Street-Level Bureaucracy Revisited: Frontline District Central-Office ...

Educational Evaluation and Policy AnalysisWinter 2006, Vol. 28, No. 4, pp. 357-383

Street-Level Bureaucracy Revisited:Frontline District Central-Office Administrators as Boundary

Spanners in Education Policy Implementation

Meredith I. HonigUniversity of Washington

The designation of district central-office administrators to operate as boundary spanners among thecentral office, schools, and community agencies can help with the implementation of challenging policydemands. However, educational research teaches little about central-office boundary spanners inpractice. This article addresses that gap with findings from an embedded, comparative case study ofboundary spanners in the implementation of collaborative education policy. The study's conceptualframework draws on public management and sociological literature on boundary spanning andneo-institutional theories of decision making. Findings reveal that the boundary spanners in this caseinitially were particularly well suited to help with implementation in part because the)' brought non-traditional experiences to the central office. However, over time, many of the resources that aidedthem initially became liabilities that frustrated their work. This article documents the importance ofexamining boundary-spanning roles in implementation and suggests how central offices might providesupports to boundary spanners to increase their potential as levers of bureaucratic change.

Keywords: district central-office administration, leadership, policy implementation, school-communitypartnerships, street-level bureaucracy

SCHOOL district central offices currently facevarious policy demands to reform their relation-ships with schools and community agencies, andsome assign frontline central-office administra-tors to play essential boundary-spanning roles inimplementation. For example, education policesthat promote school-community collaboration-called collaborative education policies here andelsewhere-ask school district central offices tohelp schools collaborate with community-basedpublic, private, and nonprofit organizations; in theprocess, central offices are to shift from traditionaltop-down, command-and-control relationshipswith schools to relationships in which they supportschools and their community partners in making

key decisions about how to improve student learn-ing and other outcomes. Researchers generallyhave found that such policies stall in implemen-tation in part because of district central-officeadministrators' failure to take on the school andcommunity support roles that the policy designsdemand (e.g., Crowson & Boyd, 1993; Malen,Ogawa, & Kranz, 1990). More recently, someschool district central offices have assigned indi-vidual central-office staff or a team of staff to workamong the central office and schools and theircommunity partners to broker new support rela-tionships and otherwise enable implementation-roles called boundary spanning in other arenas(e.g., Jemison, 1984; Tushman, 1977).

The author thanks Betty Malen, Morva McDonald, three anonymous reviewers, and the EEPA co-editors for their thoughtfulcomments on earlier drafts of this article. This article was originally presented at the 2004 Annual Meeting of the AmericanEducational Research Association in San Diego, CA.

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Public management research in sectors outsideeducation suggests that the designation of central-office administrators as boundary spanners holdspromise for helping central offices reshape theirrelationships with schools and other youth-servinginstitutions. However, within education, policyresearch sheds little light on the extent to whichthat promise is realized in practice.

This article addresses that research gap withan examination of frontline central-office admin-istrators assigned to operate as boundary spannersin the implementation of collaborative educationpolicy. Specifically, this article focuses on thefollowing research questions: (1) Who are thecentral-office administrators assigned to boundary-spanning roles in collaborative education policyand what demands do they face? (2) To whatextent do they meet those demands in practice?And (3) What conditions help or hinder them inmeeting those demands?

Data come from a multiyear study of central-office administrators' participation in the imple-mentation of three collaborative education poli-cies. My conceptual framework draws primarilyfrom public management and sociological litera-ture on boundary spanning and on neo-institutionaltheories of decision making. I show that in myfocal district, individuals with experiences gen-erally not found in the central office were newlyhired into frontline positions specifically to oper-ate as boundary spanners-to help build new andgenerally nontraditional partnership relationshipsbetween the district central office and school-community sites. Each of the boundary spanners,for the most part, embraced their charge early intheir central-office tenure. However, with time,they all appeared to fall back on top-down,command-and-control relationships with schoolsand community agencies that seemed to threatenimplementation. Some adopted those roles reluc-tantly in the face of nonsupportive central-officecolleagues, but most embraced them as the "right"and "legitimate" behavior for a central-officeadministrator, even though different roles wouldhave been right and legitimate in light of theiroriginal charge. Findings suggest that some of theresources that promised to enable their work atthe outset, such as their nontraditional experiencesand frontline positions, later came to be liabilitiesthat frustrated their adoption of school-communitysupport roles. I conclude with suggestions for how

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central offices might better stave off these counter-productive patterns, and I highlight areas for futurestudy of boundary spanners that may help advanceeducation policy research and practice.

Policy and Research Context: Districts,Collaborative Education Policy, and the

Promise of Boundary SpannersCollaborative education policies call for new

roles and relationships among schools, commu-nity agencies, and school district central offices,as well as other public bureaucracies, to expandlearning and other outcomes for school-age chil-dren and their families (Crowson & Boyd, 1993;Honig, Kahne, & McLaughlin, 2001; Mawhin-ney & Smrekar, 1996; Smrekar, 1994; Smylie,Crowson, Chou, & Levin, 1994). The titles ofthese initiatives (e.g., California's Healthy StartSchool-linked Services Initiative and New JerseyFamily Resource and Youth Service Centers)often highlight collaboration between schools andcommunity agencies as the policies' key changestrategy (California Department of Education[CDE], 1999a, 1999b; Honig & Jehl, 2000). How-ever, their policy designs to varying degrees oftencall for three types of change: (1) schools collab-orate with other youth serving agencies; (2) theschool-community partnership sites set goals andcreate, implement, and continuously refine strate-gies for improving youth outcomes; and (3) schooldistrict central offices and other public bureau-cracies (e.g., county health and human servicesagencies) continually develop policies that mightsupport implementation of sites' local, collabora-tive decisions as those decisions evolve over time.

These policy designs rest on a theory of changeshared by some school site-based management,new small autonomous schools, and other so-called bottom-up reform initiatives (Honig, 2004).Namely, professionals and others closest to youthwithin and beyond schools have information,sometimes called "local knowledge," that is im-portant to strengthening youth learning and otheroutcomes. This information relates to youth needsand strengths and the community and school re-sources that could help improve youths' schoolperformance (Moll, Amanti, & Gonzalez, 2005;Honig et al., 2001; Pittman & Cahill, 1992). Suchinformation could be marshaled to improve youthoutcomes if schools and community agenciesworked closely together and if school-community

Frontline District Central-Office Administrators as Boundary Spanners

partnerships were empowered to use their localknowledge to make key decisions about theirgoals and strategies. School district central-officeadministrators typically lack this informationand have limited, if any, jurisdictional author-ity to mandate goals and strategies for schools'community partners. Because school-communitypartnership sites will be continually developing,implementing, and refining their goals and strate-gies, central-office supports for implementation tooshould change over time. Accordingly, central-office administrators should partner with sites tolearn about site decisions and progress and usethat information to develop policies that mightenable implementation of sites as they evolve overtime rather than try to direct site decisions in ad-vance or all at once by "remote control" (Shulman,1983; see also, Foundation Consortium for School-Linked Services, 2002; Honig, 2003; Lawson,2006, May).

Much has been written about implementationof these policies at the school and communitylevels (e.g., Center for the Study of Social Policy,1995; Cibulka, 1994; Cibulka & Kritek, 1996;Crowson & Boyd, 1993; David and Lucile PackardFoundation, 1992; Smrekar, 1994; Smylie et al.,1994; Wehlage, Smith, & Lipman, 1992). Schooldistrict central offices, rarely addressed in thisresearch, typically appear in school studies asbarriers to implementation in at least two respects:some central-office administrators fail to developpolicy frameworks in support of schools' com-munity partnerships; others seek to control sitedecisions rather than to enable sites to make thekey decisions that the policy designs demand(e.g., Cunningham & Mitchell, 1990; Mawhinney& Smrekar, 1996; Smithmier, 1996).

This research and the broader literature oneducational administration and public bureau-cracies suggest that school district central-office administrators may struggle to adopt theschool-community support roles because theyface few institutional supports-training, on-the-job rewards, or professional role models-that reinforce those roles. For example, workwith community agencies may require districtcentral-office administrators to have a basicknowledge of human services systems beyondeducation that exceeds the general fare of educa-tional administration preparation programs (e.g.,Lawson, 1998). Political and professional in-centives for central-office administrators his-

torically have emphasized top-down, command-and-control relationships with schools and notongoing support for schools' local, collaborativedecision making (Malen et al., 1990; Walker, 2002;Wildavsky, 1996); in these relationships, central-office administrators may tend to use informationfrom schools to control, not enable, schools' de-cisions (Weiss & Gruber, -1984). These incen-tives may be exacerbated by some high-stakesaccountability policies that emphasize schooldistrict central-office control over school im-provement decisions (Finnigan & O'Day, 2003;Katz, Fine, & Simon, 1997; Mintrop, 2003;O'Day, 2002; Raywid & Schmerler, 2003). Re-search on public bureaucracies suggests thatsuch institutions, including school district cen-tral offices, were originally established as part ofProgressive Era reforms to limit the influence ofoutside interests on professional administratorsin the name of equity and efficiency; as a result,such bureaucracies may have evolved with lim-ited guides for administrators regarding how topromote cross-sector collaboration or how toshare decision-making authority with their hier-archical subordinates (e.g., schools) (Blau, 1963;Skowronek, 1982).

In the wake of these policy, public management,and research trends, some school district centraloffices have designated individual central-officeadministrators to focus specifically on supportingcollaborative education policy implementation.These administrators hold various titles, such asschool-linked services coordinator, small schoolsor school site-based management director, andteacher on special assignment, among others. Tovarying degrees, these individuals are assigned tounits on the geographical and often hierarchicalboundaries of their school district's central officeto help negotiate new relationships between thecentral office and school-community partnershipsites. Through these new relationships, central-office administrators are to inform and supportrather than direct and control local school-community improvement plans. Although theseboundary-spanning central-office administratorspromise to play critical roles in implementation,educational research provides little insight intotheir experiences. A small number of studies onschool principals and other school-based staffpoints to the importance of understanding bound-ary spanning by school principals (Goldring,1990; Honig & Hatch, 2004; Lam, 1997; Louis,

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1994). However, decades of research on schooldistrict central offices have treated the centraloffice as a monolithic entity and not as a work-place comprising individuals with differentiatedroles and responsibilities (Spillane, 1996, 1998).Some district research breaks from this trend bydistinguishing central-office administrators bytheir formal roles or hierarchical position, such as"superintendent" (Murphy & Hallinger, 1988).However, a handful of recent studies revealthat central-office administrators' functionalroles-what they actually do day-to-day-maybe obscured by these formal categories andstrongly suggest that an examination of central-office administrators by their day-to-day roles inreform rather than by formal categories is afruitful line of analysis (Bogotch & Brooks,1994; Burch & Spillane, 2004; for a related pointabout school leadership, see Louis, 1994).

