Chapter 1

Complexity and Policy Implementation

Challenges and Opportunities for the Field
Meredith I. Honig
Education policy implementation as a field of research and practice for
decades has amounted to a sort of national search for two types of policies:
implementable policiesthose that in practice resemble policy designsand
successful policiesthose that produce demonstrable improvements in stu-
dents school performance. This focus on what gets implemented and what
works makes sense especially in education. After all, education has become a
high-stakes, big-budget policy arena. Education commands a lions share of
state and local budgets to levels that beg hard questions about the feasibility
and value added by education policies. Given its promise to serve as a signifi-
cant lever of change in an institution intended to serve all children and youth,
education policy affects multiple dimensions of social welfare. And given these
high stakes, education policy implementation warrants careful scrutiny.
However, recent trends in education policy signal the importance of reex-
amining what we know about what gets implemented and what works. In
practice, education policy demands arguably have become more complex.
School systems now are held accountable for demonstrable improvements in
the academic achievement of all students in ways barely imagined just 20 years
ago. Across the country, the increasing ethnic and racial diversity of public
schools (Ladson-Billings, 1999; Villegas & Lucas, 2002), a shrinking base of
resources for education in many states and districts, and new systems of nega-
tive sanctions for underperforming schools (Massell, 2001; ODay, 2002) only
add to the urgency and challenge of meeting those standards. Contemporary
public school systems vie for resources in competitive and contentious politi-
cal arenas against projects for roads and sewers, prisons, and health care as well
as school alternatives such as vouchers, charters, private schools, and home
schooling. Research and experience continue to deepen knowledge about how
students experiences in school are highly dependent on conditions in their
neighborhoods, families, and peer groups in ways that up the ante on school
11
2006 State University of New York Press, Albany
improvement efforts to look beyond school walls for key reform partners
(Honig, Kahne, & McLaughlin, 2001). The federal government, states, school
districts, mayors offices, and others each promote various educational reform
agendas that typically converge on schools simultaneously (Honig & Hatch,
2004; Knapp, Bamburg, Ferguson, & Hill, 1998).
In such contentious, interconnected, and multidimensional arenas, no one
policy gets implemented or is successful everywhere all the time; on the bright
side, some policies are implemented and successful some of the places some of
the time. For example, some research on class size reduction links smaller class
sizes with increases in student performance but other research reveals no
improvement (Finn & Achilles, 1990; Gilman & Kiger, 2003; Hanushek,
1999; Illig, 1997; Smith, Molnar, & Zahorik, 2002; Zahorik, Halbach, Earle,
& Molnar, 2004). Linking student support services to schools has been shown
not to expand students opportunities to learn but under certain conditions it
has been associated with various positive youth development and learning out-
comes (Honig et al., 2001; Mathematica Policy Research & Decision Infor-
mation Resources, 2005). In some districts charter schools outperform neigh-
borhood public schools but nationwide their performance has been mixed
(Mishel, 2004, September 23; Viadero, 2004a, 2004b). Single-sex schooling
seems both to strengthen and to impede educational outcomes (Datnow, Hub-
bard, & Conchas, 2001; Lee & Bryk, 1986). Accountability policies and other
central directives have limited impacts on teachers practice in some settings
but significant effects in others (Elmore & Burney, 1997; Firestone, Schorr, &
Monfils, 2004; Louis, 1994a).
These realities of schooling in diverse communities nationwide suggest that
those interested in improving the quality of education policy implementation
should focus not simply on whats implementable and what works but rather
investigate under what conditions, if any, various education policies get imple-
mented and work. In this view, implementability and success are still essen-
tial policy outcomes, but they are not inherent properties of particular policies.
Rather implementability and success are the product of interactions between
policies, people, and placesthe demands specific policies place on imple-
menters; the participants in implementation and their starting beliefs, knowl-
edge, and other orientations toward policy demands; and the places or contexts
that help shape what people can and will do. Implementation research should
aim to reveal the policies, people, and places that shape how implementation
unfolds and provide robust, grounded explanations for how interactions among
them help to explain implementation outcomes. The essential implementation
question then becomes not simply whats implementable and works, but what
is implementable and what works for whom, where, when, and why?
The complexity of these policy dynamics poses a dilemma for policy ana-
lysts, policy researchers, and others who routinely produce information about
2 COMPLEXITY AND POLICY IMPLEMENTATION
2006 State University of New York Press, Albany
implementation. On the one hand, primary audiences for implementation
informationelected officials, public managers, school principals, and oth-
ersby many reports demand clear, actionable, and reliable information that
can guide their decisions especially in complex policy arenas; clear information
in such arenas is often considered that which limits complexity and provides
unambiguous action steps and chains of command (Cohen & Weiss, 1977;
Majone, 1989; Weiss & Gruber, 1984). For example, policy recommendations
in this spirit might call for the implementation of a single district-wide read-
ing curriculum to help ensure that all schools are on the same page and offer-
ing consistent, coherent instruction. Such recommendations might urge the
development of what works lists and clearinghouses and seek relatively
unambiguous verdicts regarding program success (http://www.whatworks.
ed.gov). A more complex view of education policy implementation may appear
particularly unwelcome in the high-stakes accountability environments of
many states and districts where short timelines for producing demonstrable
improvements put a premium on swift and confident action.
But on the other hand, if such information and recommendations gloss
over public school systems complex day-to-day realities they run the risk of
missing their mark and actually undermining progress. Without detailed
information about the conditions under which certain interventions work,
decision makers will not know if the failure of a particular reading curriculum,
for example, stemmed from their choice of curriculum or poor conditions for
implementation. Lists of recommended programs that work may obscure the
resources and practices that enabled those programs to work, inadequately
explain implementation results, and otherwise fail to help educational leaders
understand which successful program might actually be successful with their
own staff and students in their workplaces and communities. Recent federal
emphases on scientifically based approaches to improvement arguably up the
ante on researchers and practitioners alike to better understand the value and
applicability of particular educational research in specific educational contexts.
This book starts from two broad premises: confronting the complexity of
policy implementation is essential to building the kind of instructive knowl-
edge base that educational decision-makers demand; and strong theoretical
and empirical guides are needed to help researchers and practitioners navigate
this inherently messy terrain. The time is ripe for a compilation of studies that
build on this perspective. Decades of education policy implementation
research and experience have been pointing to the complexity of implementa-
tion (Elmore, 1983; Sizer, 1985) and, specifically, to policy, people, and places
as essential interrelated influences on how implementation unfolds (Odden &
Marsh, 1988). Some scholars have developed models theoretically consistent
with such descriptors (e.g., Goggin, Bowman, Lester, & OToole,Jr., 1990).
