Shaping Education Policy

Power and Process

Douglas E. Mitchell, Dorothy Shipps, Robert L. Crowson, Douglas E. Mitchell, Dorothy Shipps, Robert L. Crowson

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317221524
• Auflage: 2
• Thema: Bildung
• Thema: Bildung Allgemein

Shaping Education Policy is a comprehensive overview of education politics and policy, which provides conceptual guideposts for future policy development and strategies for change. Leading scholars explore the interacting social processes and the dynamics of power politics as they intersect with democratic ideals and shape school performance. Chapters cover major themes that have influenced education, including the Civil Rights Movement, federal involvement, the accountability movement, family choice, and development of nationalization and globalization. This edited collection examines how education policy in the United States has evolved over the last several decades and how the resulting policies are affecting schools and the children who attend them. This important book is a necessary resource for understanding the evolution, current status, and possibilities of educational policy and politics.

1

PROGRESSIVISM AND THE EVOLUTION OF EDUCATION POLICY

Douglas E. Mitchell

The latest reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act … is in many ways a U-turn from the current, much maligned No Child Left Behind Act. Under the Every Student Succeeds Act, states would get significant leeway in a wide range of areas.

(Education Week, 12/9/15, p. 17)

The final rules give states more time and flexibility to provide every student with a high quality, well-rounded education while ensuring that states and districts keep the focus on improving outcomes and maintaining civil rights protections for all students.

(U. S. Secretary of Education, John B. King Jr., 11/28/16 Press Release)

Any survey of the landscape of education policy development over the last few decades would likely conclude that “the only thing constant about education policy is change.” Until quite recently, the main theme in education policy development has been a dramatic centralization of policy control at the state and federal levels, with increasing pressure on local districts and individual schools to become more uniform in practice and more compliant with centrally controlled policy goals. But, as the opening epigraphs suggest, the most recent federal reauthorization of the landmark 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act—this time labeled the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA)—signals a change in rhetoric regarding federal control. Though many state and local officials challenged the initial draft of Department of Education regulations for implementation of this law, Education Week, the flagship chronicler of education policy and politics, announced upon the 2015 passage of the new that it was nothing less than a “U-turn” away from the aggressive centralization that had been pursued aggressively since publication of the A Nation at Risk report in 1983. John B. King, Jr., outgoing Secretary of Education in the Obama administration, was less dramatic in his press release language, but echoed a tone of greater decentralization and more flexibility at the federal level.

Control over public education policymaking was not always centralized, of course. At its inception, public education in America was an entirely locally controlled institution with minimal state oversight and almost no federal involvement until the end of World War II. Indeed, Iannaccone (1967) characterizes education as America’s “secular religion” with about the same level of localism as was characteristic of Protestant churches. Beginning about 1950, however, centralization of policy at both state and federal levels began to grow, placing increasing stringent demands on the local school systems. As schools grappled with post-war population movement from agriculture to industrial employment and the influx of large numbers of Baby Boom children, stresses in the system were felt at the state and federal levels. These more centralized policy makers emphasized as primary functions of schooling: support for economic development, social integration of communities, and securing global competitiveness and national security. Family and community centered educational systems were challenged by these centralized policy makers to overcome local variations and create more uniform curricula and more cosmopolitan values. The resulting policy regime brought a mixture of substantial changes on many levels, often with mixed or unexpected results and generally appearing with a surprising suddenness that left local educators harried and resistive. Local restiveness and resistance encouraged central policy makers to “double down,” increasingly demanding rather than supporting changes in local systems.

