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Meredith I. Honig Assistant Professor, Educational Leadership & Policy Studies 315D Miller Hall, Box 353600 College of Education University of Washington Seattle, WA 98195-3600 206-616-0679 mihonig@u.washington.edu

Education Publications Courses Curriculum Vitae

Dr. Honig’s research and teaching focus on policy design, policy implementation, and organizational change in cities. She is particularly interested in how public policy making bureaucracies such as school district central offices manage ambiguity, complexity, and innovation. She examines these challenges using a variety of cases including school-community partnerships and new small autonomous schools initiatives.  Her current research projects examine:

• The participation of district central office administrators in the implementation of new small autonomous schools in two urban districts
• The role of community-based youth agencies and intermediary organizations in supporting youths’ opportunities to learn
• Urban district central offices that are reinventing themselves to support districtwide teaching and learning improvement. 

Evidence-based decision-making has been a major focus of these projects—particularly how policymakers incorporate local or practitioner knowledge into their decision-making. 
Dr. Honig's work starts from the premise that multiple institutions beyond schools matter for youth development and learning and that policymaking appropriate to this orientation demands that policymakers adopt non-traditional roles. She focuses on how theories of organizational learning, systems complexity, and managerial innovation help illuminate how policymakers manage (and why they sometimes do not manage) these non-traditional, public-sector demands.
Prior to joining the University of Washington faculty, Meredith was an assistant professor and co-director of the Center for Educational Policy and Leadership at the University of Maryland, College Park. She has worked at the California Department of Education and in other state and local youth-serving agencies.

Education

Ph.D. Stanford University, 2001
B.A. Brown University

Publications

Honig, M.I. & Coburn, C. (2008). Evidence-Based Decision Making in School District Central Offices. Educational Policy, 22(4), 578-608.
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Honig, M.I. (Ed.). (2006). New directions in education policy implementation: Confronting complexity.  Albany, NY: The State University of New York Press.  Book Details»
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Honig, M.I. (2006).  Street-level bureaucracy revisited: Frontline district central office administrators as boundary spanners in education policy implementation.  Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 28(4), 357-383.
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Honig, M.I. & McDonald, M.A. (2005).  From promise to participation: After-school programs through the lens of socio-cultural learning theory.  The Robert Bowne Foundation Occasional Paper Series, #5 Fall.  New York City, NY: The Robert Bowne Foundation.
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Honig, M.I., & Hatch, T.C. (2004). Crafting coherence: How schools strategically manage multiple, external demands. Educational Researcher, 33(8), 16-30. Download pdf»

Honig, M.I. (2004). Where's the 'up' in bottom-up reform. Educational Policy, 18(4), 527-561.
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Honig, M.I. (2004). The new middle management: Intermediary organizations in education policy implementation. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 26(1), 65-87.
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Honig, M.I. (2004).  District central office-community partnerships: From contracts to collaboration to control.  In W. Hoy & C. Miskel (Eds.) Educational administration, policy, and reform: Research and measurement (pp. 59-90).  Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing.

Honig, M.I. (2003). Building policy from practice: District central office administrators’ roles and capacity for implementing collaborative education policy. Educational Administration Quarterly, 39(3), 292-338.
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Honig, M.I. (2003, December). A view from the edge: An interim report on Oakland’s implementation of site-based decision-making and new small autonomous schools.  Report submitted to the Oakland Cross-city Campaign for Urban School Reform.  CEPAL Occasional Paper OP-03-01.  College Park, MD: Center for Education Policy and Leadership, University of Maryland, College Park.
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Honig, M.I. (2002, May).  Oakland’s site-based decision-making and new small autonomous schools: An examination of schools’ progress and central office participation.  Report submitted to the Oakland Cross-city Campaign for Urban School Reform.  CEPAL Occasional Paper OP-02-01.  College Park, MD: Center for Education Policy and Leadership, University of Maryland, College Park.
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Honig, M.I., Kahne, J., & McLaughlin, M.W.  (2001).  School-community connections: Strengthening opportunity to learn and opportunity to teach.  In V. Richardson, (Ed.) Handbook of research on teaching  (4th Ed.) (pp. 998-1028).  Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association. 
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Courses

• EDPLS550C Dynamics of Educational Organizations (Flier   Syllabus)
• EDLPS 575 (formerly EDPLPS 579) Education Policy Implementation (Flier  Syllabus)
• Leadership for Learning Module: Moving Ideas into Action