However, arguably for the first time in education, implementation studies that
Meredith I. Honig 3
2006 State University of New York Press, Albany
confront complexity have reached a critical mass and when examined together
begin to elaborate what productively confronting complexity might entail.
This new generation of education policy implementation research is distin-
guished by three specific features: (1) the policies under investigation on the
whole are significantly more comprehensive and varied than in previous decades;
(2) the research aims to uncover the various dimensions of and interactions
among policies, people, and places that help explain variations in policy results;
and (3) the basic epistemological approach of the research reflects the impor-
tance of moving beyond universal truths about implementation (e.g., you cant
mandate what matters) to revealing implementation as a complex and highly
contingent enterprise in which variation is the rule, rather than the exception.
This volume brings together scholars whose original empirical work con-
tributes to this new generation of implementation research. No one chapter
promises to present an overall model of policy implementation. However,
when viewed together in combination with other contemporary education pol-
icy implementation studies, these chapters begin to add up to a portrait of edu-
cation policy implementation as the product of the interaction among partic-
ular policies, people, and places. These studies suggest that education policy
researchers and practitioners interested in improving the quality of education
policy implementation should help build knowledge about what works for
whom, where, when, and why.
To help elaborate the distinguishing features of these chapters and con-
temporary education policy implementation research more broadly, I first locate
recent studies in the context of past generations of implementation research
identified by many other researchers (e.g., Goggin et al., 1990; Radin, 2000;
Wildavsky, 1996). My analysis of these research waves reveals that contempo-
rary implementation research in many ways builds directly on lessons learned
from the past and seeks to deepen past findings. In doing so, contemporary
research breaks from the past along particular dimensions that mark it as a dis-
tinct generationone seeking more nuanced, contingent, rigorous, theory-
based explications of how implementation unfolds. I highlight throughout the
next sections how each chapter in this volume illuminates this approach and I
conclude with implications for implementation research and practice.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF EDUCATION POLICY IMPLEMENTATION
Generalizing about generations or waves of research in a multidisciplinary
field such as education policy implementation surely obscures variations in the
work underway at any given time. However, bodies of research during differ-
ent time periods may reflect prevailing approaches and underlying assump-
tions that help mark distinct evolutions in knowledge. In scholarly reviews of
4 COMPLEXITY AND POLICY IMPLEMENTATION
2006 State University of New York Press, Albany
education policy implementation researchand implementation research in
other social policy arenasthere is remarkable agreement that the field has
passed through at least three stages (Odden, 1991a; see also Goggin et al.,
1990; Lennon & Corbett, 2003; Radin, 2000; Wildavsky, 1996). I find that
scholars generally distinguish each stage by (1) particular features of policies
enacted and examined and (2) predominant approaches to implementation
research. A review of these stages with attention to selected outlying studies
helps highlight that contemporary education policy implementation research
both builds on and departs from all three past eras in ways that mark a distinct
new phase of knowledge-building about implementation.
Wave 1: A Focus on What Gets Implemented
According to Odden and others, implementation research as a formal field of
inquiry emerged in the 1960s. Early implementation studies mainly focused on
federal Great Society Period policies such as the Elementary and Secondary
Education Act (ESEA), then newly passed in 1965 (Murphy, 1971). These
policies aimed to achieve broad societal goals such as eradicating poverty but
implementers were evaluated along far more modest measures: namely, the
extent to which schools delivered supplemental services to low-income students
(Elmore & McLaughlin, 1988). Policy designs were largely distributive, cate-
gorical, and regulatory in nature. That is, they aimed to help spread particular
resources (typically funding) to groups or categories of students who met par-
ticular eligibility criteria and to ensure the appropriate use of resources as spec-
ified by policy makers. These policy designs were generally top-down in orien-
tationbased on assumptions that policy makers should develop policies for
implementers to carry out and monitor implementers compliance.
Supported in large part by federal contracts, many Great Society Period
researchers conducted large-scale evaluations of these policies and were almost
unanimous in their findings of implementation failureschools and districts
tended not to put programs in place in ways that faithfully resembled policy
designs or, in economic terms, that could be predicted by policy designs.
Researchers and others generally traced root causes of these failures to conflicts
between policy makers and implementers interests and to implementers overall
lack of capacity and will to carry out those instructions (Murphy, 1971; see also,
Derthick, 1972; Pressman & Wildavsky, 1984). Such assumptions stemmed in
part from conventions of particular academic disciplines such as economics and
political sciencedominant in implementation research at that timethat
viewed the individual implementer as the most meaningful unit of analysis and
posited that these individuals were driven by individual self-interest to behave in
ways not always congruous with policy designers goals. Coalition building
Meredith I. Honig 5
2006 State University of New York Press, Albany
among implementers, stronger incentives, and clearer instructions for imple-
mentation were heralded as important strategies for closing policy design-imple-
mentation gaps (Bardach, 1977; Sabatier & Mazmanian, 1979).
Wave 2: Attention to What Gets Implemented over Time
In the 1970s, predominant policy designs reflected some continuity and some
change. The federal Great Society Period programs persisted as a focal point
for implementation research thanks in part to ongoing federal evaluation con-
tracts. However, long-standing policies such as ESEA through multiple reau-
thorizations had come to include more specific regulations and other guidance.
By the 1970s ESEA and its signature program, Title I, had become old-hat for
many schools and districts that had been implementing its programs for
almost a decade. In addition, the types of federal policies under study
expanded to include other distributive, categorical, and regulatory policies
such as those for special education students.
Research on these federal policies also followed a pattern of continuity
and change. Research questions still probed fidelity of implementation. For
example, Kirst and Jung demonstrated that over extended periods of time, fed-
eral programs in practice did resemble initial policy designs and they con-
cluded that longitudinal approaches to policy making and policy research
would improve implementation (Kirst & Jung, 1980; see also Farrar & Milsap,
1986; Knapp, Stearns, Turnbull, David, & Peterson, 1991). However, a hand-
ful of researchers began to concern themselves with variations in implementa-
tion and to forecast the importance of policies, people, and places as mediators
of implementation.
For example, Peterson, Rabe, and Wong highlighted that policy designs dif-
fered not only in the details of their provisions but also in terms of their under-
lying mechanisms for allocating resources. They argued that the implementation
of redistributive programs (those that required government to provide more
services to certain generally underprivileged groups) led to more conflicts at var-
ious points in the policy process than developmental programs (those that made
infrastructure investments and promised benefits for wider groups) (Peterson,
Rabe, & Wong, 1986; Peterson, Rabe, & Wong, 1991. See also Lowi, 1969).