Conceptual FrameworkI address these policy and research gaps by ex-

amining how school district central-office ad-ministrators operate as boundary spanners in thecontext of collaborative education policy imple-mentation. I turned to a conceptual frameworkand research methods that promised to uncovercentral-office administrators'functional roles, suchas boundary spanning, which typically cut acrossvarious formal positions and that promise to revealsignificant dimensions of central-office adminis-trators' work. Three research traditions developedmainly outside education provide the conceptualunderpinnings for this examination: literature onstreet-level bureaucracy, management and soci-ological research on boundary spanning in thepublic and private sectors, and neo-institutionaltheories of decision making.

Boundary Spanning in Policy ImplementationWeatherley and Lipsky's classic examination

of street-level bureaucrats in 1970s service orga-nizations provided an initial starting point forthis inquiry. This work framed boundary span-ners as a key unit of analysis for research andhighlighted fundamental opportunities and chal-lenges boundary spanners may face in their day-to-day work (Lipsky, 1971; Weatherly & Lipsky,1977; Weatherly, 1979). Weatherley and Lipskyfound that boundary spanners-staff of publicbureaucracies who work on the frontlines or"street level" in positions closest to their agencies'

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clients-are essential to how policy implementa-tion unfolds. On the frontlines, these staff peopleface minimal oversight by their hierarchical supe-riors, which may afford them significant discretionover their decisions and opportunities to inventnew approaches to nonroutine problems. How-ever, they also often encounter daily demands thatfar exceed what they can manage given limitedtime and significant uncertainty and ambiguityregarding the extent to which particular coursesof action may help them realize their goals-acondition March and others call means-ends am-biguity (March, 1994). Under these conditions,Weatherley and Lipsky's boundary spanners rou-tinized and otherwise simplified procedures tomake their work manageable-in many casesabsorbing the new demands into long-standingroutines of their agencies, but these efforts didnot necessarily improve organizational outcomes.

Public management and sociological literatureon boundary spanning elaborates more specificallywhat boundary spanners do, risks they face, andconditions that influence their decision. Acrossa motley collection of organizations,' boundaryspanners' roles primarily involve two particu-lar information management activities consistentwith collaborative education policy demands oncentral-office administrators: (1) search or theongoing gathering of new information from out-side their organizations (Aldrich & Herker, 1977;Galaskiewicz & Wasserman, 1989; Geletkanycz& Hambrick, 1997; Gladstein & Caldwell, 1985;Jemison, 1984) and (2) use-efforts to incor-porate that information into organizational rou-tines to advance performance goals (Aldrich &Herker, 1977; Kanter, 1988; Tushman & Scanlan,1981a). In collaborative education policy con-texts, search might involve central-office admin-istrators partnering with school-community sitesto gather information about site decisions andexperiences; use might entail ongoing work withinthe central office (and other youth-serving sys-tems) to develop policies and procedures thatmight inform and enable the implementation ofsites' decisions.

Far from a passive or one-time activity, searchis sometimes described as "reconnaissance"-a continuous process of identifying conditionsand ideas outside the organization that the organi-zation should address to improve performance(Gladstein & Caldwell, 1985; Kanter, 1988;Levitt & March, 1988). Searching activities range


from formal meetings with outside organizationsto occasional informal interactions and may in-clude a combination of arrangements that changeover time-whatever activities put boundary span-ners in regular contact with external needs anddemands.

Boundary spanners often do not have the requi-site authority within their organizations to use theinformation they gather to develop organizationalpolicy and other influences on organizational rou-tines. Central-office boundary spanners and othercentral-office administrators do not have thejurisdictional authority to develop policy withinother youth-serving systems. Rather they helpother organizational members use the informationby translating that information into forms that theother decision makers may consider accessible anduseable (Adams, 1976; Tushman, 1977; Tushman& Katz, 1980). Translation fundamentally involves"absorbing uncertainty" from the information-"drawing inferences from perceived facts andpassing on only the inferences" that decisionmakers might recognize as important and on whichthey may take action (Aldrich & Herker, 1977,p. 219; see also Dollinger, 1984). For example,a central-office administrator in a boundary-spanning role may collect a range of informationabout root causes of poor school performance, in-cluding school resources, neighborhood condi-tions, student readiness, and teacher quality.Rather than deliver that large volume of complexinformation, a boundary spanner would translateit into a less complex form, such as a specific rec-ommendation that the district central office pro-vide on-site teacher development. In this way,boundary spanners "select out of the total per-ceived environment some subset for transmissioninternally to the organization" (Leifer & Delbecq,1978, p. 47; see also Aldrich & Herker, 1977) andthereby defend their organizations against poten-tially unproductive information overload andambiguity (Aldrich & Herker, 1977).

These information management activities arearguably the most prevalent in the literature, butboundary spanners also serve various politicalpurposes that are sometimes supportive of theseinformation management roles. For example, someboundary spanners represent their organization tothe outside world and vice versa (Adams, 1976;Aldrich & Herker, 1977; Leifer & Huber, 1977).In some cases, boundary spanners are the primarypublic face of their organizations and conversely

the main opportunity some outside groups havefor representing their interests to high-level deci-sion makers within the organization. This litera-ture suggests that central-office administratorswho operate as boundary spanners may representschool-community sites' and central-office ad-ministrators' interest to the other and sit in posi-tions to mediate conflicts or new relationships be-tween the two.

These information and political managementroles may be a double-edged sword when help-ing school district central offices forge support-ive partnerships with schools and communityagencies. For example, researchers have foundthat when boundary spanners operate as infor-mation managers or political brokers, they in-crease their contact with organizations outsidetheir home organization, such as schools or com-munity agencies in this case. Boundary spanners'contact with outside organizations can improverelationships and trust with those organizationsand the support they provide to those organi-zations (Aldrich & Herker, 1977). On the otherhand, increased contact can be perceived byother organizations as regulatory rather than sup-portive, especially when those other organiza-tions are dependent on the focal organization,and actually reinforce such regulatory relation-ships (Aldrich & Herker, 1977; Pfeffer & Salancik,1978; Selznick, 1949).

According to this literature, specific conditionsinfluence the extent to which these informationand political management activities may promotethe types of relationships with school-communitysites that the focal policies demand. First, bound-ary spanners' ability to understand the language ofmultiple professional communities is fundamen-tal to their identification of relevant information,their translation of information into forms thatdifferent audiences might use, and the extent towhich they represent their organization produc-tively to others and vice versa. Boundary spannerswho are primarily fluent in external languages tendto search well but to be relatively ineffective athelping their organization use the information theycollect; boundary spanners who are fluent in theirorganization's language tend to be skilled at usebut lack the information to ground use (Tushman& Scanlan, 198 1a; Tushman & Romanello, 1983).

Second, consistent with Weatherley and Lipsky,contemporary researchers elaborate that bound-ary spanners' orientation to their work is shaped

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by particular past and present social cues. AsLeifer and Delbeq revealed, how boundary span-ners attend to their work is not a purely technicalor rational enterprise but a function of "(a) whatthey are told to pay attention to (superior's needs,wants); (b) their own wants, needs, and person-alities; (c) some attention to cues based on pastexperience; (d) how and in what context theyexpect the information to be utilized; and (e) cuesbased on whether or not the information is redun-dant" (Leifer & Delbecq, 1978, p. 47). They usethese cues to help them interpret what particularforms of information mean, how to translate anduse the information, and how to make decisionsin the face of competing demands.

Third, boundary spanners' position on theorganizational margins may be a help or a hin-drance. Such positions may increase their com-munication and relationships with people outsidetheir organizations, which are essential to gather-ing information from beyond their organizationalboundaries; on the other hand, such marginalpositions often limit their communication and re-lationships with people within their organizationand thereby jeopardize their ability to help ensurethe information they gather is actually used inter-nally (Brass, 1984).

Boundary spanners' ability to manage roleconflicts also shapes their work. In part becauseboundary spanners invariably have responsibili-ties related to at least two distinct organizations(e.g., central offices and school-community sites),they often encounter conflicting demands on theirtime and choice of priorities. These conflictscan lead to a lack of clarity regarding goals andrewards for performance and a limited sense ofcontrol over their own work, all of which have beentied to low levels of job satisfaction (Crawford &Nonis, 1996), high levels of job turnover (Craw-ford & Nonis, 1996), stress (Friedman & Podolny,1992), and other tension associated with poorperformance (Keller & Holland, 1975). Whenorganizational and environmental demands do notconflict, boundary spanners may use their accessto information across organizations to obtain bet-ter pay, promotion, favorable relationships withcoworkers, and other resources that may improvetheir performance (Keller & Holland, 1975).

Boundary spanners' perceived organizationalinfluence and the length of their tenure are inter-related conditions that can help or hinder theirwork. For example, Shrum found that when

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boundary spanners have high status within theirorganization, they typically make productive useof the information they collect and otherwisecomplete their work in less time than those withlower status; however, these individuals may alsotend to give information/direction more often thanthey receive it and otherwise take on a command-and-control stance rather than a partnership ori-entation (Shrum, 1990). The longer the boundaryspanners' tenure in their organizations, the moreauthority they may have for influencing organiza-tional direction (Blau, 1963). However, becauseboundary-spanning positions typically fall low inorganizational hierarchies, the longer their tenure,the more likely other organizational members maybe to assume they have little power (or else theywould have been promoted to higher hierarchicallevels). Such perceptions by colleagues potentiallylimit boundary spanners' effectiveness, particu-larly when it comes to helping their organizationuse information (Brass, 1984).

Neo-institutional theories of decision makinground-out this conceptual framework by elaborat-ing models of professional practice as key influ-ences on boundary spanners. These influences areparticularly powerful when individuals face thetypes of complexity that Weatherly and Lipskyhighlighted-i.e., situations involving high levelsof discretion, conflicting and counter-normativedemands, and means-ends ambiguity. In brief,these theories suggest that under such circum-stances, boundary spanners will look for profes-sional practice models that they associate withlegitimacy or success regardless of whether fol-lowing those models is actually likely to improvesuch outcomes. March calls this pattern followinga logic of appropriateness rather than a logic ofconsequence (March, 1994). When decision mak-ers follow a logic of appropriateness, they fit asituation to a particular identity. These decisionmakers will not ask, "What is most efficient in thissituation?" and choose that approach. Rather,they will ask, "Who am I in this situation?" and"What behaviors are appropriate to that identityin this particular situation?" and make theirchoices based on answers to those questions.

