Institutional constraints of digitalization in school education within the framework of state educational policy implementation

The subject of the research is the institutional constraints on the implementation of state policy for the digitalization of school education in the Russian Federation. The object of the study is the implementation of state educational policy as a process that passes through management levels – from the federal level to individual educational organizations. The author examines in detail aspects of the topic such as the asymmetry of the policy target contour, where the goal of digital transformation is operationally undefined, while the instruments for achieving it are detailed. The discrepancy between target indicators and the actual state of schools, recorded through control measures, specifically the irrelevance of indicators measuring access to infrastructure rather than the nature of technology use. Special attention is paid to the typology of institutional constraints – normative-terminological, infrastructural-technological, personnel, and structural-pedagogical – and their relation to types of policy implementation based on R. Matland's model. Considering these processes demonstrates that the manageability of policy does not increase with resource expenditure but shifts from the decision-making level to the conditions of policy implementation by individual educational organizations. The methodological basis of the study consists of the model of state policy implementation (ambiguity-conflict model), institutional and resource-organizational approaches, analysis of legal regulatory acts and strategic planning documents, as well as secondary analysis of open data from state audits and public monitoring. The scientific novelty of the research lies in the application of the model of state policy implementation to the field of school digitalization and the systematization of its institutional constraints as failures of the management mechanism, categorized by types of implementation. The work shows that the discrepancy between target indicators and the actual state of schools is due not to insufficient performance but to the structure of the implementation mechanism: infrastructural tools operate in an administrative manner, while the goal of transformation remains symbolic. The main conclusion of the research is the assertion that overcoming this discrepancy requires transforming the goal of digital transformation into operational requirements – indicators that capture the nature of technology use – and establishing accountability across management levels. Meanwhile, existing indicators primarily reflect the availability of necessary infrastructure and access to digital resources rather than how digital technologies are actually used in the educational process.