Examining Practice Across International Policy Contexts: Organizational Roles and Distributed Leadership in the US and Denmark

Scholars of educational leadership, school-based practitioners, and education policy-makers have been focused on the ways in which the members of their respective professions can engage in the work required to improve the school environment for all students. Education researchers and school-based practitioners in several Western countries have been working to examine and make sense of changing policies, here exemplified by the Nordic countries compared with the US (Day, 2015; Höög, Johansson, & Olofsson, 2005; Moos et al., 2008a; Moos et al. 2008b; Moos, Möller, & Johansson, 2004; Moos 2012). Though the contexts in which these latest education policies may be implemented vary by nation and locale, the content and intended outcomes of the policies are similar and run parallel to each other in this current era of globalization, where national policies on education share similar themes and goals across nations (Lingard et al., 2016). The similarities in policy content include an increased focus on accountability for school teachers and leaders, augmented testing programs for students, and changes to the working or professional culture for teachers, leaders and other professions often achieved through contract negotiations or unilateral decisions with local unions. Given the similarity of policy content that countries like Denmark and the United States are implementing in their local schools, scholars are uniquely poised to interpret, analyze and make sense of the impact these similar reform policies are having on their respective contexts. In Denmark, the Ministry of Education introduced a major school reform in Fall 2014. The reform was the latest initiative in more than a decade of national educational policy marked by the increased focus on accountability, international ranking systems and standardized tests prescribed by organizations like the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), as well as an increased awareness of the policy recommendations issued by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The latest reform, in several ways reflects the original content of the 2002 No Child Left Behind (NCLB) policy in the US. First, the reform introduces national goals for improving learning outcomes and social well-being for all students; thereby focusing on learning outcomes and equity on a systems level. In terms of accountability, the Danish school reform increases the focus and importance of the national standardized testing system, which was first implemented in 2010. While the accountability measures applied to schools through students’ test results are not as high stakes as has been the case in the US, the Danish reform does aim to augment accountability for students’ learning outcomes. Specifically, there is an increased demand that school leaders, use performance data to monitor and improve student learning; this applies to both professionals and students’ parents. The reform thus aims to strengthen the community’s trust in public schools and work against parents’ growing tendency to favor private over public schools. Regarding school leaders, the reform has been followed by a greater focus on school leadership, particularly the role of school leaders in improving students’ learning and social well-being. School leaders are thus charged with interpreting the policies that the Ministry of Education has recently issued, and promoting the necessary changes in their school. This policy-driven focus on school leadership aims to realize a scenario in which school principals are expected not only to work closely within the team of formally designated leaders, but also to distribute leadership tasks throughout the school organization to increase efficiency and ownership of policy ideas. The purpose of this study is to examine how the implementation of current reforms impact schools in Denmark and the United States. The study applies a distributed leadership framework which focuses on the relationship among the leader(s), follower(s) and the situation or context (Spillane, Halverson & Diamond, 2004), in the analysis of data from the Comprehensive Assessment of Leadership for Learning (CALL). While CALL was developed for schools in the US context, the implementation of recent reform policies in the Danish school context allows us to examine, compare and contrast the leadership practices and policies through the following research questions: (1) How does distributed leadership practice compare in the US and the Danish context of schooling? (2) How do views on policy and practice vary according to professional roles in specific national and local contexts? (3) To what extent does the sensemaking of professionals through their daily practices of teaching, leadership and learning influence the implementation of complex policy challenges?