Abstract
School leaders in the United States today are expected to implement an ever-increasing flow of policies enacted by educational authorities at the federal, state, and district levels. These policies are developed under the assumption that their implementation with fidelity will ameliorate the challenges policymakers perceive to exist in schools. However, as noted by Cohen et al. (Am J Educ 113(4):515–548, 2007), “The relations between policy and practice embody a dilemma. Policies aim to solve problems, yet the key problem solvers are those who have the problem” (p. 515). Thus, in order to realize the benefits of educational authorities’ influences on schools, it is necessary to understand better how this dilemma between policy and practice can be resolved. The purpose of this chapter is to describe and analyze the development and implementation of an education policy initiated by state-level educational authorities in one U.S. state. In particular, the aim of this study is to understand how the lack of interaction between education authorities and practitioners around the development and implementation of the policy resulted in conflict. We conclude the chapter with an example of a policy recently developed and implemented with more cooperation and offer recommendations for successful policy implementation.
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Klar, H.W., D’Andrea, K.L., Young, S.D. (2020). South Carolina, USA: Educational Authorities and the Schools: Conflict and Cooperation in South Carolina. In: Ärlestig, H., Johansson, O. (eds) Educational Authorities and the Schools. Educational Governance Research, vol 13. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38759-4_16
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