Opportunities and challenges for NGOs amid competing institutional logics
| Date | 08 July 2019 |
| Published date | 08 July 2019 |
| Pages | 376-392 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JEA-10-2018-0191 |
| Author | Joshua L. Glazer,Laura Groth,Blair Beuche |
| Subject Matter | Education,Administration & policy in education,School administration/policy,Educational administration,Leadership in education |
Opportunities and challenges
for NGOs amid competing
institutional logics
Joshua L. Glazer and Laura Groth
Graduate School of Education and Human Development,
George Washington University, Washington, District of Columbia, USA, and
Blair Beuche
School of Education,
University of Michigan College of Literature Science and the Arts, Ann Arbor,
Michigan, USA
Abstract
Purpose –This paper considers the implications of reform efforts that rely on charter management
organizations to assume operational control of underperforming neighborhood schools. The purpose of this
paper is to examine the way in which changes to the education sector place enormous pressure on these
organizations to both manage instruction and their social environments.
Design/methodology/approach –The research presents the results from a longitudinal case study of two
organizations operating within the Tennessee Achievement School District (ASD). Interviews, observations
and document analysis provided insight into the perspectives of school operators, state officials and
community leaders. The study design allowed researchers to observe the influence of the environment on
school operators over a four-year period.
Findings –Results show that the environment that includeda muscular state, marketpressures, NGOs and
local communities placed an extreme and contradictory set of demands on organizations operating schools,
pressing them to develop robust systems of instruction, leadership and teacher development while actively
working to ensure social legitimacy in the community. Neither a national network nor a small local startup
began witha strategy aligned to these environmental demands,and both needed to make substantialrevisions.
Research limitations/implications –Research into contemporary educational reform should account for
rapidly evolving environments that feature a complex mix of resources and incentives. Careful examination of
the consequences of these environments for educational organizations will further our understanding of how
markets, communities and governments are shaping the education sector.
Practical implications –The extraordinarychallenges that confront organizations that operate in crowded
and contested environments preclude fastor dramatic results. Policymakersand the public should assume an
incrementalprocess of organizational learningand improvement. Settingunrealistic expectations andfocusing
exclusively on impact risks delegitimizing organizations and policy initiatives before they havetime to adapt.
Originality/value –This research reported here is among the few studies that have explored the
experiences and implications of NGOs that have attempted to assume operational controlof underperforming
neighborhood schools. The popularity of this approach among a growing number of states highlights the
importance of this topic.
Keywords Governance, Organizational learning, Policy, Market forces, Educational policy,
Charter schools
Paper type Research paper
Over the last several decades, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have taken
a significant role in the national effort to turn around the most chronically
underperforming schools. For example, organizations like Success for All, Reading
Recovery and Core Knowledge gained national attention by demonstrating
Journal of Educational
Administration
Vol. 57 No. 4, 2019
pp. 376-392
© Emerald PublishingLimited
0957-8234
DOI 10.1108/JEA-10-2018-0191
Received 8 October 2018
Revised 16 January 2019
7 March 2019
Accepted 7 March 2019
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/0957-8234.htm
The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Walton Family Foundation. In
addition, sincere thanks go to Diane Massell, Cori Egan, Matthew Malone, Nina Kolleck, Miri Yemini
and two anonymous reviewers.
376
JEA
57,4
effectiveness in raising student outcomes and building networks of hundreds and
even thousands of schools (Kolleck, 2019; Trujillo and Woulfin, 2014). The last
several years, however, have witnessed a new development in this trend. Spurred
by pressure from the federal government (Peurach and Neumerski, 2015), and
consistent with larger global trends that value an enhanced NGO role in public
education (Kolleck and Yemini, 2019; Tamir et al., 2019), an increasing number of states
are turning to NGOs –frequently charter management organizations –to assume
operational control of existing schools (Glazer et al., 2019). Unlike typical charter schools
that operate schools of choice and unlike the above-mentioned NGOs that collaborate with
schools, these private organizations have assumed operational control of traditional
neighborhood schools.
The political and social significance of this trend raises important questions. One regards
the capacity of these organizations to deliver the expected improvements in student
outcomes. A primary motivation for legislators and state officials that construct and oversee
these governance changes is to generate gains in student learning outcomes in schools that
traditional districts have struggled to improve. Yet is it reasonable to expect that
organizations with little experience in managing traditional neighborhood schools can
design and implement improvement models that engender meaningful changes in learning
outcomes in these more uncertain and challenging environments? A second question is
whether these organizations can generate and maintain social legitimacy in the eyes of the
communities they serve. While state authorities and funders emphasize learning outcomes,
communities may prioritize other values that rest on a more expansive vision of public
schooling (Eyal and Berkovich, 2019; Strike, 2003; Trujillo and Renee, 2015; Yemini and
Sagie, 2015). For example, in some communities, schools are seen as institutional
repositories of community history, culture and traditions that they are expected to maintain.
New organizations (particularly those not perceived as local) that upend local traditions and
impose a narrower definition of schooling, can quickly find that their legitimacy is openly
contested and their presence resisted (Glazer and Egan, 2018; Henig and Bulkley, 2010).
In this sense, NGOs that operate neighborhood schools must respond to divergent
“institutional logics”(Thornton et al., 2012) that demand technical effectiveness, on the one
hand, and conformity to local conceptions of schools on the other (we elaborate on
institutional logics below). This leads to a third question: how do these organizations
manage these complex environments and their competing value systems, and what are the
implications for their strategy and viability?
The remainder of this paper addresses these questions by reporting on the results
of a comparative case study of two organizations that operated neighborhood high
schools in the Tennessee Achievement School District (ASD). The results of this
comparative case study shed light on the extreme demands that confront organizations
operating in complex and contested environments, and the extraordinary capabilities
required to meet them.
Literature review
Traditional institutional analyses of US education posited that a combination of a weak
technical environment (i.e. a tenuous connection between teaching and learning), a dense but
incoherent regulatory environment and deeply embedded cultural norms about schooling
contributed to educational organizations whose structure mirrored the social environment
but was loosely connected to the technical work of instruction. Schools obtained legitimacy
from practices that resonated with cultural norms –certified teachers, subject areas,
textbooks, report cards, graduation –while evading public inspection of their technical
performance, and delegating the management of instruction to individual teachers
(Meyer and Rowan, 1977; Meyer and Scott, 1983).
377
Opportunities
and challenges
for NGOs
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