Editors Philip G. Altbach, Boston College Diana C. Pullin ...

EditorsPhilip G. Altbach, Boston College Diana C. Pullin, Boston College

Associate EditorAna M. Martínez Alemán, Boston College

Managing EditorEdith Hoshino, Boston College

Politics of Education Association Contributing EditorHanne B. Mawhinney, University of Maryland

Former EditorsGail P. Kelly, Founding Editor, 1986-1991

Hugh G. Petrie, Founding Editor, 1986-1998Mwalimu J. Shujaa, 1992-1998

Sheila Slaughter, Founding Editor and Associate Editor, 1988-1996Lois Weis, Founding Editor, 1986-1998

Advisory BoardMichael W. AppleUniversity of WisconsinDavid C. BerlinerArizona State UniversityDavid C. CohenUniversity of MichiganLisa D. DelpitGeorgia State UniversityWilliam A. FirestoneRutgers UniversitySusan FuhrmanUniversity of PennsylvaniaMichael FullanOISE, University of

TorontoGene V. GlassArizona State UniversityCarl A. GrantUniversity of WisconsinMaxine GreeneTeachers CollegeHarry JudgeUniversity of OxfordJoyce E. KingMedgar Evers College,

CUNY

Gloria Ladson-BillingsUniversity of Wisconsin,

MadisonHenry M. LevinTeachers CollegeJames H. LytleSchool District of

PhiladelphiaGeorge F. MadausBoston CollegeDeborah MeierThe Mission Hill School

BostonDavid H. MonkPennsylvania State

UniversityJohn U. OgbuUniversity of California,

Berkeley

Hugh G. PetrieSUNY BuffaloMwalimu J. ShujaaMedgar Evers College,

CUNYTheodore SizerThe Coalition of Essential

Schools

Sheila SlaughterUniversity of ArizonaChristine SleeterCalifornia State University,

Monterey BayMarshall SmithStanford UniversityGary SykesMichigan State UniversityCarlos Alberto TorresUniversity of California,

Los AngelesAdam UrbanskiRochester Teachers

AssociationLois WeisSUNY BuffaloPriscilla WohlstetterUniversity of Southern

CaliforniaKenneth WongUniversity of ChicagoCarol Camp YeakeyUniversity of Virginia

For Corwin Press, Inc.: Jason Dean, Liliane Burke, Joe Cribben,Scott F. Locklear, and Elena Nikitina

Volume 15, Number 5, November 2001

ContentsEducational Governance and Democratic Practice

Michael Mintrom 615

Illuminating the Impact of State Educational PolicyPromoting School Reform on Curriculum andInstruction in Programs of Urban Teacher Preparation

Lois Weiner, Muriel Rand, Alicia Pagano,Roselynn Obi, Althea Hall, and Arlene Bloom 644

California’s Reading Initiative:Constraints on Implementation in Middle and High Schools

Gail L. Sunderman, Marian Amoa, and Tiffany Meyers 674

Living on the Edges of State School-Funding Policies:The Plight of At-Risk, Limited-English-Proficient, and Gifted Children

Bruce D. Baker 699

Reviewing Policy

Will Standards Save Public Education?Michael W. Apple 724

Contributors 730

Acknowledgments 732

Index 734

A Sage Publications CompanyThousand Oaks, California

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EDUCATIONAL POLICY / November 2001MICHAEL MINTROM

Educational Governance andDemocratic Practice

MICHAEL MINTROM

A preoccupation with academic quality has guided contemporary educationreforms in the United States. This is hardly surprising, because political andbusiness elites recognize that well-trained, high-skilled workers are crucial forregional competitiveness. Many parents have also come to see academic cre-dentials as vital to their children’s future well-being; they have thus soughtmore control over their children’s schooling. As these changes have beenoccurring, others have voiced concerns about the state of civic engagementand democratic practice. With questions emerging over how public policiesmight promote democracy, the democratic function of public schooling hasreceived renewed scrutiny. However, as yet, no effort has been made to explorethe commensurability between reform efforts motivated by quality andaccountability concerns and the growing discussion of education for democ-racy. This article begins that task, indicating where trade-offs must be madebetween goals and where goals could be advanced in mutually supportingways.

SCHOLARS AND commentators have documented a serious decline inpolitical participation, civic engagement, and social capital in the UnitedStates in recent years (Putnam, 1995, 2000; Skocpol & Fiorina, 1999). Mean-while, efforts to reform government through a turn to the market have often

AUTHOR’S NOTE: An earlier version of this article was presented at the annual conference ofthe American Political Science Association in Washington, D.C., August 31 to September 3,2000. I wish to thank Jacqui True for sharing her ideas and insights as I developed the manu-script. I also wish to thank Peter Eisinger and Sandra Vergari for their responses to the conferenceversion.

EDUCATIONAL POLICY, Vol. 15 No. 5, November 2001 615-643© 2001 Corwin Press

615

been predicated on the belief that democratic forms of governance and publicbureaucracy reduce operational effectiveness and cause intolerable ineffi-ciencies. Thus, removing aspects of service delivery from the public sectorhas frequently been championed as the key to improved outcomes (Barzelay,1992; Gormley, 1991; Osborne & Gaebler, 1992; Savas, 1987). Might suchaction further erode opportunities for citizens to deliberate about the effectsof (public and private) policies on their individual and collective well-being?Do we face a trade-off between public policy in the service of economic effi-ciency and public policy in the service of democracy? Here, I seek to addressthese questions through an analysis of the interplay between opportunities fordemocratic practice and efforts to change educational governance.

Public schooling has always loomed large in discussions of democracyand how it can be advanced in society. Given this, thinking more about thedemocratic purposes of schools would seem an essential task for those whoare most concerned by reports of declining civic engagement. Recent discus-sions concerning public schooling in the United States and related efforts toengage in significant school reforms add urgency to that task. Increasingly,calls for school reform in the United States have been driven by a fixation oneconomic concerns (Hirsch, 1997; Murnane & Levy, 1996; National Com-mission on Excellence in Education, 1983; Stevenson, 1992). Further, manyproponents of reform have argued that substituting market forms of servicedelivery for centrally coordinated governmental forms would greatlyimprove school quality as well as the accountability of school leaders to par-ents and students (Chubb & Moe, 1990; Finn, Vanourek, & Manno, 2000;Peterson & Hassel, 1998). In this view, schooling is best pursued throughmarket-like delivery systems, and present forms of democratic control aretreated as problematic.

When thinking about educational governance and democratic practice, wemust acknowledge the broader political economy within which educationoccurs. The contemporary United States, perhaps even more than most devel-oped countries, exhibits a corporate capitalist structure that informs andinfuses every aspect of our lives. Given this reality, it is hardly surprising thatpolitical and business elites tend to emphasize the importance of knowledgeand skills for the workplace when they talk about the purposes of publicschooling. Questions of just how schooling might contribute to democraticpractice get short shrift in this context (Plank & Boyd, 1994). For their part,parents who care greatly about the future well-being of their children alsotend to emphasize credentials for the workforce over other educational goals(Laberee, 1997). Meanwhile, as socializing agents, schools must competewith families, peer groups, powerful media, and “the paraphernalia of mar-kets” (March & Olsen, 2000). Often, these other forms of influence do not

616 EDUCATIONAL POLICY / November 2001

exude dispositions or behaviors that would seem compatible with the mainte-nance and growth of a democratic political culture. What space remains forschools to support democratic practice? Although schools are not bastions ofdemocracy, they still represent vital—and, in many ways, unique—sites inwhich “prefigurative forms” of such practice are able to be developed. AsShapiro and Hacker-Cordón (1999, p. 1) have observed: “At best we can per-haps say that the democratic ideal lives in adaptive tension with the politicalrealities in most so-called democracies.” Such observations need not invitedespair. By acknowledging how far our political realities fall short of demo-cratic ideals, we open the way for asking how current institutional settingscould be transformed to positive effect.

Here, I proceed on the premise that a key task for democratic theorists andpolicy practitioners alike is to look for democratic potentials in the everydayworld. Toward this end, my analytical strategy involves scrutinizing recentschool reforms, asking if and how they might serve to enhance democraticpractice. Democratic ideals are normative benchmarks, and, thus, they areunattainable, but moves toward them are not. Of course, such an analyticalstrategy could be viewed as the refuge of a reform apologist, someone alwaysseeking the positive spin while we move further from our ideals. Those whoreject my perspective on democracy and the positive effects that I believedemocracy at its best can produce might have this reaction. However, I con-sider myself neither a reform apologist nor an ideologue. In a society wheremarket forms of organization are pervasive and democratic forms appearincreasingly constrained or under threat, looking for democratic potentials inreform efforts is important, both as an exercise in meaningful theory con-struction and as an approach to real-world policy analysis. In the spirit ofdeliberative democracy, I hope what I have to say here will stimulate discus-sion and will motivate theory-driven, research-intensive analysis of how edu-cational governance shapes democratic practice.

In what follows, I first state why there is merit in thinking beyond theincreasingly prevalent exchange theories of democratic behavior. I thenreview recent discussions of democratic practice in the United States andsuggestions for increasing civic engagement. Afterward, I consider argu-ments that link education with democratic practice. Following this primarilytheoretical discussion, I explore the practical implications for democracy offive school-reform movements currently ascendant in the United States.These are the charter school movement, the voucher movement, homeschooling, state and national standard setting, and top-down takeovers ofpoorly performing schools. By integrating my theoretical discussion withobservations of actual school reforms, I am able to identify both instanceswhere trade-offs must be made between promoting democracy and

MICHAEL MINTROM 617

promoting other social goals and instances where those goals could beadvanced in mutually supporting ways.

BEYOND EXCHANGE PERSPECTIVES

There is no doubt that moneyed interests—including businesses, single-issue public interest groups, professional associations, and unions—enjoyenormous political clout in contemporary politics in the United States. Theinfluence of moneyed interests can be routinely observed at the national,state, and local levels. Often, these interests come to shape the terms of publicdebates about policy change. Campaign finance laws make it all the easier formoneyed interests to dominate contemporary politics, using contributions, orthe promise of them, to entice elected politicians to do their bidding for them.Invoking Olson’s (1965) theory of collective action and Mayhew’s (1974)theory of the connection between policy making and electoral politics, astraightforward explanation for the influence of moneyed interests canreadily be made. Theories of this sort, and other contributions to the rationalchoice literature, constitute what March and Olsen (1995) term exchangeperspectives on democratic governance. These rational choice theoriesassume that interests and resources are fixed and, hence, exogenous to thepolitical process. Actors in politics, like actors in markets, are assumed to bemotivated by self-interest and, thus, democracy is reduced to a form of gover-nance characterized by contending interests continuously striking bargains.In this conception, the role of political discourse is downplayed. Moe (2000),a proponent of rational choice theory and its application to political analysis,has observed that “group preferences are usually rooted in basic interests, andthey cannot be expected to change much as a result of argument, deliberation,or participation. The groups want what they want, and more ‘democracy’willnot change that” (p. 134).

Exchange perspectives on politics offer important insights on processesand outcomes. However, by assuming fixed interests and discounting thevalue of political discourse, such perspectives ultimately offer an impover-ished view of humanity and our developmental potentials. Policy prescrip-tions informed by exchange perspectives treat individuals as self-interestedand such prescriptions themselves have the effect of cultivating narrownotions of self-interest. Public education is valued within the exchange per-spective primarily as a means by which individuals are prepared for engage-ment in market and market-like activity. In this context, democratic citizen-ship is accorded little meaning. The communitarian benefits that derive fromcivic engagement are treated as intangibles and are thus accorded no value.Of course, these exchange perspectives have been met with criticism from a


variety of quarters, yet the views of their proponents have often dominateddiscussions of public policy. There is no good intellectual reason why demo-cratic theorists should cede the terms of policy debates to proponents ofexchange perspectives. There is enormous scope here for conversationamong scholars working out of different paradigms and perspectives. Moreimportant, conversation of this sort, bringing issues of democratic practice tothe fore, could provide renewed intellectual leadership for policy makers andtheir advisors.

Even if we admit that individuals are often motivated by self-interest, weneed not assume that interests and identities are necessarily fixed. By relax-ing this assumption, we can integrate the possibility of socially contingenthuman development into our understandings of politics. For example,Coleman’s (1988) highly influential notion of social capital is predicated onthe assumption that ongoing social interactions generate tangible benefitsthat do not receive a full accounting within a narrow exchange perspective.Recent proposals by political scientists and policy practitioners for how toarrest and reverse the decline of political participation and civic engagementreflect views of the social world that extend well beyond exchange perspec-tives. Likewise, here, I assume broader human motivations and human poten-tials. I believe that carefully designed public policies can shape us as citizensin uplifting ways, that power in politics is socially contingent and, hence, farfrom immutable, and that democracy need not always disappoint. Thus, I findmyself in agreement with Skocpol (1999) when she states that “ideals ofshared citizenship and possibilities for democratic leverage have been com-promised. . . . We may need to find creative ways to repair those links if Amer-ica is to avoid becoming a country of detached spectators rather than fellowdemocratic citizens” (p. 506).

EMBEDDING DEMOCRATIC PRACTICE

Often, scholars and political pundits assume that a nation is democratic inso far as it holds free and fair elections and citizens have more than one politi-cal party to choose among. But this view of democracy is a minimalist one.As such, it fails to recognize the ways that the routine practices of citizens canaffect a nation’s political culture. For citizens living in households wheredecision making occurs in a nondemocratic fashion, or for those who experi-ence the workplace as authoritarian, democratic ideals will appear remoteand, perhaps, not especially important.

In the United States, the dominating influences of money, media, and pro-fessional political operatives pose a serious challenge to democratic practiceeven within the formal spheres of politics. These influences make it all the

MICHAEL MINTROM 619

harder for individual citizens and local community groups to develop a senseof political efficacy. Recognizing the growing disconnect between peopleand politics, a number of scholars have recently begun to think about how thissituation might be rectified. Two insights stemming from this scholarshipseem especially important. First, democratic practice grows, and it grows as afunction of the day-to-day actions of citizens. Landy (1993) has argued that“for most people, good citizenship, like physical fitness, does not come natu-rally. It is a regimen and thus requires adherence to self-imposed, but publiclysanctioned, discipline” (p. 24). Bringing people into politics—having peopleengage with each other in the practice of collective problem solving and deci-sion making—can have transformative effects both with respect to how deci-sions are made and, even more important, with respect to the participants. Apolitical culture that is supportive of democratic ideas, values, and practicescannot be maintained in a top-down fashion. There is a constant need fordemocracy to be reinvigorated, and this reinvigoration must be grounded inthe actions of large numbers of citizens. This is why Dahl (1998) has statedthat “one of the imperative needs of democratic countries is to improve citi-zens’ capacities to engage intelligently in political life” (p. 187).

A second insight concerning the disconnect between people and politics isthat, because public policy alters and shapes the behavior of citizens, it canand should be used to support democracy. This insight reminds us that bothwhat services get provided by government and how they get provided affecthow citizens relate to each other and to government. There is no presupposi-tion here that trade-offs necessarily must be made between advancingdemocracy and advancing other social values. Nonetheless, by highlightingthe relationship between policy design and democracy, Schneider andIngram (1997) make it clear that proposals for policy change can and shouldbe informed by analyses of their effects upon democratic practice. Iftrade-offs are to be made, then their nature and magnitude should be madeexplicit during policy deliberations.

The argument that democracy grows out of the day-to-day practices of cit-izens and that public policy can shape democratic practice has an importantimplication. That is, to be successful, efforts to embed democratic practicemust reflect coordinated action between the government and its citizens. Inthe face of remote, unsupportive government, citizen action alone will do lit-tle to advance democratic practice. Meanwhile, government efforts to engagecitizens will have little effect if citizens are disinterested, alienated, and cyni-cal. Thinking along these lines has led Weir and Ganz (1997) to suggest thatpeople may have been pulling back from politics not because they lack anyintrinsic interest in civic engagement but because they face so few


opportunities for effective participation. To avert a self-reinforcing cycle ofunresponsive government and citizen alienation, policy makers need to findways to energize the interest and resourcefulness of citizens. When donewell, this can have positive outcomes for all concerned. As Weir and Ganzhave observed: “It is the combination of interest and moral purpose that candraw us into deliberative engagement with others through which we begin todiscover new common interests even while constructing the capacity to act onthem” (p. 166).

Scholars have delineated a range of strategies that governments can use tofoster closer connections between citizens and government. For example, thecontributors to Ingram and Rathgeb-Smith’s (1993) volume Public Policy forDemocracy suggest a variety of ways that public policies can serve toempower, enlighten, and engage citizens so that they might more fully con-tribute to the practice of government for the people, of the people, by the peo-ple. Typically, these strategies focus on the local, grassroots level, whereefforts to build citizen capacity are likely to be most effective. There is no rea-son why efforts to embed democratic practice could not be spurred by gov-ernment entities at the state and federal level, although it is likely that suchefforts would have to be undertaken in close consultation with local officials.Here, I list four key strategies.

First, democratic practice might be advanced through the use of publicprograms and public organizations that enjoy a high degree of local auton-omy and that have a relatively low ratio of users to providers. Designed in thisway, programs and organizations can provide more opportunities for citizenvoice and for broader group deliberation over local policy choices. Govern-ment entities of this sort can serve as schools for democracy. Valelly (1993)has noted the following:

To the extent that people govern on a small scale, the possibilities grow for the transferof skills engendered in one area to another, small-scale context, or to involvement inelectoral politics and the associational life of groups or movements with nationalgoals. (p. 258)

Second, democratic practice might be advanced by giving citizens greaterchoice among service providers. In contrast to a monopoly situation, whenservice providers must compete for clients, they face strong incentives toencourage client feedback on what they are doing. Whereas greater clientchoice serves to transform government organizations into market-like orga-nizations, the leaders of those organizations actually stand to benefit fromfinding ways to transform their relations with clients so that the organizations

MICHAEL MINTROM 621

themselves become community forming. As in any market situation, serviceproviders in a competitive environment benefit from developing ongoingrelationships with clients. The upshot is that such organizations mightachieve a competitive edge and enjoy a loyal client base through welcomingvoice and creating opportunities for deliberative democracy concerning pol-icy directions (Mintrom, 1998).

Third, democratic practice might be advanced through government effortsto facilitate network ties among local organizations. Efforts to promotereconnected citizenship ultimately must involve building ties across individ-uals and organizations that are multiple and variegated. Clearly, this is a diffi-cult challenge and one that might only be met once citizens have developed asense of personal and political efficacy through close involvement in particu-lar organizations in specific local settings. Skocpol (1999) argues that civicrevitalization is best facilitated when ways are found “to weave connectionsamong institutions and places, classes and cultural groups” (p. 504). Theseefforts have to begin somewhere. Several successful national citizen advo-cacy associations have built their fund-raising and lobbying capacity throughcultivating strong grassroots organizations. Observing these associations,such as chambers of commerce and some church groups, Weir and Ganz(1997) have noted how the local organizations offer opportunities for theirmembers to participate in programs, join in deliberation, and select leadersfor themselves. These authors have also noted the ways that some nationalassociations carefully build network ties across local organizations. Theseties serve as conduits for disseminating ideas, generating training opportuni-ties, and passing on practical know-how and lessons learned from one localsite to another. Government efforts could mirror these to positive effect.

Finally, democratic practice might be advanced through the use of publicinformation campaigns (Weiss, 1993), the dissemination of database infor-mation (Valelly, 1993), and the development of organizational report cards(Gormley & Weimer, 1999). So long as the information made available inthese ways is truthful and of sufficiently high quality, it can serve to empowercitizens, giving them access to information that would otherwise remain inthe hands of providers. (These means of information collection and dissemi-nation also can be potentially of enormous assistance to providers, givingthem a sense of the relative quality of their services.) The availability ofgood-quality information to clients can increase their ability to hold provid-ers accountable for results. With respect to advancing democratic practice,new information presented in these ways can provide the starting point fordiscussion and for collective efforts to find appropriate—and possiblyunique—solutions to local problems.


The four strategies listed here do not constitute an exhaustive set ofapproaches that governments might use to advance democratic practice. Fur-ther, depending on the policy area under consideration, some strategies mightbe more fruitfully pursued in some contexts than in others. There may betimes when, pursued in combination, these strategies serve to be mutuallyreinforcing. In the remainder of this article, my interest lies in scrutinizinghow contemporary school reforms might serve either to promote or to inhibitdemocratic practice. My analysis is informed by an understanding of thesegeneral strategies for citizen empowerment and the embedding of democraticpractice. However, of course, it is shaped in ways that acknowledge theunique features of education as a social activity. As a necessary precursor tomy focus on these contemporary school reforms, I next review the distinctconnections that exist between democratic practice and the social practice ofeducating the young.

EDUCATION AND DEMOCRACY

Stretching back to the work of the classical political theorists, a long tradi-tion of scholarship has recognized the critical role education plays in the con-struction and maintenance of political community. Education of the youngpresents both extraordinary challenges and extraordinary opportunities forgovernmental regimes. Undertaken with sufficient perspicacity, formalschooling can serve to advance the values of a regime and maintain its contin-ued viability. Recently, Dahl (1998) has argued that

the prospects for stable democracy in a country are improved if its citizens and leadersstrongly support democratic ideas, values, and practices. The most reliable supportcomes when these beliefs and predispositions are embedded in the country’s cultureand are transmitted, in large part, from one generation to the next. (p. 157)

In a democracy, the primary function of public schooling is to impart a demo-cratic education to the young. The content and the form of democratic educa-tion cannot be meaningfully separated. For example, providing excellenteducation for democracy to some groups while systematically denying it toothers makes a mockery of democratic ideals. Likewise, seeking to provide ademocratic education through organizations deliberately placed at arm’slength from democratic control must be an ultimately self-defeating exercise.In each case, day-to-day practices serve to contradict the democratic valuesbeing imparted in the schools. Dewey (1916) encapsulated the basic require-ments of democratic education when he stated the following:

MICHAEL MINTROM 623

A society which makes provision for participation in its good of all its members onequal terms and which secures flexible readjustment of its institutions through inter-action of the different forms of associated life is in so far democratic. Such a societymust have a type of education which gives individuals a personal interest in socialrelationships and control, and the habits of mind which secure social change withoutintroducing disorder. (p. 99)

Gutmann (1987) has provided a comprehensive analysis of the necessarycomponents of democratic education in contemporary society, doing so withreference to education in the United States. Based on Gutmann’s analysis,five requirements for democratic education can be stated.

First, democratic education must teach mutual respect and the value ofworking through differences in deliberation. Gutmann (1987) argues that “astate makes choices possible by teaching its future citizens respect for oppos-ing points of view and ways of life” (p. 30). Gutmann also argues thatwell-run schools serve to model in students some of the basic skills and vir-tues that are needed for them to become democratic citizens. Of course, forcitizens to be able to contribute equally to processes of deliberation, all musthave acquired at least some threshold of knowledge and skills. This thresholdGutmann describes as possession of “the intellectual skills and the informa-tion that enable [citizens] to think about democratic politics and to developtheir deliberative skills and their knowledge through practical experience”(p. 147). The threshold for effective political participation is likely to rise asthe average level and quality of education in society increases. Gutmannargues that schooling in the United States often fails to educate students to alevel adequate for effective engagement in politics. This failure has conse-quences for democratic practice and, thus, for the life chances of citizens asthey are mediated by government policies (p. 148).

Second, democratic education should be nonrepressive and nondiscrimi-natory. Gutmann (1987) argues that nonrepressive schooling occurs when thestate and any group within it is prevented from using education to restrictrational deliberation of competing conceptions of the good life and the goodsociety (p. 44). Nondiscrimination (or nonexclusion) can be thought of as thedistributional counterpart to nonrepression. Gutmann’s principle of nondis-crimination states that nobody should be excluded from receiving a demo-cratic education. “A society is undemocratic—it cannot engage in conscioussocial reproduction—if it restricts rational deliberation or excludes someeducable citizens from an adequate education” (p. 95).

Third, funding for democratic education should be distributed by govern-ment. Distribution through complete reliance on the market should beavoided because that would mean children with poor or uninterested families


would not receive it (Gutmann, 1987, p. 127). However, in turning to the gov-ernment for funding, it is critical that the rules of allocation be carefullydetermined. Gutmann warns that distribution should not occur through“unconstrained democratic decision.” Distribution through a political pro-cess that relies entirely upon majority rule can lead to the children ofdisfavored minorities being relegated to the worst schools. According toGutmann, although funding for democratic education should be allocated sothat every citizen receives a threshold level of quality schooling, full equal-ization of funding is neither necessary nor desirable. Inevitably, differentfamilies and different communities will reasonably display differences in theexpenditure priority that they accord to education relative to other goods.Gutmann contends that “inequalities in the distribution of educational goodscan be justified if, but only if, they do not deprive any child of the ability toparticipate effectively in the democratic process” (p. 136).