Other studies began to cast implementers in a different lightnot as individu-
als who lacked the motivation to change but as engaged actors trying to cope
with the sheer number of new policy requirements that converged on the street
level (Weatherley & Lipsky, 1977) and to reconcile workplace demands with
their personal and professional worldviews (Radin, 1977). The importance of
attending to places or local context edged to center stage thanks in large part to
the RAND Change Agent study. This study found, among other things, that
6 COMPLEXITY AND POLICY IMPLEMENTATION
2006 State University of New York Press, Albany
implementation is shaped by macro- (policy-level) and micro- (implementation-
level) influences; implementation unfolds as a process of mutual adaptation as
implementers attempt to reconcile conditions in their microlevel context with
macrolevel demands (Berman & McLaughlin, 1976, 1978).
These and other landmark studies began to herald that variations among
policy, people, and places mattered to implementation. However, studies dur-
ing this period seldom elaborated how they mattered. For example, few dis-
agreed that local context mattered to implementation but instructions to
attend to context said little about the dimensions of context that mattered,
under what conditions they mattered, whether context could be attended to,
and if it could, how policy makers should do so (Kirst & Jung, 1980). Further-
more, the general orientation to knowledge-building about implementation
during this decade reflected persistent concerns with closing the gap between
policy makers intentions and implementers actions and reinforcing top-down
command-and-control relationships between policy makers and imple-
menters. New, alternative policy models and tools such as backward mapping
and decision checklists for policy makers aimed to help policy makers antici-
pate implementers deviations from policy makers plans and to take steps to
avoid such implementation pitfalls at the point of policy design (Elmore,
1979-80; Elmore, 1983; Sabatier & Mazmanian, 1979, 1980).
Wave 3: Growing Concerns with What Works
In the 1980s, policy demands shifted again thanks in part to the publication of
A Nation at Risk in 1983, the growing maturity of the federal Great Society
Period programs, and the emergence of states as designers of broad-based pol-
icy initiatives. Policy designs during this period not only aimed to ensure full
implementation but to achieve demonstrable improvements in students school
performance through new attention to curriculum and instruction and teacher
professionalism (McLaughlin, 1990b). As Fuhrman and others have noted,
policy making and policy research in previous eras generally:
. . . centered on individual programs many of which were for special
needs students and were more peripheral than central to core ele-
ments of schooling. They were discrete and amenable to study. By
contrast, the current [Wave 3] reforms deal with central issues of who
shall teach and what shall be taught and in what manner. (Fuhrman,
Clune, & Elmore, 1988, p. 239)
Some of these policies stemmed from state educational agencies which
emerged in many regions across the country as significant education reform
Meredith I. Honig 7
2006 State University of New York Press, Albany
leaders. State policy development focused in part on the categorical federal
programs of the prior decades but also on curriculum (Anderson et al., 1987).
For example, during this decade California launched a major effort to develop
curriculum frameworks and grade-level initiatives to guide school decisions
and teacher professional development (Knapp et al., 1991; Marsh & Crocker,
1991; Odden & Marsh, 1988). States and districts passed and promoted
prominent initiatives that called for school restructuring and school site-based
management (David, 1989; Malen, Ogawa, & Kranz, 1990) and other strate-
gies to reshape basic, usually formal school structures based in part on the the-
ory that such restructuring would contribute to better decisions about various
school operations. A related strand of policy making emerged from a host of
other and relatively new policy makers including whole school reform
designers such as the Coalition for Essential Schools, Accelerated Schools,
and Comer Schools who aimed in part to develop schoolwide improvement
strategies they could replicate across multiple schools.
Lessons from education policy implementation research during this period
extended some of the past. For example, many studies of state policy implemen-
tation echoed previous waves federal policy studies in their findings that mis-
matches between policy makers and implementers incentives impeded imple-
mentation (e.g., Anderson et al., 1987). However, more nuanced
understandings of the significance of policies, people, and places also began to
take shape. For example, McDonnell and Elmore expanded on the notion that
differences in policy design matter to implementation by distinguishing policies
by their instruments or tools (McDonnell & Elmore, 1987). They highlighted
that policy instrumentsmandates, incentives, capacity building, and systems
change in particularreflected different underlying assumptions about how to
motivate implementers to change. They argued that an analysis of policy
designs at this level would help reveal why policies of certain types were more
or less effective. (See also Schneider & Ingram, 1990.)
A wider range of people emerged in implementation studies as conse-
quential to implementation. For example, various researchers began to illumi-
nate the importance of state educational agency leaders and staff as designers
and implementers of policy (Cohen, 1982; Fuhrman, 1988; Fuhrman et al.,
1988). While schoolteachers and principals long had been topics of study in
the fields of teacher education and educational leadership, research explicitly
located within the field of policy implementation began to explore how these
school-based professionals shaped implementation processes and outcomes
(Elmore & McLaughlin, 1988; McLaughlin, 1991a, 1991b; Rosenholtz,
1985). For example, Clune and others revealed policy implementation as a
negotiated process involving at least the federal government, states, and local
districts through which the terms of policy compliance were constructed
(Clune III, 1983). Consistent with conventions of terminology in federal leg-
8 COMPLEXITY AND POLICY IMPLEMENTATION
2006 State University of New York Press, Albany
islation, studies during this period tended to refer to implementers by broad
categories such as teachers and state educational agencies and not to
explore how differences among individuals within these broad categories
shaped implementation. Nonetheless, this research helped solidify a focus on
implementers agency as an important avenue for implementation research.
Studies in the 1980s also began to elaborate the places that mattered to
implementation in several respects. For one, places included geographic loca-
tions and jurisdictions such as states that had received little attention in prior
waves of reform and research. Studies revealed that these locations and juris-
dictions varied in terms of their politics, culture, and histories in ways that
helped to explain their differing responses to policy directives (Fuhrman et al.,
1988, p. 64). Places also included new units of analysis such as teacher net-
works and communities and studies in this vein revealed these nonlegislated
associations among implementers as powerful influences on implementers
work (Anderson et al., 1987; Fuhrman et al., 1988; Lieberman & McLaugh-
lin, 1992; Little, 1984; Marsh & Crocker, 1991).
