Moving educational policy to educators’ lived reality: One state’s trickle-down, bottom-up pathway to literacy intervention reform

Abstract

What happens when a state’s literacy reform policy allows for ownership and individualized diversification of the policy’s instructional mandates at the level of district and school? How do systems and individuals experience the change in reform and respond to both the power and the pressures of having to design and implement their own literacy assessment and intervention accountability plans? This research highlights the variety of pathways and interpretations the policy took within and across districts and individual schools across the state. Interviews with 29 teachers, reading coaches, and administrators in 10 schools from 4 unique districts across the state describe their unique experiences with their district and school accountability plans and the actual reform implementation that followed. Educators at each school experienced the policy’s preparation and implementation differently as each district and school had a hand in creating their own plan to meet reform requirements. Implications from this research address the issues of inequities and imbalance of power experienced by educators within a system’s educational reform movement.