When multiple identities seem appropriate,boundary spanners will choose those that "confirmtheir individual competencies" and that were usedrecently, stem from direct experienced, and arereinforced by others in their immediate environ-ments (March, 1994, p. 65). Favored identities


are also those that are rewarded by institutions thatdecision makers value and that confirm decisionmakers' sense that they are doing their job appro-priately and well. If decision makers believe theoutcomes of their work fall below their perfor-mance targets, they will focus their attention onroles and routines they believe will help themachieve their targets and otherwise avoid choicesthat increase their risk of not achieving thosetargets (Levitt & March, 1988).

These bodies of literature framed my analysisby highlighting boundary spanners as the mainunit of analysis and focusing my attention on theextent to which boundary spanners perform theinformation and political management activitiesnoted. Second, these literatures directed data col-lection to specific conditions that may shape howboundary spanning plays out in practice, such asboundary spanners' ability to understand multi-ple languages. Third, neo-institutional theoriesof decision making called my attention to theimportance of professional practice models inshaping boundary spanners' work. In addition,I heeded some scholars' critiques of this litera-ture that it overrelies on large-scale surveys con-ducted at a single point in time without triangu-lation of other data sources that can provide afuller picture of boundary spanners' decisionsand practices; I followed their advice to pursue"ethnographic" studies that dig deeply into thepractice of small numbers of boundary spannersover time (Brass, 1984).

Methods

This conceptual framework grounded my analy-sis of data from a qualitative, embedded, com-parative, and strategic case study of collaborativeeducation policy implementation. The broaderstudy examined city-level policymakers' roles inimplementation of these policies in Oakland, CA,between 1990 and 2000 captured through field-work conducted between 1998 and 2000. Forreports of methods from the full study, please seeHonig, 2003, 2004.

The data from the larger study were ripe for thissubanalysis about boundary spanners. First, thestudy focused on the implementation of three2

collaborative education policies. The simultaneousimplementation of three policies allowed forcross-case comparisons and increased the num-ber of data points for analysis while holding city,county, and state constant. The focal policies were:

- Healthy Start School-Linked Services Ini-tiative. This program of the CDE has awardedgrants to school-community partnership sites

since 1992. Sites are to set goals related to youthdevelopment and learning and to design and im-plement collaborative strategies to achieve thosegoals. CDE holds district central offices account-able for enabling ongoing site implementationduring and after the time-limited state grantshave expired by requiring district plans for on-going site support and by suspending funds foradditional sites pending such evidence. This en-gagement of district central offices is supposedto leverage change in youth-serving systemsfrom the bottom up (California Department ofEducation, 1999b).- Village Centers Initiative. Through this ini-

tiative, a citywide nonprofit organization, incollaboration with the city, school district, andcounty, funded and supported school and com-munity leaders in developing and implementingschool-community partnerships. Initial fundingcame from a multiyear, multimillion-dollar grantfrom the DeWitt Wallace Beacons Disseminationinitiative to transform schools into locally designedcommunity learning centers. In Oakland's ap-plication to the foundation, the district centraloffice committed to support the ongoing devel-opment and implementation of site-driven im-provement plans.- Oakland Child Health and Safety Initiative

(OCHSI). With multimillion-dollar funding fromthe Robert Wood Johnson's 10-year Urban HealthInitiative (UHI), OCHSI in the 1990s aimed tofuel the transformation of all Oakland middleschools into Village Centers by reconfiguringpublic city, school district, and county bureaucra-cies to seed and support these centers. Oakland'sUHI plan focused centrally on the transformationof the school district central office and city andcounty agencies into supporters of Village Centerimplementation.

I studied implementation of these policies dur-ing the 1990s, a decade some consider a periodof heightened federal and state support forschool-community partnerships (Honig & Jehl,2000). During the latter part of this period, Oak-land was just beginning to become engaged inthe high-stakes accountability initiatives that bythen had already engulfed some other districts.Such policies, with their top-down, command-

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and-control orientations, had they been longerstanding in Oakland, would have posed obviousimpediments to the site-support relationships fea-tured in the collaborative education policy de-signs. Accordingly, 1990s Oakland promised toreveal central-office administration under pol-icy conditions theoretically conducive (or atleast not obviously inhospitable) to collaborativeeducation policies.

Third,,the school district central office des-ignated individual administrators to serve inboundary-spanning roles in implementation. Theseindividuals were assigned to broker new central-office site relationships specifically to supportthe implementation of sites' locally developedschool-community site improvement plans. Giventheir prominence in implementation, the boundaryspanners were among my primary respondents inthe main study.

Data CollectionThe data reported in this article come from self-

reports (interviews and conversations), direct ob-servations, and records (written policies, plans,procedures, official meeting minutes, and news-paper archives) related to the implementation ofthe three focal policies identified above. Specificsources included 42 interviews with 33 peoplewho participated in implementation, includingcentral-office administrators, school board andcity council members, county government repre-sentatives, citywide nonprofit organization direc-tors, and school principals and youth-agency di-rectors who oversaw the school-communitypartnership sites. Eight of these respondents werecentral-office administrators specifically assignedto operate as boundary spanners. Each interviewlasted between 60 and 120 minutes and addressedrespondents' conceptions of policy demands,experiences on the job, and explanations forparticular events. I probed these issues through 17conversations-unstructured, inquiry-based dis-cussions with individual respondents systemat-ically documented in field notes.

In addition to interviews, between 1998 and2000, I directly observed formal meetings (ap-proximately 160 hours) between representativesof the school district central office (usually theboundary spanners), school/community sites, andothers specifically convened to support imple-mentation, such as directors of nonprofit youth-serving organizations and public youth-serving

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agencies. (For a full report on these meetings,see Honig, 2004.) At these meetings, I wrotealmost verbatim transcripts to capture the trans-fer of information and relationships between thedistrict central office and other meeting partic-ipants. For the same reasons, I reviewed recorddata dating back to the early 1990s from suchsources as newspaper archives and city and schooldistrict policies, evaluation reports, and meetingminutes.

Data AnalysisUsing NUDIST software, I coded my data ini-

tially using concepts from the main study's theo-retical framework, organizational learning theory,as described in detail in other publications (Honig,2003, 2004). This framework prompted me tocode instances of central-office administratorssearching for and using information aboutschool/community decisions to guide central-office policy development. I coded specifically forinstances of central-office administrators adoptinga role conception and activities that reflected anorientation supportive of sites' local collaborativedecision making and those that were more consis-tent with controlling sites. Findings from thebroader study revealed that frontline central-officeadministrators were assigned to and actuallyplayed strategic boundary-spanning roles in thesesearch-and-use processes and in other aspects ofimplementation. Subsequent to that discovery, Ideveloped the conceptual framework describedabove to highlight boundary spanners' particularexperiences and I recoded my data. New codesadded during this phase included "boundary span-ner" to help isolate frontline central-office admin-istrators' specific experiences with searching forand using site information. I also coded data forother activities, such as "political representation"and factors the literature suggested might affectboundary spanners' work. The latter includedtheir membership in/ability to understand multiplecommunities, their social cues, evidence of roleconflict, and how their position on the organiza-tional margins may have mediated their work.Coding data by the year of the events described byrespondents allowed me to compare boundaryspanners' discussions of their charges and rolesover time. I also coded instances in which bound-ary spanners' described or suggested their ratio-nale for particular decisions to help reveal theirmodels of appropriate professional practice.

Findings

Overall, my findings suggest that Oakland'sboundary spanners were both well and poorlyequipped for the job of helping the school districtcentral-office participate productively in the im-plementation of the focal education policies. Inthe initial periods of their central-office tenures,boundary spanners' positions as new, nontradi-tional, and organizationally marginal central-officeemployees promised to enable their boundary-spanning roles in ways consistent with policydemands to support sites' local, collaborativedecision making. However, as their tenures woreon, their new, nontraditional, and organizationallymarginal positions became liabilities that curbedtheir ability and, in some cases, their sense thatthey should support such decision making. In thefollowing sections, I address my first researchquestion by describing who these individuals were,their charge, and why some Oakland leadersviewed boundary spanners as essential for en-abling implementation. Because the trends re-ported here were evident throughout the threeinitiatives with little variation, I report my findingsacross the three initiatives. Then I discuss howboundary spanners managed their demands, witha focus on the extent to which they aimed and ac-tually worked to enable sites' local collaborativedecision making, and the factors that shaped theirwork.

Nontraditional Employees forNontraditional Work

Respondents of all stripes in Oakland generallyconfirmed the above policy discussion that theyviewed district central-office administrator's par-ticipation in collaborative education policyimplementation as demanding nontraditionalcentral-office work in at least two respects. Forone, central offices would forge close partner-ships between school and other youth-servingagencies. For example, in a comment typical ofrespondents' views of these demands, one cen-tral-office administrator explained that the poli-cies called for the central office to

create a seamless system of support for youth soyou don't get, "This is the school system's re-sponsibility and that is public health's." But"How can all of us work together for kids." That'snot what [the view] you have always gotten frommost people here [in the central office].

Respondents also specified that implementationrequired a departure from traditional top-down,command-and-control relationships betweenthe central office and school-community sites.For example, when asked to compare the collab-orative education policy demands to what he/sheconsidered "traditional central-office work," onecentral-office administrator reported, "We be-come servants to the neighborhoods." He/sheelaborated that this meant working with wholeneighborhoods rather than only schools and to doso in a servant or service capacity rather than witha control orientation. A school board membercorroborated this view:

I am trying to resist... the notion that there needsto be one model and that the [school] boardneeds to impose it. I mean, that's why I like theidea of school-by-school assessments and thenworking between the district and the city andthe county to meet the needs at each site.

Two of the first frontline central-office admin-istrators hired into the boundary-spanning postsrecalled that when they began their work in theearly 1990s there were few role models for theirnew responsibilities and that they began theirwork specifically to invent such school-commu-nity support roles on the job. For example, asone of them reflected:

I was brought in by the then superintendent toconstruct a program that dealt with students andfamilies and the life circumstances that preventstudents from learning. And [he] ... wasn'tquite sure what it all meant but he just knew thathe wanted to ... and for the school district toplay a central role....