This era of substantial centralization left its mark in many ways. Among the most obvious are:

• Centralization of control over school finance and governance by the states and the federal government;
• Shifting of decision-making authority from education professionals into the hands of civic governance bodies;
• Transformation of teachers from semi-professional civil service workers into a substantially unionized workforce;
• Insisting that schools meet standards and accept test-based accountability for educational outcomes;
• An expanding set of the protected classes beginning with race and ethnicity; then adding policies addressing poverty, equality for women, limited English speakers, special needs groups and sexual orientation;
• An initially aggressive judicial arbitration of demands for equal educational opportunity followed in the 1970s by a gradual but substantial abandonment of this commitment as the courts became increasingly conservative;
• Increasing insistence that schools rely on evidence or research-based innovations including establishment of a federal “What Works Clearinghouse” to provide certification for research studies meeting acceptable methodological standards;
• Attempts to broaden the school’s mission in the areas of health and education of English language learners; and
• Educational policies fashioned to encourage a “consumer” interest in family choice and a “producer” interest in assuring the attainment of minimum standards of literacy and numeracy.

There were, to be sure, some cautionary voices being raised as this centralization was taking place. Schools, it was noted, lack robust infrastructures, rendering them incapable of keeping pressure for change from disrupting attention to their core mission and equally incapable of implementing with integrity programs and practices needed to successfully address demands for restructuring academic pedagogy or broadening democratic access and participation (see Cohen, Moffitt, & Smith, Chapter 8, this volume). It was also noted that, after a relatively brief period of progress, the adopted reforms did not succeed very well in reaching their central goals of overcoming stark achievement gaps or assuring consistently high academic performance (Barton & Coley, 2010).

In Rhetoric ESSA Marks a Shift Away From Centralized Control

While it is not yet clear how seriously we should take the rhetorical change embodied in the language of ESSA or the more modest turn away from centralized control found in the ESSA regulations, it does appear that centralization of control has reached some sort of end or turning point, suggesting that a different type of substantial but unpredictable policy changes can be expected in the near future. In large part, the decentralizing language and modest movement of ESSA has come in response to political resistance at the state and local levels to its immediate predecessor, the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. It is also, however, a by-product of growing political awareness that the nation has experienced embarrassingly modest increases in overall school achievement and too little progress on the twin goals of producing school-to-school equalization in academic performance and amelioration of the shameful gaps between rich and poor, ethnic majority and minority students, or between English learners and native English speakers. Moreover, we’ve seen signs of “buyer’s remorse” among some of the policy entrepreneurs who designed federal initiatives during the second half of the 20th century (see, e.g., Diane Ravitch’s 2010 book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System). Among political and policy leaders not experiencing buyer’s remorse, we see efforts to find something to explain the limited success of established policy requirements. Blame for weak school performance is directed at a number of different targets including attacks on teacher unionism (notably in Wisconsin and Ohio), reduced confidence in the coherence or forcefulness of the federal policy frameworks, documentation of continued and increasing inter- and intra-institutional segregation of racial, ethnic, and socio-economic groups (see Putnam, 2015; Fiela, 2013), reports of student disengagement from the educational process, charges that the public school curriculum has been denuded of its cultural content in favor of narrow rudimentary skill development (Ravitch, 2010), and insistence on a dramatic overhaul of the curricular standards against which school performance is to be assessed. All these changes, prominent in policy debates since 2010, signal a significant concern with, and potential abandonment of, the centralization and accountability policies that became dominant following release of the A Nation at Risk report in 1983 and were firmly established as state and federal policy by the start of the 21st century.

While there has been a deluge of policy initiatives proposed, debated, adopted, and often abandoned over the last several decades, the pace of change in the actual operation of school organizations and programs has been far less dramatic. Indeed, one of the most intriguing aspects of education policy since World War II is how sharply and surprisingly policy topics and directions changed while school organizations, educational practices, and academic productivity moved only modestly. In Tinkering Toward Utopia, Tyack and Cuban (1995) focus on this disconnect by distinguishing “policy action” from “policy talk.” These authors report that, while policy talk has been dramatic, policy action has proven exceedingly slow because what they call the “grammar of schooling”—agreement that elementary schools should be neighborhood-based and age-graded, with self-contained classrooms occupied by one teacher and 20 to 40 pupils, and that high schools should be departmentally organized with students taking instruction in approximately one-hour blocks divided by subject matter and moving from one classroom to another according to a fixed schedule, with schools at both levels largely insulated from civic governmental controls—was largely established by the start of the 20th century and has not been seriously challenged since. They assert that this basic structure keeps reasserting itself, despite dramatic changes in policy talk, with the result that the established grammar of schooling works to nullify most school reform efforts.