Some implementation researchers went so far as to make places rather than
policies their main concern. That is, past decades implementation studies gen-
erally asked whether or not a given policy was implemented. By the 1980s, a
growing cadre of implementation researchers focused on high performing
schools and asked: What are the policy and other conditions in those places
that explain that performance? This approach of tracking backwards from
practice to policy was a particular hallmark of the effective schools movement
(Purkey & Smith, 1983; Sizer, 1986). Reinforcing this approach, McLaughlin
argued that implementation researchers should move away from mainly trying
to understand which policies get implemented to elaborating the various condi-
tions that matter to enabling effective practice (McLaughlin, 1991b).
In sum, the history of education policy implementation research may be
divided into three waves that correspond roughly with the decades between
1960 and 1990. These waves may be distinguished by changes in policy
demands that grew progressively more varied and complex. Policy implemen-
tation research followed suit by beginning to highlight that variations in poli-
cies, people, and places matter to how implementation unfolds.
THE CURRENT STATE OF THE FIELD:
CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY
(W)e have learned that there are few slam bang policy effects. This
is because policy effects necessarily are indirect, operating through
and within the existing setting. Thus policy is transformed and
Meredith I. Honig 9
2006 State University of New York Press, Albany
adapted to conditions of the implementing unit. Consequently, local
manifestations of state or federal policies will differ in fundamental
respects and effective implementation may have different meanings
in different settings. (McLaughlin, 1991, p. 190)
Education policy implementation research over the past 15 years has con-
tinued to build on lessons and insights from previous waves. However, as with
previous waves, two developments mark contemporary education policy
implementation research as a new generation of implementation inquiry: focal
policy designs that differ significantly from those of previous eras and growing
attention to how policy, people, and places interact to shape how implementa-
tion unfolds. In addition, contemporary research aims to build knowledge
about implementation processes in ways that mark a distinct epistemological
departure from past waves research. I discuss each of these three trends in the
following subsections.
New Policy Designs
Contemporary education policies differ from those of all three previous eras in
terms of their basic design. Policies with similar designs may be found in previ-
ous decades and policies with past decades characteristics can be found through-
out contemporary educational systems. However, policies with certain features
have reached a critical mass in recent years and have come to constitute a dis-
tinct trend. Table 1.1 elaborates on these major policy design distinctions.
Goals
To elaborate, the goals sought by policies of various stripes have exploded to
address systemic, deep, and large-scale educational improvement. To be sure, cer-
tain past federal policies aimed to tackle such ambitious problems as societal dis-
advantage. However, by and large, the formal goals of even those policies focused
on schools delivery of particular discrete programs, procedural changes in
schools, and students meeting basic minimum standards. Title I of the Elemen-
tary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) reflects this distinction. In its early
years, Title I of ESEA aimed to reach the long-term goal of reducing poverty and
disadvantage by achieving the short- and mid-term goals of encouraging schools
to provide supplemental services to help low-income, low-achieving students
meet basic minimum performance standards. By 2001, Title I of ESEA had
become a leg in the so-called systemic or standards-based reform movement. In
conjunction with other components of ESEA, now called the No Child Left
Behind Act, Title I aims to help all students achieve to high-performance stan-
dards. In the short term, it focuses on helping to develop systems of schools with
10 COMPLEXITY AND POLICY IMPLEMENTATION
2006 State University of New York Press, Albany
aligned content and performance standards, student performance assessments,
data-driven decision making, penalties for failure to meet adequate yearly
progress, major investments in supplemental services (many of which are pro-
vided outside public school systems), and school choice provisions.
Likewise, contemporary education policies aimed at fostering teacher pro-
fessional learning communities and improved instruction in math, science, and
reading move beyond past decades effort to distribute programs and seek fun-
damental or core changes in the beliefs and practices of schoolteachers and
district central office and state administrators (Coburn, 2003; Cohen & Ball,
1990; Elmore, 1996). Education policy goals sometimes extend to a scale
beyond formal school systems to address the quality of learning opportunities
in students families and communities (Honig & Jehl, 2000).
Meredith I. Honig 11
Then (19651990) Now (1990early 2000s)
Change Goals TO HELP CERTAIN STUDENTS
REACH BASIC MINIMUM
STANDARDS through discrete
programs and procedural changes
Focus mainly on adding programs on
to the regular school day for specific
categories of students.
TO ENSURE ALL STUDENTS
ACHIEVE HIGH STANDARDS
through systemic, deep, large-scale
change initiatives
Aim to change professional practice
throughout schools, districts, and states
and students various communities.
Targets SCHOOL ACTORS
Mainly school staff.
ACTORS SYSTEMWIDE &
BEYOND
People and organizations at school,
district, state, and federal levels.
Actors across institutions that matter
for student learning, such as families,
neighborhood services organizations,
and youth agencies.
Tools LIMITED
Mainly federal mandates and incentives
and other instruments that assert top-
down command-and-control relation-
ships in hierarchical education systems.
SIGNIFICANTLY EXPANDED
New tools reinforce traditional control
models (e.g., threat, sanctions, high
stakes) but also depart from them
(e.g., capacity building, systems
change, learning, and community).
MULTIPLE
Tools with conflicting logics or theo-
ries about how to effect change now
more likely operate within single
omnibus policies or otherwise con-
verge on schools.
TABLE 1.1
Changes in Policy Designs Then and Now
2006 State University of New York Press, Albany
Targets
The targetspeople and organizations named in policy designs as those slated
for changeonce resided almost exclusively in schools. Contemporary policy
designs now more routinely include targets who sit throughout and beyond
formal educational systems. For example, as noted above, systemic reform ini-
tiatives focus on the decisions of leaders in schools, school district central
offices, and state educational agencies consequential to the alignment of cur-
ricular content, instruction, and assessments. Likewise, state agencies and dis-
trict central offices have launched accountability policies that place various
demands on schools but that also call for the marshalling of their own staff to
participate in implementation (Massell & Goertz, 2002). In other words, those
targeted to implement educational policies may very well be the policy makers
themselves.
Many policy designs also no longer exclusively focus on schools but rather
now target various organizational actors across institutions that seem to mat-
ter for improved school performance including those in families, neighbor-
hoods, businesses, community organizations, the courts, and service systems
(Crowson & Boyd, 1993; Mawhinney & Smrekar, 1996). For example, federal
policies related to science programs, bilingual education programs, after-
school partnerships, and parental involvement ask schools to collaborate with
families and various community-based organizations to develop and imple-
ment reform efforts (Honig & Jehl, 2000). Statewide school restructuring in
Kentucky and districtwide reform in Philadelphia include community service
organizations as key education policy implementers. In Chicago, low-per-
forming schools on probation must utilize a school-level support system that
includes an external partner such as a university or professional development
organization (Burch, 2002; Finnigan & ODay, 2003). For almost a decade, the
Comprehensive School Reform Demonstration Program has required that
schools work with school reform support providers in the implementation of
comprehensive school reform designs (Berends, Bodilly, & Kirby, 2002; Bod-
illy, 1998).
