[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":-1},["ShallowReactive",2],{"doc-seo-590307-105":3,"detail-sidebar-cat-0-en-105":81,"doc-detail-590307-en":130},{"code":4,"msg":5,"data":6},0,"ok",{"site_id":7,"language":8,"slug":9,"title":10,"keywords":11,"description":12,"schema_data":13,"social_meta":74,"head_meta":76,"extra_data":78,"updated_unix":80},105,"en","hiring-under-constraint-how-school-administrators-perceive-and-respond-to-centralized-screening-by-the-district","Hiring Under Constraint - How School Administrators Perceive and Respond to Centralized Screening by the District","","Investigation examines how principal attitudes shape policy implementation in school hiring under a centralized screening regime. Drawing on interviews with 30 school administrators in Los Angeles Unified School District, the study analyzes perceptions of the Multiple Measures Teacher Selection Process and corresponding hiring strategies. Findings show perceptions range from positive to very negative and align with administrators’ discretion, with positively disposed principals using more assertive recruitment tactics. Results advance theory linking professional control to policy enactment.",{"@graph":14,"@context":73},[15,34,56],{"@type":16,"itemListElement":17},"BreadcrumbList",[18,23,27,31],{"item":19,"name":20,"@type":21,"position":22},"https://docshare.wps.com","Home","ListItem",1,{"item":24,"name":25,"@type":21,"position":26},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/","Document",2,{"item":28,"name":29,"@type":21,"position":30},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/research-report/","Research & Report",3,{"item":32,"name":10,"@type":21,"position":33},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/hiring-under-constraint-how-school-administrators-perceive-and-respond-to-centralized-screening-by-the-district/590307/",4,{"url":32,"name":10,"@type":35,"image":36,"author":41,"headline":10,"publisher":44,"fileFormat":47,"inLanguage":8,"description":12,"dateModified":48,"datePublished":49,"encodingFormat":47,"isAccessibleForFree":50,"interactionStatistic":51},"DigitalDocument",{"url":37,"@type":38,"width":39,"height":40},"https://docshare.wps.com/thumbnails/hiring-under-constraint-how-school-administrators-perceive-and-respond-to-centralized-screening-by-the-district/590307.png","ImageObject",300,407,{"name":42,"@type":43},"Pentious","Person",{"url":19,"name":45,"@type":46},"DocShare","Organization","application/pdf","2026-11-07","2026-10-15",true,{"@type":52,"interactionType":53,"userInteractionCount":55},"InteractionCounter",{"@type":54},"ViewAction",6,{"@type":57,"mainEntity":58},"FAQPage",[59,65,69],{"name":60,"@type":61,"acceptedAnswer":62},"What policy and screening system does the study focus on?","Question",{"text":63,"@type":64},"The study focuses on a district-level screening protocol in LAUSD: the Multiple Measures Teacher Selection Process (MMTSP), used to screen applicants before principals make hiring decisions.","Answer",{"name":66,"@type":61,"acceptedAnswer":67},"How do principals’ perceptions affect their hiring strategies?",{"text":68,"@type":64},"Principals’ perceptions vary from positive to very negative, and they also differ in how much discretion they exercise; unexpectedly, principals with positive perceptions enact the most assertive recruitment strategies.",{"name":70,"@type":61,"acceptedAnswer":71},"What research questions does the article address?",{"text":72,"@type":64},"The article asks how principals perceive the centralized screening process, how those perceptions relate to hiring strategies, and how perceptions vary by principal and school characteristics.","https://schema.org",{"og:url":32,"og:type":75,"og:title":10,"og:site_name":45,"og:description":12},"article",{"robots":77,"canonical":32},"index,follow",{"doc_id":79,"site_id":7},590307,1792161187,{"code":4,"msg":82,"data":83},"success",[84,88,92,96,101,105,110,114,119,122,126],{"id":22,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":25,"category_name":85,"show_sort_weight":86,"slug":87},"Story & Novel",90,"story-novel",{"id":26,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":25,"category_name":89,"show_sort_weight":90,"slug":91},"Literature",80,"literature",{"id":33,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":25,"category_name":93,"show_sort_weight":94,"slug":95},"Exam",70,"exam",{"id":97,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":25,"category_name":98,"show_sort_weight":99,"slug":100},5,"Comic",60,"comic",{"id":55,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":25,"category_name":102,"show_sort_weight":103,"slug":104},"Technology",50,"technology",{"id":106,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":25,"category_name":107,"show_sort_weight":108,"slug":109},7,"Healthcare",40,"healthcare",{"id":111,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":25,"category_name":29,"show_sort_weight":112,"slug":113},8,30,"research-report",{"id":115,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":25,"category_name":116,"show_sort_weight":117,"slug":118},9,"Religion & Spirituality",20,"religion-spirituality",{"id":117,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":25,"category_name":120,"show_sort_weight":117,"slug":121},"World Cup","world-cup",{"id":123,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":25,"category_name":124,"show_sort_weight":123,"slug":125},10,"Lifestyle","lifestyle",{"id":127,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":25,"category_name":128,"show_sort_weight":97,"slug":129},19,"General","general",{"code":4,"msg":82,"data":131},{"doc_id":79,"user_id":132,"nickname":42,"user_avatar":133,"doc_module":4,"category_id":111,"category_name":29,"doc_title":10,"doc_description":12,"doc_content":134,"file_id":135,"file_url":136,"file_type":137,"file_size":138,"view_count":55,"is_deleted":4,"is_public":22,"is_downloadable":22,"audit_status":22,"page_count":117,"language":139,"language_code":8,"site_id":7,"html_lang":8,"table_of_contents":140,"faqs":141,"seo_title":142,"seo_description":12,"update_tm":143,"read_time":103,"preview_page_count":4},1374404730887,"https://ap-avatar.wpscdn.com/davatar_6f874abed73319feea01a86fa6f0fab8","AERA Open  \nJanuary-December 2025, Vol. 11, No. 1, pp. 1–20 DOI: 10. 