UC Berkeley

Deregulation advocates have long argued that local educational leaders can make better resource decisions than state and federal policymakers. But viewed from the central state, without regulatory requirements locals will spend too little on underserved students and specific educational reforms. Lacking direct authority over local districts, the California Legislature has frequently used mandates and sanctions, tied to targeted "categorical aid" grant programs, to encourage attentiveness to state reform aims. Categorical aid programs' rules, layered on over time, have produced a range of bureaucratic tasks which have become part of the taken-for-granted fabric of work in the central office, but remain loosely connected to instructional aspects of districts' work. At the same time, tacit cultural conceptions of schooling have come to overlap with some of the educational objectives funded through categorical resources, from providing supplementary dollars for particular kinds of students to reducing class size. Deregulation proponents argue that districts will cut administrative costs, reconsider local fiscal priorities, and deploy resources in ways that boost students' achievement. But little is known about how organizational routines, neoinstitutional conceptions of the district's work, and local political pressures shape how district organizations implement large-scale deregulation. What, then, is the relationship between the institutionalized practices used to manage categorical aid resources inside districts and deregulation?

Conventional politics of education explanations suggest that decentralization expands locally powerful constituents' influence and control over how deregulated resources are used. But neoinstitutional theorists, on the other hand, suggest that pressures from the institutional and technical environment of schooling will shape how deregulation unfolds. Some categorical aid programs, supported by a web of work practices, norms, and cultural expectations, will remain firmly in place while others that are less deeply embedded will be redeployed to address salient institutional and technical pressures.

This study uses a qualitative, comparative case study to investigate how districts responded to 2009 legislation deregulating about 40 state categorical aid programs, commonly referred to as Tier 3 categorical flexibility. At face value, this reform freed up six percent of annual revenues. But it was enacted in the context of mid-year budget cuts and ongoing fiscal austerity. I analyze Tier 3 categorical flexibility implementation in two California districts to investigate the processes used to make decisions about Tier 3 categorical resource reallocation. I examine how these processes connected to tacit conceptions of schooling. I also examine the role of power and constituencies in how discretionary resources came to be distributed. Data include: observations of district budgeting routines; interviews with central office administrators, board members, and stakeholders; and a review of budget materials.

The two study districts reallocated some, but not all, Tier 3 categorical resources. I found that political and cultural pressures influenced how board members and district administrators engaged in resource decision making, and these pressures were constrained and enabled by the formal structure of district positions, relational trust, and the distribution of expertise in district management and operations. These processes did not mirror the rationalized responses of deregulation's theory of action. In particular, I found that districts' resource decision making was shaped by the fiduciary role of the elected school board, a role that has generally been overlooked in research on education policy implementation.