Tools
Perhaps not surprisingly given these changes in goals and targets, the policy
tools or underlying levers of change employed by policy makers have expanded
significantly (McDonnell & Elmore, 1991). Prior to the 1990s federal, state,
and other policy makers primarily relied on mandates and incentives tools
consistent with top-down command-and-control models of decision making.
The 1990s and beyond have witnessed a broader set of policy tools in practice.
For example, systems change tools (instruments that aim to effect change pri-
marily by shifting authority among various parties) have appeared more promi-
nently in recent years as part of school choice and site-based decision-making
12 COMPLEXITY AND POLICY IMPLEMENTATION
2006 State University of New York Press, Albany
policies (e.g, Bryk, Kerbow, Rollow, & Sebring, 1993), school-linked services
efforts (Smithmier, 1996), and new small autonomous schools initiatives.
Teacher professional development initiatives throughout educational systems
often rely on capacity building tools (instruments that aim to build resources
and capabilities for future use) to increase teacher supply and quality.
Still other contemporary policies seem to represent policy instruments not
specifically identified in previous catalogs of education policy tools. Various
school improvement planning and waiver processes support schools collection
and use of student performance and other data to develop strategies for edu-
cational improvement (United States Department of Education, 1998b;
United States General Accounting Office, 1998). Accordingly, these policies
employ what Schneider and Ingram referred to as learning toolstools that
reflect that policy makers do not necessarily know which strategy will improve
outcomes and their willingness to fund implementers to invent such improve-
ment strategies (Schneider & Ingram, 1990). The bully pulpit or hortatory
policy toolstools that rely on the sheer power of argument and persuasion
have grown in prominence especially in the context of the 1990s standards-
based reform efforts that used such slogans as all students can learn and it
takes a village to raise a child as primary levers of change (Smith, Levin, &
Cianci, 1997). Arguably, standard-setting and credentialing constitute a dis-
tinct policy tool, particularly prominent in the 1990s and beyond, that relies on
performance targets themselves as the main lever for change (Mitchell &
Encarnation, 1984). Some high-stakes testing, reconstitution, and accounta-
bility policies stem from the premise that schools will reform and improve
under threat of penalty and takeover to lengths that seem quite distinct from
negative incentives (Mintrop, 2003; ODay, 2002). Still other policies use the
formation of communities or partnerships to leverage change in various set-
tings (Rochefort, Rosenberg, & White, 1998).
Adding to the complexity of contemporary policy designs, policies with
different tools or theories of change converge on schools, districts, and states
(Chrispeels, 1997; Hatch, 2002; Honig & Hatch, 2004; Knapp et al., 1998;
Newmann, Smith, Allensworth, & Bryk, 2001). Schools and other implement-
ing organizations always have managed multiple policies at the same time.
However, the diversity of policy tools simultaneously at play in contemporary
public educational systems means that implementers now juggle an arguably
unprecedented variety of strategies, logics, and underlying assumptions about
how to improve school performance in ways that significantly complicate
implementation (Hatch, 2002). For example, some schools participate in new
small autonomous schools or site-based management initiatives that promise
considerable new autonomy for schools over curriculum, instruction, and other
operations and accordingly rely on systems change or learning tools as the main
levers of change.These same schools may also face mandates to participate in dis-
Meredith I. Honig 13
2006 State University of New York Press, Albany
trictwide reading programs or professional development opportunities.
Accordingly, such schools face demands both to set their own curriculum and
follow others decisions about curriculum. The convergence of such demands
that rest on fundamentally different theories of change can create significant
confusion regarding who ultimately decides and, if not managed strategically,
can frustrate educational improvement goals (Honig & Hatch, 2004).
New Approaches to Implementation Research
Whereas past implementation research generally revealed that policy, people,
and places affected implementation, contemporary implementation research
specifically aims to uncover their various dimensions and how and why interac-
tions among these dimensions shape implementation in particular ways. I outline
these dimensions in Figure 1.1.
Policy
Contemporary studies generally suggest that policy designs have three key
dimensionsgoals, targets, and toolsand aim to uncover how differences at
this analytic level influence implementation. For example, researchers now
commonly highlight that policies with goals related to the core of schooling
teachers relationships with students, their subject matter, and their work-
placespose fundamentally different implementation challenges than policies
that seek more peripheral changes such as new course schedules or classroom
14 COMPLEXITY AND POLICY IMPLEMENTATION
POLICIES PLACES
PEOPLE

Include:
Formal policy targets
Those not formally named as targets
Subgroups within formal
professional categories
Communities and other associations
Policy makers as key implementers
Dimensions
include:
Goals
Target
Tools
Vary by:
Focal organization,
agency, or
jurisdiction
Historical/
institutional context
Cross-system
interdependencies
FIGURE 1.1. Dimensions of contemporary education policy implementation in practice and
research.
2006 State University of New York Press, Albany
seating arrangements (Cuban & Tyack, 1995; Elmore, 1996; Lee & Smith,
1995; McLaughlin & Talbert, 2001; Siskin, 1994). Goals also differ by scope:
Policies that aim to impact schools districtwide require a different degree of
engagement by district central offices than policies that focus on a limited
number of schools. Policies that focus on changes in the short term have dif-
ferent consequences in implementation than those that allow for a longer
implementation horizon. For example, Hess highlights that accountability
policies in general aim to deliver diffuse benefits over the long term; but
because costs in the short term are so high, implementation of such policies
typically meets strong immediate resistance, particularly among the communi-
ties the policies aim to benefit over the long term (Hess, 2002). Failure to
attend to the different challenges and opportunities such policies present in
short and long terms may significantly curb implementation.
Certain goals also are more or less attainable depending on implementers
starting capacity or current performance relative to the goal. For example,
schools that are labeled as low-performing but that are on the cusp of meeting
required performance standards face different challenges in reaching those
standards than schools performing at lower levels (Mintrop, 2003). Similarly,
adopting particular standards for the teaching of mathematics for some teach-
ers may constitute a core change in their practice but for others such adoption
may involve a more peripheral change (Hill, this volume).