Fourth, decision making over schooling and the content of that schoolingshould be jointly undertaken by states, families, and educators. Gutmann(1987) notes that children are neither the property of their parents nor theproperty of the state (p. 33). Given this, families and the state should eachhave input into determining the development of moral character in children.However, it is also important that professional educators be allowed to makejudgments on this matter that are independent from the judgments of parentsand the state. Such independence increases the chances that democratic edu-cation integrates the value of critical deliberation among good lives. Accord-ing to Gutmann:

A democratic state of education recognizes that educational authority must be sharedamong parents, citizens, and professional educators even though such sharing doesnot guarantee that power will be wedded to knowledge, that parents can successfullypass their prejudices on to their children, or that education will be neutral among com-peting conceptions of the good life. (p. 42)

There is another reason why states and families should cede some educa-tional authority to professional educators. When efforts to control the contentof classroom teaching effectively repress reasonable challenges to dominantpolitical perspectives, this serves to undercut the democratic ideal of mutualrespect for alternative viewpoints (p. 77).

Finally, local autonomy for schools must be balanced against the pursuitof national educational goals. This is especially important in a mass society.In the face of unlimited local control, efforts to teach essential democraticvalues and to cultivate a common culture can be seriously undermined, espe-cially when localities have the tendency to display bigotry of various kinds.

MICHAEL MINTROM 625

Nonetheless, the imposition of federal and state standards holds the danger ofseriously constraining opportunities for citizens to deliberate over the kindsof educational policies they wish their local schools to follow. According toGutmann (1987):

Local school boards must retain substantial control and freedom to exercise their dis-cretion over education within their school districts, subject to the strictures of demo-cratic accountability. So construed, local implementation of both centrally and locallydetermined educational standards makes diversity of public schooling possible with-out destroying the moral unity of a democratic society. (p. 75)

As we might hope, Gutmann’s (1987) requirements for democratic educa-tion do not contradict—and, indeed, can be seen as complementing—thestrategies for embedding democratic practice introduced in the previous sec-tion of this article. Aside from this, it seems reasonable to conclude that manyaspects of contemporary public schooling in the United States should beviewed in a positive light by those who voice concern about democracy’sfuture. There are, however, also reasons for concern. Woefully inadequatefunding of some public schools means that too often the state is not ensuringthat every child receives a level of education consistent with the democraticthreshold. In addition, high levels of bureaucracy, especially in big-cityschool districts, serve to minimize opportunities for parents and other con-cerned citizens to influence decisions over the education being provided inlocal schools. Then again, arguments for placing more control of educationalchoices in the hands of parents raise the issue of how the common goals ofdemocratic education might be pursued if the state cedes too much power tofamilies. Given our interest in democratic practice and democratic potentials,how should we judge the recent flurry of efforts to reform educational gover-nance? In the remainder of this article, I seek to answer that question througha democracy audit of five contemporary reform movements.

REFORMING EDUCATIONAL GOVERNANCE

Recent efforts to change educational governance in the United States havetaken two distinct forms that, in some ways, seem to contradict one another.The reforms in the first set have been centrifugal in nature, serving to furtherdecentralize decision making and giving more discretion to schools them-selves as well as to parents. Reforms in the second set have been more cen-tripetal. Here, states and other central decision-making entities have soughtto bring their power to bear directly on schools in ways that are somewhat


unusual for a system that has traditionally vested much decision-makingpower at the local level. Here, I discuss three centrifugal reform movements(charter schools, voucher plans, and home schooling) and two centripetalmovements (standard setting and top-down takeovers of schools). In eachcase, after providing a brief description of each type of reform, I assess itsdemocratic potentials. I then consider the ways in which each reform poseschallenges to democratic ideals. To the extent that a given reform threatens toundermine democratic practice, we must then consider what benefits—withrespect to the attainment of other desirable social values—have been soughtat the cost of pursuing democratic values.

Charter Schools

Charter schools represent an important addition to the set of public poli-cies that have been developed over the past decade or so to infuse an elementof school choice into the delivery of public education. Charter schools haveneither a guaranteed budget nor a guaranteed student population. Rather, theymust find ways to attract and maintain a viable student body, and funding isbased upon the number of students in attendance. Charter schools typicallyoperate as legally and fiscally autonomous organizations. They operatewithin the public school system under contracts, or charters. The charters arenegotiated between organizers and sponsors. The organizers may be teach-ers, parents, or others from the public or private sectors. The sponsors may belocal school boards, state school boards, or other public authorities, such asstate universities. The organizers manage the schools, and the sponsors—orauthorizing agencies—monitor compliance with the charter. The charterscontain provisions regarding issues such as the curriculum, performancemeasures, the school governance structure, and management and financialplans. The first charter school law was adopted by Minnesota in 1991. ByJune 2001, a total of 36 states, along with Washington, D.C., had charterschool laws, and more than 1,700 charter schools were operating across theUnites States. Nathan (1996) and Finn et al. (2000) provide useful overviewsof the charter school movement. Charter school laws differ from state to state,so that making generalizations across all charter schools is unwise. Nonethe-less, some general tendencies are apparent, and it is those that I focus on here.

The advent of charter schools brings with it several important possibilitiesfor embedding democratic practice. Most charter schools are relatively smallin size. This means that the educators and parents associated with each schoolare able to feel a greater level of efficacy with respect to having input intodecisions and making a difference on how things happen. Charter schoolsalso benefit from being schools of choice because everybody associated with

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the school must first have made a positive choice to be there, and no individu-als in the school can be said to be there because they face no other options.The major benefit of choice in this instance is that it increases the likelihoodthat members of the school community, because they have selected into it,can readily develop a shared sense of identity.

The democratic potential of charter schools is advanced in other waysbecause of the fact of parental choice. School choice implies that, at base,charter schools are market organizations. As such, leaders of the schoolsmust be concerned to avoid parents and students leaving their schools,because if too many leave, the schools will eventually have to close. Charterschool leaders face incentives to reduce the threat of exit by encouraging par-ents and students to express their concerns about the school in ways thatensure that the parents and students feel they have been given a fair hearingand treated with respect. The upshot of this situation is that charter schoolshold the potential to be important sites for the development of forms of delib-erative democracy, where all concerned provide reasoned explanations fortheir ideas and actions. (In another article associated with this project on edu-cational governance and democratic practice, I have made this argument inmore depth and reported empirical support for it. See Mintrom, in press.)

The advent of charter schools does pose some potential threats to demo-cratic practice, although all of these could be mitigated through appropriatepolicy changes. First, in some states—Michigan is a prominent exam-ple—charter schools are increasingly being managed by for-profit compa-nies, referred to as education management organizations. Some of these man-agement companies, such as Edison Schools Incorporated, require that all theschools they manage are run according to a fairly rigid blueprint. This limitsthe amount of autonomy that decision makers at the local sites can exercisewith respect to key issues like the curriculum, instructional procedures, andthe general ethos of the school. Because the viability of large managementcompanies is not dependent on the viability of any given school, companydecision makers can make choices about school policies and be immune tothe consequences. This would be impossible in a charter school that is notpart of a franchise. To the extent that management companies with rigid blue-prints become more prominent in the management of charter schools, thedemocratic potentials of this movement could be lost.

A second threat to democracy posed by charter schools arises through thepossibility that school leaders might find subtle ways to screen the studentswho attend their schools. This threat to democracy arises because of thegreater degree of autonomy that charter schools enjoy compared with tradi-tional public schools. A third threat is posed by the greater weight that thecharter school model places on accountability to parents as opposed to


accountability to the broader public. Given the greater influence that parentsenjoy over charter schools, it is possible that some schools will become sopreoccupied by local interests and the specific concerns of parents that theywill neglect to teach essential democratic values and to support the cultiva-tion of a common national culture.

Voucher Plans

Politically, voucher plans are extraordinarily controversial, and, for thisreason, policy entrepreneurs have often promoted charter schools as a step-ping stone to this more radical form of policy change (Mintrom, 2000).Voucher plans currently in place in the United States fall into two groups:public programs and private programs. Of these, private plans are far morenumerous.

Public voucher programs have been designed to provide opportunities forchildren in public schools to attend private schools, with their tuition beingcovered by the state. Advocates for children from poor, inner-city, minorityfamilies have proposed voucher programs as a desperate means to escapeineffective local schools. At the same time, Republican legislators, businessleaders, conservative foundations, and church groups have advocatedvoucher programs for a variety of reasons. These range from the charitabledesire to help poor children receive high-quality education to the strategicgoal of introducing greater competition in the delivery of publicly fundededucation, thus setting the scene for private companies to run public schools.Three public voucher programs currently exist in the United States. Theintroduction of a public voucher program in Milwaukee in 1990 and anotherin Cleveland in 1996 occurred in both cases only after pitched battles in thestate legislatures in which the respective state governors became activelyinvolved. Witte (2000) provides a comprehensive analysis of the Milwaukeeprogram; Greene, Howell, and Peterson (1998) provide a preliminary analy-sis of the Cleveland program. In Florida, a plan introduced in 1998 has beendesigned to provide opportunities for students in schools deemed to be failingto use state-funded vouchers to attend other schools, which might include pri-vate, religious schools. So far, no students have been granted vouchers,because schools deemed to be failing are given a year to improve their perfor-mance, and, until now, all “failing” schools have been able to make requiredimprovements.

Private voucher plans represent a distinctive effort to promote schoolchoice. The first of these plans was established in 1991 by an insurance com-pany executive, J. Patrick Rooney. Frustrated by the lack of action occurringin the Indiana state legislature to promote school choice, Rooney decided toestablish his own charitable voucher plan. Under this plan, children from

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poor families are provided with subsidies to attend private schools of theirchoice, including religious schools. Rooney saw this as a strategy that wouldprovide immediate relief to poor families seeking to place their children inbetter schools. However, he also saw it as a way to alter the nature of theschool choice debate in his state and to develop evidence of the workability ofbroader, publicly funded voucher plans. Rooney’s plan has now been suc-cessfully emulated by private charities in many cities across the UnitedStates. Moe (1995) and Peterson and Hassel (1998) bring together a numberof analyses of private voucher plans.

Conceivably, if all public schools and some number of private schoolsconverted to charter schools, then the public school system would operateessentially as a voucher system. Under such a voucher-type scenario, thedemocratic potentials and the threats posed to democracy would be identicalto those associated with the advent of charter schools. It is possible, therefore,to consider voucher plans as holding the potential to advance democraticpractice. Typically, however, voucher plans are viewed as posing majorthreats to the democratic practice currently associated with public schools.Although opponents of voucher plans express concern over this prospect,voucher advocates see things differently. According to Moe (2000), the dem-ocratic control of public schools is the source of many of their current diffi-culties, and he advocates removing schools as much as possible from demo-cratic influence. For Moe, voucher plans offer the hope of a politics-freeschooling nirvana, where governments provide the funding, parents do thechoosing, and schools compete to deliver the kind of education that familiesmost desire.

Unconstrained voucher plans pose a threat to democratic practice for anumber of reasons. First, they give up large amounts of decision-makingauthority to parents and to other private interests. Voucher plans are designedon the presumption that parents should have considerably more say over theways that their children are educated than should the state. This presumption,however, ignores the point made by Gutmann (1987) and others that childrenare neither the property of their parents nor the property of the state. Demo-cratic education requires that parents, the state, and professional educators allhave appropriate input into establishing the nature of the education that chil-dren will receive. Ceding too much control to parents limits opportunities forcitizens to deliberate over the nature of the education that the young shouldreceive. This makes it that much harder for the state to ensure that democraticpractice will be advanced in society. Under voucher plans, it is also possiblethat parents will make concerted efforts to (further) segregate their childrenfrom others through their choices of schools. This clearly reduces the poten-tial for schools to offer democratic education. As Gutmann has observed:


[A democratic] state makes choices possible by teaching its future citizens respect foropposing points of view and ways of life. It makes choice meaningful by equippingchildren with the intellectual skills necessary to evaluate ways of life different fromthat of their parents. (p. 30)

In practice, public voucher plans are constrained in a variety of ways bystate regulations. For example, serious efforts are made to avoid racial segre-gation through vouchers. Private voucher plans are not constrained in theseways. However, because the voucher advocates administering them have sofar sought to use the academic results of voucher recipients to demonstratethe merits of voucher plans, many private plans use lottery systems to ran-domly allocate their scholarships. Some private voucher plans have evenoffered scholarships to all children in particular geographical areas who seekthem. (For example, these plans have operated in parts of Albany, New York,and parts of San Antonio, Texas.) However, this broad-based approach doesnot eliminate the prospect of vouchers being used in the service of segrega-tion, and it raises an even more serious concern: Private voucher plans for alleligible students in a given locale represent instances of private policies—theactions of wealthy individuals or foundations—that have very public conse-quences. These efforts that have public consequences are based on policymaking removed from democratic influence. Private policies that have sig-nificant public consequences serve to directly challenge democratically con-trolled efforts to educate the young. Large-scale private voucher plans shouldtherefore be viewed as deliberate efforts to circumvent and erode democraticpractice. Greater critical scrutiny of such plans is urgently needed for thisreason.

Home Schooling

Home schooling occurs when families decide to opt out of sending theirchildren to public or private schools and to conduct lessons themselvesinstead. Home schooling was a relatively common phenomenon in the earlydays of the American republic, when organized schooling was less prevalent,a large proportion of the population was rurally located, and transportationwas difficult. From the end of the nineteenth century onwards, the practice ofhome schooling declined. However, beginning in the 1970s, increasing num-bers of parents have chosen to engage in home schooling (Kirschner, 1991).Often, these efforts have been motivated by religious convictions or byextreme political commitments. Since the early 1980s, members of homeschooling movements across the United States have managed to securechanges to state laws that have made it relatively easier for parents to lawfullykeep their children at home and conduct their own schooling (Cibulka, 1991).

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During the 1990s, advocates of home schooling turned their attention tosecuring governmental support for their efforts. Thus, several states now pro-vide tax credits to families engaging in home schooling of their children. InCalifornia, the state’s charter school law supports the establishment of on-line schools that are designed to give educational support to home schoolingfamilies. As might be expected, it is difficult to estimate the number of chil-dren who are being home schooled across the United States, but estimateshover around one million and are growing (Archer, 1999; Lines, 1998).

Home schooling might be thought of as the most extreme form of schoolchoice. In many cases, home schooling parents believe that through theirefforts they can provide their children with an education that is more morallyappropriate than what they would receive in the local public schools. Othersbelieve that they can exert more academic press on their children than wouldbe the case in the local public schools. Still other parents engage in homeschooling because they fear that the local public schools offer too many risksfrom the perspective of personal safety. As Hill (2000) has observed, “Homeschooling is part of a broad movement in which private groups and individu-als are learning how to provide services that once were left to public bureau-cracies” (p. 21). There is nothing wrong with parents wanting to influence themoral focus, academic standards, and safety of the environments in whichtheir children are schooled. In fact, the argument could be made that educa-tional outcomes would be improved if more parents were to display such con-cern and interest in the schooling of their children (Apple, 2000). However,when energies toward such ends are channeled into home schooling, theyserve to maximize private benefits and reduce the opportunities for citizens todeliberate over collective goals and to work together to secure them.

From the perspective of embedding democratic practice, efforts to homeschool children would appear to have nothing to commend it. In fact, homeschooling can be seen as posing threats to democratic education and the dem-ocratic practice that such education is intended to advance. Home schoolingis based on the supposition that children are the property of their parents and,hence, that parents are free to encourage their children to embrace their con-ception of the good life and reject others. Even if home schooling parentsadhered to democratic principles and were intent on inculcating them in theirchildren, this practice would still pose a threat to democratic practice. Homeschoolers deliberately turn their backs to significant aspects of the broadercommunity. In so doing, they exhibit intolerance for the views and practicesof others. Thus, they do not offer their children an environment in which theymight develop mutual respect for the views of others with whom they mightdisagree. In addition, home schooling serves to promote segregation because


it does not allow children to socialize with others from different back-grounds. This does not equip them for engaging in democratic practice in apluralist society.

Aside from depriving children of the opportunity to receive a democraticeducation, home schooling serves to erode the prospects for democratic prac-tice. The isolationist mentality accompanying home schooling efforts canonly be viewed as harmful for democracy. This mentality presumes that noth-ing good can come from engagement with the broader world or from con-fronting and seeking to understand ideas and practices that are unfamiliar anddisconcerting. Tolerance of such behavior is problematic in a democracy,and, if unchecked, such behavior can do damage to the broader fabric of soci-ety. In addition, home schooling is typically facilitated through a patriarchalfamily structure where the mother manages the private sphere, part of whichinvolves teaching the children. However, because mothers in patriarchal fam-ilies of this sort are essentially removed from participation in public life, theytend to construct their interests with respect to the private needs of the family.This provides them with little basis on which to train their children in the hab-its of democratic citizenship.

Based on what I have said so far, there would appear to be little prospectfor democratic potential to be found in the home schooling movement. Per-haps, however, things need not be viewed so negatively. If we give due recog-nition to the energy and commitment that home schooling parents bring toorganizing the education of their children, then it is possible to begin thinkingabout how that energy and commitment might be rechanneled into support-ing more publicly oriented educational endeavors. Many home schoolingparents have created networks among themselves, and many also engage inthe “bartering” of services based on pedagogical expertise. Thus, determinedefforts to achieve independence from organized, public education do not nec-essarily lead to isolationism (Hill, 2000). Further, it is noteworthy thatincreasing numbers of instances can be found where home schooling parentsare turning to organized educational entities, like traditional public schoolsand charter schools, to help them in their efforts to educate their children.Given this, perhaps there are ways that aspects of educational organizationand funding could be managed so that home schooling parents are givenencouragement to take a more publicly oriented turn in their practices. Thecharter schools model, because it is so flexible, represents one potentialmeans by which the more negative isolationist tendencies of home schoolerscould be mitigated. Aspects of traditional public education in the UnitedStates do not serve democracy well, yet we do not argue that the enterpriseshould be abandoned. We consider ways that it might be improved so that

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democratic practice could be further embedded in society. By the same logic,the fact of one million children being home schooled in this country need notbe seen as immutable or even especially discouraging. The challenge is todiscover means by which to change the situation in ways that are mutuallybeneficial for all concerned.

Standard Setting

Following the 1983 publication of A Nation at Risk, the report of theNational Commission on Excellence in Education, considerable effort wentinto the development of state and national educational standards. Althoughefforts to devise national standards drew much political attention, they didnot result in the creation of broad curricular guidelines or national tests(Massell & Kirst, 1994; Porter, 1994). By contrast, at the state level, majorchanges were made. Today, many states have detailed curriculum guidelinesin place, and they use annual testing programs to assess how well studentsand schools are measuring up against specified content standards (Firestone,Bader, Massell, & Rosenblum, 1992; Fuhrman & Elmore, 1995). Typically,state curriculum guidelines leave a considerable degree of room for localeducational authorities to decide how best to teach required material. Ofcourse, this assumes that there are sufficient resources at the local level foractors to decide how to most appropriately mesh state requirements withclassroom practice. Sometimes, this is not the case (Spillane, 1999). Mean-while, the use of standardized tests to assess student and school performancecan serve to undercut efforts by magnet schools and charter schools to deviseand offer unique curricular content. As state test results are given increasingweight for accountability purposes, schools face strong incentives to raisetheir average test performance by teaching to the test, screening out studentswho they believe will do badly on the tests, or just encouraging poorly per-forming students to be elsewhere on test days.

The trend toward states requiring all public schools to teach a commoncurriculum and to administer standardized tests can be viewed as a positivedevelopment with respect to democratic practice. These efforts serve toremind local educational decision makers that the children in their schoolsare citizens of a broader political economy and, as such, they should beacquiring the knowledge and skills necessary to participate effectively withinit. As the general level of education required to be a full participant in theeconomy and in the broader society increases, it is essential that some mecha-nism be available for higher level governments to ensure that local schoolsare bringing children up to at least a minimum academic threshold. Standardsetting and performance testing are well suited to this task.


Centralized analysis and dissemination of the test results can also contrib-ute to local democratic practice. Information concerning how well schoolsare performing relative to others offers parents and other interested citizensvital knowledge. Armed with this knowledge, it is much easier for citizens toask pointed questions about school performance. For example, several statesnow report district test scores in ways that break them down by race. Awarethat African American students appear to be systematically underperformingon test scores, even in schools with good reputations, parents in places likeNyack, New York, have called for the matter to be addressed (Zernike, 2000).Knowledge of relative test results can also help educators to identify thestrengths and weaknesses of their schools and, thus, to determine how best toallocate resources to make improvements. Used most effectively, knowledgeof school test results can provide a starting point for local stakeholders todeliberate over problems and to work together to develop appropriate solu-tions. As evidence of such promising practice, Wohlstetter and Smith (2000,p. 508) report the efforts of “school families” in Los Angeles to conduct train-ing workshops on how to use test data to diagnose student needs. In this par-ticular case, the school families and other efforts to establish social networksacross schools have been supported by the Annenberg Challenge, a nationalreform initiative aimed at improving student performance in inner-city publicschools and funded by former U.S. Ambassador Walter Annenberg. Effortsof this sort have the potential to support the emergence of deliberative democ-racy, and many school leaders could benefit from finding ways to encouragefact-based discourse among stakeholders concerning student performanceand how it might be improved. Such collective efforts could also provide afoundation from which advocacy efforts could be launched on behalf of theschools involved. For example, if students in schools with limited funding arefound to consistently underperform on standardized tests, then this wouldsupport arguments for greater equalization of funding through state efforts.

State standards and performance tests have been introduced primarilybecause political and business elites recognize that well-trained, high-skilledworkers are crucial for regional competitiveness. However, this policy movecan also be seen as holding positive implications for democratic practice.There need not be—and probably is not—a trade-off here between economicgoals and democratic goals. Such a trade-off would arise if curriculum guide-lines became so prescriptive as to rule out local input. This does not seem tohave occurred so far. A trade-off would also arise if test results became socentral to holding schools accountable that teaching to the tests became per-vasive. This problem could most readily arise in schools that have beenplaced on notice as failing. In a culture where parents care greatly (and for

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good reason) about the academic credentials of their children, it is possiblethat some charter schools—being more subject to parental control and influ-ence than traditional public schools—could emphasize test performance overother equally important educational goals.

Top-Down Takeovers

Since 1989, when New Jersey assumed control of the Jersey City schools,23 states have passed laws that permit state officials or city mayors to exertspecial authority over school districts that are deemed to be “academicallybankrupt.” Such action has been taken in less than half of the states with suchlaws in place. Typically, when action is taken, it occurs only after a period inwhich school districts have been placed on notice of potential takeover.Actual takeovers of school districts usually involve replacing all or at leastsome of the leading board members and administrators in a district. Often,the takeover threat allows state officials to influence district decisions behindthe scenes rather than through taking control directly (Sandham, 1999).When takeovers do occur, states make various structural changes in theschool district. For example, in a recent takeover effort in Pennsylvania, thestate opened opportunities for the districts concerned to improve their aca-demic performance through the creation of charter schools and throughbringing private management companies in to run other schools (Johnston,2000). As mentioned earlier, in Florida, state takeover provisions have beendesigned so that students would be eligible for vouchers to attend privateschools if the troubled district schools do not rapidly improve their academicperformance.

State legislation allowing state and mayoral takeovers of districts andschools has been motivated by concerns over the quality of the educationbeing provided in public schools. Like state standards and performance tests,this policy move represents another aspect of efforts to increase public schoolaccountability. Both initiatives emerge out of the growing realization of justhow crucial a well-educated population can be for supporting positive eco-nomic outcomes. From the perspective of democratic practice, top-downtakeovers could be viewed as antidemocratic. After all, they involve a higherauthority stepping in to take power away from local actors who have beenlegitimately put in place through democratic processes. In addition, the racialdynamics of takeovers deserve serious attention. According to Hunter andSwann (1999), almost all takeover efforts have been supported by Whitemajority state legislatures, yet the districts involved have had predominantlyminority student populations. Eisinger (2000) notes that the mayoral take-over of the Detroit School District occurred in a racially charged atmosphere.Moreover, Eisinger states that


Black opponents of the Detroit takeover were quick to point out that the predomi-nantly white legislature in Lansing never contemplated removing the school boards inseveral rural white school districts in Michigan, even though the test scores in thoseplaces were typically lower than in Detroit. Indeed, the only other communitiesbesides Detroit that were considered for takeovers in Michigan have been otherlargely black cities in the state. (p. 14)

Although the racial dynamics of top-down takeovers could readily under-cut the potential benefits of such efforts, they do not negate the point that thetop-down actions of state legislatures and city mayors may well have much tocommend them. It has long been acknowledged that local democratic pro-cesses can sometimes produce outcomes that are morally reprehensible. Rec-ognizing that point, top-down takeovers of failing schools can be viewed asinstances when state officials, who are constitutionally responsible for ensur-ing adequate education of all citizens, decide that too much power has beenceded to individuals at the local level who are not fulfilling theirresponsibilities.

