Download or read book Educational Reform At The State Level The Politics And Problems Of Implementation written by Jean Madsen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-11 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book sets out to describe the personal experiences of a state worker in Missouri as she attempted to implement educational reform programmes in the late 1980's. This was a critical time in America as other states were mandating new regulations to improve the quality of schools. Problems emerged such as lack of resources, bureaucratic red tape, and a dysfunctional administrative structure caused chaos, hampering the ability of the state workers to regulate and administer the new programmes. Some of the superintendents who did not believe in the new programmes resisted by abusing state funds and witholding information so teachers could not participate. This is a timely case study as legislators play a more important role in developing schools and the state will become the responsible agency to implement reform. Madsen's experience verifies the policy implementation literature and cites several new theoretical perspectives on the important role of the state agency in determining the success or failure of mandated reform programmes. The study indicates the need for state agencies to change their perspectives from regulation to service orientation if reform programmes are to succeed in schools.
Download or read book An Education in Politics written by Jesse Rhodes and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2012-05-01 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the early 1990s, the federal role in education-exemplified by the controversial No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB)-has expanded dramatically. Yet states and localities have retained a central role in education policy, leading to a growing struggle for control over the direction of the nation's schools. In An Education in Politics, Jesse H. Rhodes explains the uneven development of federal involvement in education. While supporters of expanded federal involvement enjoyed some success in bringing new ideas to the federal policy agenda, Rhodes argues, they also encountered stiff resistance from proponents of local control. Built atop existing decentralized policies, new federal reforms raised difficult questions about which level of government bore ultimate responsibility for improving schools. Rhodes's argument focuses on the role played by civil rights activists, business leaders, and education experts in promoting the reforms that would be enacted with federal policies such as NCLB. It also underscores the constraints on federal involvement imposed by existing education policies, hostile interest groups, and, above all, the nation's federal system. Indeed, the federal system, which left specific policy formation and implementation to the states and localities, repeatedly frustrated efforts to effect changes: national reforms lost their force as policies passed through iterations at the state, county, and municipal levels. Ironically, state and local resistance only encouraged civil rights activists, business leaders, and their political allies to advocate even more stringent reforms that imposed heavier burdens on state and local governments. Through it all, the nation's education system made only incremental steps toward the goal of providing a quality education for every child.
Download or read book High Stakes Reform written by Kathryn A. McDermott and published by Georgetown University Press. This book was released on 2011-07-13 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Performance accountability has been the dominant trend in education policy reform since the 1970s. State and federal policies set standards for what students should learn; require students to take “high-stakes” tests to measure what they have learned; and then hold students, schools, and school districts accountable for their performance. The goal of these policies is to push public school districts to ensure that all students reach a common threshold of knowledge and skills. High-Stakes Reform analyzes the political processes and historical context that led to the enactment of state-level education accountability policies across the country. It also situates the education accountability movement in the broader context of public administration research, emphasizing the relationships among equity, accountability, and intergovernmental relations. The book then focuses on three in-depth case studies of policy development in Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Connecticut. Kathryn McDermott zeroes in on the most controversial and politically charged forms of state performance accountability sanctions, including graduation tests, direct state intervention in or closing of schools, and state takeovers of school districts. Public debate casts performance accountability as either a cure for the problems of US public education or a destructive mistake. Kathryn McDermott expertly navigates both sides of the debate detailing why particular policies became popular, how the assumptions behind the policies influenced the forms they took, and what practitioners and scholars can learn from the successes and failures of education accountability policies.