Policy designers choices of policy targets appear in implementation
research as influences on implementation in their own right. For example,
Malen in this volume highlights that those who stand to win or lose from par-
ticular policies significantly shape the mobilization of groups either in support
of or against implementation. (See also Hess, 2002; Stone, 1998.) How vari-
ous groups are named or labeled in policy designs sends signals about the tar-
gets value in ways that significantly influence policy outcomes (Mintrop,
2003; Schneider & Ingram, 1993; Stein, 2004). For example, Pillow argues
that the social construction of teen mothers as a target group within education
policies has systematically denied them access to educational opportunity
despite the provision of other resources (Pillow, 2004. See also Schram, 1995).
Stein has revealed implementers themselves as significant creators and rein-
forcers of group labels and has demonstrated how such labels may function to
frustrate precisely the equity and other policy goals that implementers aim to
advance (Stein, 2004; see also Datnow et al., 2001).
Tools also exert their own influences on implementation and have differ-
ential benefits depending on other implementation conditions. For example, in
this volume, Coburn and Stein demonstrate how in some settings the imple-
mentation of teacher professional communities may be reinforced by central
mandates whereas in other districts such mandates are unnecessary or pro-
hibitive. (See also McLaughlin & Talbert, 2001.) The same accountability
Meredith I. Honig 15
2006 State University of New York Press, Albany
policies are met with different degrees of resistance within states depending on
teacher motivation, capacity, incentives, and other factors (Mintrop, 2003).
Honig has highlighted that bottom-up reform initiatives as designed generally
rely on systems change and learning tools and at a minimum can spark a
rethinking of relationships between school district central offices and schools;
however, their strength as levers of change seems to depend on supportive con-
textual conditions, the starting capacity of district central offices and schools,
and the assistance of intermediary organizations (Honig, 2001).
People
The people who ultimately implement policy significantly mediate implemen-
tation in a wide variety of ways that have begun to take center stage in con-
temporary implementation studies. First, to be sure, researchers continue to
examine how those targets formally named in policy designs respond to policy
demands. But given the expansion of the types of formal policy targets noted
above, a focus on targets now means that contemporary studies are more likely
than those of past decades to consider a host of individuals both inside and
outside the formal education system including parents, youth workers, health
and human service providers, and comprehensive school reform designers to
name a few (e.g., Honig et al., 2001). A battery of new policy initiatives and
related research highlight school district central office administrators as key
mediators of policy outcomes (e.g., Burch & Spillane, 2004; Hightower,
Knapp, Marsh, & McLaughlin, 2002; Honig, 2003; Spillane, 1996).
Second, researchers also focus on individuals who are not formally named
as targets in policy designs but who nonetheless participate in and otherwise
influence implementation. For example, Shipps has shown how business lead-
ers had a profound effect on the implementation of various Chicago reform
efforts over the course of nearly two decades even though they were not named
specifically in policy designs as targets (Shipps, 1997). City mayors play
increasingly prominent roles in education policy implementation not only as
policy makers but as primary influences on the implementation of policies
passed by state and local school boards (Cuban & Usdan, 2003; Katz, Fine, &
Simon, 1997; Kirst & Bulkley, 2000).
Third, past decades research tended to focus on groups of implementers
based on their formal professional affiliations (e.g., teachers, central office
administrators) and to assume that such groups on the whole held certain
interests, beliefs, values, ideas, knowledge, and other orientations that shaped
their participation in implementation. Contemporary studies are more likely
to probe differences among sub-groups within these broad categories. Louis
has demonstrated that implementers functional rolessuch as stimulator,
storyteller, networker, and coperreveal important implementation dynamics
not always obvious from formal employment categories such as teacher
16 COMPLEXITY AND POLICY IMPLEMENTATION
2006 State University of New York Press, Albany
(Louis, 1994a). Likewise, school district central offices are less likely to appear,
in Spillanes words, as monolithic but rather to be viewed as consisting of
frontline and midlevel administrators among others who each face different
demands, opportunities, and constraints in implementation (Spillane, 1998b;
see also Burch & Spillane, 2004; Hannaway, 1989; Honig, 2003).
Research in this vein sometimes highlights the processes whereby various
individual and group orientations shape implementation. For example,
Spillane, Gomez, and Reiser in this volume build on their previous publica-
tions to reveal that implementers identities and experiences extend well
beyond their formal professional positions; these authors elaborate the individ-
ual, group, and distributed sense-making processes through which imple-
menters draw on various identities and experiences to shape their choices dur-
ing implementation. In this view, opportunities for peoplepolicy makers and
implementers aliketo learn about policy problems, policy designs, and
implementation progress essentially shape how implementation unfolds
(Cohen & Hill, 2000; Louis, 1994a; ODay, 2002; see also Honig, this volume).
Fourth, researchers have come to reveal that peoples participation in var-
ious communities and relationships is essential to implementation. For exam-
ple, researchers have shown that teachers within schools and districts are situ-
ated in professional communities that help shape their beliefs and worldviews
and ultimately their interpretations of policy messages (Cobb, McClain, Lam-
berg, & Dean, 2003; Coburn, 2001a; McLaughlin & Talbert, 2001; see also
Coburn & Stein, this volume). Hill in this volume argues that teachers and
others belong to different discourse communities that significantly shape their
responses to ambitious standards-based reform demands. Pollocks school-
based ethnography examines in part how such communities in schools influ-
ence how teachers talk about and act on potentially racially charged issues in
their educational improvement efforts; she recounts multiple instances in
which teachers aimed to use race-neutral language in an effort not to generate
negative racial stereotypes of students but in the process actually reinforced the
very categories they sought to avoid (Pollock, 2001). Smylie and Evans (this
volume) discuss how other forms of social interactions and trusting relation-
ships both fuel and frustrate reform (see also, Knapp, 1997).
Importantly, contemporary education policy implementation research also
continues to move beyond traditional distinctions between policy makers and
implementers and teaches that both are consequential sets of people who
shape how a policy is designed and implemented. For example, in this volume,
Malen reveals how policy design and implementation are overlapping
processes that unfold in a series of games through which those in formal des-
ignated policy-making roles and those in implementation roles shape both
processeseven in cases such as school reconstitution in which traditional
top-down control dynamics are a fundamental aspect of policy design. Also in
Meredith I. Honig 17
2006 State University of New York Press, Albany
this volume, Datnow elaborates on her prior work to reveal education policy
systems as nested systems in which local, state, and federal actors play key roles
in co-constructing policy design and implementation. Honig in this volume
and elsewhere flips these traditional policy-making and implementing roles on
their heads to reveal implementers as significant drivers of policy and policy
makers as key implementers.
