School Implementation Leadership Scale (SILS)
Category: Teacher and Leader Development
School districts are a distinct but long-critiqued feature of the United States educational system. Amid these critiques and increased public dissatisfaction with education, we revisit a fundamental question: What do school districts aim to do? Using a computational mixed methods analysis of 624 district strategic plans, we find that districts a) commit to a broad range of goals beyond student academics; b) diverge in which non-academic goals for students they commit to and in their commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion; c) and converge on cultivating positive learning environments and building family and community connections. We interpret this last finding as offering insight into districts’ understanding of their role in the broader educational ecosystem.
Keywords
school boards, educational goods, strategic planning, topic modeling, unsupervised machine learning
Education level
Document Object Identifier (DOI)
10.26300/36at-sq75
