| This study is an interpretative history of the development of the Missouri School Improvement Program (MSIP). It explores the nature of institutional change by describing the ways that developers of a new system of state regulation mobilized resources and constructed new practices necessary to transform the pre-existing accountability system.; Social change is conceptualized with the framework of Anthony Giddens' Structuration Theory. The forms of social resources constructed are analyzed and connected with structural contexts such as national educational reform movements and the politics of education. The study considers the relationships and understandings MSIP developers established to secure resources the use of information as an organization resource and as a medium of power. MSIP is characterized by formalized relations with extensive informal relationships involved in relatively transparent, intense reviews of detailed, discursively understood information (involving educational resources, processes and performance), with extensive levels of participation and with a future orientation engaging significant stakes for school districts. |