Another confirmed, "I'd say we [another frontlinecentral-office administrator and I] were wingingit. And that was the plan. There was a tremen-dous sense that this [central-office participation]was new ground and we had to lay that ground."This sense that they would invent new roles ex-tended to other frontline central-office adminis-trators, even those who were hired several yearslater. For example, when asked what their for-mal job description included as their main jobresponsibilities, the four frontline central-officeadministrators hired later in the decade generallyreported that their job descriptions did not andperhaps could not capture their day-to-day work.In a typical comment, one explained:

Sure, I can show it [my job description] to you.But you know, it's really generally like 'Man-

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age this grant' and of course 'Other duties asassigned.' [Laughs] No, seriously, [departmentdirector] made it pretty clear that I was hired tofigure this out [what implementation involved].And I was given latitude to do that. That's noton paper.

To manage these demands, during the 1990s,eight individuals were hired into new positionson the frontlines of the central office specificallyto work between the central office and school-community sites to support implementation ofthe three focal policies, in other words, to operateas boundary spanners in implementation. Fourwere hired in the early 1990s when Healthy Startlaunched, and four were hired later in the decadewhen Oakland initiated the other two collabora-tive policy initiatives. Multiple data sources sug-gested that regardless of when each individualwas hired, his or her selection and the crafting ofhis or her central-office position reflected similarunderlying assumptions about how to organize thecentral office to manage these policy demands-assumptions that were generally consistent withmany of the conditions the boundary-spanners'literature suggested would be conducive to pro-ductive boundary spanning.

Importance of outsiders

All the frontline central-office administratorshired specifically to support implementation werecentral-office and school system outsiders in nu-merous respects. All were new central-office em-ployees, and half were new to the school districtsystem altogether. These individuals identifiedthemselves as "outsiders," "community-basedpersonalities," "from the community," a "voicefrom the community,"" "community organizers,"and "educational advocates" who were hired to bethe "movers and the shakers" of the central officeand to work "out of the box" where they believed"real change happened." Some of them had beenschool teachers, but they typically reported expe-nience in "alternative" school settings, including aMontessori school and an I Have a Dream Pro-gram. They claimed other experiences that theybelieved were atypical for the school district cen-tral office but that were essential to their school-community support roles, including communityorganizing, public health, directing a youth orga-nization, serving as an educational advocate, andworking on "antipoverty initiatives."

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Being an outsider toward the latter half of thedecade also meant that many of the new frontlinecentral-office administrators belonged to partic-ular racial and ethnic groups, namely, Oakland'sSpanish-speaking and Asian communities thatwere traditionally underrepresented in the centraloffice or the school system. Although membersof these communities were hired into these posi-tions earlier in the decade, racial/ethnic repre-sentation appeared in my data as an explicit ra-tionale for hiring at the end of the decade. As onefrontline central-office administrator reflectedon some of the hiring choices:

Well, some people felt.., the racial thing wasa big thing [in our hiring] because there's anentrenched black power structure here [in thecentral office].... So in other words I think ithas a lot to do with opening it up to people thattraditionally have not been in the system at leastin the recent past.... People that the commu-nity knows to carry the message that he [thesuperintendent] wants to change the dynamicsbetween communities and the district.

When asked why the central office hired out-siders, frontline central-office administrators,superintendents, and directors echoed theory'semphasis on the importance of people who couldunderstand the language of school-communitysites and whose past and present social cues andprofessional practice models were likely to rein-force site-support orientations or at least providealternatives to the cues and models generallyavailable in the central office. In particular, theyreported that central-office leaders believed thatthe training and experience to promote local, col-laborative decision making likely would not befound among current central-office staff. As onefrontline central-office administrator recalledabout his/her hiring in the early 1990s:

The thinking was you can't just have a districtperson, a certificated person or personnel man-ager because they generally won't have that otherexperience... experience in working with non-profits in general and an understanding aboutsystems collaborations and working with diversegroups. They felt it better to go on the outside.

Promotion from practice

All the frontline central-office administra-tors, regardless of when they were hired, reportedthat they had relatively extensive experiences at


the school-community level with implementingschool-community partnerships. Specifically, fourof them had been directors or the main coordi-nators of school-community partnership sites.One had been training parents to be educationaladvocates, and, in that capacity, he/she had beenworking with several sites. The three others hadbeen consultants on the development of suchsites. These central-office administrators wereunanimous in their reports that these past siteexperiences made them well suited for their newcentral-office posts. For example, one indicated,"It [my past site work] made all of this [the central-office post] seem like second nature to me."Another explained:

I was at a meeting where we were pretty hardon the district [central office] ... and the super-intendent leaned over the table and said whydon't you come work for me and do somethingabout it.... So I think the thinking was I knewthe schools and the community and that's whatthe central office needed. To get some of theseother voices in.

This trend, what I call promotion from prac-tice, stood out in my analysis as a particular biasin hiring for a position that called for individualswho understood the language of and took socialcues from school-community sites but also thoseof the central office. One central-office adminis-trator indicated that it was rare to find an indi-vidual with both site and central-office experi-ence and that site experience should be preferredin hiring for the frontline posts, that an ideal can-didate should have

A personality that is going to deal with com-munity members .... To truly feel for the effortsthat they [community members] want to seehappen in their communities ... Being able tounderstand ... what is happening within theircommunity .... Being able to respect them andhonor them no matter what walk of life theycome from. And not being afraid of going intothose communities at unreasonable hours, youknow, during hours that would be fearful for alot of people in our district .... Somebody whowould be able to advocate for the [sites] andbe able to truly take their passion and theircommitment for community building and orga-nizing back to a system that has not in the pastembraced it.

Another central-office director corroboratedthat in hiring new staff for these posts he/she con-

sidered experience with school-community sitesa primary asset:

The person would have a good sense of what'savailable in the [school] feeder system. At theschool site level but also in the surroundingcommunities.... I've thought about teachers,possibly. It may be some people from the non-profit community maybe would be good candi-dates. But I think you have, you'd have to havea lot of experience kind of working with both ofthese groups....

New dedicated frontline positions

The frontline central-office administrators werehired into new positions in the central office ini-tially dedicated to implementation of the collab-orative education policies. These positions went bytitles related to the specific collaborative policyfor which the individual was responsible, such asVillage Centers Director, and assignments thatcut across multiple collaborative policies, suchas School-Linked Services Coordinator. Whenasked about the initial scope of their work, allemphasized one or several of the collaborativepolicies. In the words of one, [I was brought in towork on] "Nothing but Healthy Start." Such afocus meant that the frontline central-office ad-ministrators generally aimed to spend their timemainly on the collaborative policy initiatives andpotentially would face limited unproductive roleconflicts.

Almost all the new dedicated positions werelocated on the frontlines of the central office in"street-level" positions where, by their reports,the central office came into frequent contact withprincipals, teachers, parents, community-serviceproviders, and other community members. All butone of them worked in offices on the geographicmargins of the central office-in a building called"Portable 15" across the street from the maincentral-office building that housed the majorityof central-office administrators-and the outlierindicated that he/she would probably move toPortable 15 within the year.

The assignment of implementation to geo-graphically marginal frontline staff, too, appearedas a particular bias in hiring for ajob that requiredclose connections both to sites and to the centraloffice. When asked directly why the positions werecrafted this way, all six of the eight frontlinecentral-office administrators who were asked this

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question explained that supporting sites was dif-ficult work and required dedicated attention. Inthe words of one, "Just quite frankly the level ofcomplexity..." demanded that these responsi-bilities not be "added on to someone's plate."Many of these new hires described their locationin Portable 15 as an asset to their new roles. Inthe words of one:

We are far enough away here [across the streetfrom the main central-office building] that par-ents and community members will come here.They tell me they won't go across the street.But we aren't so far away that we aren't a partof what's going on over there.

In summary, the frontline central-office admin-istrators in this case faced many of the conditionstheoretically conducive to productive boundaryspanning, including their reported ready ability tounderstand the language of school-communitysites and past and present social cues that departedfrom central-office administration-as-usual. Theirpositions on the organizational margins were in-tended to sharpen their focus on the focal policiesand suggested they would face minimal role con-flicts. Their frontline positions also promised toincrease their interactions with school-communitysites productively. However, in choosing theseindividuals and crafting their positions, the centraloffice made several apparently necessary tradeoffs.For one, given the reported scarcity of individu-als with experience with both school-communitysites and the central office, central-office leadersfavored individuals with language and past/presentsocial cues tied to sites. The latter promised tohelp with their interactions with sites that wereessential to search, but their limited central-officeexperience threatened to hamper their ability tohelp the central office use information from sites tosupport implementation. Furthermore, the bound-ary spanners were located on the geographical andhierarchical margins of the central office, whichtheoretically enabled search and minimized theirrole conflicts; however, these locations also poten-tially limited their positional influence within thecentral office, which was also important to imple-mentation. How did these conditions and trade-offs play out in practice?

Boundary Spanners on the JobAs noted, frontline central-office administrators

generally reported that they were hired to invent

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a line of work related to supporting the school-community sites. Regardless of when they werehired, all the frontline central-office administratorsstarted out on the job by engaging in activitiesthat were consistent with searching for informationabout school-community partnership sites andusing that information to support implementation.The frontline central-office administrators reportedthat they generally used that information to helpstart-up sites by negotiating new relationshipsbetween schools and local and county communityservices organizations and otherwise to informtheir own individual on-site work with school-community partnerships. However, I found littleevidence that early in their individual tenures inthe central office they worked to use site infor-mation to influence central-office policy per theiroriginal charge.

Initial period on the jobTo elaborate, the first two frontline central-

office administrators hired in the early 1990sreported in retrospective interviews that they spentthe majority of their time during their first years onthe job on Healthy Start implementation. Com-pleting the application for Healthy Start fundingrequired that school and community applicantsconduct an assessment of school/community needsand strengths (search) and that they use that infor-mation to set goals and collaborative strategiesfor reaching those goals; school district centraloffices were asked to develop a plan for support-ing sites during and beyond the 3-year state-grantperiod (CDE, 1999b). These frontline central-office administrators reported that they, ratherthan schools or community agencies, generallytook the lead in searching for information aboutschool needs and community resources and inusing that information to help broker school-community partnerships. They described havingextensive conversations with school principals aspart of this process. In the words of one: "And wewere like, 'Do you have any community groups[as partners]?' They were like, 'No we don't.' Butwe heard about one that works nearby and invitedthem in and literally put it [the school-communitypartnership] together."

