Effective School District Policies and Practices: Synthesizing Theoretical Frameworks and Empirical Findings across Disciplines

Abstract

What guidance does research provide about how to improve school district performance in the United States? Despite over 30 years of inquiry on the topic of effective districts, existing frameworks are relatively narrow in terms of disciplinary focus (primarily educational leadership perspectives) and research design (primarily qualitative case studies). To bridge this gap for researchers, we first review the theoretical literatures on how districts are thought to affect educational outcomes, arguing that an expanded set of disciplinary perspectives—organizational behavior, political science, economics—have distinct theories about the types of district-level policies that might improve district-wide performance. Using these frameworks as a guide, we next conduct a review of quantitative studies that estimate the relationship between district-level inputs and educational outcomes, finding benefits of policies that cross disciplinary perspectives: higher teacher salaries, data use, and school autonomy and parental choice in the context of district-wide turnarounds. Our review also reveals the need for significant additional causal evidence and provides an inter-disciplinary map of theorized pathways through which district-level policies could influence student outcomes that are ripe for rigorous testing.