Top-down takeovers of failing schools can be seen as positive for demo-cratic practice if they lead to better educational outcomes in the schools con-cerned. Used appropriately, this strategy could serve to improve the quality ofthe education on offer in the relevant schools (Kirst & Bulkley, 2000). Todate, little effort has been made to assess the academic consequences of take-overs. Beyond this, top-down takeovers can also create opportunities formore democratic practice to occur at the local level. This possibility is ofmost interest here. For example, the efforts by the Illinois legislature torestructure the governance of Chicago’s schools in 1988 have been praisedfor the ways that they have expanded local democratic participation.

The Chicago reforms, although not involving a state takeover of theschools, were intended to break through the bureaucracy that had grownaround the provision of public schooling in that city. Recognizing thatbureaucracy, not democracy, was the problem to be addressed, legislatorscreated a plan that has devolved governance to the level of every individualschool, where school councils made up of the principal and parent, teacher,and community representatives are given broad powers to engage inschool-based management. “Democratic localism” in Chicago has been seenas opening new opportunities for concerned stakeholders to deliberate overschool problems and to develop creative ways to address them (Bryk,Kerbow, & Rollow, 1997). Takeover efforts elsewhere that make use of char-ter schools could also potentially have a positive effect for promoting demo-cratic practice. In contrast, other efforts that seek to reduce community input

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and to use for-profit companies to manage the public schools could erodeopportunities for local democracy. As Landy (1993) has avowed,

Given the transcendent importance of the schools in the process of civic education, itwould be a mistake to respond to this disheartening situation by abandoning the prin-ciple of public education itself. It is not too late for parents and neighbors to reclaimtheir local schools and insist on governing them according to their lights. (pp. 38-39)

Conducted appropriately—which means, among other things, being sensi-tive to the racial dynamics at play—top-down takeovers of failing schoolscan allow this to happen.

Emerging Issues

This analysis of five recent school reform efforts suggests two major con-clusions. First, moves toward decentralization that place more control ofschools at the local level and in the hands of parents are not necessarily posi-tive developments from the perspective of embedding democratic practice.Perhaps we should not find this surprising, because some reform efforts,especially efforts to introduce voucher plans, have been predicated on theassumption that the problems associated with public schools often stem fromdemocratic governance and the bureaucratization associated with it. Yet it iscritical to observe that democratic governance need not necessarily engenderbureaucracy. Careful efforts to design local institutions can support the maxi-mization of democratic practice and the simultaneous minimization ofbureaucracy, as the reform of Chicago’s public schools has indicated. Fur-ther, schools-within-schools and charter school initiatives can support demo-cratic practice and reduce bureaucracy. School reformers should not assumethat a turn to the market is the only viable response to problems caused byoverly bureaucratized local schools. Indeed, it should also be observed that,as they relentlessly pursue economies of scale, over time, many private-sector organizations grow increasingly bureaucratic in character.

A second conclusion to be drawn from this analysis is that reforms thatappear to be centralizing control over schools might well serve to promotelocal democratic practice. The introduction of state standards and testingefforts has generated information that can be of potential benefit to those whoseek to organize local responses to problems in their schools. Additionally,top-down takeovers of schools hold the potential to clear new spaces for dem-ocratic practice to emerge.


EDUCATIONAL GOVERNANCE AND DEMOCRATIC PRACTICE

Public schools represent key sites for the development of democratic prac-tice. Aside from presenting unique opportunities for states to ensure thatdemocratic values are passed on to the young and that members of future gen-erations receive the knowledge and skills necessary to act as efficacious citi-zens, schools represent rare spaces in a highly individualized, marketizedsociety for citizens to engage with each other to solve common problems. Weall benefit from each other’s higher level of education hence, all citizens—not just parents—should face incentives and opportunities to discuss andcontribute to public education. In making these points, we need not ignore theobvious fact that democratic forms of governance are too often dominated bypowerful interests and that this makes it all the harder for ordinary citizens tomake a difference in the political process. However, greater democraticengagement must start somewhere; ideally, we would find it in families, theworkplace, and other associations. At present, public schools remain our besthope for increasing democratic potentials.

Rather than being guided by concerns about democratic practice, contem-porary efforts to change educational governance in the United States havebeen guided by a preoccupation with academic quality. This is hardly surpris-ing, because political and business elites recognize that well-trained,high-skilled workers are crucial for regional competitiveness. Increasingnumbers of parents also see academic credentials as the key to their children’sfuture well-being, and many have sought more control over their children’sschooling. As these economically motivated changes in educational gover-nance have proliferated, voices have been raised in other arenas concerningthe state of civic engagement and democratic practice. With questions com-ing to the fore over how public policies might promote democracy, the demo-cratic function of public schooling has inevitably received renewed scrutiny.To add to that scrutiny, I have explored in this article the commensurabilitybetween reform efforts motivated by quality and accountability concerns andthe growing discussion of education for democracy.

The message that emerges here calls both for optimism and for vigilance:optimism because public schools can be used in many ways to advancedemocracy, vigilance because some of the loudest and most influential voicesin recent debates about the future of public schooling in the United Stateshave claimed that democratic control of schools is the source of their perfor-mance problems. Such claims should be challenged for two reasons. First,they are based on an impoverished conception of humanity and of people’sabilities to work together for common purposes. Second, they use words likechoice and freedom in the service of public policies that would actually limit

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democratic practice. The historical record shows that choice and freedom forall groups in society is most likely to be secured when members of thesegroups have opportunities to voice their concerns and to control outcomesthrough participation in political decision making. Democracy, althoughoften frustrating, has shown itself to be a more consistently effective form ofgovernance for securing choice and freedom than has any other form of gov-ernance. Rather than adopt policies that erode democratic practice, govern-ments should be seeking ways to advance it. This certainly does not mean thatthe status quo in educational governance should always be defended. Whenreform efforts are being discussed, however, special attention should be givento how those efforts might serve to further embed democratic practice. Manyscholars, especially economists, have felt quite at ease advocating schoolreforms predicated on the achievement of efficiency gains, and those advo-cates have achieved considerable success in getting the ear of policy makers.In light of this, heightened scholarly advocacy of democracy as a social prac-tice would undoubtedly be refreshing. I suggest that such advocacy is neces-sary. The challenge, then, is to look for democratic potentials within designsfor the reform of educational governance or within emerging practices. Theprospects here for creative theorizing and creative practice are many, and,done well, work of this sort could eventually prompt major shifts in how peo-ple think about education as a social activity.

REFERENCES

Apple, M. W. (2000). The cultural politics of home schooling. Peabody Journal of Education,75, 256-271.

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EDUCATIONAL POLICY / November 2001LOIS WEINER et al.

Illuminating the Impact of State EducationalPolicy Promoting School Reform on

Curriculum and Instruction in Programsof Urban Teacher Preparation

LOIS WEINER, MURIEL RAND,ALICIA PAGANO, ROSELYNN OBI,

ALTHEA HALL, and ARLENE BLOOM

Using their experiences as teacher educators as a starting point, the authorsidentify and describe the most salient manifestations of state policy in theirwork with prospective urban teachers. Analysis of six vignettes demonstrateshow experiences of teacher educators might be interpreted to support com-monly accepted tenets of systemic reform: for instance, alignment of institu-tional mandates. However, another reading of the narratives demonstrates thatsystemic reform as it has become operationalized adversely affects urbanteacher preparation in several important areas because the centrality of teach-ers’thinking and beliefs is ignored, and power differentials among education’sconstituencies have been reinforced.

HOW DO state educational policies promoting school reform influence thework of teacher educators preparing teachers for urban schools? How havenational policy talk and organizational strategies promoting “systemicreform” in schools serving low-income students (Ball, Cohen, Peterson, &

AUTHORS’ NOTE: Research for this article was made possible by a grant from the SpencerFoundation to Lois Weiner, as part of a larger project. The data presented, the statements made,and the views expressed are solely the responsibility of the authors.


644

Wilson, 1994) influenced the work of teacher educators preparing teachersfor these schools and districts?

Using our experiences as teacher educators in a teaching university as astarting point, we, as faculty members in our state’s only program of teacherpreparation with an explicitly urban mission, address these questions. In sixvignettes, we describe the most salient manifestations of state policy in ourwork with prospective teachers. The vignettes serve as a starting point foranalysis of the ways state policies intended to improve schools influence cur-riculum and instruction in the program of teacher preparation. Discussionincludes broader implications of our findings for researchers, policy makers,and teacher educators.

RATIONALE AND IMPORTANCE OF TOPIC

Historically, issues of curriculum and instruction in urban teacher prepa-ration have been examined apart from federal and state educational policiespromoting school improvement (Weiner, 1993). However, the “third wave”focus on systemic reform of schools (Lusi, 1997) has called for attention tothe interrelationship between state policies to improve student achievementin urban schools, teachers’ work in schools, their professional development,and alterations in teacher preparation (Brown, 1992; Darling-Hammond,1998; Darling-Hammond & Sclan, 1996). Several concepts that are promi-nent in the move for systemic reform of schools have significant implicationsfor the ways that programs of teacher education conceptualize and organizetheir course work and field experiences, but, curiously, analyses by teachereducators of the way reforms associated with the third wave are being playedout in classrooms—theirs and the ones in which their students teach—are fre-quently absent from the policy discussion, as are the voices of parents fromcommunities that have not been well served by schools (Carr, 1997; Foster,1997). Carr’s review of the literature on systemic change points to a seriousdisparity between the way systemic change is defined and the description ofactual change. Most often, current power systems are left unchanged, alongwith people’s roles and the distribution of power. Moreover, systemicreform’s actual impact may contrast sharply with its expressed intention ofbringing higher order teaching and learning to all schools (Cohen, 1995b;Darling-Hammond & McLaughlin, 1995). Bullough, Burbank, Gess-Newsome,Kauchak, and Kennedy (1998) concluded that in Utah and Florida, the driveto link classroom teaching more closely to higher standards has led to identi-fying dozens of behaviors teachers are supposed to exhibit in a 40-minute les-son, with teaching practice “translated into trivial performance-based behav-iors” (p. 18). Studies of classrooms in restructured schools illuminate that

LOIS WEINER et al. 645

surface-level compliance with the kind of instruction called for by advocatesof systemic reform masks the continuation of old organizational policies indistricts, as well as of traditional teaching behaviors in classrooms (Elmore,Peterson, & McCarthey, 1996; Spillane, 1998).

This article explores the influence of state educational policies on bothuniversity and public school classrooms, as observed by teacher educationfaculty. The study relies on a variant of “backward mapping,” a tool advo-cated by Elmore (1979-1980). Backward mapping as a strategy for imple-mentation of research and policy making differs from forward mapping in itsfocus on behavior at the last stage of implementation, where the need for pol-icy is created. Rather than identifying the most salient state policies inadvance and searching for their effects, our study reverses this process: Weidentify critical incidents in our work with students that we believe have beeninfluenced by state policy, then we identify the salient policies and analyzethe connections. We bring to backward mapping a perspective that differsfrom that of most policy analysts in research universities who evaluate imple-mentation, for reasons that are germane to the study’s usefulness. A key dif-ference is the nature of teacher preparation in the nation’s research universi-ties, as opposed to preservice teacher preparation in teaching colleges anduniversities, institutions that became liberal arts colleges after jettisoningtheir identity as normal schools (Herbst, 1989). The difference betweenteacher preparation in the nation’s major research universities and formernormal schools and state teachers colleges remains a critical but rarelyacknowledged factor in reform (Christopher, 1999). The “divide” that existsin support for research between university researchers and classroom teach-ers (Zeichner, 1995) is similarly present between faculty within research uni-versities who work with doctoral students and those who prepare teachers(Maher, 1999), as well as between faculty in research universities and institu-tions that are not (Howey, Arends, Galluzzo, Yarger, & Zimpher, 1994).

We suggest that the perspective brought to policy evaluation by teachereducators is essential to understanding how and why reforms operate. Inaddition to our work in schools, our perspective is informed by particularorganizational aspects of the program at our urban university. Though thedepartment is large enough to house separate components of elementary, sec-ondary, and early childhood teacher preparation, as well as administration, itis small enough so that faculty teach in more than one area. Hence, we do notshare many of the characteristics of teacher education faculty in the researchuniversity’s school of education, particularly separation by discipline andisolation from life in classrooms and schools (The Holmes Group, 1995;Tom, 1998). Our work with prospective and practicing teachers as well as


with school administrators has generated a “common language for talking toeach other” (Elmore et al., 1996, “Introduction”). We suggest that studies byteacher education faculty who view classrooms close-up open a different andimportant window onto the understanding of policy implementation. Suchdata and insights about the effects of reforms can aid policy analysts inresearch universities in their own learning about systemic reform (Wilson,Peterson, Ball, & Cohen, 1996).

Our perspective is also informed by the explicit urban mission of the pro-gram and the university. Most urban teacher preparation consists of smallprojects within much larger programs, temporary ventures funded by “soft”money (Haberman, 1996), which gives them an experimental character. Incontrast, an orientation to urban schools is embedded in the university. Edu-cation faculty are recruited and hired with the clear understanding that theirwork will take them into urban schools. Unlike the teacher educators in theRATE VII study of teacher preparation in the urban context, we have no“apprehensions” about working in inner-city schools (Howey et al., 1994,p. 5). Thus, our view of how state educational policy has influenced instruc-tion has been informed by a long-standing involvement with urban schoolsand urban teacher preparation.

THE CONTEXT OF THE STUDY

Six vignettes address different aspects of curriculum and instruction in theteacher preparation program in Urban University, a public teaching univer-sity in a populous state in the northeast United States (all names of individu-als, communities, and schools have been changed in this study). The univer-sity’s composition in 1998-1999 was approximately 41% EuropeanAmerican, 27% Hispanic, 21% African American, and 10% Asian (figuresare from the dean’s oral report to College of Education, presented in the fall of1999). Both Urban University and its College of Education have an explicitlyurban mission. Its undergraduate programs in elementary and early child-hood education have received National Commission on Accreditation inTeacher Education (NCATE) accreditation, but a continuing problem andsource of concern has been many graduates’low scores on the general knowl-edge portion of the Praxis/National Teacher Examination (NTE), which isneeded for certification. Many students attend part-time because they mustwork to support themselves and family. In 1998-1999, approximately 25 stu-dents completed the program for secondary school teaching, 25 for earlychildhood, and 50 for elementary school teaching.


The university is located in the state’s urban corridor, but it serves a stu-dent population drawn from the state’s two largest cities, Ferristown andUrbanville, as well as small suburbs and rural areas. A good many students inteacher education in Urban University resemble the profile of the typical pro-spective teacher nationally: female, European American, young, monolin-gual (Zimpher, 1989). However, a study that the faculty conducted of studentmotivations for choosing teaching as a career found that a majority of stu-dents in the program had grown up and had been educated in urban areas(Weiner, Obi, Pagano, & Swearingen, 1993). In addition, mirroring theimmigrant population of Urbanville and the adjacent communities, a signifi-cant number of students in the program are bilingual speakers of English andSpanish or languages like Creole, Tagalog, Arabic, or Urdu.

Five of the state’s 28 poorest school districts are located in the samecounty as Urban University, and Urban University itself is located across thestreet from the Urbanville high school that is most racially segregated. In aninitiative that has had political support from both political parties, the stategovernment took control of both the Ferristown and Urbanville school sys-tems, attributing the schools’ low scores on the state competency test andhigh drop-out rates to endemic mismanagement (Corcoran & Scovronick,1998). At the time of the study, Urbanville schools had been in receivershipfor a decade; control had just been assumed of Ferristown schools.

State educational policy has been influenced by aggressive legal advocacyby proponents of equalizing school funding, and the courts have ruled favor-ably on a series of vignettes that have forced the state legislature to providemore money for the state’s 28 poorest school districts, among themFerristown and Urbanville (Corcoran & Scovronick, 1998).

All of the vignettes in this article stem from faculty work in the program ofundergraduate teacher preparation, which takes as its starting point the para-digm of the “reflective urban practitioner.” Department members expresssupport for the program’s urban mission and articulate a shared commitmentto prepare teachers who can work with children and families from diversecultures. Eleven full-time faculty, nine female and two male, composed thedepartment at the time of the study; one faculty member is African, another isAfrican American, and the remaining are European American. Most studentsat Urban University complete their student teaching in schools in the metro-politan area. For the most part, supervision of field experiences is done byfull-time faculty, who customarily observe each student teacher six or seventimes in the 15-week semester. All faculty at Urban University carry a teach-ing load of 12 credits a semester; supervision of a student teacher is compen-sated at one credit.


METHOD

Urban University faculty wrote the vignettes based on data collected dur-ing the spring 1998 and fall 1998 semesters. Data include field notes duringvisits to student teachers in schools, evaluation reports of student teachers,notes taken about incidents in classes, and students’ written work submittedfor classes. One vignette is based on faculty recollections about classroomincidents that were not recorded but were communicated to colleagues ininformal discussions. The vignettes are included in an appendix anddescribed in Table 1.

The vignettes and analysis follow in the interpretivist family of research(Erickson, 1986). They are written in the tradition of the researcher who is anactive participant and supporter of a project but is able to bring a critical per-spective. We attempt to be “empirical . . . rigorous and systematic” withoutbeing positivist (Erickson, p. 119) in our investigation of the meaning theactors in the vignettes attach to their actions, and in the connections betweenthe vignettes and the policy environment. The viewpoint and voice of thevignettes are those of the teacher educator, and we acknowledge this particu-lar perspective to clarify that other viewpoints are possible, meaningful, anddifferent. Hence, we link our work to feminist traditions in scholarship, not-ing, as does Biklen (1995), that one must assume a particular vantage point,though other perspectives are, of necessity, minimized. Although using thefirst person, we concur with Howe’s (1998) analysis of the “interpretive turn”in educational research and the commitment that researchers must attempt topresent the data as objectively as possible.

Concerned that our vantage point as teacher educators was not being rep-resented in policy talk about improving urban schooling and urban teacherpreparation, seven teacher education faculty met in fall 1998 to discuss theimpact on our work of state policies to improve urban schools. One facultymember decided subsequently to withdraw from the project, due to otherdemands on her time. Rather than first hypothesizing which state policiesaffected our work and then attempting to corroborate the hypothesis by gath-ering data, we agreed to use a variant of backward mapping (Elmore,1979-1980), first identifying critical situations that showed the influence ofstate policy on our work as teacher educators and then “mapping” the connec-tions. Data would be written up as vignettes of no more than 500 words. Weagreed on a design that included two more meetings: one to present ourvignettes and generate a preliminary interpretation and a second at which wewould synthesize our findings and relate our work to other research on urbanschool reform.



Table 1Summary of Vignettes Illustrating How State Policy Affects Undergraduate Teacher Preparation

Title and Policy Focus Description

Effects on Student Teachers ofEnforcement of Curricular Man-dates in the State’s Takeover ofUrbanville

Giovanni, a student teacher, is paired with ateacher who feels constrained to haveGiovanni follow the rigid state-mandated andstate-enforced curriculum. Richard, in thesame school, flourishes with a teacher whocircumvents the state’s rigid control but whoeventually leaves the district.

Carrying Out the State’s Mandate forField Experiences: Case 1

Debby experiences a less-than-ideal field place-ment. She recognizes that she has a differentphilosophy than her cooperating teacher andbegins to reflect and deepen her understand-ing of the complexities surrounding teachingand learning.


A failed attempt at a professional developmentschool collaboration between the Universityprogram and a public school leads to reflec-tions on the role of collaboration and theeffectiveness of professional developmentschools in a rigidly controlled district understate control.


Tara, a student teacher in art who believes hercooperating teacher’s practices are wrong,complies by teaching the way the cooperatingteacher wants her to. She does not know howto handle this dissonance and asks her super-visor what she should do.

The State’s Elimination of an Under-graduate Major in Education andLimitation of Certification to 30Credits

Marie, a student taking an elective course whilestudent teaching, begins to examine her cul-tural frame of reference, beliefs, and practicein more depth. The 30-credit limitation onteacher education courses constrains theteacher preparation program from requiringthese courses.

Implementation of the State Mandatefor Intensive Early ChildhoodEducation in Low-Income SchoolDistricts

Marcia’s cooperating teacher, having recentlymoved from teaching seventh grade to kinder-garten, lacks knowledge about the develop-mental needs of young children. The absenceof a state license for early childhood teachingcontradicts the state’s need for developmen-tally appropriate instruction for youngchildren.

In the audiotaped meeting in which we presented drafts of vignettes wehad written, we probed for reasons each author thought this to be a situationthat showed the critical influence of state policy. In several instances, anauthor’s frame on the experience was challenged by a colleague’s questions,which were informed by her firsthand knowledge of school sites, students,and of our program. We decided that all vignettes would be written in firstperson, to make the voice and stance more personal. Analysis was truncatedbecause three faculty had to leave for other meetings that were taking up mat-ters that affected the teacher education program.

Using written notes and the audiotape, the first author wrote a draft. Thispreliminary version was critiqued at the second planned meeting, attended bythree people. Individual conversations were held with the other authors, whocould not attend because of unforeseen family and departmental obligations.Based on the discussion in the meeting and in individual conversations, thefirst author revised the analysis section. Although we recognized that aspectsof the vignettes might not be as clear to readers as they had been to us, wedecided that because the vignettes served as the data for the analysis section,we would not alter the vignettes, so that the vignettes that appear in theappendix and are described in Table 1 were the basis for our analysis and con-clusions. Family and departmental responsibilities, especially advising ofstudents—a pressing obligation because of many students’ failing scores onthe NTE—precluded the possibility of scheduling a third meeting to reviewthe second draft. Instead, each participant suggested revisions ranging fromword changes to corrections of fact, which the first author made in the finalversion.

Noting the ways that our original design was altered because of circum-stances that are generally considered personal is important, as we will arguein the conclusion, because such personal circumstances that women faceaccount for much of the invisibility of gender in debate about policy initia-tives to reform urban schools. The ways that gender had mediated our percep-tions and experiences as teacher educators and researchers eluded us until thesecond meeting, as we reviewed the methodology and reasons the originalstudy design was changed. The invisibility of gender as a consideration in ouroriginal analysis highlights the feminist contention that social interaction isstructured and power relations are obscured so that some questions aboutgender are never asked and phenomenon are unrevealed (Marshall, 1997). Asthe description of changes in our study design illustrates, demands made onteacher educators by personal commitments to nurture students detract fromtime for intellectual work. Students often bring staggering personal responsi-bilities and require considerable assistance in navigating the labyrinth ofstate and university regulations for graduation and certification. Yet, the


conditions under which teacher educators of prospective urban teachers work(Howey et al., 1994) recapitulate the inadequate resources of urban schoolsand absence of reward or acknowledgment of this nurturing function.

ANALYSIS

We identified six state policies that influenced our work in urban teacherpreparation: the takeover of the Urbanville school district; the test of mini-mum skills; creation and implementation of core curriculum standards thatparallel the work of the New Standards Project; elimination of the undergrad-uate major in education and a limit of 30 credit hours for all courses in educa-tion required for certification; a requirement for three different field experi-ences; and implementation of a court-mandated requirement that the 28lowest income districts in the state provide intensive early childhood educa-tion to all 3- and 4-year-old children. It is important to clarify that we identi-fied what we perceive to be state policy. Neither the department head nor indi-vidual faculty in the program of teacher education receive direct informationfrom the state about policy. All of our knowledge of state regulations comesfrom university administrators whose representations of state policies wepresume to be accurate.

A common theme of the vignettes is that faculty perceive that state poli-cies that have been adopted with a rationale of improving education generallyand urban schools in particular in fact constrain faculty from helping studentslearn to “teach against the grain” (Cochran-Smith, 1991) of accepted practicein urban schools. For instance, the 30-credit limitation for teacher prepara-tion, adopted when the state mandated elimination of the undergraduatemajor in education, demands that the “Rethinking” courses be offered only aselectives, though they are identified as instrumental in prodding students toexamine their beliefs about learning, teaching, race, and culture. The30-credit limit constrains the program from providing enough opportunityboth to spend time in field experiences and to enroll in courses that allow thereading and discussion that seem to be essential elements of the “long andlabor-intensive process” (Gomez, 1996, p. 120) described in studies thatreport success in altering attitudes and beliefs of preservice teachers(Bullough & Stokes, 1994; Cochran-Smith, 1995; Finney & Orr, 1995;Liedel-Rice, 1995; Tellez, Hlebowitsh, Cohen, & Norwood, 1995).