Three of the four frontline central-office admin-istrators who were brought on later in the 1990ssimilarly described their central-office tenures asstarting out with their spending the majority oftheir work time on site helping with various


implementation challenges that arose betweenschools and community agencies. For example,during real-time interviews, two central-office ad-ministrators described a typical week during theirfirst 6 months on the job as involving extensive on-site work. According to one, "I'm rarely here [inthe central office]. There's always something outat the schools. It's [my schedul6 is] always meet-ings, meetings, meetings with schools, communityagencies, parents, as part of this process." A thirdreported that when he/she first arrived on the jobhe/she mainly continued his/her prior work over-seeing a program at one site and starting conversa-tions at other sites about launching similar pro-grams as part of their local collaborations.

Three frontline central-office administratorsbrought on in the early 1990s also reported inretrospective interviews that early in their indi-vidual tenures they worked between sites andcounty health and human services agencies tohelp the latter use site information to supportimplementation. As confirmed by a series of in-dependent reports, these frontline central-officeadministrators partnered with a nonprofit organi-zation and county services agencies to identifyschools whose students were involved with mul-tiple public services agencies (Oakland SchoolLinked Services Work Group, 1999; Urban Strate-gies Council, 1992, 1993). The frontline central-office administrators then successfully negotiatedwith county public services agencies to redirectsocial work case managers to particular schoolsites. As one described, "[W]e had social workcase managers in all those schools.... And that'swhere we focused our attention. And the socialwork case management was the first thrust." Atthe same time, the fourth frontline central-officeadministrator in this subgroup similarly workedwith the county health agency to support the pro-vision of health services at or near school sites.

The frontline central-office administrators, re-gardless of when they were hired, reported noexamples of attempts to spanning boundaries be-tween the rest of the central office and school-community partnership sites as part of their earlyinformation-management efforts. For example,when interviewed in 1998 about his/her experi-ence in the central office to date, one central-office administrator indicated that he/she reporteddirectly to an assistant superintendent to pro-vide frequent updates about his/her work. Whenpressed for examples of instances when he/she

brought information about implementation to theassistant superintendent or others in the centraloffice to help influence central-office support forimplementation, the administrator could not recallany examples. The first frontline central-office ad-ministrator hired gave a similar report but addedthat they should have primarily focused their at-tention at the site level-"to... provide the tech-nical assistance, get them [sites] from now thatyou've got the [state]money what to set up. That'sup to us [frontline central-office administrators]."

For the frontline central-office administra-tors hired early in the 1990s, these information-management roles at the start of their tenure tookon distinct though limited political dimensions.Namely, as several of the quotes suggest, someof these frontline central-office administratorsused information about school sites to help buildlocal consistencies in favor of school-communitysites in particular neighborhood and to representschool sites to outside health and human servicesagencies. These four also unanimously reportedthat their work demanded that they represent theinterests of school-community partnerships toother central-office administrators and to the schoolboard, but they rarely did so. In the words of one,"I think we have not done a good job of inform-ing them. I would fault [myself and the otherthree frontline central-office administrators]....We invite them so infrequently to events ... theydon't link to it [school-community sites], becauseof the infrequency of it." Frontline central-officeadministrators typically reported that the impor-tance of building political support for sites withinthe central office was a lesson they learned on thejob and that it came as a surprise. For example,one reported that supporting school-communitypartnerships

... is natural to me you know [I thought] ofcourse... schools will want these outside pro-grams and services and support to come in andwork with them and the rest of the system willget behind that. [I was] A little naive there....I got swatted around pretty quick in the firstyear and just really [realized] wow this is goingto be a lot harder than I thought!

In summary, early in their individual tenures,the frontline central-office administrators took onparticular information management and politicalfunctions. However, rather than working betweenthe central office and school-community sites,

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they primarily worked between schools and com-munity agencies and, for those hired in the early1990s, between sites and county human servicesagencies to support implementation.

Frontline central-office administrators'work over time

Interviews and observations suggested thateach of the central-office administrators beganto increase his/her efforts to span boundaries be-tween school-community sites and the districtcentral office starting with the 1997-1998 schoolyear, regardless of when he/she was hired. Forthree of the four central-office administrators hiredin the early 1990s, this shift occurred approxi-mately 3-5 years into their tenures; the fourthterminated his central-office employment at ap-proximately this same time. For the four morerecent hires, these central-office site-spanningefforts fell within 7 months to 2 years of theirinitial hire.

One of the long-standing administrators ex-plained that by the latter half of the 1990s, link-ing with the rest of the central office had becomeessential because the time-limited state grants tosome sites were coming to an end and, per thedistrict's agreement with the state, the centraloffice needed to develop and implement a spe-cific plan for ongoing site support:

... if we are looking at trying to take this to scale,we need to have that presence there [throughoutthe central office] because that is [what is goingto bring it to the attention ofl executive staffand eventually also to the board to, in lack of abetter term, to give it some sanctions. Sanctionsin terms of legitimacy .... It was critical becausethose of the [first funded sites] are just aboutready to be winged off from us [the time-limitedstate grants for a relatively large group of siteswere about to expire].... We were looking forthe district to figure out okay are you going tocome forth with any type of dollars to sustainthis effort ... if you [other central-office admin-istrators] are not at the table it makes it kind ofhard to do.... So it's become important to worknot only by myself.

Fueling this central-office focus, the state depart-ment of education toward the end of the 1990sstepped up its instructions to districts to providesite supports, even though such a goal was part ofthe original policy design. For example, I directlyobserved 12 monthly meetings between 1998 and

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2000 (approximately 31 hours) of an intermediaryorganization comprising frontline central-officeadministrators, as well as nonprofit agency repre-sentatives and site directors, convened to supportimplementation of school-community partner-ships. At 10 out of the 12 observed meetings, atleast 25% of the meeting discussion (measured inminutes) concerned how to respond to relativelyrecent state requests that the central office outlineits plan for ongoing site support. Frontline central-office administrators' engagement of the centraloffice in implementation during this period alsomay have been reinforced by the launch of theOakland Child Health and Safety Initiative, whichfocused explicitly on reforming the central office,as well as city and county agencies to supportVillage Center implementation.

Frontline central-office administrators' reportsof their work early during this period suggestedthat spanning boundaries between sites and thecentral office involved searching for informationabout sites' decisions and experience and helpingother central-office administrators to use that in-formation to support sites' decisions. For example,three of the frontline central-office administratorshired toward the end of the 1990s began to describetheir roles in practice as helping executive-leveladministrators, such as the superintendent, craftcentral-office policies in support of sites' imple-mentation decisions. According to one:

For the ... initiative, I kind of do high-levelstrategy for the school district and I almost actas a staff person [to the superintendent]. So Ikind of do the nitty-gritty detail work, figuringout how to get lights at... [a particular] schooland then I do kind of high-level strategic stuff forexample setting up conditions for what you needto be a lead agency, what a school needs to havein place to be ready.... [for a school-communitypartnership grant]? How do we collaborate onlong-term funding? How do we provide technicalassistance [to sites]?

A long-standing frontline central-office adminis-trator also described his/her roles during this pe-riod specifically as moving beyond what he/shecould do on his/her own to engage the rest of thecentral office in implementation:

I'm trying to figure out how to sustain this effortbeyond just my office [and] grant support. I'mlooking to the integration with curriculum.Because, you know, that is going to do it for us[help us support site implementation].... There


should be a menu of central office services thatschools can draw down from based on their[collaborative] plans.

One participant in implementation corroborated:

Well ... [two frontline central-office adminis-trators] and I work with [central office] depart-ment heads, business services, and legal andrisk management in particular and with the cus-todial unions and stuff to figure out what thingsare going to look like [within the central officebased on school-community site plans]. So,for example, how do we allocate space [withinschool buildings] ... ? How do we incorporatea CBO's [community-based organization's] vol-unteers on staff into a school? How do we turnover the keys to a school building to a CBO... ?And... if you look at the decision tree there area million branches on this decision tree that we'retrying to figure out. But we really are trying tofigure this out right now so we can hand this toa superintendent, to community organizationsthat are interested, to the school board to helpthem make supportive decisions....

Observations further suggested that the sevenremaining frontline central-office administratorsin general spent time during this period searchingfor site information and grappling with how tohelp the rest of the central office use that infor-mation to support implementation. For example,in late 1997, a citywide nonprofit organizationconvened a group I call the Youth DevelopmentTaskforce to help with the implementation of oneof the policy initiatives. Frontline central-officeadministrators were the main central-office rep-resentatives to the taskforce; they attended meet-ings five times more often than county agencyrepresentatives and almost 100% more often thanthe city-level representative who attended onlytwice during the meetings observed. In the 2-yearperiod in which the taskforce operated, I observedalmost all of their semimonthly 2-hour meetings.I found that virtually all meetings featured sitesreporting on their implementation progress-aform of search-and that the second most fre-quently discussed issue3 related to how the schooldistrict central office could respond to sites' con-cerns and otherwise expand its supports for sites'decisions. (See Table 1.)

Observations also confirmed the previous quotethat frontline central-office administrators occa-sionally took this information to other central-office administrators for the reported purpose of

influencing central-office policy decisions to helpadvance site implementation. For example, ac-cording to their public reports at these meetings,frontline central-office administrators conferredwith the central-office legal department to exploreways to buffer schools from rules related to thescreening of adults working on school campuses(to enable participation of community members inthe in-school and after-school programs at severalsites). Frontline central-office administrators alsoheld several meetings with central-office businessmanagers to discuss changes in staff schedules andin school buildings themselves to accommodateparticular programs planned at school-communitysites. In 1999-2000, frontline central-office ad-ministrators lobbied central-office administratorsto devote particular bond funds to support ongoingsite implementation plans. In addition, I observedthe superintendent in attendance at several meet-ings of the Youth Development Taskforce and theother intermediary organization. When asked inconversations about the superintendent's atten-dance, four of the five frontline central-officeadministrators indicated that one frontline central-office administrator had encouraged him to attendwith the hope that he would receive informationfrom sites directly that would prompt him to pro-vide ongoing funding for site implementation.

However, in the 1998-1999 school year, twoof the long-standing central-office administratorsreported that by that time their job responsibilitieshad also come to include those beyond their initialschool-community site responsibilities. By 1999,the addition of responsibilities to their initialcharge became a pattern for all four of the morerecent hires. In support of this claim, my reviewof central-office committee memberships andinterview transcripts revealed that during the1998-1999 and 1999-2000 academic years, thesefrontline central-office administrators each as-sumed between four and eight additional formalresponsibilities. These responsibilities includedworking on special projects related to crime pre-vention, a federal grant for after-school pro-grams, homework centers, bilingual education,truancy, Title I district-wide planning, and re-views of teacher performance.

