Bringing values back in: How purposes shape practices in coherent school designs

Abstract

Perhaps the most daunting challenge in building good educational systems is generating quality practice consistently across classrooms. Recent work has suggested that one way to address this dilemma is by building an educational infrastructure that would guide the work of practitioners. This article seeks to build upon and complicate this work on infrastructure by examining why two very different schools are able to achieve consistency of practice where many other schools do not. Findings suggest that infrastructure is not self-enacting and needs to be coupled to school level design in ways that are coherent and mutually reinforcing if infrastructure is going to lead to consistency of outcomes. At the same time, we find that the schools differ substantially in their visions of knowledge, learning, and teaching (purposes), which in turn imply very different kinds of organizational designs (practices). In conclusion, we suggest that the notion of infrastructure is plural rather than singular, and that different designs are appropriate for different pedagogical visions and social contexts.