The vignette about implementation of early childhood education similarlyillustrates that the state’s requirements for certification—in this instance theabsence of a specific license for early child education (which has now beenchanged)—contradict the state’s own calls for developmentally appropriateinstruction for young children. Urban schools are among those that have the


highest proportion of teachers in classroom situations for which they are unli-censed or inadequately prepared (Winfield & Manning, 1992) and are mostlikely to hire uncertified teachers (Darling-Hammond & Sclan, 1996), so itshould come as no surprise that schools in Ferristown and Urbanville staff theearly grades with teachers who have not been exposed to course work aboutthe developmental needs of young children.

The idea that state policy has unintended consequences is certainly notnovel, so we probed for connections between the vignettes, our programgoals, and state policy. The vignettes that related to field experiences posedwhat seemed to be the most intractable problems and led us to discussionabout the extent to which the problems that faculty encountered could beidentified as being caused by local institutional inadequacies or state policy.Agreeing that elements of both were present, we found that two contradictoryinterpretations seemed equally valid but pointed to contradictory policydirections. We explain both below.

Interpretation 1: The Need for Systemic Reform

The vignettes can be read as affirming the idea that school improvementdepends primarily on altering school organization “to accommodate new andadventurous kinds of teaching” (Elmore et al., 1996, “Introduction”). Theymight suggest that conditions in urban schools are a barrier to providing thekinds of field experiences and socialization that prospective teachers need tobecome effective urban teachers and to master techniques of culturallyresponsive pedagogy (De Leon, Stallings, & Kurz, 1998; Ladson-Billings,1995; Tiezzi & Cross, 1994). Interpreted in this manner, the vignettes are crit-icisms of the teachers and schools that are used for placements.

If this first interpretation is accepted, the vignettes support key elements ofsystemic reform as it is currently operationalized and more research of thesort being done by the Center for the Study of Teaching and Policy, whichaims to provide information on how to improve the quality of classroom prac-tice through system-wide integration of policies (National Institute on Edu-cational Governance, Finance, and Policy Making, 1998). Further, thevignettes can be seen as evidence in support of the call for ProfessionalDevelopment Schools (The Holmes Group, 1995) as a critical piece in schoolimprovement. In this light, the vignettes support the view that systemicreform is on the right track in aligning state, federal, and local policies to syn-chronize and coordinate teacher preparation, school reform, and change inclassroom practice in schools staffed and controlled by professional educa-tors (Lusi, 1997; National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future,1996). Thus, one interpretation of the vignettes is that the state is still mired inthe old piecemeal approach to reform, enmeshed in the “loose coupling” of


state, federal, and local agencies that Elmore (1999-2000) contends under-cuts the higher standards of academic achievement. In this line of thinking,presented by Lusi in her analysis of the role of state departments of educationin complex school reform, the solution depends on the department of educa-tion and program of teacher preparation becoming more active in aligningtheir policies, linking more closely regulation of teacher preparation, schoolrestructuring, and curriculum and instruction.

Interpretation 2: Dangers of Systemic Reform

The other interpretation of the vignettes suggests an entirely differentdirection for policy, though it too could be thought of as supporting systemicreform because two contradictory definitions of systemic reform exist in theliterature of school reform. One, used by Carr (1997) in her review of the lit-erature on systemic change, defines systemic change as an approach tochange that recognizes the interrelationships and interdependencies amongthe parts of the educational system and the interrelationships and interdepen-dencies between the educational system and its community. Another versionof systemic reform, exemplified by the work of the National Commission onTeaching and America’s Future (1996) and the New Professional TeacherProject (Roth, 1996), seeks state, district, and federal alignment to generatepolicies on curriculum and instruction, teacher preparation, and schoolrestructuring that lead to learning and teaching of national standards toensure that all students master higher-level thinking and content. In Carr’sdefinition, systemic reform is “ecological” in that it relies on support andinvolvement of communities served by schools (Weiner, 1993). Using thisdefinition of systemic reform calls for renegotiation of power relations andsuggests that schools should be considered democratic institutions that makeparents partners (Seeley, 1985). However, as Carr’s literature review dis-closes, systemic reform has evolved in quite a different political direction. Asa movement, systemic reform has been composed mostly of educational pro-fessionals and members of political elites, and has no popular roots (Cohen,1995a, p. 16). Hence, for the rest of this article we use the term systemicreform as it is has become operationalized, not with its original definition.

In their focus on the complexity of human relations between the studentteachers and their cooperating teachers, between student teachers and super-visors, between faculty and students, between university faculty and schoolstaff, the vignettes illuminate the limitations of speaking of reform in lan-guage “of precisely engineered systems rather than language appropriate toecological systems that evolve over time” (Raizen, 1998, p. 74). The align-ment of policies that is the cornerstone of systemic reform is problematic fortechnical reasons to be sure (Spillane, 1998; Spillane & Jennings, 1997), but


it may be equally flawed because the language of systemic reform disguisesits ideological assumptions (Apple, 1993). One aspect of reform that hasbeen marginalized is analysis of the relationship between economic andsocial disintegration in the nation’s cities and academic achievement of citychildren (Anyon, 1997). Underlying the state’s takeover of the Urbanvilleschools is the assumption that reforms that focus on schools and school peo-ple can, by themselves, improve students’ achievement (Corcoran &Scovronick, 1998). Anyon’s political economy of the Newark schools (1997)and her work in a professional development project in that school system(1995) point to a contradictory conclusion: “Until the economic and politicalsystems in which the cities are enmeshed are themselves transformed so theymay be more democratic and productive for urban residents, educationalreformers have little chance of effecting long-lasting educational changes incity schools” (1997, p. 13).

What is missing from the vignettes is also critical in understanding thedangers of systemic reform: None discusses parents or community. Thisomission is particularly noteworthy because the authors of the vignettesagree that parents should be considered partners in schooling. Exploring rea-sons, then, for the dissonance between our beliefs and the absence of anymention of parents and community in the vignettes, we located two relatedexplanations: The first resides in the institutional insularity of Urban Univer-sity’s College of Education, as well as our program of teacher preparation;the second resides in the isolation of Urbanville public schools from the com-munities they are charged with serving. Urbanville schools and Urban Uni-versity are not unique in this regard. Their insularity and isolation from oneanother, as well as from the communities that they serve, are unexceptional(Weiner, 1993).

The vignette describing the failed attempt at collaboration with anUrbanville school recapitulates bureaucratic obstacles to collaborationsbetween schools and universities in urban school systems identified else-where (Howey et al., 1994; Kochan, 1999; Su, 1999):

Many people are making valiant efforts to support professional developmentschools . . . the effort is time intensive and requires long-term individual commitment.Although positive comments and numerous benefits are being reported, the hoped-for‘reinvented institutions’ do not seem to be forming. (Kochan, 1999, p. 187)

As the Urban University faculty member learned, a professional develop-ment school in which teachers are learners, one in which the faculty isempowered requires significant institutional support from both school dis-tricts and universities (Su). Professional development schools, which


probably number no more than 200, are labor intensive and costly, to bothschool districts and universities (Bullough et al., 1998).

Moreover, in their review of research on professional developmentschools (PDS) and equity, Valli, Cooper, and Frankes (1997) observe thatdespite the concept’s growing popularity, there are few data about whetherstudents are actually learning better under the new approaches these collabo-rations are intended to foster. Although, in theory, the PDS literature recog-nizes the relation between schooling and the broader political, economic, andsocial context, in practice, most PDS partners have either not attempted or arefloundering in this undertaking. It is interesting to note that there has been lit-tle change in the rewards and incentives for teacher educators involved inthese collaborations. Murrell (1998) notes that the teaching hospital para-digm on which the PDS is based has no room for the knowledge and insightsparents bring about their children and community, a fact that is particularlydangerous in schools serving low-income parents with little formal educa-tion, as is the case in many urban schools.

For the most part, financial costs associated with improving collaborationbetween schools and universities is a factor absent from analysis. Indeed, theauthors of What Matters Most: Teaching for America’s Future (NationalCommission on Teaching and America’s Future, 1996) expressly stipulatethat restructured schools that operate collaboratively with universities, in themodel of the teaching hospital, must do so without significantly more money.Reform will be possible “only if system wide efforts are made to free upresources from the many crevices of bureaucracies where they are nowlodged” (p. 104). Thus, school-university collaborations that are a linchpin ofsystemic reform are informed by the idea that “spending money on teachereducation is politically unattractive” (Cohen, 1995a, p. 15), and, therefore, itis not a concept worth advancing. Spring (1992) explains this phenomenon inhis description of the research networks that influence research design andresults. He argues that because of the relationship between power and knowl-edge in the politics of urban education, researchers who focus on effective-ness of implementation miss critical trends, like the diminishing financialsupport for public education.

DISCUSSION

We suggest that the second interpretation discussed above, the one thatcritiques systemic reform, points to a richer and more productive analysis ofthe linkages between state policy to improve urban schools and teacher prep-aration. Our ideas parallel those of Gittell (1998), who has advocated creat-ing a new paradigm for reform in the 21st century, one that integrates schools


into communities and enhances citizens’ roles: “Broadening our perspectiveof the context in which schools function, as well as our definition of educa-tion, will encourage new stakeholders to form coalitions to create new insti-tutions at the community level” (p. 239).

How then might the state encourage closer collaboration betweenUrbanville schools and the university? All of the vignettes about field experi-ences probably support the concept of co-reform of both schools and pro-grams of teacher preparation to create a synergy between Urbanville schoolsand Urban University’s teacher education program. State policies thatencourage collaboration would be helpful, if they were created with theunderstanding that there is no “algorithm for the specifics of how co-reformprograms should be developed or how they should work” (Glickman,Lunsford, & Szuminski, 1995). Reforms of this sort would be part of the kindof systemic reform that Carr (1997) defines if parents and community wereinvolved as partners in the process of teacher preparation, as they were in theshort-lived Trainers of Teacher Trainers (TTT) program sponsored by thefederal government in the 1970s (Weiner, 1993).

In TTT, urban teacher preparation was conceptualized as the sharedresponsibility of all of education’s constituencies. Teacher educators wererecruited to develop programs that would develop “parity” among parents,community, liberal arts faculty, and teacher educators. The program’s chargeto develop parity was broad enough to allow programs of teacher education totake into account local resources, human and material, but focused enough topermit evaluation and defunding (Weiner, 1993).

Haberman (1996) argued that university-based teacher preparation willnot be changed, so urban teacher preparation is best accomplished under thepurview of urban school systems. He maintains that if new teachers aretrained under the aegis of an urban school system, they simply cannot remainunresponsive to such formidable constituencies as strong parent and commu-nity groups. Preparation by urban school systems, combined with teacherrecruitment and selection, to weed out the “stars” and “quitter/failures” arepresented as the solution to preparing culturally competent teachers for urbanschools (p. 755). However, students’ responses in the vignette about the elec-tive course that only a few actually take echo findings in programs of teacherpreparation that seem to have succeeded in altering teachers’ beliefs(Cochran-Smith, 1995; Liedel-Rice, 1995; Tellez et al., 1995; Winitzky &Barlow, 1998) and would make Haberman’s assertions problematic.

Research on university-based teacher preparation offers two contradic-tory prescriptions for change: one focusing on acquisition of technical skillsor competencies, the other on reflection (Liston & Zeichner, 1991). Acquisi-tion of skills and techniques calls for teacher education programs to identify


and help develop field placements in which prospective teachers can serve asapprentices to master teachers. Supporting this view is the fact that studentteachers often identify the mismatch between their teacher preparation pro-gram’s espoused practices and the reality of urban classrooms as a majorchallenge in their practicum experiences (Rand & Shelton-Colangelo, 1999).The vignettes about student teachers Tara and Marcia who unable or unwill-ing to teach as they say they wish seem to be evidence that to masterconstructivist teaching, student teachers need to practice strategies they learnin their university-based course work in classrooms of teachers who areskilled in these techniques. This interpretation would support the perspectivethat placements must be made in classrooms of teachers who model bestpractice, an approach that makes the PDS and professionally controlledschools attractive reform strategies for the state to adopt.

However, once again, the vignettes can be read in a contradictory light, tosupport another view of learning to teach, one advanced in research onteacher thinking. In the vignette describing Debby Diamond, a studentteacher, observing and negotiating her relationship with the cooperatingteacher Miss Marbles, we see a phenomenon that contradicts the assumptionthat students need field work placements in classrooms of exemplary teach-ers. Debby Diamond’s conflict with Miss Marbles becomes, with the help ofthe faculty member, a profound learning experience that causes Debby todeepen her understanding of schooling’s dilemmas. Debby sees a congru-ence between her own beliefs about teaching and learning and theconstructivist orientation of her university instructor and the program, butdissonance occurs in the field placement.

Debby’s experience echoes that of students in Hollingsworth’s (1989)study who were placed with teachers whose teaching philosophies and prac-tices did not reflect their own or the constructivist orientation of the teacherpreparation program. Hollingsworth’s students used the dissonance to criti-cally examine their own practice and ideals, whereas those who were placedwith teachers whose teaching was attuned with the program’s philosophywere never forced to critique their ideas. They were able to simply follow themodel of their cooperating teacher, but when these student teachers had theirown classrooms, they were unable to implement these same practices. Theylacked the theoretical knowledge and understanding that had come to theirpeers who had been forced to defend their ideas under the glare of the cooper-ating teacher’s criticism.

Hollingworth’s (1989) study suggests that the student teacher Richard,described in the vignette about the state’s tight control of curriculum, may notbe able to implement the student-centered teaching strategies he used in his


cooperating teacher’s classroom. Other research on teacher thinking supportsthis interpretation, suggesting that preservice teachers have insufficientexperience with teaching to tie their beliefs to teaching practice (Richardson,1996). This research calls into question the nature of student teaching,including the oft-made assertion that effective urban teacher preparation nec-essarily requires field placements in urban schools with cooperating teacherswho model appropriate pedagogy (De Leon et al., 1998). If placements thatmodel best practice are not the most essential element in teacher preparation,as some of the research on teacher thinking suggests, then the paradigm of theteaching hospital, on which the PDS is based, loses much of its rationale.

The vignette about the elective class describes how students are pressedinto critique by the readings and discussion that they have in class on materialthat challenges their world view and cultural frame of reference. Althoughwe have no data to triangulate the instructor’s perception that the students’ideas have actually changed or that the students will teach differently becauseof the ideas they have acquired and rejected, the vignette indicates thatuniversity-based course work may create dissonance that students’ fieldexperiences have not. All of the students have done their student teaching orare doing it simultaneously as they take the course, yet the field placementsand course work they have encountered have not challenged the students’beliefs that the faculty member confronts in her course. For these prospectiveteachers, practice has produced no learning. It has been a case of practicemaking practice (Britzman, 1991). Their experience exemplifies the problemValli (1995) described, when the colorblindness of student teachers who areWhite obscures their “own dominating culture and behaviors.” Though we donot know what happens to the students after the course, the vignette impliesthat their thinking has changed, that their understanding of teaching andlearning has been altered by an understanding of education’s rootedness inpolitics, as well as by a sense of their own agency as teachers.

Some research supports this interpretation. We know that although changein strongly held beliefs and attitudes of preservice teacher candidates isindeed difficult to achieve (Cochran-Smith, 1995; Finney & Orr, 1995;Winitzky & Barlow, 1998), it may be sparked in course work that is notdirectly linked to a supportive field experience (Bullough & Stokes, 1994).The change in teacher beliefs may be both intellectual and moral in nature(Ball & Wilson, 1996) and be ignited by a changed sense of self, subject mat-ter, and politics (Kennedy, 1997). “Rethinking Education” provides anopportunity for students to revisit the issues that were presented in the pro-gram’s introductory social and psychological foundations courses and istaught as a corequisite of another course, so that students enroll in an


intensive 6-credit block together. Perhaps the synergy of the two courses pro-vides the type of intense experience that Winitsky and Barlow and Bulloughand Stokes observe helped their students change their beliefs about diversity.

In one vignette, the instructor acknowledges that Giovanni, a mature stu-dent teacher working with a teacher chafing under the state-mandated curric-ulum in a district taken over by the state, has not been moved from the tradi-tional beliefs about teaching he had when he began his course work ineducation at Urban University. Here, however, an absence of dissonance isresponsible for Giovanni’s failure to move beyond the teacher-centered strat-egies that he had experienced in his own education. Though Giovanni feltconstrained by Mr. Allenori, his unwillingness to teach against the grain(Cochran-Smith, 1991) was a matter of his own “grain” as well as the grain ofhis cooperating teacher and the school district. The characterological andpedagogical conservatism of both the student and cooperating teacher werebuttressed by state educational policy designed to improve test scores inUrbanville. By establishing a highly centralized administration and enforc-ing a highly circumscribed curriculum for the district, the state has under-mined teachers’ sense of self-efficacy. Yet, urban teachers with high self-efficacy engage in practices associated with high achievement gains for students(Chester & Beaudin, 1996). Perhaps the strike of Urbanville teachers,directed against the state’s enforcement of curricular mandates (Kissinger,1998), marked an assertion of a collective sense of efficacy and pride in theircraft as teachers (Metz, 1987).

Richard and Giovanni, two student teachers in the same school, had mark-edly different experiences, a situation paralleled by the differential impact ofthe same state policies on their cooperating teachers, colleagues in the samedepartment. One cooperating teacher treated his underprepared studentteacher as he did his underprepared students. He regarded working with bothnonjudgmentally, as tasks to be accomplished. He found ways to circumventthe state’s rigid control, elbowing his personality and his values into the cur-riculum. Instruction in this teacher’s class addressed both the requirements ofthe basic skills test and the new, higher-order thinking and writing skills ofthe core curriculum standards. However, despite his apparent success inteaching as he believed, this teacher left his position in Urbanville to go to adifferent school, in a larger district. On the other hand, the cooperatingteacher who did not attempt to circumvent the state curriculum remained. Hecomplied with the more powerfully enforced mandate to teach to the compe-tency test, ignoring the policy that encouraged instruction of higher-orderthinking. His student teacher Giovanni also conformed and failed to growsignificantly as a teacher during the field experience.


A similar problem is raised in the vignette about Tara, a student teacherand serious student of art, who says to her cooperating teacher’s supervisorthat she believes her cooperating teacher’s practices in teaching art arewrong, but Tara, like Giovanni, complies. It is Tara’s uneasiness with the dis-sonance between her own values and impulses and the established practice inher school that prevents her from carrying out instructional strategies that shebelieves, from her own experience, to be important. The problem is not Tara’sbeliefs about instruction nor her lack of subject matter knowledge. Taraknows that she might, indeed should, teach art differently from her cooperat-ing teacher Mrs. Singer. Tara, though, wants her instructor to tell her what todo. Unlike Debby Diamond and the students in the elective course at UrbanUniversity who have critiqued their values about learning and confronted theissue of their own power or powerlessness in schools, Tara expresses no opin-ion about social arrangements in schools. She seems unable to move beyondthe contradiction between her values and beliefs about sound educationalpractice, ideas that have been presented in university courses, and Mrs.Singer’s pressure to teach in ways that seem to contradict her beliefs aboutart. Her question, “What do I do?” is directed to her university supervisor andcalls for an answer from an authority to what in the end must be Tara’s ownmoral decision. Although the vignette describes Tara as a serious student ofart history, Tara seems not to experience the felt power of her ideas and beliefsabout education and art. However, are we certain precisely what Tara thinksand believes? Because the faculty member working with Tara does not knowher as a student in a university course, she has no access to any writing thatTara may have done about her ideas, her metacognitive strategies. Tara maybe an example of the process Holt-Reynolds (1995) identified, of preserviceteachers having a “relatively unproblematic reaction to course ideas” without“sensing any potential discrepancies between these new ideas and the previ-ously constructed beliefs about teaching they brought with them into thecourse” (p. 124). What initially seemed to be a straightforward problem of astudent buckling under the pressure of a school culture and a cooperatingteacher’s authority may be another issue entirely: Tara’s preparation to teachand her education have focused on acquisition of technical skills instead of“rationale building” and development of her consciousness of her own think-ing processes, her metacognitive control (Holt-Reynolds, p. 134).

CONCLUSIONS

The vignettes all raise questions about the ways that state policiesintended to improve urban schools have undercut the work of teacher


educators striving for the same goal. Taken together, the vignettes suggestthat teacher educators must confront the same question that Tara poses to heruniversity supervisor: “What do I do?” Tara’s question is pivotal in under-standing the implications of the vignettes because in its directionality it reca-pitulates hierarchical relations of power and status in teacher education(Herbst, 1989), power differentials in schools of education between facultywho spend time in schools and those who do not, and the differentialsbetween school of education faculty and their colleagues in liberal arts (TheHolmes Group, 1995). Tara’s question could just as well be directed towardteacher educators who see the mismatch between the stated intentions of sys-temic reform and its actual impact (Bullough et al., 1998), of the efforts tomake schools, teachers, and teacher educators accountable for outcomes thatthey have had no voice in shaping (Foster, 1997).

One interpretation of the absence of teacher educators’ voices from dis-cussions of policy development, implementation, and evaluation might bethat they lack interest in these areas or lack professional commitment. Femi-nist research offers an important critique of the traditional view that whenwomen do not act in accordance to norms of professional conduct, theiractions demonstrate that they are not as professionally committed. Forinstance, Biklen’s (1995) ethnography of an elementary school illustrates theflaw in the traditional view of career commitment that has been used to showthat female teachers are less serious about their jobs and profession. Teachersspeak of their jobs with a seriousness that belies the conclusion that they arenot committed to their work. However, they also regard obligations to theirfamilies with great urgency.

We share Patai’s (1994) concerns about dangers inherent in feminist argu-ments that personal concerns are political in nature, but the personal nature ofthe responsibilities that deter teacher educators from doing more researchabout policy are intricately woven into the fabric of political and social rela-tions and require close examination. We suggest that the “divide” betweenteacher research and academic research (Zeichner, 1995) in part results fromthe divide of gender, the disparity in the proportion of females in teaching andteacher education. In higher education, women devote more time to teachingand less to research and are disproportionately in the lower academic ranks(Allen, 1998). Institutions that do not grant doctorates certify 80% of thenation’s teachers (Haberman, 1996), yet policy analysis about educationalreform is dominated by researchers in schools of education that support doc-toral programs, schools of education in which faculty who do the most prizedresearch have little day-to-day contact with schools and teachers (TheHolmes Group, 1995). A majority of teacher educators who work in


programs that prepare urban teachers are female (Howey et al., 1994), as arethe vast majority of teachers (Zimpher & Ashburn, 1992) and the parents whosupervise their children’s education (Biklen, 1995). For the most part, infor-mation and insights from this hidden majority are missing in debate abouteducational reform.

One answer to Tara’s question, “What do I do?” is to redirect it back toTara: “Tara, what should you do now?” This strategy encourages Tara tounderstand her own agency, her own potential to make and carry out deci-sions that go against the grain of teaching in urban schools as it often occurs.It contradicts the assumption of many state policies that reforms that dramati-cally improve the quality of learning and teaching can be legislated andimplemented without the knowledge of schools and schooling that parents,teachers, and teacher educators bring to the classroom. Asking the questionof Tara places the teacher educator and student in a different relationship with“the other,” making them partners in the process of deciding how they shouldhandle a dilemma created by unequal power relations in the society andschools. It denies the existence of a simple answer from authorities to com-plex issues of reform, teaching, and learning.

Tara’s question, “What do I do?” is one that teacher educators might ask ofthose who formulate and implement policy, questioning how we should carryout policies and regulations that undercut a program’s commitment to plac-ing reflective teachers into urban classrooms, ones who are respectful of theknowledge classroom teachers and parents can bring to schooling. Reformu-lating the query so that it becomes “What shall we do now?” suggests quitedifferent answers, ones that address institutional barriers that deter teachereducators from being heard in policy debates about urban school reform. Thisreformulated question implies that it is not inevitable that teacher educatorswill be marginalized in policy implementation and that their insights areworth consideration.

APPENDIXThe Vignettes

EFFECTS ON STUDENT TEACHERS OF ENFORCEMENT OFCURRICULAR MANDATES IN THE STATE’S TAKEOVER OF URBANVILLE

This vignette describes the experiences of two student teachers in the small sec-ondary English program: Giovanni, a mature student who had emigrated from Italy asan adolescent and had received a classical education in Italy, and Richard, an exuber-ant young man who came to Urban University because of the athletic scholarship hewas offered. Both men student taught at Hancock High School, the largest of three


comprehensive high schools in Urbanville. It serves a highly diverse student body of2,500 students. The “report card” issued on the school in 1997 showed its passingrates on the state’s competency test to be 77% in reading, 92.8% in math, 90.1% inwriting. The drop-out rate was 10.9%.