When asked why they accepted additionalresponsibilities, all explained that the additionalassignments, in political terms, were consistentwith collaborative education policy goals andconceptions of boundary spanners as politicalactors, namely that the additional responsibilities

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TABLE IIssues Discussed at Youth Development Taskforce Meetings

Meetingsdirectly Site issues related to

Meeting dates observed support (sele•central-officected) Other issues discussed (selected)

December 11, 1998- 9March 19, 1999

April 2, 1999-August 5, 1999

September 9, 1999-December 15, 1999

"* How to work with the centraloffice to increase participationof school principals in site-networking sessions

"* How the central office is mobiliz-ing around new after-schoolfunding and implications for sitesupport

"* Organizing a trip for schoolprincipals and central-officeadministrators to observe siteoperations and central-officesupport in another state

"* How the central office can ensurefuture allocation of bond fundsfor site support

7 * How sites' local evaluation needsrelate to district demands forschools to report dataWhether community agency staffmay be exempt from requirementsfor adults working on schoolcampuses to go through costlybackground screenings

6 Direct discussions with super-intendent (two meetings) aboutproviding additional central-officefunds to sites

"* Role of the group in site support"* Organization of subgroups to

assist sites"* Creating a definition of a lead

agency (community partner) toguide future grant making by theorganization

"* Role of city government in sup-porting site implementation

"* How to manage group meetings sosite-support issues are heard andaddressed but do not overwhelmthe agenda

"* Backlog of site support issues-status, how they are being tracked,and plans for follow-up

"* Whether to merge with anotherpolicy initiative more closely tiedto the superintendent, vice mayor,and his or her professional peers

"* Whether the initiative will con-tinue beyond the foundationgrant period

"* Development of individual siteimplementation plans.

promised to increase their visibility within thecentral office, to strengthen their influence overcentral-office policies that could affect sites, and toestablish relationships with central-office admin-istrators who had such influence. These explana-tions were also ultimately offered by two frontlinecentral-office administrators whose initial responseto the question of additional responsibilities was,"When the superintendent asks..." and "I hadno choice. [Superintendent] called me into hisoffice .... One of the frontline central-officeadministrators explained the trend this way:

Some of the things I do in addition to my for-mal responsibilities [for collaborative policy

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implementation] include handling a lot of parentcomplaints and trying to resolve them and doingsome investigations. I also looked at some alle-gations of teacher misconduct and so did somereview of personnel files and things like that....Also bilingual education. I looked at all thecompliance agreements regarding the bilingualprogram and did a lot of interviews with peoplein the district about the program. Then I presentedto him [a central-office director] where we wereat in terms of compliance and what the barrierswere. In all these [assignments] I'm out there.I'm visible. They [other central-office adminis-trators] see me and I see them and they get toknow me and it helps when I need something[for sites].


Another frontline administrator corroborated thepolitical purposes of the additional assignments:

By doing [the taskforce] I learned a lot abouthow the central office works, how they [assistantsuperintendents] think. So now when I bringthem information [about implementing sites] Iknow how to package it. I know it has to be shortand to the point and link to the main thing thatthey are thinking about because it's [the school-community sites are] still not the main thing[that they are thinking about].

Despite such reports that these additionaldemands could help them achieve collaborativeeducation policy goals, on another level, thesedemands conflicted with those goals. That is,whereas the collaborative education policiesdemanded that frontline central-office administra-tors support sites' local and collaborative decisionmaking, the additional responsibilities involvedspecific programs tied to then-new state and countyaccountability demands and other initiatives de-signed to tighten central control over school de-cisions. For example, oversight of the truancycenters in part meant assessing the extent to whichschools were implementing penalties and supportfor truant students according to district rules. Someof the crime-prevention assignments involvedreviewing school safety plans to ensure they werealigned with state requirements related to the Safeand Drug Free Schools program. The frontlinecentral-office administrator quoted previouslyreferred to "compliance" as a primary thrust ofthese responsibilities.

The boundary spanners' literature suggestedthat these dual demands to support sites on theone hand and control/monitor them on the othercould create crippling conflicts for the frontlinecentral-office administrators regarding day-to-day activities. However, my data did not supportthis hypothesis. Rather, the conflicts faced byfrontline central-office administrators in this caseseemed more like those faced by Weatherleyand Lipsky's street-level bureaucrats in that theystemmed mainly from an increase in their vol-ume of work to levels beyond what they believedthey could reasonably handle. According to one,this compounding of work demands seemed parfor the course for the frontline central-officeadministrators:

It [my other responsibilities] got to the pointwhere we realized wow, now I had so much else

on my plate that we really needed to bring insomebody else. We hired [someone] .... Thesame thing happened. .... Then we got [anotherstaff person].... If you are capable, and I think[this person] is, it's inevitable that stuff comesup. You're going to get a little bit of [this per-son's] time and pretty soon it just the quicksandstarts sucking you down [away from sites]. Andthat's just the way it is in a bureaucracy....It's inevitable.

Reports of multiple work demands and timelimitations in a public bureaucracy are not par-ticularly remarkable. However, neo-institutionaltheories of decision making call attention to howindividuals choose to allocate their time undersuch conditions and how they explain their deci-sions. Such choices can reveal where individualslook for professional guides and how they definewhat it means to operate appropriately and pro-ductively. Interviews and observations suggestedthat as the frontline central-office administratorsbegan to adopt other central-office responsi-bilities and interact more frequently with othersin the central office, they also came to take oncommand-and-control orientations toward sitesin ways that were inconsistent with collaborativeeducation policy demands to establish supportivepartnerships with sites.

On the high end of this pattern, five of theadministrators (two longstanding and three hiredmore recently) reported that they had come toview their roles as site monitors rather than as sitesupporters and shifted their day-to-day activitiesto reflect site monitoring. For example, the front-line central-office administrator who the yearprior had described his/her role as being a "voicefor the community," in 1999 (1 year into his orher tenure) came to frame his/her role in tradi-tional bureaucratic terms related to directingsites' decisions:

Sites are going to have much more discretionbut they are going to need information [aboutwhat the district requires]. Our role is to providethat information to them. They can make thosedecisions. But we want them to make gooddecisions. We also then have a role for qualityassurance. Making sure they make the rightdecisions. Making sure that what is out there iswhat should be out there.

Another frontline central-office administratorhired in the late 1990s reported in interviews in

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1998 that he/she was hired to work "out of thebox" but in late 1999 indicated that his/her roleinvolved clarifying traditional chains of command:

I would describe my role mainly as clarifyingwhat's what. Referring back to the originaldocument [sites applications for funding fromone collaborative education policy initiative]that describes what this [site] is going to look likefor surely we put it on paper before we steppedout to do this. What was the original plan ... ?Let's go back and look and see what it says ....So defining even more definitively what thoseroles and responsibilities are and then makingsure everyone agrees what to do and then makingsure everyone does it.

Such comments sharply contrast with their ear-lier characterizations of their roles as neighbor-hood servants.

When asked to explain the basis for theseconceptions of their roles, this subgroup invari-ably suggested that guides for their decisionshad changed to those that favored command-and-control orientations. As one of them lamentedin 1999:

Especially as we do this alignment [connectingwith others in the central office] we are kind ofsliding back into traditional [central office] pat-terns. It's like we stopped pushing the boundsof 'We can add value'... you know, we are notreally looking across boundaries to how can wesupport families and children.

Others in this subgroup were not as directly re-flective or regretful about this shift, but theircomments nonetheless suggested that their basicorientations to their work had turned inward tolong-standing central-office roles and routinesthat seemed counter to collaborative educationpolicy demands. As one argued at the end of the1990s, frontline central-office administratorsshould focus their work primarily on carrying outwhat their central-office superiors required:

Otherwise, you are making decisions and theybeing executive staff are going to say 'That'snot what we want to do.' That's clearly not whatthe board's direction is. [So I ask myself] Whatare the [school] board's goals? That's basicallywhat we are trying to deal with. I try to look atmy work in that way. I.,

On the low end of this pattern, two central-office administrators maintained a conception of

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their roles as site supporters until the end of mydata collection period in 2000. The frontlinecentral-office administrator who had left thecentral office in the mid-1990s also reportedthat he/she viewed his/her role as a site supportthroughout his/her tenure. When asked wherethey looked to for guidance on what they shoulddo on the job (1 to 2 years into their tenure at theend of the 1990s in the case of the relatively newhires and at the end of his/her tenure in the caseof the departed central-office administrator), theyreported that they focused not on central-officerules but on what local strategies were helping toimprove youth and family outcomes. In the wordsof one, ".... in every conversation we have, theunderlying notion [for me] is how does this bene-fit young people and their families in low-incomeneighborhoods in Oakland? And it's as simple asthat. It's very simple." Another reported, "Wellfor me, it was intuitive that I've always believedthat.., school's a part of the community and....I view working in a school as working in thecommunity. And that's what I hold on to." Thethird reported that he/she continued to draw onhis/her past experience with a regional safety ini-tiative, which taught him or her the importance ofbuilding on "what works on the ground" ratherthan imposing new programs "from the top-down."

Although these role conceptions continued toemphasize site support, the two administrators'actions I was able to observe did not alwaysreflect this conception. For example, in 1999, sitedirectors who attended meetings of the YouthDevelopment Taskforce questioned whether theirstatus as "Village Centers" or "Healthy Start sites"might qualify them from exemptions from require-ments that adults working on school campusesmust complete background screenings. Theyargued that such screenings were costly, led todelays in hiring staff, and impeded their ability toestablish close and trusting relationships withcommunity members. They suggested that thecentral office consider covering these costs orallowing less costly and time-consuming alter-natives for ensuring student safety. The frontlinecentral-office administrator who attended thesemeetings volunteered to work with the central-office legal department to consider alternatives.After almost 2 months, the legal department in-formed the frontline central-office administratorthat it would not consider alternatives. At a sub-sequent Youth Development Taskforce meeting,

the frontline central-office administrator presentedthe ruling and instructed sites on how they couldcomply with the rules. In other words, despitehis/her reported intention of supporting sites'decisions, he/she found himself/herself in a posi-tion of delivering information that reinforcedsites' limited discretion.

Also for example, at one meeting of a school-community site governing group (mainly com-posed of the school principal, parents, andcommunity-based organization directors) that Iattended, a frontline central-office administratorpresented the district central office's new plansfor overseeing schools that post low levels ofachievement on the state's standardized test. Theseplans included the assignment of external orga-nizations approved by the district to coach schoolsin improving test scores. Before the meeting Iasked the administrator informally why he/shewould be delivering that presentation. He/she ex-plained that an assistant superintendent did notgive him/her a choice and had suggested thathe/she was the ideal presenter because of his/her close relationship with the site. During thepresentation, a parent asked whether the schoolcould choose an external organization that didnot appear on the central-office-approved list-an organization that already participated on theircollaborative and that had coached other schoolsin their whole-school reform efforts. In response,the frontline central-office administrator did notsuggest that he/she would investigate if that kindof flexibility might be possible. Rather, he/sheresponded consistently with a command-and-control orientation: "The organizations have tobe on the list. That organization is not on thelist.... There's nothing I can do about it. I'mhere to make sure you know what's up."

