School (Districts) of Democracy: Collective Stakeholder Engagement under California’s Local Control Funding Formula

In 2013, California’s Local Control Funding Formula devolved significant budget and planning control to school districts. As part of its parent involvement priority and community-centered accountability, administrators and staff must “meaningfully engage stakeholders” in district decisions and describe their processes in publicly available plans. Researchers, advocates, and policymakers agree that LCFF’s stakeholder engagement mandate is “a remarkable experiment in local democracy” (Humphrey and Koppich 2014:243), but high expectations, minimal guidelines, and tight schedules left many implementers and participants across the state unclear about their responsibilities. How do administrative agents and participants collaboratively implement ambiguous participatory governance (PG) reforms? What conditions facilitate and forestall collective democratic participation in education decisions? Researchers’ reliance on cross-sectional case studies leads many analysts to explain “failure” by extrapolating from “successes”; institutionalists to frequently examine reforms as time-in-point changes; and relational theorists to interpret PG as perpetually unsettled. Treating LCFF implementation as a “process-in-the-making” (Baiocchi and Summers 2017) under circumstances not of actors’ own choosing, I uncover how both institutional structures and ongoing relational struggles unevenly shaped stakeholder engagement practices over time. I leverage statewide implementation to test prior theories’ generalizability using computational text analyses and longitudinally explore the causes of, changes in, and consequences from “moments of uncertainty” (Baiocchi and Summers 2017:314) in one school district. Although most school districts concentrated on state compliance, several promising practices emerged in surprising places like racially and ethnically diverse school districts with support from nearby community organizations. In an unlikely school district hailed for its early engagement record, prior policies, democratic structures, and informal recruitment practices gradually stymied equitable participation. Moreover, competing policy approaches translated questions over authority into conflicts over technical procedures and institutional relationships that semi-formalized facilitation positions and procedures, committed institutional liaisons’ heightened capacities, and selective participant withdrawal attenuated. I draw lessons for practitioners’ and policymakers’ considerations as they revise and implement LCFF and future PG reforms