Giovanni, who had received a classical education in Italy before he emigrated asan adolescent with his family, was placed with Mr. Allenori, a teacher at Hancock for20 years. Mr. Allenori is soft-spoken with colleagues and students and was identifiedby the department head as a conscientious teacher known for adhering to school rulesand policy. Richard, who comes from a working-class family and often used termslike “youse guys” when he spoke, was academically unprepared for his student teach-ing. He confided to me that he was “bitter” that the college had considered his aca-demic achievement subordinate to his athletic contribution. Richard was assigned towork with Mr. Pyle, a former actor who developed and headed Hancock High’s dra-matic arts program. A dynamic teacher who exuded enthusiasm for his subject andstudents, Mr. Pyle had won the award for the state’s “teacher of the year.”

When Mr. Pyle and Richard met with me, we agreed on a course of action to helpRichard improve his mastery of standard English, as well as assuming responsibilityfor Mr. Pyle’s sophomore English classes, containing students who had failed thestate competency test. In our conference, Giovanni, Dr. Meyer, and Mr. Allenori con-curred that Giovanni would teach the senior classes assigned to Mr. Allenori and helpwith the film course Mr. Allenori had developed and taught.

As the term progressed, Richard flourished as a teacher, modeling Mr. Pyle’swarm but firm stance toward the students, exuding the kind of energy that made Mr.Pyle’s classroom lively and animated. My biweekly evaluations note approvingly thatRichard experimented with the student-centered ideas he had been taught in his meth-ods courses. On the other hand, Giovanni hewed to traditional practices and com-plained of feeling restrained by Mr. Allenori. Pressed by me to negotiate this with Mr.Allenori, Giovanni resisted. In a conference held midsemester, Mr. Allenori com-plained that he too felt constrained by the strict curricular mandates the state imposed.Students in every class faced standardized midterm exams and finals, so Mr. Allenorifelt he couldn’t permit Giovanni to diverge from the curriculum the state had estab-lished for seniors. Teachers were subject to surprise visits by monitors who could givethem unsatisfactory evaluations for failing to follow the curriculum, evaluations thatthey could not contest. Mr. Allenori pointed to the latest effort to mandate instruction,a directive by the state-appointed superintendent that in every English class studentspractice writing essays for the competency test, even in classes composed of studentswho had passed the test, like seniors in the film elective.

Both students completed their student teaching and became certified to teach.Mr. Pyle left Hancock the next year, for a job in a high school specializing in perform-ing arts, in an urban district in another state. Mr. Allenori remained at Hancock. InNovember 1998, teachers of Urbanville conducted a bitter week-long strike about thestate’s over-regulation of curriculum and instruction, especially surprise visits bymonitors.


CARRYING OUT THE STATE’S MANDATEFOR FIELD EXPERIENCES: CASE 1

Debby Diamond is enrolled in the English education program. She is a returningstudent after being in the work force for 22 years. Debby was my student in the secondfield experience, a course taken concurrently with educational psychology. As juniorinterns go over theories and principles in the class, they are required to connect thetheory with the practice in the schools through the use of several student-centeredproblems, tasks, observations, and reflections.

Debby, a mother of three children enrolled in the public school, brought to hercourse work a great curiosity and commitment to improving education. But her firstvisits to school made her feel like she “had wandered onto the set of a lost episode ofStar Trek. The rowdy crowded halls, run down buildings with falling and chippedplaster, the smell of sweat and disinfectant, the stultifying heat and humidity gave mean eerie sense of deja vu.” Initially, her cooperating teacher, Miss Marbles, informedher that she had absolutely no use and no time for student teachers and felt far toooverworked. Debby learned that Miss Marbles never took any education theoryclasses in order to obtain her certification, and although she has taught high schoolEnglish for several years, she has both her undergraduate and her masters in the fieldof social science.

At first, Debby concluded that the theories in her educational theory classes do notexist in the “real” world. In the subsequent classroom visits, after the initial shock anddisappointment, she began to observe the students’ behaviors and became aware ofthe similarities and differences in the students, noting that only students in the honorsclasses operated on higher level thinking skills and that the teacher interacted withgroups differently according to their level and grade. In midsemester, Debby com-mented that emphasis was on lecture, skills, drills, and seatwork, as opposed to theproblem-solving, constructivist practices they were learning about in the classroom incollege.

However, towards the semester end, Debby began to note positive things aboutMiss Marbles’ teaching practices. Miss Marbles reinforced the students positively,employed the use of peer teaching, and managed her class effectively without raisingher voice. She treated her students with respect, and the students responded in kind.Miss Marbles set high expectations which were clear, interacted well with her stu-dents, and while they may not have been thrilled with the content of the class, Debbyreported that they were very forthright about their positive feelings towards MissMarbles.

At the end of her experience, Debby concluded that though there were positivethings she observed on certain occasions, she concluded that Miss Marbles wouldbenefit from exposure to more effective teaching strategies. Debby’s perseveranceand intelligence made the placement work in producing critical analysis of teachingand learning. I am not sure that other students would have been equally successful. Ittook a Debby Diamond to see the complexities of Miss Marbles’ classroom.



Using ideas culled from successful models of school/university partnerships suchas the Coalition of Essential Schools and literature of the Effective Schools move-ment, I set out to build a working partnership with one school in Urbanville to trans-form it into a “professional development school” that would work with our certifica-tion program in mutually beneficial ways.

I contacted a principal who was enthusiastic about bringing reform to her failingelementary school. Our agreement was that in exchange for the assurance of severalslots for both our junior and senior interns, I would assist in coordinating professionaldevelopment activities within the school, mentor teachers, students, and staff whowere interested in exploring new methodologies, and offer graduate-level courses onthe school site. The principal and I met and planned frequently; I offered in-serviceworkshops specific to the school and teachers and the agreed-upon goals, and Iassisted classroom teachers as well as supervised student interns on the site. While theprincipal with whom I worked agreed again and again that emphasis on specifictest-taking skills should not be the focus of instruction to the exclusion of other, moreconstructivist practices, pressure from the district was continually exerted on the prin-cipal and staff to demonstrate efforts to improve standardized test scores.

After 3 years, there was no noticeable change in the classrooms nor in the perfor-mance of the school as a whole. The principal left the school for a principalship in aneighboring district. And I abandoned my efforts to bring change to the school.

Another PDS project in Urbanville, begun at about the same time, was initiated bya faculty member in a private university. That faculty person had been part of the stateteam that took over administration of Urbanville several years prior. Administrativecooperation between the schools, the district, and the private university occurred byvirtue of its top-down origination with high-ranking administrators. However, myinterviews with classroom teachers and aides within those “Professional Develop-ment Schools” revealed that changes enacted were primarily in the provision ofin-service workshops by university faculty. During the 2nd year of that project, teach-ers were forced by the state-appointed administrators in Urbanville to make test prep-aration a priority. Under watchful eyes of teams sent in surprise visits to monitorinstruction, teachers and principals in the “Professional Development Schools” aban-doned virtually all other activities that were not directly related to preparation forstandardized tests. The schools, however, remain, in name, “Professional Develop-ment Schools” and are publicized as such by both the private university andUrbanville school administrators.

The school “report cards” in Urbanville show that there has been no substantialchange in school performance since the state takeover.



Tara is a serious art history major who is also completing her senior field experi-ence in the elementary teacher education program. In addition to her college responsi-bilities she is a working artist who also works as a waitress at night and is planning herwedding, which will take place shortly after graduation. Tara expressed excitementabout her student teaching assignment because it brought an opportunity to imple-ment the teaching strategies she learned in her methods courses. She is confident shecan make a difference in children’s lives and change the world so that it is a betterplace for all.

Tara was assigned to Front Street Elementary School in Baytown, a medium-sizedschool district abutting Urbanville. She immediately established good rapport withMrs. Singer, her experienced, well-dressed, organized cooperating teacher. Mrs.Singer’s classroom is neatly decorated with student art work created from patterns;each child has colored the otherwise identical objects differently. The fifth-grade stu-dents in Mrs. Singer’s classroom are seated in rows and always are on task. I can see onmy visits that the students in her class view Tara as a gentle, soft-spoken, sensitiveteacher who is concerned with their welfare and development. However, despite myencouraging Tara to teach in student-centered ways, her lessons generally remainedteacher-directed. In addition, during conferences, Tara and I discussed the need fordevelopmentally appropriate creative arts education that enhances the creativity andself-expression of children. The topic was not new to Tara because she has researchedarts education, and, as an artist herself, Tara is opposed to the use of patterns with10-year-old fifth graders. From her course work, Tara is familiar with approaches toteaching art that she feels are more appropriate and recalls her own distaste for pat-terns in art when she was a student. Tara complained, “This is not the way I want toteach but the way Mrs. Singer wants me to. What do I do?”

When Tara and I reviewed one of the two video tapes I require my supervisees todo, the camera focused on Tara conducting a “round robin” in reading. Tara seemed tobe upset and uncomfortable. “We learned so many great reading strategies in Dr.Bird’s class. Can I use them? No. Mrs. Singer wants round robin. This is not what Iwant to do. But, what do I do?”

THE STATE’S ELIMINATION OF AN UNDERGRADUATE MAJOR INEDUCATION AND LIMITATION OF CERTIFICATION

TO 30 CREDIT HOURS

“I was so angry, sooo angry that I had to write this paper five times. The otherpapers were just too angry,” said Marie. Beth chimed in: “I’m angry too. This articlesays that just because I’m white, I can’t teach minorities. And it’s even written by awhite woman. This is so prejudiced.” These were the opening statements in our sec-ond class of the undergraduate capstone course, “Rethinking Education,” as we beganour open discussion on the reading assignment from Keepers of the American Dream


by Christine Sleeter. Thirteen students are European American and one is AfricanAmerican; all are female. All students have either completed their student teaching orare doing it while they take this course so that they will graduate as education majors,in addition to being certified to teach.

The thought that anyone might question their ability to treat all children in theirstudent teaching classes equally was unthinkable. “I was brought up in this urbancommunity, and I never saw racism in my classes, and I always will treat all childrenequally in my classes,” continued Marie, who was still visibly upset.

I was surprised at this outburst. Usually students begin the course cautiously. Theyanalyze the readings at a surface level, but gradually develop the skills to sharethoughtful, reflective critiques as they discuss assigned readings in class. Studentshad never before demonstrated such a volatile response to this reading. I reaffirmedtheir right to express their views openly in this class but added, “We also should beable to explain why we have interpreted the reading in this manner and to participatein an open dialogue with each other.” Each person gave her analysis of the reading anddescribed her personal version of the “American Dream,” which often included abelief that if they work hard, they can achieve it. Their anger gradually dissipated, andwe moved to broader societal questions that led us to consider the impact of theteacher’s American Dream on her/his teaching children for whom the dream mighthave different meanings. By the time the class ended, they were beginning to see thearticle from a different viewpoint, not ready to give up their current beliefs aboutthemselves, but not as threatened.

By the end of the semester, students commented that “I never thought about theseissues before,” and “Now I look at education more critically,” and “Now I’m not afraidto ask questions and to take action.”

This course is not required of all students because the state allows only 30 creditsin a program of teacher preparation, and introductory course work and field experi-ences consume all 30 credits. Taking the two courses to become an education majorfrequently means that students must delay graduation for an extra semester, which is afinancial hardship or impossibility for most students in our program.

But where else will they have this opportunity to reflect about the educational sys-tem AFTER the experience of having their own classroom? Where will they developthe attitude and skills to move beyond their own cultural frame of reference, to beproactive rather than reactive as professionals in the field of education?

IMPLEMENTATION OF THE STATE MANDATE FOR INTENSIVE EARLYCHILDHOOD EDUCATION IN LOW-INCOME SCHOOL DISTRICTS

When I arrived at 1st Street school for my second supervisory visit, Marcia, mystudent teacher greeted me in the hall outside the classroom. She is placed in a kinder-garten in a K-8 elementary school in our local city’s school district.

“Dr. Grant, I need to talk to you,” Marcia greeted me with a nervous look. “I’m alittle worried about your observation. You see, I’ve planned a lesson that I don’t thinkyou’re going to like very much, but my cooperating teacher wanted me to do it thisway. She is very concerned about getting children ready for the standardized testing


that begins in a few weeks. I thought it was best if I just did the lesson the way shewould teach, since it’s really her classroom.” She went on to explain what she wasplanning to do with the children.

“Have you explained to her any of your reasons for wanting to plan activities dif-ferently?” I asked.

“Oh, sure. But whenever I begin to explain what we learned to do in our methodscourses, she tells me that I’m in the real world now and to forget that stuff I learned inclasses. According to her, it doesn’t really work.”

Unfortunately, these are words I’ve heard before from my student teachers in ourearly childhood teacher preparation program at Urban University. We struggle withthe difficulty in finding field placements sites that model the developmentally appro-priate practice that we advocate at the university. One of the real difficulties we have isfinding cooperating teachers who have specialized training in early childhood educa-tion. Marcia’s cooperating teacher has taught sixth and seventh grade for 12 years andwas moved to kindergarten when there was an opening to cover 2 years ago. She hasgotten very little professional support in this transition, and I can see that her methodsshow a lack of understanding of the developmental needs of young children.

Unfortunately, our state teacher certification does not mandate early childhoodcourse work or field experiences, and certification is very broad: Nursery througheighth grade. Marcia’s situation is not unusual. Although urban schools like this onegive a lot of lip service to the importance of early childhood education, teachers areoften pushed into using inappropriate curriculum by principals or supervisors.Teachers often receive neither preservice nor in-service training in early childhoodeducation. As a result, we have a lack of classrooms that provide good models of earlychildhood practices to support the apprenticeship of our student teachers. Our stu-dents quickly learn exactly what Marcia’s cooperating teacher told her: that the teach-ing philosophy and methods they’ve learned in college are idealistic and won’t workin the real world of urban teaching.

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EDUCATIONAL POLICY / November 2001GAIL L. SUNDERMAN et al.

California’s Reading Initiative:Constraints on Implementation in

Middle and High Schools

GAIL L. SUNDERMAN, MARIAN AMOA,and TIFFANY MEYERS

This article examines interactions between the policy environment and schoolsas institutions to understand how eight middle and high schools in Californiaresponded to demands to improve student reading. The authors argue thatschool-level reading programs were shaped by the broader institutional envi-ronment: institutional norms that govern conceptions of appropriate roles andresponsibilities, technical components of the middle and high school curricu-lum, and the limitations posed by resource constraints. The authors considerthe state curriculum policy an impetus for schools to focus on reading develop-ment but insufficient to overcome these other important constraints. At thesame time, the authors contend that the organization and allocation ofresources to support instruction made important contributions to readingdevelopment. This article uses data from case studies of eight middle and highschools located in six school districts in California.

OVER THE past decade, substantial policy attention has been devoted toeducational accountability and raising student achievement. More recently,

AUTHORS’NOTE: An earlier version of this article was presented at the American EducationalResearch Association Annual Conference, New Orleans, April 24-28, 2000. This research wassupported by a grant from the California Department of Education to the American Institutes forResearch and the Johns Hopkins University. The content does not necessarily reflect the views ofthe California Department of Education, the American Institutes for Research, or Johns HopkinsUniversity. Marisa Castellano, Gina Hewes, Nettie Legters, Judi Paver, Laura Rachuba, and SamStringfield provided research assistance.


674

improving literacy has moved onto the policy agenda as policy makers debatethe best way to teach reading. State lawmakers from several states, includingCalifornia, have passed reading reform legislation that is increasingly pre-scriptive about how to teach reading, and President George W. Bush haspromised to make the improvement of reading a top priority of his adminis-tration. Although much of this attention has focused on improving literacy inelementary schools, there is growing recognition that the reading skills ofmiddle and high school students are also in need of improvement. Nonethe-less, little information exists to inform policy makers about the reading prior-ities of middle and high schools or the challenges they may face when imple-menting reading programs. Resource constraints and the uncertain policyenvironment in which schools operate may limit their capacity to developbroad-based reading programs. The organization of secondary schools andmiddle and high school teachers who are trained as subject matter specialistsare challenges schools confront as they respond to the reading deficiencies oftheir students.

In this article, we examine how eight California middle and high schoolsthat serve low-income students support the improvement of reading. Afterestablishing the policy context of reading reform in California, we describethe local context. We use an institutional approach and a resource allocationperspective to examine how local middle and high schools organized andused instructional resources to promote student learning and to examine theapproaches these schools took to improve reading. Our central concern is tounderstand how the broader institutional environment that middle and highschools are embedded in shape instructional decisions and the particularapproaches to reading instruction that schools adopt.

STATE POLICY CONTEXT

During the 1980s, California was considered a leader in education reformin general and curriculum reform in particular. Under the leadership of statesuperintendent Bill Honig, the California Department of Education (CDE)developed a curriculum-driven comprehensive reform strategy that includedcurriculum frameworks in core subject matter areas, a performance-basedassessment system, and a professional development network of teachers anduniversities (Carlos & Kirst, 1997). The language arts framework, firstadopted in 1987, emphasized literature-based instruction and a “whole lan-guage” approach to literacy.

This approach to language arts instruction was called into question begin-ning in 1993 when the 1992 National Assessment of Educational Progress(NAEP) scores were released. These scores placed California near the

GAIL L. SUNDERMAN et al. 675

bottom in reading proficiency among the states. The 1994 CaliforniaLearning Assessment System (CLAS) scores, released in the spring of 1995,also indicated low student performance in core subject areas, especially inlanguage arts. A few months later, the 1994 NAEP scores were released,which placed the state last among the 39 participating states. A theoryemerged that linked the poor test scores to the shift away from traditionalapproaches to teaching reading to an emphasis on whole language andliterature-based approaches (Carlos & Kirst, 1997). The CDE and Honigwere criticized for promoting whole language while ignoring phonicsinstruction.

The poor reading performance led to a public and political backlash,resulting in a shift in policy direction and changes in the state-level educa-tional leadership arrangements.1 The newly elected superintendent, DelaineEastin, appointed a task force in the spring of 1995 to develop new guidelinesfor reading and mathematics. The task force issued a number of nonbindingadvisories that emphasized “a balanced and comprehensive approach toreading” (California Reading Task Force, 1995, p. 3) and included literature,language, and skills development. The policy shift was also facilitated by anewly elected state assembly in 1994. In October 1995, the state legislatureproposed and passed a series of bills, called the “ABC Bills,” regarding theadoption of instructional materials that emphasized basic skills. These billsprescribed a level of detail in addressing curricular and instructional issuesthat departed from past legislative practice (Carlos & Kirst, 1997). In addi-tion, the state legislature reconfigured the decision-making hierarchy in cur-riculum and assessment policy by creating independent state “advisory”agencies. The creation of these agencies diminished the authority of the CDEand contributed to increased leadership fragmentation at the state level.

Building on these legislative initiatives, the state assembly adopted addi-tional legislation aimed at improving literacy and basic skills. These initia-tives retained the notion of systemic reform but challenged previous defini-tions of content and pedagogy. In 1995, the legislature passed the CaliforniaAssessment and Academic Achievement Act (AB 265) that required thedevelopment of a new set of statewide academic standards. This was fol-lowed in 1997 with SB 376, which established the Standardized Testing andReporting (STAR) program. These bills required the development ofgrade-by-grade standards and an assessment program that emphasized basicskills. Other legislation adopted in 1996 authorized programs to support thepurchase of instructional materials and professional development thatstressed phonics-based reading instruction.

As a result of the political and policy changes, improving literacy emergedat the top of the school reform agenda. Named the California Reading


Initiative (CRI), this agenda embraced the various initiatives passed since1995 to promote reading and language arts instruction. Within this agendawas an emphasis on “an organized explicit skills program and continued andsustained teacher professional development in reading instruction” (Califor-nia Department of Education, personal communication, August 2, 1999). Tosupport this initiative, AB 1086, passed in 1997, authorized funds to districtsto provide in-service training in reading instruction, beginning with teachersin kindergarten through third grade, and later expanded to include fourth-through eighth-grade teachers (effective the 1998-1999 school year, the yearwe conducted this study). Following the lead of earlier legislation, this billspecified that the content of these courses include phonemic awareness, pho-nics, and decoding skills.

Although it may never have been the intent of the CDE that schools adoptwhole language at the expense of phonics, the perception emerged that thiswas the case. The policy shift to a focus on basic skills represents an emphasisin the other direction. These new policies are reinforced by California text-book policy, which requires that districts spend 85% of their textbook alloca-tion on state-approved textbooks or seek a waiver to purchase nonapprovedtexts.

ANALYTICAL PERSPECTIVE

To understand how middle and secondary schools support reading, weneed to consider how schools organize and manage teaching and learningwithin the broader, institutional environment. Organizational theory pro-vides us with two perspectives that take into account how organizationsrespond to their environment and how schools as organizations affect studentachievement. An institutional perspective regards schools as connected toand affected by the larger system of relations that constitutes the school sys-tem and offers insights into how institutional mechanisms structure organiza-tional responses to change. The resource allocation perspective considershow the allocation of instructional resources in schools and classrooms influ-ence student achievement and the implementation of policies such as legis-lated literacy initiatives.

An institutional approach provides insights into how school officials mayrespond to reform proposals and takes into account the ways in which policymakers attempt to control their behavior. By placing schools within abroader, institutional environment, this approach emphasizes the regulative,normative, and cognitive processes that contribute in interdependent andmutually reinforcing ways to shape and preserve organizational behavior(Powell & DiMaggio, 1991; Scott, 2001; Scott & Meyer, 1994). Regulative


processes point to the importance of rules, monitoring for conformity, andmanipulating sanctions to influence behavior. Attempts to regulate class-room teaching include input controls such as standardized textbooks or cur-riculum standards that constrain teachers’ decisions about instructional con-tent and output controls such as standardized testing to assess studentachievement (Rowan, 1990). Normative mechanisms include conceptions ofpreferred or desirable behavior and specify how things should be done (Scott,2001). In a decentralized educational system where both bureaucratic andprofessional control over instruction is relatively weak, informal relation-ships between teachers elicit particular behavioral responses by communi-cating accepted standards and practices (Bidwell, 1965; March & Olsen,1976; Meyer & Rowan, 1977; Rowan, 1990; Weick, 1976). Normative mech-anisms confer legitimacy on policies by defining their appropriateness withina particular context. Cognitive frameworks influence behavior by creatingshared conceptions of reality and the frames through which meaning is made.For example, Stodolsky (1988) demonstrated how subject matter shapesinstruction by making particular goals, activities, and instructional practicestaken for granted by teachers when they teach particular subjects. These insti-tutional mechanisms serve different functions. They may operate to promotethe diffusion of innovations by providing legitimacy for new structures andprograms (Rowan, 1982). They may also promote change through indirectmeans, as when regulatory systems, which often exert only weak effects,bring about change by stimulating other institutional mechanisms such asnormative processes (Scott, 2001). They may also preserve existing prac-tices, as cognitive structures do when they shape particular approaches toinstruction.

The resource allocation perspective considers how schools as organiza-tions influence teaching and learning. It distinguishes between schools asorganizations that provide the context for instruction and schooling as theinstructional processes that contribute to learning (Bidwell & Kasarda,1980). Bidwell and Kasarda argue that schools control schooling through theallocation of resources to classrooms and by influencing how teachers andstudents use them. The resource allocation perspective identifies importantresources as teachers’ knowledge and skills, student composition of schoolsand classrooms, curricular materials, allocation and use of time, and instruc-tional activities in the classroom.

According to this perspective, school systems influence teaching andlearning through the progressive allocation of resources from the district tothe school and classroom (Barr & Dreeben, 1983; Gamoran & Dreeben,1986). For example, schools structure the learning opportunities of their stu-dents by establishing different curricular programs (Gamoran, 1987). In a


study of first-grade reading, district administrators influenced both the con-tent of instruction and student learning through the provision of curricularmaterials, the allotment of time for instruction, and the distribution of studentcharacteristics (Barr & Dreeben, 1983). Wong and Anagnostopoulos (1998)showed how district intervention policies narrowly focused on raising stan-dardized test scores changed how schools and teachers allocated coreresources. Schools responded to district probation and reconstitution policiesby mandating that teachers devote more time to test-taking activities and toteaching basic reading skills and by strategically reallocating teachers andstudents to maximize the school’s overall test scores.

RESEARCH DESIGN AND DATA COLLECTION

The sample for this study is a subsample drawn from a larger study oneffective schools in California.2 This umbrella project used a regression anal-ysis to identify a school’s outlier status that was based on the distance of aparticular school from its predicted STAR reading scores. Actual 1998 read-ing scores were used, and poverty and limited English proficiency status werethe predictor variables.3 Because the model accounted for much of the varia-tion, few schools were extreme outliers.4 Schools were ranked according totheir outlier status (from positive to negative), and a sample of 20 schools wasselected that included an equal number of schools from each end of the range(10 positive and 10 negative outliers). The final site selection also took intoconsideration geography to ensure coverage of the state’s largest districts,and selection was influenced by forced substitutions when schools declinedto participate.

