Hiring under constraint: How administrators perceive and respond to centralized screening

<b>Abstract: </b>Prior research on school reform implementation demonstrates that school leaders may translate policies into practice in ways that either promote or undermine the policy’s goals. To generate a more in-depth understanding about how principal attitudes towards policies relate to how they implement them, we draw on interviews of 30 school administrators who were experiencing the rollout of a more rigorous and centralized screening protocol for teacher applicants in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). We find that principals’ perceptions of the policy ranged from positive to very negative, and they also varied in how much discretion they exercised in their own subsequent hiring practices. Perhaps counterintuitively, principals with positive perceptions of the district’s protocols enacted the most assertive strategies to recruit teachers. Our findings advance research and theory on how school leaders’ attitudes about policies influence policy implementation.