; Dunway, 2011).
Research on Districts’ Responses
Some authors assert that dealing with irrefutable external influences, such as state initiated policies, necessitates a strenuous undertaking for school districts, as they strive to comply with demands that do not always make sense in the local context (Mintrop, 2012;
Finnigan et al, 2013) and suggest that a more pressured political environment results in a more purposive action of organizational actors striving to attain their ends (Hannaway, 1993). Others

LITERATURE REVIEW 11 propose that districts readily acknowledge the legitimacy of state policies and generally find a way to utilize state-mandated initiatives to enlarge their own influence in local settings
(Leithwood & Seashore, 2012). Hence, although scholars agree that state policies have a direct and significant impact upon school districts, there seems to be a discrepancy in opinions on the definitive effects of these influences. This divergent nature of the effects of the accountabilitydriven educational reform can be traced from states to districts and from districts to schools and classrooms. For example, districts today engage in broader efforts to improve the quality of instruction, attempt to standardize and adopt district-wide curricula and pacing guides, require teachers to administer assessments that are aligned with the state tests, focus on previously neglected subgroups of student population and on data as a central component in districts’ improvement arsenal (Supovitz, 2010; Hamilton et al, 2013). At the same time, other responses are typically considered as undesirable: increasing attention, time, and financial support for testrelated activities, cheating scandals, focusing on students near proficient threshold, lowering standards, performance measures for educators, etc. Coburn and colleagues (2009) emphasize that broader organizational and political influences at the district levels, as well as the ways that educators and administrators at each level interpret accountability policies, are also likely to shape the nature of these responses (Coburn et al., 2009).
Many researchers and practitioners recognize not only the importance of historical national, but also local contextual aspects and their affect on the behaviors and the effectiveness of districts. The paper by the Data Quality Campaign in collaboration with several national educational organizations (2011) states that “because districts are the agents that directly affect teaching and learning, states cannot succeed in this evolution in policy and practice unless they actively engage districts” and move forward from ensuring compliance “to a new role as service

LITERATURE REVIEW 12 providers” that recognize and meet the diverse needs of all districts in the state (p. 3). In the meantime, however, most empirical studies focus on the districts that have been tagged as
“effective” or “improving”, resulting in the identification of strategic approaches within successful districts, and repeatedly bypass or minimize the significance of inert or limited responses and the actions anchored to the specific local environment of average or “failing” school systems.
Looking back, it becomes obvious how several studies of district-wide efforts to improve schools sparked the current interest in the district role in school reform and how it can be made effective. Spillane (1998) studied school district responses to state education reforms in
Michigan. His data reaffirmed the active role of districts in educational change. Elmore and
Burney’s (1997) and Supovitz’s (2006) chronicles and analyses of Superintendents Alvarado and
Fryer’s efforts to transform schools in New York City and Duval County Schools in Florida respectively demonstrated that districts “matter”. These studies provided a forefront to the recent array of individual and multi-site investigations of high performing or improving school districts.
The dominant bulk of literature can be defined as diagnostic research positioned to isolate what is happening at the district level that might account for the reported success. While there are differences in emphasis and detail across these and prior studies of district policies and actions associated with state-initiated reforms, there is a notable convergence in findings on what works in designing and leading effective districts (Anderson, 2003; Trujillo, 2013).
Another trend has been to develop generalized, broad schemes that attempt to identify and present dramatic periods of change unrelated to local contextual factors (Derr & Gabarro,
1972; Berger, 1982; Terry, 2010; Arsen & Yongmei Ni, 2012). For example, an early retrenchment theory describes five chronological stages of an organizational response to