This study included 8 of the 10 schools identified as positive outliers in thelarger study. The 4 middle and 4 high schools, located in six communities inCalifornia, were at least 0.5 standard deviations (SD) from the mean (seeTable 1). We visited each school for 2 days in the spring of 1999; conductedinterviews with principals, teachers, and a central office administrator in eachdistrict; observed in classrooms; and collected documents. The socioeco-nomic and demographic characteristics of each school are described inTable 1. Principal responses on a reading survey were used to determine thepercentage of students identified with reading development needs (seeTable 1).5 This ranged from a low of 1% at Montevideo High to a high of 62%at Webster Junior High. Thomas Jefferson High School reported that 46% ofstudents were deficient in reading skills, and the remaining 4 schools (HarrietTubman Middle School did not return the survey) reported that between 24%and 31% of their students had reading deficiencies.


Table 1Outlier Designation, Percentage of Students Identified With Reading Development Needs, andSocioeconomic and Demographic Characteristics for Selected Schools in California (1997-1998)

Students

% With % Receiving Free %Outlier Reading Number or Reduced- % % % African % % American

School Designation Needs Enrolled Price Lunch LEP White American Latino Asiana

Indian

Harriet Tubman Middle School 1.07 — 921 26.9 24.1 20.5 6.0 30.4 42.9 0.2Webster Junior High School 0.94 62 646 65.5 20.6 29.6 10.1 57.4 1.4 1.5Los Arcos Middle School 1.06 29 719 48.2 10.6 30.7 22.0 16.4 29.7 1.3Anderson Middle School 0.77 31 1171 43.5 20.3 12.9 4.1 72.1 10.8 0.1Collin Springs High School 0.68 26 1523 61.1 22.1 30.7 10.9 43.9 13.8 0.7Mercury High School 0.69 24 2660 26.7 17.7 34.9 5.8 36.3 22.4 0.6Montevideo High School 1.44 1 1567 17.9 5.2 54.7 12.1 14.9 17.7 0.7Thomas Jefferson High School 0.88 46 1826 75.2 37.5 21.2 13.3 60.2 5.0 0.3

Source. Education Data Partnership (1999).Note. LEP = limited English proficient. Dash indicates data were not available.a. Includes Asians, Filipinos, and Pacific Islanders.

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We conducted 122 interviews (107 faculty members, 8 principals, and 7district administrators) and made 57 observations.6 Our strategy includedinterviewing the principal in each school, the department chairs in highschools and reading coordinators in middle schools, other program coordina-tors, and a sample of teachers at each grade level teaching in different tracks(e.g., remedial, general, and advanced English). Where possible, weobserved the teachers we interviewed. Interviews ranged from 30 to 60 min-utes, and observations were for one class period. In addition to interviewingand observing English and language arts teachers, we also interviewed andobserved teachers of other subject matter to inform us about the teaching ofreading in other subjects. Depending on the school, we made sure we inter-viewed and observed teachers or coordinators responsible for unique ormajor programs in those schools. In each district, we interviewed the district-level person in charge of curriculum and instruction. Interviews, which weresemistructured, focused on school organization, approaches to readingdevelopment, professional development, curriculum and instructional prac-tices, teacher recruitment, and state and district policies and practices.

LOCAL SCHOOL CONTEXT

In this section, we describe the local school context, focusing first onteacher and student characteristics and then on how these schools allocatedand used important instructional resources. We found that these schoolsattracted and retained highly qualified teachers and adopted strategies torecruit a diverse student population. Additionally, these schools allocatedhigh-quality instructional resources (teacher competencies and materials) toall educational tracks within the school, teachers adapted their instructionalpractices to accommodate differences in student abilities, and schoolsoffered a variety of support programs to assist students. Taken together, theteacher and student characteristics and the school- and teacher-level instruc-tional decisions contribute to understanding why these schools were positiveoutliers.

Teacher Quality, Recruitment, and Retention

The quality of the teachers that students encounter is one factor that islikely to affect student learning. There is strong evidence that suggests havinga high-quality teacher affects learning and is an important factor in explain-ing students’ test score gains (Loeb, 2000). There is also evidence that docu-ments substantial differences in teacher characteristics across schools anddistricts, suggesting that some schools are better able to attract and retainhigh-quality teachers (Betts, Rueben, & Danenberg, 2000; Loeb, 2000). At a


time when the national pool of teacher applicants is composed of people witha broad range of teaching competencies, the ability to draw those teachers inthe highest tier becomes particularly important. In this section, we first com-pare the qualifications of teachers in the schools we visited to those of teach-ers at the county, district, and state level. We looked for differences in threeteacher characteristics: credentials, teaching experience, and turnover rate.Although these characteristics do not necessarily guarantee quality instruc-tion, they are likely to have an impact on the capacity of the schools to deliverviable services. We then discuss why these differences might exist, focusingon the recruitment and hiring practices of the schools and districts.

We found that teachers at the schools studied were more likely to have fullteaching credentials, more years of experience, and a greater tendency toremain for longer periods of time in the same district—an indicator of lowrates of teacher turnover—when compared to teachers at the county, district,and state level. Table 2 provides information on teacher credentials and expe-rience at each of these levels. Seven of the eight schools in our sample had apercentage of teachers with full teaching credentials that was higher than thestate average of 87.5%. This ranged from the 100% of teachers at MercuryHigh School and Tubman Middle School who were fully credentialed to the91.2% at Los Arcos Middle School. Only Anderson Middle School, where86% of the teachers had full credentials, did not surpass the state average.Seven of the eight schools staffed teachers with more years of teaching expe-rience than the state average of 12.9 years, and teachers in these schools weremore likely to remain in the same district longer than the state average of 10.4years. Similar trends were observed when the characteristics of teachers inthese schools were compared to those at the county and district levels.

Differences in teacher characteristics among the levels discussed aboveraise the question of how these schools were able to attract quality teachersand retain them for longer periods of time. Our findings point to the impor-tance of these schools’ recruitment strategies. Principals in these schoolswere actively involved in the hiring process, pinpointing qualities that teach-ers needed to work well in the school. For example, the principal at CollinSprings High School described her approach to hiring in the following way:“We interview very carefully when we bring teachers on board. Because wereally want them to be people who are willing to work with all kinds of kids”(principal interview, Collin Springs High School, March 23, 1999). The prin-cipal of Los Arcos was appointed to the middle school the year it lost eightteachers to another district or to retirement. The school used substitute teach-ers until the end of November 1997 because, as the principal explained, “I’mso stubborn that I wasn’t about to settle for anybody. I was going to settle foronly the best I could find” (principal interview, Los Arcos Middle School,


April 1, 1999). The principal of Anderson explained her strategy of hiring tal-ented student teachers this way: “We’ve tried to encourage our student teach-ers [to join as full-time staff] if they are really good. We recently had three[student teachers], and we’ve encouraged them to apply” (principal inter-view, Anderson Middle School, May 3, 1999). Anderson’s principal alsohired teachers whom she knew through personal experience to be wellqualified.

In some instances, the district hiring process facilitated access to a broadpool of teacher applicants. For example, Smith, director of curriculum andstaff development, noted that Mercury City School District aggressively


Table 2Number of Teachers, Percentage With Teacher Credentials, andTeacher Experience at the State, County, District, and School Level (1998-1999)

Total % First- M MNo. Of Year % Full Years Years in

Level Teachers Teachers Credentials Teaching District

State of California 282,635 8.8 87.5 12.9 10.4County 6,995 6.7 88.0 12.4 9.9District 1,451 5.2 82.6 12.5 10.5

Webster Junior High School 26 3.8 96.2 20.1 17.4County 12,543 9.9 87.8 14.1 11.5District 569 9.1 92.4 12.7 10.3

Harriet Tubman Middle School 40 2.5 100 16.0 13.4County 4,394 5.9 95.9 13.8 11.0District 526 2.9 98.9 16.3 13.2

Mercury High School 103 3.9 100 16.4 14.1County 3,480 8.3 87.3 14.0 10.4District 690 5.7 93.0 17.5 13.6

Los Arcos Middle School 34 8.8 91.2 16.6 11.6County 22,872 10.4 95.1 12.5 10.8District 7,139 18.0 93.4 11.2 11.1

Thomas Jefferson High School 89 18.0 95.5 10.1 10.1County 22,872 10.4 95.1 12.5 10.8District 7,139 18.0 93.4 11.2 11.1

Collin Springs High School 71 12.6 95.8 14.7 14.5County 21,668 8.0 92.8 13.9 11.3District 2,481 6.0 82.0 14.0 10.3

Anderson Middle School 43 7.0 86.0 15.4 11.9County 3,496 8.3 87.4 14.0 10.0District 690 5.7 93.0 17.5 13.6

Montevideo High School 75 2.7 93.3 21.0 16.2

Source. California Department of Education, Educational Demographics Unit, “ClassroomTeacher Credential and Experience Report by District,” retrieved August 26, 1999 from http://star.cde.ca.gov/dataquest and February 28, 2000 from http://data1.cde.ca.gov/dataquest.

recruited teachers from outside of California, having sent teams to recruit inArizona and New Mexico. “We don’t want to hire unskilled people,” she said,“so we’re willing to go to the states that have reciprocity with California toattract them to sign contracts to come here” (district interview, Mercury CitySchools, May 5, 1999). A comparatively high salary schedule also contrib-uted to the ability of Mercury High School to attract and keep well-qualifiedteachers. As Murnane, Singer, Willett, Kemple, and Olsen (1991) show, ade-quate funding levels can facilitate solutions to the challenges that districtsface in hiring skilled teachers.

School Composition

School and classroom composition, or the characteristics of the studentswithin a school or classroom, have important implications for literacy devel-opment and student achievement because they establish the conditions forinstruction. Schools with large numbers of disadvantaged students pose par-ticular problems in the organization of classroom instruction because thesestudents often need additional assistance and can slow the pace of instruction(Barr & Dreeben, 1983). Empirical studies on the effects of school or class-room composition on student achievement provide evidence that the abilitymix of students affects the educational achievement of individual students,with low-ability, low-socioeconomic-status students benefiting the mostfrom exposure to their higher ability peers (Rosenbaum, Kulieke, &Rubinowitz, 1987; Zimmer & Toma, 2000). The overall poverty level of theschool a student attends is also related to student achievement (Puma et al.,1997). To mitigate against the challenges of teaching large numbers of disad-vantaged students, the schools we visited offered a wide range of academicprograms and courses that attracted a diverse student population, compliedwith desegregation orders, or altered school attendance boundaries to ensurestudent diversity.

The special programs, magnets, and academies available in each of theeight schools and their enrollment criteria are shown in Table 3. The additionof these programs meant that these eight schools were not solely neighbor-hood schools; rather, they attracted students from across the district and con-tributed to increasing diversity among the students. The Montevideo Acad-emy of Oceanography Science (MAOS), Principal Lewis said, “is the biggestdraw” of the school. She noted that teachers in the academy recruited stu-dents from several towns in the area for the MAOS program. The Academy ofTravel and Tourism attracted students from throughout the district as well. Tothis effect, the associate superintendent of curriculum and instruction inMontevideo School District said the following:


Montevideo High School pulls kids in from all over the district. . . . Montevideo HighSchool—by virtue of the MAOS program, by virtue of the Arts Academy, by virtue ofthe Academy of Travel and Tourism, which was our first academy—has pulled kidsin . . . who would typically be going to Bayside High. . . . What you have happeninghere is that in every one of the middle schools, you have parents at the end of eighthgrade who are making decisions [to send their children here]. (district interview, Mon-tevideo Peninsular School District, March 29, 1999)

The same was true of Collin Springs High, where only a fourth of its studentscame from the local Pacific Beach area, with the rest coming from throughoutthe entire district. The principal mentioned that before the magnet was intro-duced to Collin Springs, the school was populated with “beach kids. . . . Butsince we had the magnet come in it’s really recruited a whole different clien-tele of kids” (principal interview, Collin Springs High School, March 23,1999).

The junior high and middle schools also had various policies, programs, orenrollment procedures that helped to diversify the student body. WebsterJunior High attracted a diverse set of students because of the special pro-grams it offered, open enrollment policies that provided students who livedoutside the school boundaries an opportunity to attend, and its compliancewith a federal desegregation order still in effect. As a “fundamental” school,Anderson Middle School provided an alternative educational approach forstudents in grades six through eight. Primary emphasis was placed on ahighly structured program of basic skills and enrichment and the establish-ment of good study habits. The school required both parents and students tosign a contract agreeing to comply with the school’s code of conduct; parentsand students were also made aware of the school’s strict disciplinary policies.Tubman Middle School, on the other hand, bussed students in from alow-income neighborhood. Because Tubman was located in a high-incomearea, the district drew the school boundaries to ensure equity among the dis-trict’s three middle schools. The goal was to maintain some economic diver-sity within the school and to prevent a concentration of low-income studentsin any one school.

Ability Grouping and the Allocation of Resources

As with many middle and high schools, the schools we visited all had dif-ferent educational tracks to accommodate academic and ability differencesamong students. The use of tracking is controversial for a number of reasons.The concern of most opponents of tracking is that it leads to different oppor-tunities to learn—because of an unequal allocation of instruction acrossgroups—which, in turn, leads to inequality in achievement (Gamoran,


Table 3Special Programs Offered by Selected Schools and Their Enrollment Procedures (1998-1999 school year)

School Special Program Enrollment Procedure

Harriet Tubman Middle School Neighborhood school Seventy percent of students are from the neighborhood;30% are bused from poor neighborhoods.

Webster Junior High School Project Youth Employment Start, CISCO Students who live within the school’s boundaries areAcademy, technology broadcasting, music guaranteed admission. After that has been satisfied,

students from other neighborhoods can enter on first-come, first-served basis.

Los Arcos Middle School Magnet for special education studentsAnderson Middle School Fundamental Admission is on first-come, first-served basis. Because the

school is oversubscribed, parents camp out and stand inline to gain admission. Students and parents sign a contractto abide by school policies.

Collin Springs High School Marketing, management, graphics and Open enrollment. Students from the entire district apply fordesign magnet entrance to the magnet program. To maintain eligibility,

students enrolled in the magnet program are required totake at least one magnet class each semester.

Mercury High School International baccalaureate (IB) Students from the entire district apply for entrance to the IBprogram. Applicants to the IB program must meet certainqualifications.

Montevideo High School Montevideo Academy of Oceanography Science, Students from the entire district apply for entrance toAcademy of Travel and Tourism, Arts the academies.Career Academy

Thomas Jefferson High School International baccalaureate (IB), Writing Students from the entire district apply for entrance to the IBAcademy, Spanish and French immersion program and magnet programs. Applicants to the IBcontinuity program must meet certain qualifications.

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Nystrand, Berends, & LePore, 1995; Gamoran & Weinstein, 1998; Loveless,1999). Nonetheless, research findings suggest that differences in the rate ofinstruction may work better for different types of students (Slavin, 1987). Tooffset the effects of tracking, the schools we visited adopted strategies thathelped to improve instruction in the low tracks (Gamoran, 1993). Thisincluded allocating resources (teaching competencies and materials) equita-bly across tracks, providing high-level instruction that accommodated differ-ences in students’ skill levels, and adopting programs that provided studentswith additional opportunities to receive extra instruction on their regularclassroom curriculum.

Allocation of Resources

The schools we visited paid attention to how they distributed instructionalresources—teaching competencies and curricular materials—to students indifferent tracks. For one, the same teachers taught both high- and low-trackclasses. This avoided a common practice of assigning the best teachers to theupper track and the poorest teachers to the lowest track. At Mercury HighSchool, it was not unusual to find a teacher teaching advanced, general, andinternational baccalaureate (IB) courses. For example, in English, 11 out ofthe 22 teachers taught some combination of courses across different tracks.As the principal said:

I have teachers that, while they teach the international baccalaureate kids, also insiston having the basic classes, too. So, while those international baccalaureate teachersget extra training, our bottom kids also receive the benefits of some of that trainingbecause some of my very best teachers teach in both programs. (principal interview,Mercury High School, May 6, 1999)

The situation was similar at the other high schools. For example, a veteranEnglish teacher at Montevideo chose to teach primarily general-trackninth-grade students, believing that the ninth grade was a critical year inwhich to engage students in high school and to identify and help studentswork through potential literacy problems.

Several schools made sure that they had books and other materials thatwere appropriate for different reading levels. For example, Tubman MiddleSchool used school improvement monies to buy supplemental materials thatwere appropriate for low-achieving sixth-grade students. They purchasedmaterials for the school’s English language development students as well.The librarian at Mercury High made sure the school had books to accommo-date every reading level from about the fourth grade for students in the Accel-erated Reader program to college level materials for the IB students. Both


Collin Springs and Thomas Jefferson also bought books at different readinglevels.

Quality of Instruction

The instructional decisions that teachers make have important implica-tions for student learning because these decisions structure the learningopportunities of students. In the schools studied, teachers adopted instruc-tional strategies and assessment practices that encouraged student perfor-mance across all ability levels. For example, Robert Wagner, an IB and chem-istry teacher at Mercury High, noted a number of differences in teachingscience to IB students as compared to “regular” students. According to Wag-ner, IB students, who are very bright and highly motivated, will persist withthe material until they understand it. On the other hand, a “regular kid” whodoesn’t understand something “won’t get involved.” To involve these stu-dents, Wagner used projects, writing assignments that required students tolook for information in the textbook, and simulations that helped studentsconnect the material to their lives.

Teachers used different instructional strategies toward the same goal: toencourage all students to think and analyze the material presented to them.Although the teachers recognized that students in lower tracks required dif-ferent instructional strategies, the teachers did not compromise on educa-tional rigor. As Doug Chou, a history teacher at Los Arcos, explained:

In the standard class, I might give them a worksheet and have them find the informa-tion from the textbook. With the honors class, I give them the same worksheet, but I’llmaybe add a couple of questions at the end and have them write an essay on it to chal-lenge their critical thinking and their understanding. (teacher interview, AndersonMiddle School)

Kent Olson, a teacher of remedial English at Mercury High School, focusedon

small pieces, small reading selections, a lot of feedback, small assignments. . . . Theyare not major, huge assignments. They are small pieces and they just keep hammeringaway. I am trying to teach them . . . that if they will just plug away, they can make prog-ress. (teacher interview, Mercury High School, May 6, 1999)

The use of these different strategies for different ability levels ensured thatall types of students were capable of success. Wagner gave as much credit forsuccessful participation in a simulation as for an examination. He said thiswas a way to tell students that what they think was as important as a correctanswer on a test. With students who had not been successful before, he began


with relatively easy assignments to build their confidence. To a similar end,Olson explained: “I use a number of approaches to basically encourage themto give it their best effort. . . . These kids . . . need to have some sense of suc-cess” (teacher interview, Mercury High School, May 6, 1999).

Supporting Programs

Finally, many of the schools had other, general support programs that werelikely to benefit student learning. Mercury and Montevideo High Schoolsoffered study skills programs that provided a combination of study skills andorganizational skills for students and teachers. Commenting on the studyskills program at Mercury, the English chair said, “We’ve found it’s reallymade a difference, especially with a lot of the grade level kids and belowgrade level kids” (teacher interview, Mercury High School, May 6, 1999).

Some schools, particularly middle schools, provided students with oppor-tunities to receive additional instruction on the curriculum that they receivedin their regular classes. Sometimes, these were after-school tutoring pro-grams, such as the homework center at Los Arcos where students could go forassistance with math and language arts homework, or the after-school“clubs” at Tubman Middle School that provided academic support and tutor-ing to students needing assistance. At other times, assistance was offered dur-ing the day, as was the case at Anderson Middle School. The school used its45-minute lunch period to offer academic support programs—where stu-dents could get extra help, receive tutoring, or work on their homework—anda study skills class for students identified by the faculty as needing extra help.

SCHOOL-LEVEL READING SUPPORT

An institutional approach and the resource allocation perspective bothprovide insights into how middle and high schools might address the readingdevelopment needs of their students. By situating schools within a broader,institutional environment, these perspectives explain why some structuresand programs are preferred over others. We begin by identifying the con-straints on implementing reading programs, followed by a description of theapproaches to reading development that schools adopted. Because we foundthat these schools adopted a limited number of strategies to improve reading,we were interested in how the institutional environment facilitated or con-strained particular choices. Because of similarities in the organizational char-acteristics of middle and high schools, we expect our analysis to provideinsights into how policy makers and administrators in other jurisdictionsmight also structure reading programs.


Constraints on Implementing Reading Programs

Schools as institutions include conceptions of appropriate roles andresponsibilities that establish the parameters within which teachers andadministrators operate. These can be normative—such as beliefs, norms, andexpectations—or cognitive: for example, the frameworks, activities,and practices that determine the delivery of instruction. We identified theexpectation that the students entering junior high or high school already knewhow to read as one (normative) constraining factor on the development ofreading programs. For example, according to Smith, the director of curricu-lum and staff development in Mercury, there had been no system-wide dis-trict reading policy for junior high and high schools until after the statewideinitiative. As Smith noted, there was a belief “that [the students] knew how toread before they got to junior high.” There were reading programs in a fewhigh schools, but “there was no coordinated curriculum, no expectation forhaving any reading training” (district interview, Mercury City Schools, May5, 1999). Teachers at Tubman also struggled with the fact that many of theirmiddle school students had not acquired adequate reading skills in their ele-mentary school years, but the school had not addressed the issue in any sys-tematic way. “We realized,” a Tubman language arts teacher said, “we neededto focus on reading because our kids could read words but they weren’t think-ing about what they were reading. . . . They were not able to predict. Theywere not able to draw conclusions” (teacher interview, Harriet Tubman Mid-dle School, March 24, 1999).

One function that policies serve is to alter these expectations. Indeed, theCRI and the political response to the poor performance on standardized testsraised awareness of the need for reading development in middle and highschools. Nonetheless, the cognitive frameworks that govern the delivery ofinstruction in middle and high schools often reinforced these expectationsabout student reading abilities. The basic goal of most middle school lan-guage arts programs and high school English departments is to impart to stu-dents a knowledge and appreciation of literature. This literature-based read-ing curriculum, frequently the emphasis in elementary school readingprograms as well, often lacks any congruity with the reading skills needed incontent areas, leaving students ill-prepared to read other types of materials(Venezky, 1996). Different skills are needed for narrative reading than forreading expository texts, the primary source used for mathematics, socialstudies, and science. At the same time, the middle school language arts cur-riculum and high school English curriculum are designed for students whoalready know how to read, and these programs rarely teach basic readingskills. Students entering middle and high school who do not know how to


read well, either because they are second language learners or because theydid not acquire reading skills in the elementary grades, require additionalcurriculum materials if they are to acquire these skills.

Resource constraints, including scheduling (time) constraints, the level ofteacher expertise, the availability of appropriate materials, and funding canalso structure the approach a school takes to reading improvement. The allo-cation of time during the day is often determined by state and district curricu-lum requirements. As California has increased the number of coursesrequired for graduation and has mandated other courses, reading competeswith the scheduling of other, required courses.7 Another resource limitationis the availability of teachers with expertise in reading instruction. Typical ofmany high schools is a focus on teaching content, where teachers have sub-ject matter expertise but do not necessarily know how to teach reading. Read-ing expertise may be less of an issue among middle school language artsteachers, because many middle school teachers have K-8, multisubject cre-dentials. Teachers in one school, Thomas Jefferson High School, mentionedthe difficulty of finding reading strategies that were appropriate for second-ary school students. Teachers had received training in a district-sponsored lit-eracy program but commented that they were having difficulty transferringwhat they learned to the secondary school level. Finally, the availability andsource of funds is likely to structure a school’s approach to reading becauseresources are needed to cover the costs of teachers and materials. The sourceof funds can structure the form a program takes because funding guidelinesfrequently dictate how money can be used. For example, schools receivingtargeted assistance Title I funds must use the funds to help participatingstudents.

SCHOOL-LEVEL READING PROGRAMS

Interviews with district administrators, principals, and teachers provideddetailed descriptions about the reading supports implemented by the schools(see Table 4). First, reading and writing across the curriculum and sustainedsilent reading (SSR) were the most widely used strategies. Five schools(Mercury and Thomas Jefferson High Schools, Webster Junior High, andAnderson and Harriet Tubman Middle Schools) implemented reading orwriting across the curriculum strategies, and three high schools (Thomas Jef-ferson, Montevideo, and Collin Springs) supported SSR. These strategies aredesigned to increase the amount of time that students read. SSR typically setsaside a regular period of time, usually 20 minutes to begin with, for students—and teachers—to read. Reading and writing across the curriculum reinforces


reading and writing in all subject areas and usually involves training teachersin some reading or writing strategies.