In summary, by the end of the 1990s, the front-line central-office administrators were more likelythan in the past to indicate and demonstrate thatthey straddled boundaries between sites and thecentral office. However, most of the administra-tors' reports of and all of their observed actionsreflected not the intended site-support relation-ships but longstanding central-office patterns oftop-down control over schools. Ironically, thosewho fell back on these longstanding forms ofcentral-office practice had been originally hiredbecause they promised to infuse the central officewith new forms of practice more consistent withsite support. What explains this pattern?

Factors That Shaped Boundary Spanners'Activities and Choices

Theory suggested that all the frontline central-office administrators would have been particularlyvulnerable to the influence of professional prac-tice models that reflected command-and-controlorientations for several reasons. First, even afteralmost 10 years of collective implementationexperience, the frontline central-office adminis-trators, like Weatherley & Lipsky's street-levelbureaucrats, faced high levels of discretion, com-plexity, counter-normative demands, and means-ends ambiguity. The latter may have become aparticular liability as federal and state account-ability pressures increased during the late 1990s.For example, results of school-community part-nerships were slow in coming as evidenced byresearch in California and nationwide; manyresearchers concluded that the sheer complexityof school-community partnerships meant it wouldtake 3 to 5 years for sites to begin to put basicpieces of their initial collaborative strategy in placelet alone to begin to affect youth learning andother outcomes (e.g., Knapp, 1995; SRI Interna-tional, 1996a, 1996b). When asked in interviewsabout such effects and the effects of their ownwork on school-community partnership sites,frontline central-office administrators generallyacknowledged that they lacked evidence on eithercount. For example, one frontline central-officeadministrator lamented, "We need something wecan take before them [the school board] that saysthis is what this initiative looks like, this is whatwe need, and here is our evaluation to show thatthis is what sites have done. If we had to do thatnow [go before the board], we would be on veryshaky ground." Regarding his/her own work, onecommented, "It's tough. I have to know its true[that what I am doing is making a difference.] The[site directors] tell me it is. But some days ... tobe honest, I don't know. I just don't know."

Neo-institutional theories of decision makingsuggest that under such circumstances, central-office administrators will choose models of pro-fessional practice that they associate with legiti-macy and success. Several conditions at the endof the 1990s may have made traditional top-downorientations the preferred models for Oakland'sfrontline central-office administrators. For one,some frontline central-office administrators' com-petencies may have changed in ways that no

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longer favored site decision making. For exam-ple, in one revealing exchange at a meeting of theYouth Development Taskforce, a site directorexpressed extreme frustration with one frontlinecentral-office administrator's limited site knowl-edge, even though this frontline administrator,according to multiple reports, had been hired inpart for his/her extensive site knowledge: "Youhave never even been to my site. You don't evenknow our budgets .... I don't care what my totalbudget looks like to you, if I can't make my pay-roll because I may not receive the check youpromised this is all going to hit the fan."

As frontline central-office administrators' day-to-day work shifted to include more traditionalcentral-office responsibilities, it is possible thattheir most recent, direct, and reinforced identitiestoo may have changed to those that mirrored tra-ditional central-office administration. That is, astheir responsibilities within the central officeincreased, traditional central-office roles and rou-tines may have become those that they used mostrecently, that stemmed from their direct experi-ence, and that were reinforced by the social con-text of others and therefore the ones they wouldhave been most likely to choose as guides.

The literature on boundary spanners suggestedthat boundary spanners' positions on the marginsand their short central-office tenures could havehelped or hindered their site support work. At theend of the 1990s, these factors became more lia-bilities than opportunities. As discussed, early intheir implementation, frontline central-office ad-ministrators saw their positions on the boundariesof the central office as akin to the cutting edge ofcentral-office operations and a source of prideand fuel for their work. By the end of the 1990s,their comments, especially comments of thosehired in the early 1990s, were more likely to referto the boundary positions as marginal to central-office operations and as a curb on their effective-ness. In a typical comment, one indicated:

... [We] are still here on the margins of theschool district. It is not a central focus of theschool district. So its just harder and harder toget their [senior central-office administrators']attention which is ironic since in some ways weare really in utopia right now because the num-ber of sites has grown from only a few in theearly days to almost 1/3 of all schools. But ifyou went to the higher echelons of the schooldistrict and said, 'Can you tell me about [what

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we all do]' ... a lot of the top administratorswould look at you with a blank stare.

An assistant superintendent suggested thatincreasing federal and state demands to improveacademic performance may have fueled the neg-ative connotations of such marginalization. Whenasked to discuss his or her priorities for the dis-trict, he or she responded, "Academic excellencefor all students. Improved reading districtwide.All students at grade level in mathematics. Andcommunity relations. Those are my priorities rightnow." When asked if the collaborative educationpolicies fell in the fourth category and not amongthe top three priorities he/she responded:

They are important. Of course they are important.We value our community partners. But for toolong we haven't focused on classroom teachingand learning. On strengthening teaching. That hasto come first. That's what the API [academicperformance index] says. And the [state audit]means we have to tie everything we do to theclassroom. The whole [unit staffed by front-line central-office administrators] is outsidecurriculum and instruction. We may be lookingto pull them in but that's not where we are rightnow at the present time.

Likewise, other respondents' comments suggestedthat the meaning associated with the frontlinepositions by decade's end may have come tohave a negative connotation. As one communityagency director reflected on the frontline central-office administrators in early 2000:

... [T]he breadth of experience and the viewalso narrows as you come down here [to thefrontline central-office levels] and I think peoplewho are not as open to the risk-taking kind ofthing that a director or deputy supe[rintendent]feels comfortable with. People who are moreburied in the bureaucracy.

In other words, the frontline posts that commu-nicated out-of-the-box thinking earlier in thedecade for some came to mean "buried in thebureaucracy" by the end of the decade.

Frontline central-office administrators' rela-tively short tenures in the central office may havefurther curtailed their enthusiasm for nontraditionalroles and relationships with sites. Even the central-office administrators hired early in the 1990s werestill relatively new central-office employees, and,as such, they would have faced weak job securityin the district civil-service system and strong


incentives to demonstrate their value if for noother reason than to maintain their employment.The data presented suggest that participating inthe collaborative education policy initiatives mayhave been a liability in this regard because suchwork was not highly valued within the centraloffice or had come to have lesser value over time.

Data related to the three central-office admin-istrators who opposed the dominant trend alsoconfirmed the importance of these factors, partic-ularly means-ends ambiguity, role models, andshort central-office tenures, as well as their invest-ments in central-office careers as influences oncentral-office administrators' conceptions of theirroles. Regarding means-ends ambiguity and rolemodels, two of the frontline central-office admin-istrators in this subgroup reported that they didnot experience ambiguity regarding their perfor-mance and that they believed they were generallyperforming well. When asked to reflect on thesources of their confidence, these respondents,though interviewed separately, both pointed tovisits they had made to other districts that theyconsidered "exemplary." On these trips they metwith their central-office counterparts who alsowere grappling with how to support sites' local,collaborative decision making. These adminis-trators indicated that these trips taught them thatOakland's collaborative policy initiatives werenot underperforming relative to those of otherdistricts and that perhaps their own professionalstruggles as central-office administrators tryingto support sites were par for the course. In otherwords, these frontline central-office administratorsmay have accessed role models of sorts-othercentral-office administrators who did not necessar-ily demonstrate exemplary central-office practicein a similar policy context but who nonethelessconformed that perhaps they were on the righttrack despite their challenges.

Regarding central-office tenure and investmentsin central-office careers, these three central-officeadministrators were significantly less invested incentral-office careers than all of the other fiveand accordingly may not have experienced theirshort central-office tenures and relative job in-security as liabilities. As evidence of this, theone central-office administrator who left in themid- 1990s indicated that he/she was never a"lifer," that he or she had joined the central officemainly to help one superintendent advance school-community partnerships, and that he/she was

surprised he/she stayed beyond several years.Another indicated that he/she could take risks onthe job specifically because he or she did not fearlosing his/her job. In his/her words, "I don'tcare what he [the superintendent] says. I don'tneed this job. I can always go back to my [formerposition outside the central office]."

Despite their apparent ability to sustain roleconceptions supportive of site decision-making,these central-office administrators still struggled tooperate consistently within those roles. The ex-amples presented demonstrate that at least occa-sionally these frontline central-office administra-tors found themselves essentially deliveringmessages from other central-office administra-tors to sites that particular site supports wouldnot be forthcoming and outlining how sites couldcome into compliance with central-office deci-sions. These examples suggest that other central-office administrators may have significantlycurbed the frontline central-office administra-tors' ability to be responsive to sites. After all, thefrontline central-office administrators had limitedauthority over central-office decisions and werehighly dependent on the willingness of other cen-tral-office administrators to make use of the siteinformation they collected. The infrequent in-stances of such internal responsiveness suggestthat perhaps it was in short supply.

Summary and ImplicationsThis article draws on findings from a strategic

research site to begin to elaborate theory aboutfrontline central-office administrators' as bound-ary spanners in collaborative education policyimplementation. This analysis was prompted inpart by the potential of boundary spanners toleverage the significant changes in organiza-tional operations that such policies demandedand the lack of research on boundary spanning inschool district central-office contexts. I show thatOakland's frontline central-office administratorswere charged with spanning boundaries betweenthe central office and school-community sitesto enable site implementation. Their boundary-spanning activities were intended primarily tosupport the development and implementation ofsites' local collaborative plans rather than mainlyto direct them from the top-down. Early in theirtenures, the frontline central-office administratorsin this case worked to enable implementationmainly by positioning themselves on site between

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schools and community agencies and, to some ex-tent, between school-community sites and healthand human services agencies. In the process, theyengaged in some of the information and politicalmanagement roles anticipated by my conceptualframework. They did not link to the central officebeyond their own participation in site implemen-tation reportedly because they perceived that thesites' needs did not warrant broader central-officeparticipation.