Download or read book The Politics of Civic Education written by Eleni M. Mantas-Kourounis and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2024-06-10 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book chronicles the progression of civic education advocacy since the early 2000s. It identifies the main actors that called for civic education reform, describes their motivations and policy platforms, and documents the path taken to capture state policy agendas. It argues that No Child Left Behind incentivized civic education advocates to mobilize a “call to action” to restore emphasis on civics that materialized into national policy reform proposals that successfully captured the agendas of state legislatures and bureaucracies. This book analyzes the implementation and sustainability of these civic education policy reforms by undertaking a comparative case study analysis of school districts in Utah and Connecticut. Through the voices of teachers and district administrators, the book tells the story of what happened when these state policy reforms inspired by national initiatives hit the local level where the rubber meets the road. As ideological debates about schools and democracy unfold across the country, as civic education advocates and proposals proliferate, this book treats civic education not as panacea but as a concrete policy area to be analyzed and understood. It contextualizes the current debate and offers a critical assessment of the most recent, comprehensive state-level civic education policy reform. It argues that while questions linger about what type of civic-inspired educational interventions remains most effective for whom, where, and why, the implementation of such interventions are profoundly impacted by local actors and local politics and that future initiatives should take this dimension into consideration.
Download or read book Despite the Odds written by Merilee S. Grindle and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2004-07-26 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Despite the Odds' examines five examples of education reform in South America, focusing on the political battle to secure reform in the face of powerfully entrenched opposition. It shows how strategic choices by reformers can reshape power equations & undermine institutional biases.
Download or read book The Color of School Reform written by Jeffrey R. Henig and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why is it so difficult to design and implement fundamental educational reform in large city schools in spite of broad popular support for change? How does the politics of race complicate the challenge of building and sustaining coalitions for improving urban schools? These questions have provoked a great deal of theorizing, but this is the first book to explore the issues on the basis of extensive, solid evidence. Here a group of political scientists examines education reform in Atlanta, Baltimore, Detroit, and Washington, D.C., where local governmental authority has passed from white to black leaders. The authors show that black administrative control of big-city school systems has not translated into broad improvements in the quality of public education within black-led cities. Race can be crucial, however, in fostering the broad civic involvement perhaps most needed for school reform. In each city examined, reform efforts often arise but collapse, partly because leaders are unable to craft effective political coalitions that would commit community resources to a concrete policy agenda. What undermines the leadership, according to the authors, is the complex role of race in each city. First, public authority does not guarantee access to private resources, usually still controlled by white economic elites. Second, local authorities must interact with external actors, at the state and national levels, who remain predominantly white. Finally, issues of race divide the African American community itself and often place limits on what leaders can and cannot do. Filled with insightful explanations together with recommendations for policy change, this book is an important component of the debate now being waged among researchers, education activists, and the community as a whole.
Download or read book To Educate a Nation written by Carl F. Kaestle and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eleven stimulating essays--using case studies of major cities and their schools--suggest what might be done to better foster equity and diversity in educating American public schoolchildren, highlighting the complications inherent in today's education system, and providing a framework for grappling with these problems.
Download or read book Reforming the Reform written by Susan L. Moffitt and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2023 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "School reforms are almost always born out of big dreams and a well-meaning desire to change the status quo-the American education system as we know it was the product of such a reform. But between the lawmakers who spearhead these changes and the students whose education is at stake, there are countless teachers, principals, administrators, and local politicians and, correspondingly, countless ways that things can go sideways. In Reforming the Reform, political scientist Susan Moffitt, education scholar Michaela O'Neill, and the late policy and education scholar David K. Cohen take on a wide-ranging examination of the nitty-gritty of school reform. They focus especially on mezzo-level actors: but the countless school superintendents, principals, and teachers figuring out how to apply a new policy in the unique context of their district or school. They conducted more than 250 interviews with mezzo-level administrators in Tennessee and California (chosen as contrasts for their different political makeup and centralization of the education system) between 2016 and 2020, ending their data collection as schools were going virtual at the beginning of the pandemic. They also collected survey data from across the US. Finally, they turned to archival data dating to the earliest American educational reform: the creation of a centralized national education policy. Taken together, this data demonstrates an impressive ambition: to identify common problems that arise when a general policy is implemented in a local context. The framework provides a general explanation for problems facing social policy reforms in federalist systems (including healthcare) and offers pathways forward for education policy in particular"--
Download or read book Educational Change and the Political Process written by Dana L. Mitra and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-06-15 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Educational Change and the Political Process brings together key ideas on both the system of educational policy and the policy process in the United States. It provides students with a broad, methodical understanding of educational policy. No other textbook offers as comprehensive a view of the US educational policy procedure and political systems. Section I discusses the actors and systems that create and implement policy on both the federal and the local level; Section II walks students through the policy process from idea to implementation to evaluation; and Section III delves into three major forces driving the creation of educational policies in the current era—accountability, equity, and market-driven reforms. Each chapter provides case studies, discussion questions, and classroom activities to scaffold learning, as well as a bibliography for further reading to deepen exploration of these topics. This new edition will explore recent Trump-era and post-Trump era US politics and policy changes as well as the politics of race.
