Principals or Agents? How State Education Agencies Build Trust to Balance Support and Accountability in Turnaround Policy Implementation

Abstract

In recent years, policymakers and scholars argued that state education agencies (SEAs) should move away from simply acting as compliance monitors and take on more prominent roles as providers of technical support to schools and school districts. Scholars find that SEAs have struggled to do so, yet there is little empirical work to explain what SEAs do or why they struggle. This study looks at Michigan's Partnership model for School and District turnaround, which began in 2018 and includes the Michigan Department of Education (MDE) as a formal partner in building the capacity of school districts to craft and meet ambitious student learning targets. Analyzing interviews with MDE “liaisons” and turnaround leaders, I find that Partnership leaders reported a deeper sense of trust with the SEA compared to prior years because liaisons were more focused on support and understanding individual school/district contexts. However, supports were generally “passive” (e.g., sending standardized emails with resources/links; helping navigate compliance issues) rather than targeted technical assistance that helped Partnership leaders build capacity. I argue that this was in part due to the SEA's conflicting role as both accountability monitor and technical assistance provider. I show how SEAs navigated this dynamic and provide suggestions for how SEAs can balance district autonomy with support through trust building, ideas of “controlled autonomy,” and “flexible specificity,” which recommends highly specific technical guidance paired with ongoing processes of feedback and experimentation from implementers so that guidance matches context.