The appeal of reading or writing across the curriculum and SSR, particu-larly in high schools, is apparent when viewed from a resource perspective.Regular teachers, who are often trained in workshops or in-services pre-sented by the district, school personnel, or outside experts, can implementthese strategies. These strategies normally do not require extensive knowl-edge of how to teach reading, or a special certification. They also help torelieve language arts or English teachers of part of the responsibility for read-ing improvement, an important consideration in the distribution of responsi-bilities within a school. Most important, these strategies do not alter schedul-ing routines because they can be absorbed into existing courses. They do notrequire introducing an additional course to the schedule, something thatwould necessitate finding staff, materials, and space. For example, twoschools (Jefferson and Collin Springs) modified an existing “advisory”period to incorporate SSR. In schools adopting reading across the curricu-lum, teachers were expected to incorporate reading into their lesson plans.

A second practice in the high schools was to offer a remedial or develop-mental reading class. Three of the four high schools (Mercury, Thomas Jef-ferson, and Collin Springs) offered a reading class to help students identifiedwith reading problems. Title I funds often supported these courses. Accord-ing to Paul Daniels, a reading teacher at Mercury, “Efforts to improve readinghave been special programs, such as Title I, so only schools with specialfunds [can support reading programs]” (teacher interview, Mercury HighSchool, May 6, 1999). Because Title I was categorical funding, it is not sur-prising that these funds were used to support a separate reading class.

The use of remedial courses also conformed to existing scheduling rou-tines and staffing constraints. These courses were most often offered as anelective for students identified as reading below grade level and were taughtby a resource teacher with a California reading credential. The curriculumtypically focused on literature-based reading skills. Mercury High Schooloffered the course as an elective for ninth-grade students, and the curriculumincluded SSR, the Accelerated Reader program, reading for main idea andcomprehension, and vocabulary development. Students were encouraged totake the course based on their eighth-grade test scores. Collin Springs offereda reading development class for ninth- and tenth-grade students reading fouror more levels below grade level expectations. This class provided readinginstruction in reading comprehension, vocabulary, and “speed reading.”Likewise, the reading development class at Thomas Jefferson was designedto teach literacy skills to students who scored below the 49th percentile on theSAT-9.


In the middle schools, strong support for reading came from the languagearts department, with reading incorporated into the language arts curriculumin all three middle schools. This was facilitated by decisions schools madeabout the allocation of time to language arts instruction. Los Arcos is oneexample. They offered a “core” language arts class that included three peri-ods in the sixth grade, two periods in seventh grade, and one period in eighthgrade. In the sixth and seventh grade, one full period was devoted to reading.Anderson Middle School also had a block schedule for teaching languagearts, which, according to the principal, “gives [the language arts teachers]some flexibility in using a lot of reading and writing” (principal interview,Anderson Middle School, May 3, 1999). Tubman included reading, writing,grammar, oral communication, and vocabulary in the language arts curricu-lum. In addition, the school was in the process of upgrading the language artscurriculum to reflect a greater emphasis on improving reading skills.

Finally, schools often allocated professional development resources tosupport reading development. Although professional development is usefulin upgrading teachers’ skills, it is also consistent with the adoption of strate-gies that place responsibility for improving students’ reading skills on indi-vidual teachers. The language arts teachers at Tubman received training ininstructional strategies for teaching reading, something the school alsowanted to extend to teachers of subjects other than language arts. One


Table 4Organizational Characteristics of Schools and Reading Initiatives in California (1999)

Middle School orReading Initiative High School Junior High School

Reading and writing Mercury Anderson Middleacross the curriculum Thomas Jefferson Harriet Tubman Middle

Webster Junior HighSustained silent reading Thomas Jefferson

Collin SpringsMontevideo

Remedial reading class MercuryThomas JeffersonCollin Springs

Accelerated reader program Thomas JeffersonTutoring Webster Junior HighLanguage Arts/English Montevideo Anderson Middle

Harriet Tubman MiddleLos Arcos Middle

Professional development Mercury Harriet Tubman MiddleCollins Springs Webster Junior High

language arts teacher said, “We’ve gone to as many workshops that we can toget ideas” (teacher interview, Harriet Tubman Middle School, March 24,1999). When Mercury High School adopted writing across the curriculum,the English department offered training to the faculty in how to implementthis strategy. Most of the faculty participated in the training sessions, accord-ing to Laura Jones, the English department chair, who considered the strategyto be widely implemented. A different approach was taken at Collin Springs,where the entire staff was trained in instructional strategies designed for Eng-lish language learners. The principal felt that these strategies were useful forimproving the reading skills of the schools’students because of the high num-ber of second language learners in the school (22%). She also believed thatthese were strategies that could be applied to all students to “bring them alongwithout overwhelming them” (principal interview, Collin Springs HighSchool, March 23, 1999).

CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS

In California, the state policy context was instrumental in raising anawareness of the need to address literacy in middle and high schools andfacilitated the adoption of a statewide reading initiative aimed at improvingliteracy. These provided the starting point for the initiation and implementa-tion of reading programs by districts and schools. In addition, awareness byschool personnel that their students were frequently deficient in readingskills has meant that districts and schools are beginning to tackle literacyissues.

Notwithstanding this increased attention to literacy, the findings pre-sented in this study suggest that middle and high schools in Californiaadopted a limited number of strategies aimed specifically at improving theliteracy skills of their students. Expectations about what students shouldknow and learn in middle and high schools, the nature of the curriculum, andlimitations posed by resource constraints were important considerations inhow schools approached literacy development. Middle and high schools pre-ferred reading programs and strategies that conformed to existing schedulingroutines, accommodated staffing constraints, met funding requirements, andcould be supported by available resources.

The results of this study also indicate that school context and the nature ofclassroom instruction constitute an important part of the explanation for whystudent achievement in these schools was better than predicted by studentsocioeconomic characteristics. These schools recruited and retained highlyqualified teachers, attracted a diverse student population, and distributedresources within the schools in ways that benefited students of all ability


levels. Students received high-quality instruction that accommodated theirdifferent abilities, and the schools provided support programs that gave stu-dents opportunities for additional instruction in their academic subjects.

This study raises a number of issues for policy makers, district administra-tors, and school leaders to consider, especially for schools with high concen-trations of low-income, low-achieving students. The schools in this studywere racially, economically, and academically diverse. So often policy mak-ers seem to assume that the effects of racial and economic segregation andconcentrated poverty can be overcome with the right set of educationalreforms or programs. The findings from this study would suggest that schoolsthat can attract a more diverse student population are more likely to performwell, to attract and retain better teachers, and to offer a more diversified cur-riculum. Although administrators cannot change the socioeconomic charac-teristics of its students, they can adjust school attendance boundaries, as onedistrict did, or add programs to attract more able students, as many of theseschools did to increase diversity.

Increasing the number of skilled and motivated teachers poses a difficultchallenge that is not easily remedied by short-term solutions. Policies thattarget improvements in working conditions (school environment), that pro-vide higher salaries, or both may help to attract teachers to schools servinglarge numbers of disadvantaged students. Paying attention to recruitment andhiring practices can also help schools and districts attract quality teachers.Administrators also need to pay attention to how teachers are assigned toschools and, within schools, to classrooms, so that students of all ability lev-els have access to high-quality instruction.

To support reading and writing in middle and high schools, three issuesneed to be considered. First, attention needs to be devoted to the organizationof instruction as it takes place in middle and high school classrooms. Thisincludes information about students’ current reading levels, goals to identifywhat improvements realistically can be expected, and ways to monitor prog-ress. Second, an organizational structure is needed that will support and sus-tain reading instruction, including the availability of adequate instructionaltime, teachers that are properly trained, and availability of appropriateresources. Third, the issue of reading for content knowledge as well as liter-acy development needs to be addressed if students are to perform well acrosssubject areas.

At the policy level, policies that support the improvement of the curricu-lum and instructional practices should be better coordinated. This is particu-larly important as state legislators take a more active role in instructionalissues. In California, the legislature and state board adopted a number of ini-tiatives in recent years aimed at improving literacy. They allocated money for


professional development in reading and provided support for the purchaseof instructional materials and the development of reading programs. How-ever, these initiatives are politically and ideologically driven, with an almostexclusive focus on basic skills and phonics instruction. In addition, there areother obstacles to developing a coherent policy. California state policies havenot accounted for the large number of students who are learning English as asecond language, class size reduction policies exacerbate teacher shortages,and the reading initiatives ignore scheduling constraints. To adequatelyaddress the literacy needs of California students, these issues will have to beaddressed.

NOTES

1. At about the same time, critics expressed concerns about the mathematics framework andthe California Learning Assessment System (CLAS), adding to the dissatisfaction with the edu-cational leadership and student performance. See Carlos and Kirst (1997).

2. School and district names and the names of school and district staff are pseudonyms.3. The poverty predictor was an 8th- and 11th-grade measure derived from a parent-education

variable coded for all students taking the STAR program.4. The range for high schools was from –1.40 SD to 1.44 SD (with one school at 3.33 SD)

from the mean; for middle schools, the range was from –1.33 SD to 1.68 SD from the mean.5. The larger study included a survey that was mailed to principals in 200 middle and high

schools. Seven of the eight schools in this study returned the survey.6. Harriet Tubman Middle School: 12 interviews and 10 observations; Webster Junior High

School: 13 interviews, 5 observations; Los Arcos Middle School: 7 interviews and 5 observa-tions; Anderson Middle School: 16 interviews and 10 observations; Collin Springs High School:15 interviews, 6 observations; Mercury High School: 29 interviews, 12 observations; Montevi-deo High School: 9 interviews, 4 observations; Thomas Jefferson High School: 14 interviews,5 observations.

7. For example, AB 365, passed in 1997, requires a high school pupil to complete one coursein visual or performing arts and one course in a foreign language to receive a high schooldiploma. SB 669, passed in 1997, requires school districts to ensure that all pupils in grades 9 to12 receive parenting education.

REFERENCES

Barr, R., & Dreeben, R. (1983). How schools work. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Betts, J. R., Rueben, K. S., & Danenberg, A. (2000). Equal resources, equal outcomes? The dis-

tribution of school resources and student achievement in California. San Francisco: PublicPolicy Institute of California.

Bidwell, C. E. (1965). The school as a formal organization. In J. G. March (Ed.), Handbook oforganizations (pp. 973-1002). Chicago: Rand McNally.

Bidwell, C. E., & Kasarda, J. D. (1980). Conceptualizing and measuring the effects of school andschooling. American Journal of Education, 89, 401-431.

California Reading Task Force. (1995). Every child a reader: The report of the California Read-ing Task Force. Sacramento: California Department of Education.


Carlos, L., & Kirst, M. (1997, March). California curriculum policy in the 1990’s: We don’t haveto be in front to lead. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American EducationalResearch Association, Chicago.

Education Data Partnership. (1999). California public schools profiles [Online]. Available:http://www.ed-data.k12.ca.us/dev/school.asp

Gamoran, A. (1987). The stratification of high school learning opportunities. Sociology of Edu-cation, 60, 135-155.

Gamoran, A., & Dreeben, R. (1986). Coupling and control in educational organizations. Admin-istrative Science Quarterly, 31, 612-632.

Gamoran, A., Nystrand, M., Berends, M., & LePore. P. C. (1995). An organizational analysis ofthe effects of ability grouping. American Educational Research Journal, 32, 687-715.

Gamoran, A., & Weinstein, M. (1998). Differentiation and opportunity in restructured schools.American Journal of Education, 106, 385-415.

Loeb, S. (2000, November). Teacher quality: Its enhancement and potential for improving pupilachievement. Paper presented at the National Invitational Conference “Improving Educa-tional Productivity: Lessons From Economics,” Washington, DC.

Loveless, T. (1999). The tracking wars: State reform meets school policy. Washington, DC:Brookings Institution Press.

March, J. G. & J. P. Olsen (1976). Ambiguity and choice in organizations. Bergen, Germany:Universitetsforlaget.

Meyer, J. W., & Rowan, B. (1977). Institutionalized organizations: Formal structure as myth andceremony. American Journal of Sociology, 83, 340-363.

Murnane, R. J., Singer, J. D., Willett, J. B., Kemple, J. J., & Olsen, R. J. (1991). Who will teach?Policies that matter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Powell, W. W., & DiMaggio, P. J. (Eds.). (1991). The new institutionalism in organizationalanalysis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Puma, M. J., Karweit, N., Price, C., Ricciuti, A., Thompson, W., & Vaden-Kiernan, M. (1997).Prospects: Final report on student outcomes. Washington, DC: U.S. Department ofEducation.

Rosenbaum, J. E., Kulieke, M. J., & Rubinowitz, L. S. (1987). Low-income Black children inWhite suburban schools: A study of school and student responses. Journal of Negro Educa-tion, 56, 35-43.

Rowan, B. (1982). Organizational structure and the institutional environment: The case of publicschools. Administrative Science Quarterly, 27, 259-279.

Rowan, B. (1990). Commitment and control: Alternative strategies for the organizational designof schools. Review of Research in Education, 16, 353-389.

Scott, W. R. (2001). Institutions and organizations (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.Scott, W. R., & Meyer, J. W. (1994). Institutional environments and organizations. Thousands

Oaks, CA: Sage.Slavin, R. E. (1987). Ability grouping and student achievement in elementary schools: A

best-evidence synthesis. Review of Educational Research, 57, 293-336.Stodolsky, S. S. (1988). The subject matters: Classroom activity in math and social studies. Chi-

cago: University of Chicago Press.Venezky, R. L. (1996, October). Reading achievement, reading instruction, and Title I evalua-

tion. Paper presented at the National Invitational Conference “Implementation of the Title IProgram: Implications for Improving Our Capacity for Achieving Student Success,”Bethesda, MD.

Weick, K. (1976). Educational organizations as loosely coupled systems. Administrative Sci-ence Quarterly, 21, 1-19.


Wong, K. K., & Anagnostopoulos, D. (1998). Can integrated governance reconstruct teaching?Lessons learned from two low-performing Chicago high schools. Educational Policy, 22,31-47.

Zimmer, R. W., & Toma, E. F. (2000). Peer effects in private and public schools across countries.Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 19, 75-92.


EDUCATIONAL POLICY / November 2001BRUCE D. BAKER

Living on the Edges of State School-FundingPolicies: The Plight of At-Risk, Limited-English-Proficient, and Gifted Children

BRUCE D. BAKER

This study explores the rationality of state aid allocations to local school dis-tricts for providing opportunities to at-risk, limited-English-proficient (LEP),and gifted and talented pupils, referred to throughout as fringe populations,using data from the National Center for Education Statistics 1995-1996 Com-mon Core of Data. Findings indicate that state aid programs for these popula-tions are largely idiosyncratic. States with exemplary programs for fringe pop-ulations are Texas—where LEP aid falls slightly below, but compensatory aidmeets, minimal adequacy benchmarks and is both rational and equitable, andgifted education aid is allocated in an equalized pattern—and Virginia, wherecompensatory aid passes on all three measures, and gifted education aid issubstantial and strongly equalized. States with consistently less than exem-plary records include Kansas—which provides uniformly inadequate, ques-tionably rational, and partially disequalizing aid for compensatory and LEPprograms—and New Mexico, whose aid allocations resemble those of Kansas.

CONSIDERABLE ATTENTION has been given in recent years to under-standing the costs of serving students with disabilities (Chambers, 1999b)and the design of state funding systems for ensuring that students’ specialneeds can be met by local districts (Parrish & Wolman, 1999). Significantlyless attention has been given to three student populations that are less well

AUTHOR’S NOTE: This study was funded by the National Center for Education Statistics(NCES) and the American Education Finance Association (NCES Project 1.3.143.1. AERA/AEFA Scholars).


699

defined: at-risk, limited-English-proficient (LEP), and gifted and talentedchildren, referred to henceforth as fringe populations because they lie on theill-defined fringe between general and special education.

The objective of this study is to provide a thorough cross-state analysis ofpatterns of state aid allocations to local districts for serving at-risk, LEP, andgifted and talented students. At present, little or no cross-state empiricalresearch exists on the volume or distribution of funding allocated from statesto local districts for serving these special populations. Furthermore, little orno information exists on the effectiveness of aid distribution formulas toensure that all districts have adequate resources to provide appropriate educa-tional services. The result is a significant information void for policy makersseeking technically appropriate policy alternatives. To begin to fill this void,this study characterizes the actual state aid distributions to local districts forserving fringe populations and analyzes those distributions in terms of ade-quacy, equity, and rationality with respect to both expected student popula-tion characteristics and community capacity characteristics.

BACKGROUND

In public school finance policy, fringe populations are often treated withnominal adjustments or add-ons to general aid formulas.1 Supplemental aidallocations for special populations, like general aid quantities, are derivedprimarily via political deliberation among state legislators. In recent years,efforts have been made to introduce empirically determined values intodeliberations over adequate general education funding, to use empiricallydetermined values to scrutinize current state funding methods, or both. Onesuch example is Guthrie and Rothstein’s (1999) resource cost analysis ofprototypical “adequate” schools and the subsequent resource-based blockgrant funding formula in Wyoming. Unfortunately, those wishing to eithersupplement or supplant purely political processes with rationally derivedcost estimates for fringe populations will find themselves with far too littleinformation to adequately inform policy decisions.2

Federal Policy and Legal Protection

Why at-risk, gifted, and LEP students remain on the fringes but are recog-nized at all is largely a result of an intriguing mix of federal programs, regula-tions, and statutes, or lack thereof, that have resulted from years of politicaland legal pressures by special interests (see Casanova & Chavez, 1992). Thecompensatory needs of at-risk students were formalized in federal legislationin 1965 as Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA)(P. L. 89-10, 1965). States responded to the federal program by creating


state-level policies to recognize and provide financial support for local dis-tricts to provide compensatory programs. Title I continues to provide federalfunding to supplement, not supplant, services for at-risk children in predomi-nantly low-income schools at a present level of approximately $727 per par-ticipating pupil ($8 billion for 11 million pupils).3 Yet, participation at theschool, district, or state level remains voluntary, in that there are no specificlegal protections dictating that low-income students require and must receivesupplemental resources.

There are no significant federal initiatives that require or directly supportdiscretionary state- or local-district-level gifted education programming.The Jacob K. Javits Gifted and Talented Students program, created under theHawkins-Stafford amendments of 1988 (P.L. 100-297, April 28, 1988), pres-ently Title X of ESEA, provides continued funding for a national researchand dissemination center on gifted education. Attempts at legal protection forgifted students have been largely unsuccessful at both the federal and statelevel, even where state-level statutes exist. In a case involving a hearing-impaired student of above average academic ability, the U.S. Supreme Courtdeclared that Congress’s purpose in adopting legislation providing funds forthe education of disabled children was to provide a “basic floor of opportu-nity” and not, as argued by plaintiffs, to maximize a student’s potential.4

When the suitability of local programming offerings was challenged in courtin Connecticut, a state with no statutory mandate for gifted children, the statesupreme court held quite simply that “a gifted child’s right to a free publiceducation does not include a right to a special education” (Broadley v. Boardof Education, 1994, quoting Justice Palmer of the Connecticut SupremeCourt). Challenges under former Pennsylvania statutes for gifted education,governed under state statutes for special education, to a large degree alsoexemplify the confusion over rights for gifted children (Roe v. Pennsylvania,1986).

The case of LEP children is different from a legal protection perspectivebut largely similar to compensatory education in that the impetus for moststate policy and local district program expansion was the implementation ofTitle VII of ESEA in 1967, the Bilingual Education Act. Like Title I, Title VIIprovides funds to districts to create and supplement the operation of pro-grams to meet the needs of LEP children.5 For LEP students, however, prece-dents for legal protection do exist. In Lau v. Nichols (1974), a case involvingprimarily Chinese LEP students in California who had been placed in an Eng-lish only class, the U.S. Supreme Court found in favor of the plaintiffs on thebasis that the English only policy was discriminatory and in violation of theOffice of Civil Rights interpretation of Title VI of the Federal Civil RightsAct of 1964.6 The rights of LEP students were clarified in 1974 when Congress

BRUCE D. BAKER 701

adopted the Equal Educational Opportunity Act, which made specific notethat

no state shall deny equal educational opportunity to an individual on account of his orher race, color, sex, or national origin, by . . . the failure by an educational agency totake appropriate action to overcome language barriers that impede equal participationby its students in its instructional programs. (Imber & Van Geel, 2000, p. 258)

Who Are They and How Do We Identify Them?

Special financial provisions for fringe populations in state educationfinance policies are made on the theoretical premise of vertical equity, that is,unequal students deserve appropriately unequal educational treatment.Ideally, vertical equity adjustments in state funding formulas are intended toreflect the additional costs of serving children with distinctly different educa-tional programming needs. Yet, despite this apparently simple purpose, littleis known about the actual costs of providing appropriate instructional andrelated services to at-risk, LEP, or gifted children. For one, few educationalexperts agree on who at-risk or gifted and talented children are or can provideconsistent descriptions of their distinctly different educational programmingneeds. This is not to suggest that there is a lack of instructional models forserving either population but rather that there remains considerable debateover those models and, for that matter, over which children require serviceswithin those models.

At-risk children are often identified for state aid allocation purposes viaeconomic criteria such as qualifying for free or reduced-price lunch status.This approach is an outgrowth of federal Title I policies. Typically, state aidfor at-risk children is used to provide compensatory reading or other remedialprograms, also consistent with federal policies. Odden and Picus (2000, p. 200)note that 28 states supported compensatory aid programs during school year1993-1994. Among those states, Odden and Picus identify five states thatspecifically use the word “remedial” to describe the educational program-ming resulting from compensatory aid; at least two of the five states use eco-nomic criteria for need identification.7 Perhaps due in part to the questionableimplications of applying economic criteria to educational need, states areincreasingly including measures of academic performance, and some haveincluded language proficiency status as an indicator of risk (Odden & Picus,pp. 215-217). Nonetheless, who is considered at-risk, and how to identifythem, varies widely from state to state.

State definitions of gifted and talented children vary widely (Stephens &Karnes, 2000). Whereas some states specify particular percentiles on stan-dardized achievement tests or cutoff scores on intelligence tests, most allow


considerable flexibility to local districts. In 1995, 31 states mandated identi-fication of gifted children, but only 24 mandated services for those children(Council of State Directors of Programs for the Gifted, 1996).8

The Cost of Serving Fringe Pupils

Cost estimates or guidelines for weighting funding for at-risk and bilin-gual pupils have been presented in literature and used in policy for severalyears, despite questionable empirical bases. The most common estimatesprovided indicate a cost of serving both at-risk and limited-English-proficientpupils at 1.2 times the cost of educating the “typical” student (Parrish,Matsumoto, & Fowler, 1995). A recent National Research Council reportnoted the following with respect to the 1.2 weighting for at-risk pupils:

While this indicator may be the best currently available for determining a weightingfor students in poverty and is easily understood, it results from federal budget deci-sions about what to spend on Title I, not on a calculation of the costs of educating poorchildren and of compensating for prior deprivation that may affect their education per-formance. (Ladd & Hansen, 1999, p. 127)

Results of cost and expenditure analyses of serving at-risk pupils varywidely. Goertz (1988, as cited in Odden & Picus, 2000, p. 212), for example,found that in a study of schools in 17 districts, Chapter I expenditures rangedfrom $175 per pupil, in a district with an expenditure range of $175 to $1,070,to $2,500 per pupil. Odden and Picus cost out the ingredients of offering the“Roots and Wings/Success for All” whole school reform program focused onimproving achievement of at-risk pupils in a school of 500 pupils, arriving atapproximately $1,000 per pupil, for a total of $500,000 (p. 213). Economet-ric studies by Downes and Pogue (1994), Reschovsky and Imazeki (1998),and Duncombe and Yinger (1998, 1999) tend to yield substantially greatermarginal costs. In particular, Reschovsky and Imazeki’s models of Wiscon-sin school districts suggest a poverty weight of 1.59 (or 259% of mean spend-ing), indicating that “to achieve any given level of educational outcome coststwo and a half times as much money as required to educate a regular student”(p. 143). Similarly, Downes and Pogue, in an analysis of Arizona schools,note that “for the decile of districts with the smallest concentration of at-riskstudents, this [additional cost of achieving comparable outcomes] is $73 perstudent or less; for the decile with the greatest concentration, the cost is$2,632 or more” (p. 103).