Download or read book Achieving High Educational Standards for All written by Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education and published by . This book was released on 2002-04-15 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Council, with help from the US Department of Education, held the Millennium Convention in Washington, DC in September 2000. It gathered educators, researchers, and policy makers at the national, state, and local levels to assess success and failure in educating minority and disadvantaged students since the Brown vs, Board of Education decision nearly a half century before, report on research into the causes of the successes and failures, and review strategies and practices that hold promise for continuing improvements. There is no index. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Download or read book Education in Political Science written by Anja P. Jakobi and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009-09-10 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This pioneering volume is devoted to the analysis of education from the perspective of political science, applying the full range of the discipline’s analytical perspectives and methodological tools. The contributions demonstrate how education policy can be explored systematically from a variety of political science perspectives: comparative politics, public policy analysis and public administration, international relations, and political theory. By applying a governance perspective on education policy, the authors explore the changing institutional settings, new actors’ constellations, horizontal modes of interaction and public-private regulatory mechanisms with respect to the role of the state in this policy field. The volume deals with questions that are not merely concerned with the content or outcomes of education, but it explicitly takes a political science view on how education politics work. Including country case studies from the Americas and across Europe, institutional analyses of education policy in the EU and the WTO/GATS as well as normative reflections on the topic, the volume provides a grand overview on the diversity of issues in education policy. Dealing with a so far neglected field of policy, this book provides a comprehensive and accessible analysis of a rapidly changing topic. Education in Political Science will be of interest to scholars and students of political science, education, sociology and economics.
Download or read book Challenges of Conflicting School Reforms written by Mark Berends and published by Rand Corporation. This book was released on 2002-03-29 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A decade ago, New American Schools (NAS) launched an ambitious effort forwhole-school reform to address the perceived lagging achievement of Americanstudents and the lackluster school reform attempts that have produced so fewmeaningful changes. As a private nonprofit organization, NAS set out tohelp schools and districts significantly raise the achievement of largenumbers of students by offering whole-school designs and design-basedassistance during the implementation process. NAS is currently in thescale-up phase of its effort, and its designs are being widely diffused toschools across the nation. During the 1997_1998 and 1998_1999 school years,RAND assessed the effects of NAS designs on classroom practice and studentachievement in a sample of schools in a high-poverty district. RAND foundthat high-poverty schools often have fragmented and conflicting environmentswith difficult and changing political currents and entrenched unions.Teachers in high-poverty schools tend to face new accountability systems andfluctuating reform agendas. These teachers generally lack sufficient timefor implementing reform efforts, often becoming demoralized and losing theirenthusiasm for the difficult task of improving student performance underdifficult conditions. RAND concluded that high-stakes tests may motivateschools to increase performance and to seek out new curricula andinstructional strategies associated with comprehensive school reforms.However, those same tests may provide disincentives to adopt richer, morein-depth curricula that can succeed in improving the learning opportunitiesof all students, particularly those in high-poverty settings.
Download or read book The Politics of Institutional Reform written by Terry M. Moe and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-21 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Treating Hurricane Katrina as a natural experiment, Moe explores education reform to reveal how political power shapes and stifles efforts to fix failing institutions. Because the post-Katrina reforms proved revolutionary, this book will interest researchers and students in American politics, education, public policy, and theory of political institutions.