LITERATURE REVIEW 13 environmental stress factors: pre-response, emerging awareness and confrontation, alarm and safe responses, crisis or confrontation, and post-equilibrium (Berger, 1982). More recent research states that districts could play either enabling or constraining roles in the implementation of externally mandated tasks by: (1) “bridging” - pulling in the environment and shaping terms of compliance, (2) “buffering” - suspending ties to environment, or (3) “bridgingbuffering” - symbolic adoption and addition of peripheral structures (Honig & Hatch, 2004).
These models have quite palpable fallacies including: (1) a linear “either/or” prescriptive nature,
(2) a nonattendance to the subsystems of an organization, (3) a poor manifestation of the issue of resistance vs. adaptability, and (4) the lack of attention to advantageous transactions and organizational learning.
Although the identification of common denominators allows for general understanding and the possibility of creating models of complex systems that work in a similar way, it is essential to bear in mind that representation in them is always distributed and thus, network systems are to be understood in terms of the interactions among elements and not through an underlying universal law. From this perspective, the empirical study done by Terry (2010) to explain the districts’ responses to the federal “No Child Left Behind” policy is more sufficient, as it analyzed an assortment of sampling parameters, including settings, actors, events and processes, and presented the framework “Compliance, Commitment, and Capacity Model”
(CCCM) that integrated not only the conceptual entities (policy context, districts, external partners, structural and functional responses, consequences), but also their inter-relationships.
Additionally, this model already has an advantage of being loosely based on the earlier
“Concerns-Based Adoption Model” developed and tested by Hall and Hord (2001). The CCCM explains the districts’ responses to policy mandates through three stages: building understanding

LITERATURE REVIEW 14 and assessing requirements, internal management issues, innovation and change. Moreover, this framework reflects the importance of the mediating contextual factors of districts’ responses, such as ideological and cultural aspects. This blueprint, however, is deficient in two significant aspects: (1) the unilateral directionality of the overall flow in the model, and (2) the absence of links between districts and schools. First, the typical “top-to-bottom” orientation of the implementation of the legislative initiatives is no longer valid from the perspective of organizational ecologists, who declare that conceptualization of policy by individuals in different positions and at different levels of the system influence how districts respond and how policy plays out (Coburn & Talbert, 2006). Therefore, many of these scholars unfold horizontal and
“bottom-to-top” channels of influence among key players and practices when considering the districts’ responses to educational policies (Somech, 2005; Burch, 2007). Finally, research findings clearly illustrate that connecting links between districts and schools are essential to the implementation of educational reforms (Honig & Hatch, 2004; Brazer, Rich & Ross, 2010) and thus, a framework that overlooks this important aspect can not be accepted as adequate.
Special Topics
Another distinct cluster of published literature is dedicated to school districts’ responses to fiscal pressures (Boike, Dosier, & Moats, 2007; Hatler, 2013). Public school districts are predominantly funded by local and state revenue sources. Because their revenue sources are less stable, state governments are experiencing some of the worst budget deficits since the Great
Depression (Hatler, 2013). When faced with fiscal pressures, the school districts attempt to reduce expenditures, often succumbing to the idea of reorganization, cutting down non-mandated programs, and increasing “teacher : pupil” ratio in the classrooms. Overall, c onflicting or inconclusive findings of numerous research studies relating student performance to resources have only fueled growing controversy regarding education policy (Hanushek, 1997).

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Educational mandates are another reason school districts’ expenditures continue to escalate.
Legislative directives related to the education of students with disabilities are a good case point.
Federal legislative changes required by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA;
Pub. L. No. 105-17) and the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB; Pub. L. No. 107-110) resulted in a national movement to include students with disabilities as full participants in general education curriculum and assessment. The strong legal support for integration of students with disabilities in regular education classes correlates with the preponderance of research associating it with better outcomes in postsecondary education, employment, and income (Hehir, 2009, p.77). Thus today, teachers are asked to provide services across subject areas to all students, while preparing them to perform well on high-stakes tests (Lee & Krajcik, 2010), even though the concept of full inclusion contradicts some well-publicized statements by the Learning Disabilities Association and National Joint Committee on Learning Disabilities that claim that students with learning disabilities often require an intensity and systematicity of instruction uncommon to general education classrooms (Fuchs & Fuchs, 1994). Over the past 20 years, total costs for those receiving special education in comparison to the costs for regular education increased to be approximately two times the costs of regular education (Chaikind, Danielson, & Brauen, 1993).
Research has reported districts adopting various programs to address the specific needs of these students and providing professional development and other supports to teachers (Hamilton et al, 2013). Waivers from state and federal rules and regulations are sought, granting school districts increased flexibility to use special education resources in different and, presumably, more adaptive ways, 44 percent of districts recovered funds spent on special education services from Medicaid (Fuchs & Fuchs, 1994; Chambers, Parrish, & Harr, 2002). However, there are noted problems. For example, because special education has operated for so long separately from general education classrooms, many districts do not know “how to adapt and modify the

