Espoused Versus Enacted: Principals' Most Pressing Initial Issues in Responding to the COVID-19 Pandemic

• In Event: Leading Through Crisis: Lessons From School Principals' Leadership During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Purpose

When COVID-19 shut down schools in March 2020, many educators emerged as crisis managers to quickly identify needs and develop strategies to address those needs (Suskin, 2020). School principals acted as “street-level bureaucrats” (Lipsky, 1980)--interpreting and enacting district policies within their communities. Principals’ abilities to enact district policies, however, were oftentimes hampered by more pressing issues they faced on the ground (Lake, 2020). Laying the foundation for this symposium, this paper’s purpose is two-fold: describe the issues that nearly 120 principals from around the U.S. grappled with in the early days of COVID-19; and describe how these leaders acted as crisis managers to address issues.

Framework

Argyris and Schön (1978) offer two ways to describe people’s actions: espoused actions are what people say they do while enacted actions are what people actually do. Schein (1985) applies these concepts to organizations, positing that they may espouse one thing, but, in practice, do another. Public districts and schools can be described similarly. Many U.S. state constitutions espouse that districts and schools provide students with a “basic education” (Campaign for Fiscal Equity v. State of New York, 1995), but numerous studies highlight the variation in the provision of that basic education (Frankenberg & Orfield, 2012; Imoukhuede, 2019). Using these concepts as frames, this paper examines the enacted work of today’s principals as they responded to COVID-19.

Data Sources and Methods

We used a stratified random sampling approach (Patton, 2002) to select 57 of the 120 interviews from the broader study described above. To analyze interview transcripts, we developed an integrated coding scheme of inductive and deductive codes (Bradley et al., 2007). First, we randomly selected three interviews based on urbanicity and employed open coding (Corbin & Strauss, 2008). We met to discuss initial “noticings” (Braun & Clarke, 2013, p. 204) and developed deductive codes to supplement future open coding. Each team member randomly selected an additional 18 interviews stratified by geographic location, urbanicity, and school level. We applied the coding scheme to these 54 interviews and engaged in regular meetings to preserve inter-rater reliability and discuss and refine developing themes (Saldaña, 2009).

Findings

Preliminary findings suggest three prominent issues with which most principals contended: ensuring students, families, and staff felt safe and connected to schools; addressing community social and emotional wellbeing before instruction; and providing clear, consistent communication. Principals reported relatively little early focus on instruction and instead invested energy in distributing essential resources (e.g., food) and communicating with students’ families. Principals’ abilities to address these issues ranged considerably, due to factors that other papers in this symposium discuss.

Significance

This paper’s findings offer rich insights into some of the enacted work of today’s schools and districts, which, in the words of the principals we spoke with, is a different kind of basic education—one focused on basic needs like access, community, and safety. In line with discussions about the purposes of public education, this study highlights how districts and schools operate to educate the whole child and serve their broader communities.

Authors

• Bryan A. VanGronigen, University of Delaware

• Maya Kaul, University of Pennsylvania

• Nicole S. Simon, City University of New York