Content area
Full text
ACHIEVING COHERENCE IN DISTRICT IMPROVEMENT: MANAGING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE CENTRAL OFFICE AND SCHOOLS by Susan Moore Johnson, Geoff Marietta, Monica C. Higgins, Karen L. Mapp, and Allen Grossman Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press, 2015. 256 pp, $35.00 (paper).
Coherence has gained attention among education reformers in the last decade as an answer to the question, "What does it take to drive school improvement?" Proponents of coherence stress that alignment across the units of a school system is ultimately what makes the difference. While there is growing evidence that supports coherence as a key distinguishing factor among successful schools, less work has been done to understand how schools come to be coherent in the first place. Taking up this question in Achieving Coherence in District Improvement: Managing the Relationship Between the Central Office and Schools, coauthors Susan Moore Johnson, Geoff Marietta, Monica C. Higgins, Karen L. Mapp, and Allen Grossman ask the question, "What does it take to achieve coherence?"
In setting out to answer this, they sampled six high-achieving US school districts with varying strategic orientations. Conducting interviews with both district and school leaders, the authors aimed to further their understanding of how coherence can look and of the unique tensions and trade-offs experienced in each district around key features of coherence.
An outgrowth of the Public Education Leadership Project (PELP), Johnson and colleagues' work distinguishes itself in a number of ways. First, in focusing on large, urban school districts, the authors situate their work at the district rather than school level. In zooming out in this way, they hear...