The purpose of this study is to analyze the institutional context of changes in the curriculum of innovative schools through the integrative model of structure-institution-agent according to the viewpoint of new institutionalism. Innovative school-relevant agents have changed the educational curriculum at the structural and institutional levels utilizing polices like the innovation school policy, the principal recruitment system, and the rural school policy, the academic performance evaluation and the 2009 revised curriculum and 2015 revised curriculum, and others. Among them, the innovative school police us a ‘institutional change’ changing the rule of game itself from the viewpoint of historical, institutional contexts, and showed that this institution could give the opportunity of practice to agent. And agents utilized ideas and discourses, and actively ‘interpreted’ various guidelines or regulations of curriculum to make use of them as an opportunity factor for changing the educational curriculum and responded with strategies minimizing the restrict factors.
From the perspective of continuity and change in the educational curriculum system, there are the change factors in institutions due to the structural, institutional and the agent factor such as the path dependency to keep the existing system in the institutional context and complementarity, the structural factor, and the expansion of agent’s role.