Places
Contemporary researchers build on Wave 3 studies in elaborating dimensions
of places as fundamental to implementation outcomes in several respects.
First, as in the past, these researchers find that governmental organizations
such as state educational agencies are important settings where implementa-
tion unfolds (Hamann & Lane, 2004; Lusi, 1997). As noted above, a growing
cadre of researchers explores school district central offices as central imple-
mentation sites. However contemporary studies are more likely than those of
the past to probe differences in how formal organizational systems operate in
the implementation process. For example ODay revealed how district central
offices function as complex systems in ways that lead to particular implemen-
tation processes (ODay, 2002). Similarly, an emerging literature on urban dis-
tricts teaches that these districts have particular political and institutional
resources for implementation that mark them as a distinct subset of districts
(Kirst & Bulkley, 2000; Orr, 1998; Stone, 1998).
Second, many contemporary researchers name their districts and states in
their studies in an effort to build a body of knowledge about how implemen-
tation unfolds in these locations and to call attention to how deep-seated his-
torical institutional patterns shape implementation outcomes. For example, the
implementation literature now includes a substantial substrand concerning
Chicago school reform (e.g., Bryk & Sebring, 1991; Bryk et al., 1993; Katz et
al., 1997; ODay 2002). In this volume, Dumas and Anyon reveal implemen-
tation as significantly shaped by race- and class-based tensions that may seem
familiar nationwide but that are deeply rooted in the local educational, eco-
nomic, and political institutions of New Jerseys cities (see also Anyon, 1997).
Some contemporary researchwhat I call place-based studiesbuilds
on the effective schools tradition in that it focuses on particular geographic
locations as a main concern and asks which policies and other conditions
account for education outcomes in those settings. For example, Anyons
research for Ghetto Schooling began as an investigation into the school experi-
ences of students in Newark, New Jerseys elementary schools and ultimately
revealed important lessons about Marcy Schools main policy implementation
challenge at that timeschool restructuring (Anyon, 1997). Orrs examination
of Baltimore addressed the trajectory of multiple policies in which the city was
engaged over more than a decade to highlight not only how particular policy
18 COMPLEXITY AND POLICY IMPLEMENTATION
2006 State University of New York Press, Albany
initiatives fared but also more broadly how Baltimore as a community and
urban system managed change (Orr, 1998, 1999).
Some of this place-based research has shown that schools are inextricably
linked to other placesnamely the urban institutions they operate within and
alongsidedespite Progressive Era reforms and other efforts to separate
school from city (Bartelt, 1995; Yancey & Saporito, 1995). Such interdepen-
dencies mean policy makers, researchers, and others should cast a broad net
when considering which places matter to implementation. On the flipside, they
should aim to uncover the educational impact of policies in other sectors such as
community development, health care, and social services (Anyon, 2005).
Overall, these three dimensions of implementationpolicy, people, and
placescome together to form a conception of implementation as a highly
contingent and situated process. In this view, the benefits or limitations of one
dimension cannot be adequately understood separate from the other. For
example, as noted above and in the chapters by Hill and Spillane and associ-
ates, how teachers and central office administrators make sense of standards-
based curricular reform depends on the policy tool employed within the given
policy design, their own prior knowledge and experiences, and the broader
institutional setting in which they operate. Maryland superintendents such as
the one featured by Malen (this volume) seem to face different obstacles to
implementing high-stakes accountability policies than the Chief Executive
Officer in Chicago (Finnigan & ODay, 2003) or state-level leaders (Massell,
2001). In these studies, variation in implementation outcomes is not the
exception but the rule and researchers aim to understand how different dimen-
sions of policies, people, and places combine to shape implementation
processes and outcomes.
In the process, this generation of research is beginning to move from a
static to a dynamic and contingent view of implementation capacity. That is,
researchers are less likely than in the past to view capacity as a set of resources
with a fixed value and more likely to conceptualize capacity as including a vari-
ety of supports whose value depends on what particular people in certain
places are trying to and are currently able to accomplish. For example, past
generations of researchers tended to suggest that resources such as strong lead-
ership or increased funding were universally important to implementation and
aimed to identify the specific dimensions of leadership and the total amount
of funding necessary for implementation across sites. Contemporary
researchers more often highlight that the importance of such resources varies
depending on many factors, including what people already know and can do,
the historical patterns of opportunity in particular jurisdictions, and the stakes
associated with implementation outcomes. As Smylie and Evans demonstrate
in the context of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (this volume), social
Meredith I. Honig 19
2006 State University of New York Press, Albany
capitaldefined in part as trusting relationships among key actorsis often
highlighted as essential to implementation; however, in their case, social capi-
tal did not support implementation across the board and in some instances was
actually marshaled against policy goals. Loeb and McEwan (this volume) cite
numerous examples of the relative value of various resources in the context of
implementing school choice and accountability policies.
In part by broadening their view of capacity, contemporary researchers
have revealed a range of previously hidden or unnoticed resources necessary for
implementation including various forms of cultural, political, social, technical,
and institutional capital (Honig, this volume; Orr, 1998; Schram, 1995;
Spillane & Thompson, 1997). The ability to learn new ideas appears as a dis-
tinct resource essential to implementation in complex policy environments;
some researchers argue that this ability is so important that policies should be
evaluated by the extent to which they build policy actors capacity to learn
(Cohen & Hill, 2000; Elmore, 1983; McLaughlin, this volume) and otherwise
to evaluate, negotiate, and craft the fit between policies, people, and places over
time (Honig & Hatch, 2004).
Distinct Approach to Knowledge-Building
The discussion above reveals that contemporary education policy implemen-
tation research also may be distinguished epistemologicallyby its orientation
to the nature of knowledge and knowledge-building about implementation.
First, as already noted, contemporary researchers are less likely than those in
past decades to seek universal truths about implementation. Rather, they aim
to uncover how particular policies, people, and places interact to produce
results and they seek to accumulate knowledge about these contingencies.
