Toward Dissolving the Institutionalization of “Othering”: Organizational Conditions that Support Shared Responsibility

Abstract

Federal entitlement policies like Title III and the IDEA help grant multilingual learners (MLs) and students with disabilities (SWDs) access to public schools. Yet they have operated in ways that continue to “other” the very student populations they intend to integrate. Drawing on social network surveys and semi-structured interviews collected from one urban district over 18 months, we ask: To what degree do central office leaders share responsibility for instructional decision-making in literacy and math? And, how did organizational conditions disrupt or perpetuate the “othering” of MLs and SWDs among central office staff? Leveraging a conceptual framework of critical social network analysis and institutional theory, we found that, despite efforts to promote joint-work and shared responsibility across central office departments, regulative, normative, and cultural-cognitive dimensions of the institutional environment continued to “other” special populations leaders from content-area leaders and, thus, the core of instructional decision-making.