Papers by Bryan A VanGronigen
Principals’ perspectives on the shift to short-cycle school improvement planning
Educational Management Administration & Leadership
Principals are responsible for planning school improvement efforts at the school level to leverag... more Principals are responsible for planning school improvement efforts at the school level to leverage increases in student achievement. Recent research underscores how principals engage in satisficing behaviors that result in low-quality school improvement plans (SIPs). To disrupt compliance-based planning practices and produce high-quality SIPs, some districts have shifted from yearlong planning to short-cycle planning. Districts need to establish a coherent understanding of improvement planning to motivate and sustain new principal planning practices. Through the coherence framework, this qualitative study explored one large urban district's shift from yearlong planning processes to short-cycle planning processes to understand principals’ perspectives on improvement planning and the potential shift to short-cycle planning. Researchers examined eight principals’ short-cycle plans. Principals who participated in a two-year partnership with a University System Leadership Program (US...
Helping Every Student Succeed? State Education Agency Roles and Responsibilities for Improving Underperforming Schools and Districts
American Journal of Education
The Functions and Organizing Features of School Leadership Teams in Underperforming High Schools
Proceedings of the 2020 AERA Annual Meeting
Principals formulated their responses to the pandemic in terms of a hierarchy of needs: they unde... more Principals formulated their responses to the pandemic in terms of a hierarchy of needs: they understood that their students and staff had to feel physically and psychologically safe before they would be successful in the classroom. This is one of a series of briefs that focused on a ‘critical incident’ surrounding school closure and offers pragmatic suggestions to educational leaders as they continue to grapple with the disruptions of the pandemic
Mapping the Landscape of State Education Agencies' Use of External Providers for School Turnaround Services
Proceedings of the 2019 AERA Annual Meeting
Examining the School Improvement Industry: The Interplay Between State Education Agencies and School Turnaround Service Providers
Proceedings of the 2019 AERA Annual Meeting
Calm during crisis: school principal approaches to crisis management during the Calm during crisi... more Calm during crisis: school principal approaches to crisis management during the Calm during crisis: school principal approaches to crisis management during the COVID-19 pandemic COVID-19 pandemic
The Best-Laid Plans Can Succeed
Educational Leadership, Apr 1, 2021
The Design and Characteristics of School Improvement Plan Templates
AERA Open
Resources for school improvement efforts, such as school improvement plan (SIP) templates, can es... more Resources for school improvement efforts, such as school improvement plan (SIP) templates, can espouse governmental entities’ perspectives on and requirements and recommendations for the school improvement planning process. These resources, in turn, can influence how educators enact school improvement efforts generally and the school improvement planning process specifically. In this exploratory qualitative study, we leveraged a conventional content analysis to rigorously examine SIP templates used by schools in the United States before and after the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) in 2015. We were particularly interested in learning how a sample of SIP templates espoused the school improvement planning process before and after ESSA’s passage. Findings suggest that SIP templates focused more on developing SIPs than implementing SIPs, raising concerns about SIPs continuing to be enacted out of compliance rather than as a mechanism for spurring and sustaining improvem...
Journal of Educational Change
Many of today's educational organizations around the world contend with complex challenges. Yet, ... more Many of today's educational organizations around the world contend with complex challenges. Yet, longstanding practices and norms in educational systems can hamper educators' abilities to identify and address these challenges, such as only principals leading change efforts or the use of misaligned "quick fixes" for ill-defined challenges. A design-based approach to organizational change, on the other hand, holds promise to reframe change in local educational agencies like schools. Design thinking is one way to enact a design-based approach, but little research has investigated the process's use to help educators conceptualize and implement change. Drawing upon transformational learning theory, this United States-based mixedmethods study examined a year-long professional learning workshop sponsored by a state education agency that used design thinking to reframe how participants orchestrated change in their contexts. Results indicated that design thinking helped participants devise more nuanced understandings of themselves and the change process in their contexts, yet, most participants' actions continued to be influenced by longstanding practices and norms of the U.S. educational system. We close by discussing implications for practice and policy, particularly the need for professional learning experiences that prompt educators to critically reflect upon their mindsets and how their actions may differ from those mindsets. This greater understanding can better position educators to engage in change efforts that address increasingly complex challenges in education.
State ESSA Plans and Comprehensive Support and Improvement (CSI) Status
Educational Policy
The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) offers states increased flexibility in how they identify, r... more The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) offers states increased flexibility in how they identify, rank, label, and support underperforming schools. Initial reviews of state ESSA plans, however, suggest that identification and labeling policies have remained relatively unchanged. In this study, we analyze all state ESSA plans to systematically determine how states’ identified Comprehensive Support and Improvement (CSI) schools and the criteria they set for those schools to exit CSI status. We describe our findings through the theory of institutional isomorphism, noting the many ways states responded similarly to ESSA. We close by considering what the lack of innovation in response to ESSA flexibility might mean for the future of educational policy and the implications for schools identified as underperforming.
Planning for what? An analysis of root cause quality and content in school improvement plans
Journal of Educational Administration
PurposeLimited research on root cause analysis exists in educational leadership. Accurately diagn... more PurposeLimited research on root cause analysis exists in educational leadership. Accurately diagnosing and detailing root causes—the why—of organizational failure, as is relatively common in other fields, could improve principals' ability to devise situationally- and contextually-responsive solutions in their improvement plans. In this study, the authors analyze school improvement plans to provide insight into how principals use root cause analysis to identify their and their school's failures as a way to respond strategically with goals and action steps.Design/methodology/approachIn this exploratory qualitative study, the authors develop coding schemes and leverage an existing rubric of school improvement plan quality to assess what principals identify as root causes for 216 priorities across 111 school improvement plans.FindingsThe overall quality of root causes submitted by principals was low, typically between “beginning” and “developing” stages. The majority of root cau...