With the passage of ESSA, policy talk has taken a rhetorical turn away from centralized control and rigid accountability. While it may fall victim to existing pressures supporting centralized control, or be defeated by the established grammar of schooling, this rhetorical nod to renewed decentralization of control was unexpected by most policy analysts, even those who were advocating such a move. To understand the conundrum of powerful centralized policy making leading to weak and ephemeral effects, we need to go back in time to the period when the grammar of schooling was initially established.

During the three decades from 1890 to 1920, major reform efforts, in schools and elsewhere, produced substantial institutional and governance changes that were highly visible at the time and which laid the foundations for how public schools are governed today. These reform activities were interrupted by two World Wars and the Great Depression, but emerged again, albeit in with a modified agenda, at mid-century as the nation recovered from World War II. Interpretation of this century-long social movement devoted to reorganizing American political structures and civic beliefs, a social movement typically labeled Progressivism, is properly seen as the working out of a persistent set of political beliefs and strategies of action that tackled different concerns in the two phases. Structural governance reforms were addressed most directly in the 1890 to 1920 era; Progressivism reconstituted as the Civil Rights Movement’s expanded economic, political, and social access to the mainstream national culture and brought about cultural belief changes in the 1960s and 1970s. As argued in the following sections, by 2015 this two-phase pursuit of Progressive reform had largely run its course. Arguably, the stage is now set for a significant rethinking of how education policy can and should be shaped in the decades ahead.

Progressivism 1: Emphasis on Structural Governance Reforms

Core elements of contemporary education policy cannot be fully understood if we start our analysis with events impacting schools today, since the 1980s, or even since the 1950s, although all are common starting points for discussion of the politics of education. Major policy elements have their roots in the political reforms launched a century ago in the contentious political upheavals of the period from 1890 to 1920—the widely recognized “Progressive Era.” During that period, there emerged a complex mixture of reform activities and ideological beliefs that set in motion a profound reshaping of American governance structures and basic social institutions. Interpretation of this period and its lasting impact is complex because Progressivism has meant different things to different interpreters (cf., e.g., Hofstadter, 1955, with the various chapters in Milkis and Mileur, 1999, and Levine, 2000). Any simple summary will find itself challenged by credible competing interpretations of the social history linking the three decades prior to World War I with the contemporary period. For purposes of this chapter, we’ll identify a few key points on which most observers agree. We highlight them because they provide the foundation for both the successes and the failures of education policy formation over the 20th century.

Two key conceptual terms are essential to any interpretation of why Progressivism left its mark: (a) a series of contentious encounters between workers and the new economic entity, the “corporation” that resulted in “Trust-busting,” and other regulations of the biggest corporations, the heads of which were known as “Robber Barons” and (b) a separate series of encounters between the residents and voters of big cities who felt their democratic rights to make policy abrogated by “Machine Politics,” and in which politicians were directed behind the scenes by “party bosses,” who often “bought” votes of their constituents through the schemes of “Ward Healers.” The emergence of corporate trusts was seen by many Progressives as arising primarily from the unregulated growth of corporate power, which was able to exploit workers with non-living wages, swindle consumers with poor quality goods, and shape consumers’ “needs” by restricting their choices through monopolies. Urban machine politics arose primarily from the political and social exploitation of a flood of new immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, drawn to these cities by the exponential growth in wage labor brought about by the big corporations. Corporate power generally outpaced governmental capacity to understand, much less regulate, the “Robber Barons” of the day. Machine politicians simply provided a small amount of relief to the immigrants being exploited by corporations.