LITERATURE REVIEW 16 curriculum and instructional programs to meet diverse student needs" (Stainback & Stainback,
1992, p. 40). Districts also experience difficulties fulfilling the increasing demand in “highly qualified” teachers for students with disabilities (Billingsley, 2004; Cook & Boe, 2007).
Critical Analysis of Research
Attention paid by research to the educational matters at the district level has been fluctuating under the influence of the policy context and the accepted value of districts’ ability to produce in educational change. Today, this topic is becoming increasingly popular, as acknowledged by scholars and evident by a large number of published studies and doctoral dissertations. Nevertheless, the knowledge base has been consistently evaluated as limited and sporadic. While the current conventional position is that districts do matter for students’ academic achievement and that this organizational entity has a capacity to function as a moderating factor of educational reform, there is an apparent deficiency in agreement on other aspects of research.
Although scholars are often attracted to the organizational theory as a framework underlying district research, they note that usually this theoretical perspective is applied inefficiently, lacking in depth and unity in the modern contributions. Trujillo (2013) proposes that these wide-range conceptualizations are, perhaps, purposeful and “intended to avoid producing a narrow sample of literature”. At the same time, contemporary research favors
“effective” districts or the ones that have managed “to turn things around”. A majority of studies generate broad generic schemes for their conclusions, neglect local contextual factors, bypass average-type districts, and fail to recognize adverse, minimal or inert system responses. In addition to the problems noted with conceptual dimensions, discussions on the district responses to external environmental pressures is complicated by a lack of consensus on the language for

LITERATURE REVIEW 17 representing district actions and policies associated with educational reforms, as well as little distinction between general concepts, concrete actions, and formal policies (Anderson, 2003).
From the point of the methodological design, studies are characterized not only by inadequate sampling, but also by their inability to research longitudinal processes, as well as neglect of connections between districts and school/classroom levels. Research on districts’ responses to external stress factors related to the issues of special education is even more tapered, scarce, and incoherent. Most importantly, there is a noticeable lack of explicit theoretical framework and that, unquestionably, hinders the interpretation and adequate contextualization of findings.
Deepening our understanding of the forces that impact public school systems and the nature and the mechanisms of districts’ responses is essential for both scholars and practitioners.
The aforementioned concerns are the bedrock of my interest in conducting a comparative study that will inquire into the behavior of districts in response to escalating demands mandated by state of Virginia in the area of special education and the effects of the local context in the shaping of their organizational responses. By blending theoretical models derived from hard and soft sciences, I hope to construct a conceptual framework appropriate for exploring whether the primary driving force behind observed actions is the affinity of a system to buffer disturbances of external stress factors and re-establish its dynamic equilibrium. Not only my work will contribute to the field of educational research by reducing the acknowledged gap in literature, but it will also answer the call for development of a credible and sophisticated model that bridges organizational theory and policy implementation. I am considering using the modified CCCM framework as a tentative theory to justify and guide my research. By enhancing and testing the
CCCM, my study will contribute to existent knowledge on the subject by delivering a model that is built on previous research, shown to be sufficient and successful for exploring the studied

LITERATURE REVIEW 18 phenomena, and can be used as a tool to guide educators in making wise choices from the sometimes problematic menu thrust toward them by policymakers. My study will aim to answer the following exploratory questions:

How do districts assess state-mandated requirements and plan their responses?

How do districts respond and monitor the implementation of state-initiated policy?
 What is the overall nature of the districts’ responses to the policy?

Do districts exhibit similarities in their responses?
 Does the local context have an effect on districts’ responses? Will you have enough variability to see this?

Is there a gap between strategically planned response and the actual behavior of districts?
 What are the consequences of districts’ intended and actual responses?
Conclusion
The relationship between an organization and its external environment is central to the system’s survival and prosperity and thus, it presents an acute point of interest for both researchers and practitioners in the field. In the age of accountability and standard-based reform, particular attention is paid to the issue of growing demands of federal and state legislature on educational institutions. Disappointingly, empirical research focused on the reactions of school systems to these pressures is rather inadequate and often contradictory, particularly in the area of special education. I hope that by attending to this research debate, my work will craft a more adequate lens enabling policy makers and educational practitioners to more clearly understand on-going educational reform developments and to make better-informed, less speculative decisions during strategic planning.

LITERATURE REVIEW 19
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