These researchers seem to take to heart McLaughlins admonition that gen-
eralizations decayfew if any findings hold true across all contexts or across
all time. For example, in the early years of education policy implementation
research some researchers argued that policy makers could not mandate what
matters to educational improvementthat mandates were insufficient instru-
ments for changing teachers underlying beliefs about and engagement in their
work; however, over time researchers have shown that sometimes policy mak-
ers could mandate what matteredthat given certain conditions mandates did
in fact leverage core changes in schools (McLaughlin, 1991b). This orientation
to uncovering contingencieswhat I refer to here as confronting complex-
itystems not from a lack of rigor or scientific-basis for educational research
but rather from the basic operational realities of complex systems in education
and many other arenas. In light of these realities, education policy implemen-
tation researchers aim to uncover the various factors that combine to produce
20 COMPLEXITY AND POLICY IMPLEMENTATION
2006 State University of New York Press, Albany
implementation results and to accumulate enough cases over time to reveal
potentially predictable patterns (Majone, 1989).
Second, contemporary research increasingly reflects the orientation that
variation in implementation is not a problem to be avoided but part and par-
cel of the basic operation of complex systems; variation should be better under-
stood and harnessed to enhance the capacity of program participants to pro-
duce desired results (Elmore, 1983, p. 350; see also Honig, 2003; ODay
2002). This view stems in part from contemporary research on student and
teacher learning that suggests one size does not fit all when it comes to edu-
cational improvement, especially in diverse urban school systems; supports
provided to students should vary depending on what students, teachers, and
other implementers already know and can do (Darling-Hammond, 1998; Vil-
legas & Lucas, 2002). This orientation also reflects relatively recent education
policy implementation findings about sense making, interpretation, and learn-
ing as unavoidable dimensions of implementation processes. Studies in this
vein uncover how individual, group, and cognitive processes contribute to
implementers variable policy responses and, for certain implementers in some
settings, the achievement of policy goals (Spillane et al., 2002).
Third, contemporary research is more deeply theoretical than in past
decades in keeping with conventions that define rigorous quantitative and
qualitative research. As the subsequent chapters demonstrate, theory provides
criteria for site selection, guides data collection and analysis, and, importantly,
helps explain why certain interactions among policy, people, and places con-
tribute to particular implementation outcomes. Such research aims not to
develop a universal theory about implementation as an overall enterprise but
to use theory to illuminate how particular dimensions of policies, people, and
places come together to shape how implementation unfolds.
The theories on which education policy implementation researchers now
draw come in part from disciplines familiar in implementation arenas such as
political science and economics but researchers have begun to apply those the-
ories in new ways. For example, economic analyses of policy implementation
have tended to assume a singular implementation actor with certain almost
automatic responses to policy demands. But as Loeb and McEwan reveal in
their chapter, many contemporary applications of economic theory to imple-
mentation include significantly deeper explorations of how implementers
agency and context matter to implementation. At the same time, the field of
education policy implementation research has expanded to embrace theoreti-
cal constructs from disciplines not traditionally applied to implementation
such as those from anthropology, cognitive science, psychology, and learning
theory. Critical and sociocultural theories have contributed to particularly
vibrant lines of analysis (Anyon, 1997; Lipman, 2004; Stein, 2004; Sutton &
Levinson, 2001).
Meredith I. Honig 21
2006 State University of New York Press, Albany
Perhaps in a related development, qualitative research designs and meth-
ods have become important sources of knowledge for implementation
researchers. In particular, strategic qualitative casescases that provide special
opportunities to build knowledge about little understood and often complex
phenomenahave long informed implementation in other fields and seem to
be becoming more standard fare within education. Such methods and research
designs, especially when well grounded in theory, have allowed contemporary
researchers to elaborate the dimensions of and interactions among policy, peo-
ple, and places that comprise implementation in contemporary educational sys-
tems. In fact, the more complex portrait of implementation processes advanced
here may have become possible only recently thanks in part to the use of theo-
retically grounded qualitative methods for capturing such complexity.
PROGRESS OR POOR GUIDES FOR PRACTICE?
Critics of contemporary education policy implementation research and educa-
tion research more broadly occasionally argue that educational researchers
paint such complex portraits of the world that they obscure what is imple-
mentable and what works and serve up poor guides for practice. To the con-
trary, the chapters in this book suggest a deep interest on the part of
researchers, their funders, and others in building a base of knowledge that can
guide practice in informed, responsible, and productive ways. These chapters
reflect the orientation that those who aim to produce usable knowledge
should seek to highlight and sort through the complexity that is fundamental
to implementation in contemporary education policy arenasthat implemen-
tation studies should keep pace with and reflect, not minimize, or ignore the
complexity of contemporary policy demands and implementation processes.
Accordingly, critics might consider that confronting complexity has been a
positive development. As organizational theorists have long shown, complex-
ity in its various formsincluding variationcan serve as a stimulus for inno-
vation and improvement especially given the diverse and sometimes unpre-
dictable circumstances under which educational leaders routinely operate.
This volume represents a small but important sampling of how, over the
course of the past four decades, education policy implementation researchers
increasingly have confronted the complexity of implementation. In her impor-
tant concluding chapter to this volume, McLaughlin elaborates how
researchers can continue to build on this tradition. She emphasizes in partic-
ular that in confronting complexity future education policy implementation
research should aim to deepen knowledge about how entire systemsthose
within and beyond the formal educational systemmatter to educational out-
comes and about the learning processes that are and should be fundamental to
22 COMPLEXITY AND POLICY IMPLEMENTATION
2006 State University of New York Press, Albany
how implementation unfolds. In short, future researchers should delve deeper
into the complexity.
The view of implementation advanced here increases the urgency for edu-
cational leaders to become more savvy consumers of research. It suggests that
at this stage of knowledge development about education policy implementa-
tion leaders should look to research not for prescriptions or to light a direct
path to improvement in their own local communities. Rather, they should
mine the research for ideas, evidence, and other guides to inform their delib-
erations and decisions about how lessons from implementation research may
apply to their own policies, people, and places. For example, leaders could ask
whether the transformation of large high schools into multiple smaller schools
contributes to educational improvement. But a search for answers would yield
many studies that reveal positive results and also some important confounding
cases. Rather, a more productive question might be: under what conditions
within my own district, school, or organization might small schools yield pos-
itive results for my particular students? When viewed in this way contempo-
rary education policy implementation research seems to reflect an underlying
belief that educational leaders and other practitioners are willing and able (or
can become willing and able) to confront complexity and to draw on a variety
of increasingly nuanced research findings and other evidence to help inform
their own work. This then is an optimistic book.
1
NOTE
1
This line refers in part to Bardachs (1980) seminal work, The implementation
game. The introductory chapter of Bardachs book summarizes and generally laments
the various ways implementation deviates from policy design and concludes: This is
not an optimistic book (p. 6).
Meredith I. Honig 23
2006 State University of New York Press, Albany