I’ve only got a decent sample for one state, but here the state decides what its common core standards and teaching methods will be (rewriting the national standards, I suppose to justify someone’s job) then those are filtered through districts (admin, curriculum advisors) which hopefully turn that into something useful for classroom teachers, who are to use what the district provides. Materials, plans, and so on, are typically not among what’s provided.
Districts usually whip their focus or emphasis between tested subjects (fuck untested ones, who cares, obviously) based on whatever did worst in the most recent test results. Districts can implement all kinds of their own practices or frameworks for discipline and classroom management, materials, teaching methods, class scheduling, class structure in a broad sense, and so on. These are often drawn from popular or trendy books from education researchers and consultants. Admin (principals, superintendents) are often not much on systems or game thinking so tend to partially implement whichever of these they’ve decided on (because some part is inconvenient or otherwise not something they want to do) usually in such a way as to cripple them.
Nepotism is common. Small- to medium-scale fraud is common. Administrators will find a way to spin all their decisions as positive to protect their jobs and pad their résumés for the next one, and no one with the power to correct the record will do so because it’d make the district look bad. Principals do similar things as they all want to be superintendents or at least a principal in some district easier & better known than the one they’re in now.
It’s a mess and it’s impressive it works as well as it does.