To a rising middle class and the new professionals who began to appear at this time, these circumstances were both unfair and dangerous. Immigrants, exposed to Marxism in Europe and increasingly militant, might rebel, upending American unity and its economic progress. If the nationalization of industry followed, both capitalists and the middle class feared it would choke off innovation to the point of economic stagnation and severely damage the nation’s growth. It was also true that the middle class, and even some of the wealthy capitalists, worried that the exorbitant income inequality of the time might lead to a permanent class-based society in which one’s class status was inherited, and opportunity for advancement extremely limited; just what Americans prided themselves for having avoided two centuries earlier.

Before proceeding, however, we must note that the powerful distaste for “Machine Politics” arose primarily from members of professional and middle-class groups and was not a major issue for working class and immigrant groups. Recent interpreters have noted that the poor and the “huddled masses” of immigrants were in many cases actually helped by the Machine Bosses whom they supported. “Constituent service” was common, whether in providing a teaching job for the daughter of a supporter, or a free meal in exchange for a vote. Moreover, despite a strong rhetoric of direct and equalized democratic participation during the Progressive Era, the Progressive reforms that were successfully implemented did not eliminate the struggles of the chronically disenfranchised—the poor, ethnic minorities, new immigrants, women, and others. And, of course, racial equality was not much under consideration by early 20th century Progressives.

Notwithstanding their blinkered perception of political machines, Progressives pursuing reform during the three decades prior to 1920 devised a remarkable array of quite successful reform strategies. Their reforms rested on four key assumptions: (a) Political decisions would serve everyone better if strong executives devised policy options and took responsibility for the execution of adopted policies; (b) Direct election of government officials and popular referenda on policy decisions would overcome the corrupting influence of party bosses and special interests, such as corporations; (c) Programs would work better if the bureaucrats charged with carrying them out were professional rather than patronage employees because professionals would use social science to guide their policy suggestions, which also required that professionals be insulated from political pressure by strong job protection policies; and (d) Corporations would best create wealth and distribute it fairly if they were regulated by the government on behalf of the common good, and not allowed to grow so big that they created a monopoly over any needed product or service.

From these core strategic beliefs came the following types of reforms:

• Civil Service for government workers, tenure for teachers, and legalized unionization for private sector workers (and eventually public sector workers as well);
• An “Imperial Presidency,” City Managers for urban centers, and School Superintendents for school districts with powers mirroring those of corporate executives;
• At-large (rather than ward-based) political constituencies, term limits, and recall options to discipline politicians;
• Off-year and non-partisan civic and educational governance elections to separate them from party influences;
• Referendum and voter initiative policies to allow grassroots policy enactment;
• Enactment of regulations to control the destructive tendencies of laissez-faire capitalism, and taxes to pay for their enforcement;
• Anti-graft conflict of interest laws and freedom of press rules to curtail behind-the-scenes influence of big business on policy making and politicians;
• Adoption of laws requiring public school attendance, forbidding child labor and created curriculum to “Americanize” immigrants; and
• Voter registration reforms, including ending poll taxes and otherwise equalizing the voter franchise for (white) women through the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution but doing little else to facilitate gender equality in political, social, or econo...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: The Plan of This Volume
• 1 Progressivism and the Evolution of Education Policy
• 2 Progressive Conflicts Produced Surprising Policy Changes
• 3 Education Politics and Equity: An Altered Landscape in Efforts to Expand Educational Opportunity
• 4 Civil Rights for Individuals and Groups
• 5 The Post World War II Political Economy of Education Finance
• 6 The Paradox of Curriculum Policy
• 7 The Market for Schooling
• 8 The Influence of Practice on Policy
• 9 Disconnect by Design: College Readiness Efforts Still Hampered by Divided K–12 and Higher Education Systems
• 10 The Political Influence of Philanthropic Organizations
• 11 The New Politics of Educational Reform: Elites, Venues, and the Reframing of Reform
• 12 All Together Now: The Apparent Resurgence of Locally Based Cross-Sector Collaboration
• 13 Governance in Urban School Systems: Redrawing Institutional Boundaries
• 14 What Have We Learned About Shaping Education Policy?
• Notes on Contributors
• Index