As their central-office tenures and implemen-tation progressed, the frontline central-officeadministrators increased their efforts to spancentral-office site boundaries. At the same time,their demands to participate in more traditionalcentral-office programs increased. The frontlinecentral-office administrators framed these de-mands as opportunities to build political supportfor their school-community partnership supportwork within the central office. However, over time,these demands fueled their adoption of command-and-control orientations counter to their site sup-port charge. Some of the conditions that initiallyhelped their participation in implementation,including their marginal central-office positionsand relatively recent central-office tenures, overtime may have been among the conditions thatfrustrated their later efforts.

Findings from this study stem from a singlealbeit strategic research site and a small sampleof central-office administrators. Furthermore,this case study is not saturated with "successful"boundary spanning but rather elaborations on theparticular challenges central-office administra-tors may face when attempting to take on suchboundary-spanning roles in particular policy con-texts. These features of this study limit its powerfor providing direct lessons for policy. Nonethe-less, this analysis highlights several issues pol-icymakers might productively consider in thecontext of their own work.

First, this study helps to highlight how districtcentral-office administrators can participate in theimplementation of collaborative education policiesin ways that promise to bolster implementation. Inparticular, this study moves beyond the generaldemand that central-office administrators some-how support sites' local collaborative decisionsto reveal the particular information- and politicalmanagement activities that seem fundamentalto these roles. The designation of central-officeadministrators to operate as boundary spanners

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and take on these specific activities may expandthe ability of central offices to begin to meet thesedemands. Although boundary spanners' successalong these dimensions waned over time in thiscase, it is not insignificant that they were able tosustain supportive orientations toward school-community-level decision making at least forsome time period. Given the extent to which suchsupport roles may run counter to central-officeadministration as usual, frontline central-officeadministrators' maintenance of their site-supportorientations even over a short period of timespeaks to their potential to introduce new rolesand routines into a school district central-officebureaucracy.

The waning viability of boundary spannersas levers of change stemmed from limited insti-tutional supports for their new support roles.Although not directly supported empirically here,this case reinforces by negative example a pointemphasized by neo-institutional theories of deci-sion making: the provision of such supports, in-cluding public statements of the importance oftheir work, might infuse boundary spanners' workwith enough value to encourage them to stay thecourse. Such statements might be particularlypowerful if they called on the frontline central-office administrators not simply to support sites butto engage in the specific information and politicalmanagement activities highlighted in theory andelaborated empirically here. Oakland's central-office administrators were not given these specificcharges but rather were expected to invent sitesupport roles on the job. Clearer parameters aroundwhat such school support roles entailed might haveincreased their confidence that they were partic-ipating productively in implementation, even ifexaminations of student learning or other out-comes did not yet bear out that conclusion and iftheir work did not mirror the work of other central-office administrators.

Such public statements about the importanceand more specific nature of their work forthcom-ing from executive-level district leadership andthe school board might be particularly importantin light of contemporary federal and state account-ability and other policies that in many districtsemphasize greater centralized control over schoolsand a laser-like focus on classroom teaching andlearning. Similarly, central offices might also takesteps to increase boundary spanners' sense of jobsecurity, which this study suggested too might


have contributed to their turning to command-and-control orientations.

Other potentially productive institutional sup-ports for central-office administrators includeparticular role models-models that demonstratewhat central-office administrators do day-to-daywhen they collect and use site information tosupport sites' decisions and models that revealmore specifically what political managemententails in this context. Theory suggests that Oak-land's frontline central-office administrators facedprecisely those conditions, such as means-endsambiguity, that would have fueled their search forlegitimate role models. The models most acces-sible to them would have been those that demon-strated command-and-control relationships withschools and their community partners. Opportu-nities for central-office administrators to observeexemplary alternative practice or at least to net-work with other administrators with similar goalsand experiences, as seemed to be the case inOakland, may help infuse their efforts with thelegitimacy necessary for them to maintain theirsite-support orientations and actions.

Ultimately, however, the efforts of the boundaryspanners in this case were curbed by other central-office administrators on whose responsivenesstheir own success depended and who generallywere inclined not to be responsive. This findingamplifies that boundary spanners' realization oftheir roles is inherently tied to their engagementwith other central-office administrators with au-thority to use the information the boundary span-ners collect to develop central-office policies.This case study suggests that the designation ofboundary spanners to support implementationlargely on their own may be a recipe for theirfailure. At the same time, engagement withother central-office administrators in this casefrustrated rather than fueled boundary spanners'work. This tension raises the following questionfor central-office leaders to consider in their ownpractice: How can we better link boundary span-ners to authority structures within the central of-fice necessary for them to affect policy change,while not losing the benefits that seem to comefrom hiring staff into positions with limited tiesto such structures?

Even with closer links between boundary span-ners and such authority structures, political man-agement functions will likely remain a fundamen-tal part of boundary spanners' work, particularly

the marshalling of relevant coalitions within thecentral offices to make productive use of site in-formation over time. Such political functions mayhave become even more essential in contemporarydistricts where high-stakes accountability policieshave introduced a host of policy demands thatconflict fundamentally with the theory of changeunderlying collaborative education policies andthat compete for central-office administrators' at-tention. Policymakers interested in supportingthese types of policies might consider how policycan signal to boundary spanners the importance oftheir building central-office coalitions in supportfor implementation without dampening their ownparticipation in these policies in the process.

This study also suggests several potentially pro-ductive directions for policy analysis, evaluation,and other research. First, this study highlights theimportance of understanding boundary-spanningroles in the process of policy implementation.Future studies of boundary spanners might do wellto feature in-depth examinations of boundaryspanners' decision making over time. The lit-erature on boundary spanning in other sectors,reviewed above, already provides an extensivebody of survey-based research findings that high-light self-reported influences on boundary span-ning at specific points in time. The next generationof research might extend knowledge of boundaryspanners in policy implementation by develop-ing rich, theory-based descriptions of and expla-nations for how their work unfolds across multi-ple years. As this study demonstrates, examiningboundary spanners' experiences at one point intime or only early or late in their central-officetenures would have led to an incomplete storyabout their work contexts and decisions aboutimplementation.

The literature that undergirds this study's the-oretical framework provides important concep-tual anchors for research on boundary spanningin education, including elaborations on boundaryspanners' activities and the conditions that maysupport them. This study suggested that the pol-itical management functions touched on in theframework may involve not only representationbut also coalition building within the centraloffice in support of their work in broad terms(i.e., school-community partnerships), as well asin specific terms (i.e., around particular policy pro-posals). The use of this framework with an elab-orated discussion of its political dimensions might

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provide productive conceptual underpinnings forfuture research.

However, the case of school-community part-nerships in Oakland did not provide opportunitiesto explore all aspects of the framework. For exam-ple, because instances of "use" within the centraloffice were rare, this case did not help elaboratehow boundary spanners may help other central-office administrators use site information throughvarious translation strategies as suggested bytheory. Exploration of these theoretical ideas withother cases may reveal this dimension of boundaryspanners' work in the context of central-officeadministration.

Theory and the Oakland case also suggest thatboundary spanning and the conditions that in-fluence it may vary depending on the extent towhich a school district central office highly val-ues the policies to which the boundary spannersare assigned. Future research might advanceknowledge in this area by examining boundaryspanning in the context of educational policiesconsidered more or less valuable. For example,the boundary spanners in this case may have beenparticularly vulnerable to counterproductive pres-sures in part because the collaborative educationpolicies with which they were charged were mar-ginalized with relative ease because of their re-portedly limited empirical ties to classroom teach-ing and learning. However, other policies (orsimilar policies in other districts) may be viewedas more central to the day-to-day work of morecentral-office administrators and therefore lesseasily avoided than the school-community part-nership initiatives I examined. For example, incontemporary Oakland and other districts, district-wide initiatives, such as school site-based deci-sion making and new, small, autonomous schoolpolicies, may send stronger signals throughoutcentral offices that central-office administra-tors of all stripes should shift their practice toenable implementation. Central-office adminis-trators working as boundary spanners in the con-text of these arguably more mainstream effortsmay face different opportunities and challengesin boundary spanning than those revealed hereand provide important opportunities for advanc-ing implementation knowledge and practice.

Similarly, future research should probe moredeeply into the experiences of central-officeboundary spanners in the context of high-stakesaccountability initiatives ushered into many dis-tricts with the passage of No Child Left Behind in

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the early 2000s. Despite some policy promises toprovide schools with flexibility in return for results,many high-stakes accountability policies promoteor ultimately result in stronger central control overschools in the forms of top-down management ofdecisions and school reconstitution (Finnigan &O'Day, 2003; Mintrop, 2003). Such contempo-rary developments may run counter to the focusof collaborative and similar education policiesand significantly shape what boundary-spanningcentral-office administrators are able and willingto do. Comparative studies throughout districtsoperating under different accountability frame-works might prove particularly generative.

This study suggests by negative example thatfrontline central-office administrators might havefared better as boundary spanners in environmentswith stronger institutional supports, including pro-fessional role models and job security. Accord-ingly, this study raises the question: Are boundaryspanners more effective under these alternativeconditions? Researchers might advance imple-mentation theory and practice by choosing researchsites where those conditions are present.

In summary, this study highlights how individ-uals work between organizations or hierarchicallevels of public bureaucracies to enable policyimplementation and reveals opportunities andchallenges they face in the process. Future policyresearch and practice might further advance thefield by aiming to uncover and understand thecentrality of work on these organizational edges.

Notes'These organizations have included local government

bureaucracies (Bacharach & Aiken, 1977), newspaperpublishing companies (Brass, 1984), small businesses(Dollinger, 1984), hospitals (Fennell & Alexander,1987), universities engaged in labor negotiations (Fried-man & Podolny, 1992), food and computer industries(Geletkanycz & Hambrick, 1997), Fortune 500 compa-nies in consumer packaged good industries (Lysonski,Singer, & Wilemon, 1988), audit firms (Seabright,Levinthal, & Fichman, 1992), research and developmentoutfits (Katz & Tushman, 1979; Keller & Holland, 1975;Tushman, 1977), and health and welfare organizations(Leifer & Huber, 1977).2In the original study, I examined four collaborativeeducation policies. However, because the central-officeadministrators had formal boundary-spanning rolesrelated to three of the four, I focus this subanalysis onthe three.3The group most frequently took up issues related toits own purpose, scope of work, and internal operations.

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AuthorMEREDITH I. HONIG is Assistant Professor,

Educational Leadership and Policy Studies, Collegeof Education, University of Washington, Miller Hall,Box 363600, Seattle, WA 98195-3600; [email protected]. Her areas of specialization includeeducational policy, organizational theory, school dis-tricts, urban education, school-community partner-ships, and school autonomy and innovation.

Manuscript received December 29, 2005Revision received October 11, 2006

Accepted October 13, 2006

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