Implementing Mandated Change: The School as Change Contractor

Abstract

This article concerns a study that seeks to map and conceptualize implementation efforts of comprehensive and contracted change in schools. The setting is a national large-scale reform at the primary school level in The Netherlands. We deal specifically with those schools whose innovation efforts have acquired special funds from the central Department of Education in return for their local attempt to experiment with the implementation of their agenda-for-change; that is, the school's version of a broad and nationally mandated concept of primary school reform. These specially funded schools acquired what we term “contract status.” The focus is on the effects of this contract status, on what it generates in the school's life, and on how it affects the conduct of the implementation activities. We report on the context of the educational reform, but focus in particular on the conceptual notions that served as leading themes for our empirical work. Though the study is situated in a Dutch institutional setting, the description of school-level implementation of contracted change may have theoretical relevance for other settings as well.