Finding coherence among a district’s overlapping priorities

I was recently asked how a school district could better understand the relationships between all its various priorities.  Rather than one priority overlapping with another priority, how can all of the priorities relate to each other in a coherent fashion?

This got me thinking AGAIN about coherence and what district central office administrators could do to support coherence or undermine coherence among these priorities.

Meredith Honig’s research sheds some light on this question. One article in particular that she co-authored with Thomas Hatch discusses coherence.  The article is titled, “Crafting Coherence: How Schools Strategically Manage Multiple, External Demands.” [i]

What I found most fascinating about this article is Honig and Hatch’s exploration of the district central office’s role in developing coherence. They define coherence as…

“A process of negotiation whereby school leaders and central office administrators continually craft the fit between external policy demands and schools’ own goals and strategies and use external demands strategically to inform and enable implementation of these goals and strategies.”[ii]

Honig and Hatch go on to describe the central office administrators’ role in schools’ development of goals and strategies, and schools’ use of external demands to help advance their goals and strategies. Based on theories about organizational learning, Honig and Hatch posit that central office administrators employ these strategies to build coherence.

1.    search for information about schools’ goals and strategies;

2.    use that information as a primary guide for allocating resources and developing central policies;

3.    inform and enable schools’ decisions and implementations related to their goals and strategies.

In simple terms, central office administrators can help schools leverage the overlapping and sometimes competing district priorities, or more generally “external priorities,” to inform and advance schools’ goals and strategies.

While Honig and Hatch call for more research on this topic, and seem to be using prior research to posit this framework for thinking about coherence in schools and district, I think a district could use this framework of “search, use, inform, and enable” to examine their current practices for building coherence among the priorities in the district and the support they provide to schools for working towards those priorities.

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[i] Honig, M. and Hatch, T. (November 2004). “Crafting Coherence: How Schools Strategically Manage Multiple, External Demands. Educational Researcher. 33:16.

[ii] Honig and Hatch, 2004, p. 19.