Download or read book From Politics to Policy written by Joan M. Matthews and published by Praeger. This book was released on 1991-11-30 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays is a case study of a major educational reform enacted in Texas in 1987: an effort to test all entering college students to gauge their basic skills. The contributors were involved in implementing this reform, which aims to remedy academic deficiencies among college students and to retain students through graduation. The book chronicles how legislators, staff and educators designed the test, program, and necessary policies to support the reform. The essays in this book chronicle the work of legislators, staff, and educators in implementing House Bill 2182, which requires testing for all entering college students and mandates developmental education for students who fail to meet the established criteria. Among the issues discussed are test development, minority concerns, prevention of bias, handicapped needs, and program evaluation. From Politics to Policy presents a model for other states to emulate, and is valuable to students and teachers of education, policy analysis and psychometric testing, as well as to agencies and legislators involved in state-level educational reform.
Download or read book Reforming Special Education written by Richard Weatherley and published by MIT Press (MA). This book was released on 1979 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on Massachusetts' innovative special education reform law, Chapter 766, "Reforming Special Education" traces the complex processes through which an ostensibly universalistic and equitable policy can produce a biased distribution of public benefits favoring affluent clients."Reforming Special Education" examines three Massachusetts school systems and seven schools within those systems to determine whether laws formulated to alter practices in educating children who are deaf, blind, retarded, and physically handicapped actually result in fair and uniform treatment of children with special needs, or whether they just create more work for school personnel.The book discusses individual and community wealth as factors in the allocation of funds. Despite Massachusetts' "equalizing formula," it points out that rich districts often fare better than poor ones because they have the resources and sophistication necessary to challenge funding decisions. The book also reveals that bureaucrats who are charged with carrying out the changes are victimized by new laws which, for lack of resources, they cannot hope to put into effect. Because the street-level bureaucrats, front-line personnel, develop informal means of coping with these problems and with their jobs, they distort the policy they are charged with implementing and become policy makers in their own right.Weatherley concludes that policy initiatives must take into account potential effects on the daily work routines of those charged with implementing them. These findings have dramatic implications for all human service bureaucracies where front-line staff interact with the public--hospitals, police departments, public welfare and employment offices, mental health centers and lower courts. Students of public policy, educators, social workers, or anyone involved in public service employment will find this a scholarly, yet highly readable account of the organizational constraints to bureaucratic reform.
Download or read book Spinning Wheels written by Frederick M. Hess and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 2011-04-01 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Almost everyone agrees that America's urban schools are a mess. But while this agreement has fostered widespread support for aggressive reform, Frederick Hess argues that much of what ails urban education is actually the result of continuous or fragmentary reform. Hess explains that political incentives drive school superintendents to promote reforms--to demonstrate that they are "making a difference." Superintendents have to do this quickly, both because their tenure is usually three years or less and because urban communities are anxious to see educational improvement. However, the nature of urban school districts makes it very difficult to demonstrate concrete short-term improvement. The result is what he terms "policy churn," which distracts teachers and principals from efforts to refine classroom teaching while seldom resulting in successful long-term changes. Hess argues that policymakers have misallocated resources by pursuing the "right" structure or the "best" pedagogy while paying insufficient attention to the more mundane--and more important--questions of how to implement, refine, and sustain a particular approach in their particular district. Hess explains that previous research on high-performing schools suggests that the best schools are characterized by focus and by an ability to develop expertise in specific approaches to teaching and learning. To help educators and policymakers adopt and nurture a focused agenda, he recommends institutional changes that increase the effectiveness of performance outcomes and reduce the incentives to emphasize symbolic reform.
Download or read book State and Local Level Special Education Programs that Work and Federal Barriers to Innovation written by United States. Congress. House. Committee on Education and the Workforce. Subcommittee on Education Reform and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
