The Trouble with Coherence
Coherence within and across schools and school systems seems universally desired but seldom achieved; multiple factors sustain incoherence even amidst attempts to attain it
Everybody loves coherence, right? The concept seems to hold an ever-present place atop a pedestal of educational buzz-words and concepts. Yet despite seeming universal desire to achieve coherence, it’s seldom accomplished within school systems. It seems to me that the desire to talk about coherence far outpaces the commitment or capacity to actually achieve it. Below I share a few thoughts on why that might be.
What is coherence?
In their book Achieving Coherence in District Improvement: Managing the Relationship Between the Central Office and Schools, Moore Johnson et al. (2014) talk about coherence in at least two ways:
As the “parts” of a system that work together in service of a holistic improvement strategy
As the coordination between the central office and schools to execute such a strategy
A framework created by Harvard’s Public Education Leadership Project (PELP) provides a visual for what those parts of the whole might be, with the broader system-wide infrastructure organized around attention to the instructional core.
As the researchers who created it note, “The PELP Coherence Framework is designed to focus the attention of public school district leaders on the central problem of increasing the achievement levels of all students by making all the parts of a large district work in concert with its strategy.” (emphasis mine)
As Moore Johnson et al. note, the framework is agnostic about what the district’s theory of action is. What the district holds loose versus tight matters less than whether there is clarity and consistency about who makes what decisions and how they are expected to be executed. Per the authors, “when a high degree of coherence exists, people agree on the work that needs to be done in order to achieve strategic goals, what resources support that work, and which systems and structures facilitate it” (p. 11-12).
Sounds good, right? So what’s the problem?
Anyone working in schools and school systems knows that they are incredibly complex institutions. Achieving coherence is no easy feat, and yet there are several reasons why this work seems to be particularly challenging.
I outline four below:
Strategic plans abound . . . and yet often there’s no strategy. Districts often invest time and energy in strategic plans (or the school-level corollary, school improvement plans). Yet too often these plans are left to sit on a shelf or populate a page on a website, more performative than practical. As I’ve written about previously, drawing upon Woulfin, Stevenson, and Lord’s Making Coaching Matter: Leading Continuous Improvement in Schools, often inputs or resources (i.e. hiring or deploying coaches) are seen as the strategy when actually they are a vehicle to achieve a strategy. For school systems to have any chance of cohering around a particular improvement strategy, educators within that system first need to be able to define what that strategy is.
Conflicting agendas thwart collective efficacy. In Systems for Instructional Improvement: Creating Coherence from the Classroom to the District Office (h/t
’s Coaching Letter for turning me on to this book), Jackson et al. (2018) describe a set of challenges that arise when district leaders have different ideas about how to increase student achievement. These conflicting agendas predictably arise between leaders within offices of offices of leadership (i.e. principal supervisors, chiefs of schools) and offices of teaching and learning (i.e. content area leads, chief academic officers). Having sat in these seats, I felt seen reading this. As the authors describe, the former tend to employ an instructional management orientation, focused on accountability toward short-term goals. In contrast, the latter tend to employ an instructional improvement orientation, focused on longer-term goals of increasing educator capacity in service of long-term improvements to student learning. There’s much more to dig into here, but for now, I’ll note that these conflicting ideas at the district office often have negative downstream impacts on school leaders and teachers, who experience the incoherence of multiple approaches and priorities arising from within their own district office teams.Lack of internal capacity leads to an over-reliance on a hodgepodge of outside providers. A study by Spillane et al. (2022) notes the paradox at the heart of the quest for coherence. As district leaders attempt to implement a system-wide strategy for improving instruction, they often recognize they lack the internal capacity to achieve their goals. Realizing this, they turn to outside organizations for support. And yet doing so winds up increasing incoherence, with multiple external parties each responsible for only a piece of the pie, and no one’s eyes on the whole. District leaders may bring in one external partner to provide training on curriculum implementation and another on social-emotional learning. Coaches from one organization may not be aware of the work that coaches from another organization are doing. District and school-based instructional staff may also have limited understanding of what goals external organizations are accountable to, and how they might work together. As such, the grab-bag of professional learning and capacity building experiences for educator development either operates in silos without fruitful exchange of ideas or practices, or actively works at cross-purposes with one another, unintentionally undermining improvement given competing messages or approaches.
“Adopt, attack, abandon” is the name of the game, rather than strategic de-implementation. So often in the work of school improvement, schools and school systems tend to add more and more interventions rather than considering what they might stop doing. School finance expert Noah Wepman refers to this as the “school reform lasagna” approach to improvement. With all those layers, one piled atop another, it’s virtually impossible to know what’s working and what’s not. Brandi Hinnant-Crawford illuminates the perpetual cycle that sustains all that layering: “adopt, attack, abandon.” As she describes, educators, working with urgency to solve a problem, latch onto a shiny new solution. When it doesn’t work (or doesn’t work fast enough), they turn their attention to the next quick fix rather than considering how to adapt the program or policy to meet the needs of their school community. This “more is more” approach is a recipe for confusion and overwhelm. Leaders might address this issue by purposefully inventorying current programs and attempting to determine what they will keep versus stop. Justin Reich analogizes this subtractive approach to the guidance of Marie Kondo: if a program or practice no longer brings you joy (or no longer seems to be contributing to school improvement), be willing to thank it for its service and set it free.
So how might school and district leaders address these issues?
I offer the five questions below to facilitate reflection upon how leaders might increase coherence to drive system-wide improvement within their schools and districts:
Are constituents clear on the strategy for improving student outcomes in our district?
Do constituents understand the purpose of the strategy and the role they play in enacting it (including decision-making rights, accountability, etc.)?
Are there individuals or organizations working in siloes – or worse, in ways that advance contradictory messages – in service of the strategy?
How might systems and structures be revised or redesigned to increase the collective efficacy of individuals and organizations working together in service of the strategy?
What do we need to commit to stop doing, either because it does not support advancement of the strategy or because we need to prioritize attention to the highest-impact levers for change?
As a result of this process, school and district leaders may find that a meaningful and immediate way to increase coherence is to commit to doing less but with greater intentionality. Fewer purposefully selected pieces of the pie may then unite into a more coherent whole — in service of a well-designed and clearly articulated strategy for improvement.