Education Policy Analysis Archives, Feb 8, 2022
State boards of education (SBOEs) are one of many governmental entities that reside within the la... more State boards of education (SBOEs) are one of many governmental entities that reside within the larger educational policymaking sphere. With recent U.S. federal legislation devolving more authority over education to states, state-level governmental
The use of teacher leadership in PK-12 education has experienced a resurgence since the late 1990... more The use of teacher leadership in PK-12 education has experienced a resurgence since the late 1990's as school leadership models have evolved to include the engagement of diverse stakeholders in school and district leadership processes aimed at positive change and improvement efforts. Despite the recent evolution of school leadership, there remain several barriers to understanding the nature of the work that teacher leaders engage in and the contributions that they make to improvement efforts. This grounded theory study examined teacher perceptions of teacher leadership, the types of work teacher leaders should engage in and the boundaries of that work, and barriers to teacher leadership. Using interview data from 22 teachers in a large urban school district, we found that teachers function in many domains of work and are eager for pathways to leverage their expertise. We conclude by discussing the implications from our findings to district-and school-level leaders.
Preparing Educational Leaders for Adaptive Leadership
Buyer beware: Using external providers to improve schools
Phi Delta Kappan, 2020
Governments have injected billions of dollars into the massive school improvement industry, but l... more Governments have injected billions of dollars into the massive school improvement industry, but little is known about the providers that offer services and whether their services actually improve schools. Bryan VanGronigen and Coby Meyers highlight their research the topic, which has found that few states monitor and evaluate provider performance and many state-approved or recommended providers offer services not based in or informed by research. They offer considerations for school, district, and state educational leaders about how to navigate some of the many challenges present within these murky waters.
Topics and Trends in Short-Cycle Planning: Are Principals Leading School Turnaround Efforts Identifying the Right Priorities?
Planning and changing, 2017
Federal legislation requires all low-performing schools to create yearly school improvement plans... more Federal legislation requires all low-performing schools to create yearly school improvement plans (SIPs), and in many cases, school prin cipals are responsible fo r conceptualizing and drafting the SIP. However, this year-long approach may not create the necessary focus and sense o f urgency low-performing schools need to learn, adapt, and turn themselves around. School principals facing high-stakes accountability demands for rapid school improvement might be better served by engaging in short-cy cle (e.g., 90-day) school improvement planning. In this descriptive study, we review 410 short-cycle SIPs developed primarily by school principals leading turnaround initiatives in 194 schools in the United States. Our re sults discuss the priorities identified by school principals and how those priorities change over four planning cycles. Additionally, we assess the alignment between plan priorities and the literature on turnaround princi pal leadership. We conclude with a discussion about reconsidering the re liance upon year-long SIPs and how alternative planning processes might create the conditions fo r sustained organizational change in low-perform ing schools.
Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education, 2020
Background School improvement planning is a common school leadership practice built on assumption... more Background School improvement planning is a common school leadership practice built on assumptions that schools increase organizational performance if rational yearly plans are developed and then enacted with fidelity. A quality school improvement plan (SIP) should position subsequent critical leadership and instructional moves in a more holistic change initiative. Although multiple studies suggest that positive relationships exist between SIP quality and student achievement outcomes, all studies of SIPs have focused on the traditional, yearlong approach to school improvement planning. An alternative approach operates on shorter cycles of approximately one semester, a model that could be beneficial for low-performing schools engaged in turnaround efforts in which altering goals and strategies might need to occur more frequently to be situationally responsive. Purpose In this study, we analyze short-cycle SIPs from three cohorts of low-performing schools participating in a university...
Preparing for the worst: identifying predictors of school decline as an improvement initiative
Educational Assessment, Evaluation and Accountability, 2021
School improvement research has insufficiently considered the importance of intervening in school... more School improvement research has insufficiently considered the importance of intervening in schools with declining academic performance. Fields such as engineering and medicine have prioritized predicting decline to save structures or patients before they are in peril. Unfortunately, in education, school improvement policies and interventions are only enacted once schools reach low levels of academic performance. In this study, we apply sophisticated statistical models to analyze more than 10 years of longitudinal student achievement data in English/language arts and mathematics in the US state of Texas. We find that a considerable number of schools consistently decline over time. Some significant predictors of decline included shifting student demographics and changes in the percent of economically disadvantaged students. Higher starting percentages of students labeled as English language learners also increased the likelihood of decline, but increasing percentages of English language learners over timereduced the rate of decline. Leadership stability also appears to be important to impeding decline. We close by discussing implications for research, policy, and practice.
Exploring the Association Between Short-cycle School Improvement Planning and Student Achievement in Underperforming Schools
Journal of School Leadership, 2021
Some governments require that educational leaders working in underperforming schools create schoo... more Some governments require that educational leaders working in underperforming schools create school improvement plans (SIPs) to guide change efforts. Extant research describes two common approaches to SIPs: (a) a “traditional” approach where leaders create a single plan for an entire academic year, and (b) a “short-cycle” approach where leaders create two plans during an academic year (e.g., one for each semester). Despite widespread appeal, surprisingly little research has been conducted on SIPs and their influence on outcomes of interest. Nearly all studies investigate the traditional approach, and no published studies examine the potential influence of short-cycle SIPs on outcomes of interest (e.g., student achievement). In response to these gaps, the purpose of this study was to explore potential associations between short-cycle SIP quality and student achievement in English/language arts (ELA) and mathematics. We used a publicly available rubric to score 389 short-cycle SIPs on ...
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Papers by Bryan A VanGronigen