School system (re)design: Developing educational infrastructures to support school leadership and teaching practice

Abstract

A central challenge for local education agencies (i.e., school districts in the United States) undergoing reform is to design systems that facilitate instructional improvement. At the core of these systems are educational infrastructures that bolster capacity building efforts and support teaching and leadership practices. Our goal for this special issue is to apply infrastructure as a framework to understand educational change processes across a variety of contexts and levels of the education system (i.e., state, district, school, classroom). Taken together, the articles in this issue reveal how infrastructure can support and/or constrain educational change to the extent that it is deeply connected to, taken up in, and/or transformed by teaching and leadership practice.