1177/23328584251351552  \nArticle reuse guidelines: [sagepub.com/journals-permissions](sagepub.com/journals-permissions)[ ](sagepub.com/journals-permissions)© The Author(s) 2025. [https://journals.sagepub.com/home/ero](https://journals.sagepub.com/home/ero)  \nHiring Under Constraint: How School Administrators Perceive and Respond to Centralized Screening by the District  \nJennifer L. Nelson  \nMarisol Jimenez  \nPaul Bruno  \nUniversity of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign  \nPrior research on school reform implementation has demonstrated 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 toward policies relate to how they implement them, we applied insights from the sociological theory of professional control. We drew on interviews with 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. We found that principals’perceptions of the policy ranged from positive to very negative, and they also varied in how much discretion they exercisedin 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.  \nKeywords: organization theory/change, sociology, work, leadership, policy, in-depth interviewing  \nIntroduction  \nSchool districts have increasingly adopted systems to increase data use in decision making, including screening systems to capture information about applicant teachers more systematically (Cannata et al., 2017; Engel et al., 2018) . The extent to which these reforms improve teacher hiring is not well understood. Indeed, the effects of these reforms are difficult to predict because school leaders may implement these policies in ways that support or undermine the policies’ goals (Donaldson & Woulfin, 2018) . For example, district-level hiring reforms leave considerable discretion—that is, freedom to make school-level decisions (Lortie, 2009)—for school principals to conduct their own screening and to make final hiring decisions. Principals may maneuver around district-level reforms (Rutledge et al., 2008) or struggle to use district-provided data even when they want to (Grissom et al., 2017), muting the impacts of reforms.  \nWe investigated these issues qualitatively using interviews with 30 school administrators in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) . In 2013, the LAUSD adopted a district-level screening protocol—the Multiple Measures Teacher Selection Process (MMTSP)—intended to be more rigorous and to collect more meaningful information on applicant teachers. Applicants must be screened through this system before school principals can hire them.  \nApplicants are scored on a variety of screening assessmentsand can be disqualified based on their total score or their scores on the individual assessments. Importantly, however, applicants can receive exemptions from minimum score requirements based on the judgments of either district screening specialists or school site principals. This leaves some hiring discretion in the hands of school-level administrators but also substantially reduces their discretion (i.e., autonomy) relative to more decentralized alternatives and the status quo ante. Previous research has shown that applicants’MMTSP scores are meaningfully predictive of teachers’ outcomes, suggesting that the selection process helps to hire effective teachers (Bruno, 2024; Bruno & Strunk, 2019) . However, the lower performance of applicants who received score exemptions may indicate that principal discretion insidestepping the MMTSP is used ","cbCaitps3UieeK3t","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaitps3UieeK3t","pdf",707310,"English","# Introduction\n## Centralized screening reforms and discretion\n## Study context: LAUSD and MMTSP\n# Research questions (RQs)\n## RQ1: perceptions of screening\n## RQ2: link to hiring strategies\n## RQ3: variation by characteristics","[{\"question\":\"What policy and screening system does the study focus on?\",\"answer\":\"The study focuses on a district-level screening protocol in LAUSD: the Multiple Measures Teacher Selection Process (MMTSP), used to screen applicants before principals make hiring decisions.\"},{\"question\":\"How do principals’ perceptions affect their hiring strategies?\",\"answer\":\"Principals’ perceptions vary from positive to very negative, and they also differ in how much discretion they exercise; unexpectedly, principals with positive perceptions enact the most assertive recruitment strategies.\"},{\"question\":\"What research questions does the article address?\",\"answer\":\"The article asks how principals perceive the centralized screening process, how those perceptions relate to hiring strategies, and how perceptions vary by principal and school characteristics.\"}]","Hiring Under Constraint - How School Administrators Perceive and Respond to Centralized Screening by the District | PDF",1792069301]