Studies of the costs of providing bilingual education have also producedwidely varying results, ranging from less than an extra 5% (from studies ofCarpenter-Huffman & Samulon, 1981, and Gonzalez, 1996, as cited in

BRUCE D. BAKER 703

Odden & Picus, 2000, p. 214) to an extra 100% (Chambers & Parrish, 1983,as cited in Odden & Picus, 2000, p. 214). Parrish (1994) estimated the costs ofserving LEP students under alternative instructional models in California.Using a “resource cost model” approach, Parrish found the average total mar-ginal cost of serving LEP students to be $361 (marginal instructional cost =$186; administrative and support cost = $175). Across four approaches toservice delivery, marginal costs were approximately 18% above classroomcosts, with classroom costs ranging from $1,409 to $1,978 per pupil, and totalcosts, including support for LEP students, ranging from $1,756 to $3,505 perpupil.

There are no existing cost estimates for providing appropriate services togifted and talented children. Deeply embedded within Chambers’s (1999a)working paper on resource cost analysis is the finding that Ohio elementaryschools (1995-1996) with average caseloads and contact hours spent approx-imately $1,655 (special teaching assignment) to $2,061 (regular teachingassignment) per pupil per year on gifted education services. Applying theeconometric cost function framework, whereby estimates of the marginalcost of raising a student’s or a population of student’s achievement to a mini-mum standard are obtained, the marginal costs of serving gifted and talentedpupils would be either asymptotic to $0 or negative, in that many such stu-dents may have surpassed standards prior to the time expected or required.

The Role of Supplemental State Aid

Although a major objective of this study is to assess the logic by whichstate aid is granted to local districts to assist them in providing services forfringe populations, state aid is by no means presumed to represent totalexpenditures on services to fringe populations. Rather, state aid is presumedto be an important supplement to locally raised revenues and to federal reve-nues for Title I programs, Title VII programs, or both, that may additionallybenefit at-risk students, LEP students, or both. State aid may be granted tolocal school districts with a variety of policy objectives. First, the state may infact be the primary or even sole source of public education funding. In suchcases, state aid would typically be allocated with the intent to cover the fullcost of providing services across all districts regardless of local capacity. Fewstates function under a full state funding or fully state regulated fundingmodel.

Often, the role of state aid is to equalize local districts’ abilities to providecomparable levels of service. This objective is standard when it comes toallocating general education funds in states where local property taxesremain central to funding public schools. Yet, arguably, few if any states cur-rently support general fund equalization programs that are both completely


equitable and fully adequate. A growing concern regards the equity conse-quences of providing unequalized supplemental or special funds for fringeand special education populations in conjunction with partially equalizedand, at times, questionably adequate general fund equalization programs.The Ohio Supreme Court recognized the equity implications of such anapproach, noting the following:

Funds for handicapped students, for instance, whose education costs are substantiallyhigher are disbursed in a flat amount per unit. If the actual cost exceeds the fundsreceived, wealthier districts are in a better position to make up the difference.(DeRolph v. State, 1997, as cited in Parrish & Wolman, 1999, p. 248)

The Ohio court’s finding points out that it is possible for supplemental stateaid allocations that are determined without consideration for the general aidformula to result in illogical or undesirable outcomes.

METHOD

Four questions guide the empirical analyses that follow:

1. On average, how much money per pupil in average daily attendance isbeing allocated from states to local districts for meeting the needs of bilin-gual, at-risk, and gifted and talented pupils?

2. What is the range and distribution of state aid allocations (total aid) to dis-tricts by district characteristics?

3. What is the relationship between state aid allocations and prevalence ofneed, where need can be estimated?

4. What is the relationship between state aid allocations and communitycharacteristics such as median family income?

Data

This study uses data from the Common Core of Data (CCD), school years1993-1994 through 1997-1998, provided by the National Center for Educa-tion Statistics (2000). The analyses that follow focus specifically on schoolyear 1995-1996. In 1995-1996, for example, districts in 17 states reportedseparate state aid allocations for gifted education (C C08).9 Districts in 13states reported separate state aid allocations for bilingual education or educa-tion of LEP students (C C06), and districts in 24 states reported separate stateaid allocations for educating at-risk pupils (C C07). Data on both total reve-nues from states to districts and on revenues per student (AG PK12) are usedin the analyses.

BRUCE D. BAKER 705

Although there are no direct measures of prevalence for at-risk or bilin-gual students available in the CCD, there are a variety of useful indirect mea-sures. Several states use indirect measures such as incidence of poverty forallocating aid to at-risk pupils. The CCD includes data on median familyincome for all households (P1080A01), households with children(P3080A01), percentages of families with income below poverty levels(P211803-P211804; P711803-P711804), and percentage of all at-risk chil-dren enrolled (PC30ETP) to estimate at-risk prevalence. The CCD alsoincludes data on students’English language proficiency (P7028ETP). Unfor-tunately, the CCD contains no prevalence data regarding gifted and talentedchildren, and there are no reasonable proxies available. Finally, communitycharacteristics including median family income of all households(P1080A01) and median value of housing units (H1061A01) will be used togage the distributional impact of state aid according to the previously statedexpectations.

Characterizing State Aid to Local Districts

The first objective was to estimate the state revenues allocated for eachfringe population per the total enrollment of districts. These ratios provide anindication of the average level of supplemental resources available given thetotal student population, indicating to some degree a state’s commitment to aparticular fringe service. The second objective was to estimate the state reve-nues allocated for each fringe population per school. This step is taken, inpart, to estimate the average quantity of service that might be purchased at theschool-building level. For example, if, on average, schools receive a total of$2,000 to $5,000 for gifted education, one might preclude the possibility thatpersonnel could be purchased with state aid. Both aid per pupil and aid perschool values are presumably influenced by the prevalence of need pupils. Assuch, average allocations across all schools and all pupils are only minimallyinformative with respect to the adequacy and distribution of aid, indicatingonly the overall level of resources available to fringe populations.

Characterizing Aid to Expected Need Pupils

The second set of the analyses estimates the level of state resources avail-able to students expected to require those resources. For at-risk children,prevalence was estimated by multiplying the variable for the percentage ofchildren at-risk by the district enrollment. The resultant expected at-risk pop-ulation is likely to be understated by the use of a single poverty measure but ispresumed to remain highly correlated with more inclusive criteria. Compen-satory allotments were divided by the expected at-risk population to generate


the allocation per “need” pupil. Similar steps were taken for LEP children,where the measure of the percentage of children in the community who speakEnglish “not well” was used as a proxy for need. Estimates for allocations pergifted pupil were more speculative and were based on somewhat idealisticassumptions, namely, that giftedness is roughly evenly, or at least randomly,distributed around a mean of 5% across districts, regardless of wealth,income, or other contextual differences. The final step in this analysis was tocalculate revenue per need pupil as a percentage of each district’s coreinstructional expenditures per pupil. This step is taken to discern the averagepercentage of supplemental aid allocated, providing values that should becomparable to supplemental pupil weights as used in many state’s fundingformulas.

The Relationship Between Aid and Need Across Districts

The next set of analyses shift the focus from the level of resources avail-able to the pattern of distribution of those resources. Perhaps the most logicalquestion to pursue regarding distribution is whether more resources are beingallocated to districts with greater expected need, where need is characterizedby prevalence. Given the assumption of a flat prevalence distribution forgifted children, this analysis pertains only to at-risk and LEP children.

Two sets of correlation analyses were performed. In the first, the level ofcompensatory or LEP aid per pupil was correlated with the expected at-riskand LEP populations across districts in an effort to determine whether thebudget impact of supplemental resources substantially increased for districtswith greater expected need. In the second analysis, the total supplemental aidwas correlated with the total number of expected need pupils. These twoapproaches were expected to produce largely the same results, but the lattermethod was expected to potentially overstate the strength of the relationshipbetween resource availability and need. That is, by the design of most alloca-tion formulas, it is expected, at the very least, that additional identified chil-dren will yield additional dollars in aid and that larger districts are likely toreceive larger sums of total aid, but not necessarily more aid per pupil. Inshort, the expectation for all states allocating fringe aid would be for the cor-relation between prevalence and allocation to be quite high.

The Relationship Between Aid and Capacity Variables

The final analysis characterizes the relationship between aid distributionsand local capacity indicators. This analysis addresses the equity concern thatsupplemental aid allocations made solely on the basis of pupil need, with lit-tle or no consideration for local district capacity, may yield unintended

BRUCE D. BAKER 707

horizontal inequities across special populations. For example, it might bereasonable for a state’s correlation between aid and prevalence to be low if itturned out that need pupils were more prevalent in higher capacity districts.For both at-risk and LEP pupils, this is presumed to be an unlikely generalpattern, though anecdotal examples of high wealth, high percentage of LEPor even high wealth, high number of at-risk pupil districts may exist.

Capacity variables included district median family income, core expendi-tures per pupil, and cumulative state aid percentage. Median family income ispresumed to be the primary measure of a district’s capacity to raise localresources (in states where allowed) for school programs. State revenue per-centage is presumed to indicate a district’s fiscal dependence on stateresources, often an indicator of lacking local capacity. In some states, thatlack of capacity may be in the form of property wealth, whereas in others,state revenue may be adjusted on combinations of income, property wealth,and other measures. Core expenditures per pupil are used as a measure oflocal district resource constraints, in that it is presumed that districts withhigher levels of core expenditures have greater capacity to supplement spe-cial programs with general funds at less expense to general opportunities.

Some of the expected outcomes of this analysis are quite simple andstraightforward, whereas others may be more contentious. For example,where at-risk pupils are commonly identified via economic criteria, and whereat-risk aid is appropriately correlated with prevalence, one would expect astrong, negative correlation between at-risk aid and median family income.In addition, one might presume that in states with “less equalized” general aidprograms, higher levels of compensatory aid would go to districts with lowercore expenditures per pupil, and higher levels of compensatory aid would goto districts with greater dependence on state aid.

The expectations are murkier for LEP students and murkiest for gifted andtalented students. The expectations for aid to LEP students are contingentupon the extent to which we presume lack of language proficiency to relate toeconomic status. I choose not to presume any such correlation, leaving thedoor open regarding the relationship between LEP aid and median familyincome, except where median family income also dictates available districtresources. However, if state aid is intended to equalize districts’ abilities toserve LEP students rather than to fully provide for those programs, then onewould expect districts with lower core expenditures and greater state aiddependence to receive more aid for LEP programs.

The issue is similar for gifted and talented children. On one hand, onemight presume these children to be completely randomly distributed and pre-sume state aid to fully meet their needs. If this is the case, no correlation


between local capacity measures and aid is expected. However, if aid to giftedprograms is intended to equalize local capacity to provide opportunities, thendistricts with lower core expenditures, greater state dependence, and lowermedian income should receive more aid.

FINDINGS

Findings are limited to those states reporting data on state aid allocationsfor each particular fringe population. There are a variety of reasons why aidthat does exist may not be reported in the CCD or may be reported under vari-ables not used in this study. For example, many states, such as Kansas,include funding for gifted education under policies for special education. Assuch, gifted education state aid is collapsed within the special education aidformula and not separable in the CCD.

Characterizing State Aid to Local Districts

States committed the greatest volume of resources to compensatory pro-grams, with per-pupil allocations ranging from $303 (Mississippi) to $.03(Indiana) and per-school allocations ranging from $146,000 (Mississippi) to$13 (Indiana) in 1995-1996 (see Table 1). A total of 24 states reported com-pensatory funding allocations. Of the 13 states that reported aid to LEP pro-grams, values ranged from approximately $0 per pupil and $1 per school(Massachusetts) to $60 per pupil and $46,000 per school (Hawaii). Of the 18states that reported aid for gifted education, allocations were comparable forthose to LEP programs, ranging from less than a dollar per pupil and $33 perschool (Oregon) to over $30 per pupil and $17,000 per school (SouthCarolina). Again, these data provide only an indication of a state’s total com-mitment given its total population and number of schools without regard forexpected need.

Characterizing Aid to Expected Need Pupils

The magnitude of allocations per expected need pupil for compensatoryprogramming raises concerns regarding the underestimation of need.Accepting the need expectations as generated, allocations ranged from$6,760 per need pupil, or 191.4% of core expenditures per pupil, in Texas, to$2 per need pupil, or 0.1% of core expenditures per pupil, in states such asIndiana or New Mexico (see Table 1). Several states allocated substantialfunds per expected at-risk pupil in excess of 100% above core expenditures.These allocations are consistent with the cost function findings ofReschovsky and Imazeki (1998), who recommended a supplemental 159%

BRUCE D. BAKER 709

Table 1State Aid to Fringe Populations

Compensatory Limited English Proficient (LEP) Gifted and Talented (GT)

Aid per

Aid Expected % of Core Aid per % of Core Aid Gifted Aid % of Core

Aid per per School Compensatory Expenditures Aid per Aid per Expected Expenditures Aid per per School per 5% of Expenditures

State Pupil ($) ($) Pupil ($) per Pupil Pupil ($) School ($) LEP Pupil ($) per Pupil Pupil ($) ($) Pupils ($) per Pupil

Arizona 50 17,724 770 27 — — — — 2 782 50 2

Arkansas 16 5,445 323 12 — — — — 0 181 9 0

California — — — — — — — — 8 3,319 159 4

Colorado 7 630 315 10 — — — — — — — —

Connecticut 33 805 2,493 48 1 518 120 2 — — — —

Florida 110 67,432 2,330 83 39 28,776 3,647 130 23 16,160 452 16

Hawaii — — — — 60 45,850 1,058 30 20 14,915 392 11

Illinois 36 11,863 1,460 49 8 4,909 1,199 41 10 4,166 194 7

Indiana 0 13 2 0 — — — — 9 3,690 173 6

Iowa 17 4,160 1,672 54 — — — — — — — —

Kansas 3 764 230 7 0 2 1 0 — — — —

Maryland 121 62,028 4,399 117 5 2,792 607 16 2 819 30 1

Massachusetts — — — — 0 1 — — — — — —

Michigan 109 38,784 5,225 162 — — — — 2 1,550 37 1

Minnesota 5 841 525 16 7 1,037 1,745 53 — — — —

Mississippi 303 146,932 2,943 118 — — — — — — — —

Montana — — — — — — — — 1 152 23 1

New Jersey 155 72,428 5,744 105 25 12,232 1,435 26 — — —

New Mexico 0 31 2 0 0 14 1 0 — — — —

North Carolina 91 45,792 1,932 64 5 2,573 634 21 — — — —

Ohio 57 22,822 2,786 111 — — — — — — — —

Oregon — — — — — — — — 0 33 2 0

Pennsylvania 16 7,537 859 26 — — — — — — — —

710

South Carolina 166 85,878 2,088 73 — — — — 31 17,355 619 22

South Dakota — — — — — — — — 8 993 162 5

Texas 270 86,244 6,760 191 15 5,936 644 18 16 5,464 322 9

Utah 19 6,385 1,421 53 — — — — 12 4,927 247 9

Virginia 93 38,409 2,249 83 — — — — 19 8,118 377 14

Washington 155 51,458 5,344 144 28 9,242 1,553 42 4 1,275 70 2

Wyoming 10 2,051 590 14 — — — — 3 659 55 1

Note. Cells with a dash indicate that no data were reported for that category.

711

per at-risk pupil. The presumption remains, however, that these allocationswere somewhat inflated by underestimated need.

LEP allocations per expected need pupil also varied widely, from $3,647per expected LEP pupil for Florida (130% core) to $1 or less per expectedneed pupil in Kansas, Massachusetts, and New Mexico. North Carolina, NewJersey, Texas, and Hawaii each allocated on the order of 20% supplementalfunding for LEP programs beyond core expenditures, consistent with themarginal cost estimates of Parrish (1994).

In general, allocations per expected gifted pupil were lower than alloca-tions for either at-risk or LEP pupils. The maximum with respect to coreexpenditures was 21.6% in South Carolina. Only Florida, Hawaii, Virginia,and South Carolina exceeded 10% supplemental allocations, with dollar allo-cations ranging from $377 for Virginia to $619 for South Carolina. As previ-ously noted, there is no empirical cost basis for judging the reasonableness ofthese allocations.

The Relationship Between Aid and Need Across Districts

Although several states yielded logical results regarding state aid alloca-tions and expected need for both at-risk and LEP pupils, there were othermore curious outcomes that emerged (see Table 2). Among the states yield-ing rational outcomes for compensatory aid were Colorado, Maryland,Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, Ohio, South Carolina, Texas, and Vir-ginia, where correlations between total aid and expected need all exceeded.90, and correlations between aid per pupil and expected need all exceeded.40. Overall, 15 of 24 states possessed positive, significant (p < .05) coeffi-cients for total aid and aid per pupil and expected need for compensatory pro-gramming. Curiously, New Mexico and Illinois yielded negative coefficientsbetween total compensatory aid allocations and expected need, suggestingthat more compensatory aid systematically went to districts with fewerat-risk pupils. This result may simply arise from inconsistency between thosestates’ compensatory programming objectives and the definition of at-riskpupils contained in the CCD.

For LEP programming, Connecticut, Florida, Maryland, New Jersey,Texas, and Washington produced the most rational results (for a total of 6 outof 13 states), with positive significant coefficients for both aid per pupil andtotal aid with expected need. Results for some states, including Illinois, Mas-sachusetts, and New Mexico, conflicted, with significant positive and nega-tive coefficients on alternate measures. Only Kansas and Massachusetts dis-played negative, but small, significant relationships between total aid andexpected need that is not offset by a significant (p < .05) positive relationshipbetween aid per pupil and expected need.


The Relationship Between Aid and Capacity Variables

Table 2 displays the correlations between per pupil allocations to fringepopulations and contextual capacity variables. In general, compensatory aidallocations with respect to median family income were reasonable across thestates, with 18 of 24 states yielding negative, significant correlations. That is,in 18 states, compensatory aid allocations per pupil were systematicallyhigher in districts with lower median family income. No state possessed asignificant positive coefficient for this relationship.

For LEP program aid, the relationships between median family incomeand aid were mixed, with 6 of 13 states yielding negative significant coeffi-cients and 4 of 13 states reporting positive significant coefficients. Regardingcore expenditures per pupil, 5 of 13 states (Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota,New Jersey, and Texas) possessed positive significant relationships with LEPaid, and no states yielded negative significant coefficients, indicating that, ingeneral, districts with higher core expenditures per pupil received more aidfor LEP students, though the correlation was only high (.73) for Maryland.Correlations between state revenue percentage and LEP aid suggest that, per-haps, many of the high-core-expenditure districts receiving high LEP aidallotments had high core expenditures as a result of state support. Five of 13states (Connecticut, Illinois, North Carolina, New Jersey, and Texas) pos-sessed positive, significant (p < .05) coefficients between state revenuedependence and LEP aid. Considering all three correlations, New Jersey andTexas presented comparable and reasonable descriptions: Lower income dis-tricts that had high core expenditures but that were highly state dependentwere the primary recipients of aid for LEP programs. Beyond these twoexamples, findings were less coherent.

Findings on the distribution of aid for gifted and talented programmingwere mixed across all three measures. With respect to median family income,4 states of 17 reporting (Florida, Illinois, South Carolina, and Wyoming) allo-cated more funds to higher income districts (p < .05) and 3 (Indiana, Texas,and Virginia) allocated more funds to lower income districts. South Carolina,in particular, displayed a strong positive correlation between aid for giftededucation and median family income. Note that South Carolina allocated thegreatest volume of funding for gifted education ($619 per expected gifted andtalented pupil), with Florida, also displaying a positive correlation, providingthe second greatest volume ($452 per expected gifted and talented pupil).These combined results indicate that these two states in particular providedrelatively large sums of money for gifted education at systematically higherlevels to higher income districts. In contrast, Virginia, also a high-allocation

BRUCE D. BAKER 713

Table 2Correlations Between State Aid and Key Indicators

At Risk Limited English Proficient (LEP) Gifted and Talented

Total Total

Aid per At-Risk LEP Aid LEP Aid

Median Core State Pupil and Aid and Total Median Core State per Pupil and and Total Median Core State

Family Expenditures Revenue per Expected Expected Family Expenditures Revenue per Expected Expected Family Expenditures Revenue

State Income per Pupil (%) At-Risk pupil At-Risk Pupils Income per Pupil % LEP pupil LEP Pupils Income per Pupil %

Arizona negative*** positive*** positive positive*** positive*** — — — — — negative positive negative

Arkansas negative** negative negative*** positive*** positive*** — — — — — negative positive positive

California — — — — — — — — — — negative negative*** negative

Colorado negative negative*** negative positive*** positive*** — — — — — — — —

Connecticut negative** negative*** positive positive*** positive*** negative*** positive* positive*** positive*** positive*** — — —

Florida negative*** negative positive*** positive*** positive*** positive positive* negative positive*** positive*** positive*** positive negative

Illinois negative*** negative*** positive*** positive negative*** positive*** positive*** positive*** positive*** negative*** positive** positive*** negative**

Indiana negative positive** negative positive positive*** — — — — — negative** positive* positive***

Iowa negative** positive*** positive* positive positive*** — — — — — — — —

Kansas negative negative negative positive* positive*** positive*** positive negative* positive negative*** — — —

Maryland negative*** negative positive*** positive*** positive*** positive** positive*** negative* positive*** positive*** negative* positive positive*

Massachusetts — — — — — negative negative positive positive* negative*** — — —

Michigan negative*** positive negative positive*** positive*** — — — — — negative negative positive

Minnesota negative** positive*** positive positive*** positive*** negative** positive*** positive negative positive*** — — —

Mississippi negative*** positive positive*** positive* positive*** — — — — — — — —

Montana — — — — — — — — — — negative positive positive

New Jersey negative*** negative positive*** positive*** positive*** negative*** positive*** positive*** positive*** positive*** — — —

New Mexico negative negative negative*** positive negative*** positive*** positive negative negative positive*** — — —

North Carolina negative*** positive*** positive*** positive*** positive*** negative** positive positive** positive positive — — —

Ohio negative*** positive positive*** positive*** positive*** — — — — — — — —

Oregon — — — — — — — — — — negative positive positive

Pennsylvania negative* positive** positive** positive positive*** — — — — — — — —

South Carolina negative*** negative positive** positive*** positive*** — — — — — positive*** positive* negative**

714

South Dakota — — — — — — — — — — negative positive*** negative

Texas negative*** positive*** positive*** positive*** positive*** negative*** positive*** positive*** positive*** positive*** negative*** positive*** positive***

Utah negative*** positive*** positive positive positive*** — — — — — negative positive* positive

Virginia negative*** negative positive*** positive*** positive*** — — — — — negative*** negative*** positive***

Washington negative*** positive*** positive*** positive*** positive*** negative** positive positive positive*** positive*** negative negative*** negative

Wyoming positive negative negative negative positive*** — — — — — positive** negative*** negative

Note. Cells with a dash indicate that no data were reported for that category.*p < .10. **p < .05. ***p < .01.

715

state ($377 per expected gifted pupil), allocated higher levels of funding tolower income districts.

Regarding core expenditures per pupil, three states (Illinois, SouthDakota, and Texas) possessed positive significant correlations with giftedprogram aid, though none were particularly striking. Four states (California,Virginia, Washington, and Wyoming) possessed negative significant coeffi-cients, the strongest being Virginia at –.53. Regarding state aid dependence,the correlation for Virginia was most striking (.92) and was consistent withother Virginia findings for gifted education aid. As a complete package, theVirginia correlations indicate that the state used gifted education aid to equal-ize programming opportunities by allocating larger sums to districts withlower income (–.54) and lower core expenditures (–.53) and districts thatwere more dependent on state aid (.92). The only other state with a coherent,but less exemplary, complete package of correlations for gifted educationwas South Carolina, which allocated more aid to districts that were larger(.26), had higher income (.61), had higher core expenditure (.18, p < .10), andwere less state dependent (–.21).

SUMMARY

The following standards were applied to summarize the adequacy, ratio-nality, and equity of state aid allocations:

Adequate: Aid allocation per expected need pupil as a percentage of coreexpenditures exceeds minimum reported, though not necessarily empiri-cally cost-based, adequacy weight from existing literature (LEP = 1.2,at-risk = 1.2).

Rational: Aid allocation per pupil and total allocation significantly corre-lated (p < .05) with expected prevalence (LEP and at-risk only).

Equitable: Aid allocation per pupil significantly correlated in the expecteddirection (p < .05) with two of three context measures (median familyincome, core expenditures per pupil, state revenue share).

In 1995-1996, states reported spending a total of $2.6 billion on compen-satory aid to local districts, $454 million on aid for LEP children, and $257million on aid for gifted education, excluding gifted education aid providedunder state special education laws. Despite this relatively large volume ofstate aid, it is clear that existing state aid for fringe populations alone was farfrom adequate in 1995-1996 for meeting full service costs, even by the leaststringent standards. For example, only 71% of states reporting allocated stateaid for compensatory programming exceeding 120% of core expenditures;


54% of states reporting allocated aid for LEP children exceeding 120%; andno cost estimates exist for knowing the adequacy of existing allocations forgifted education. Although it seems that rationality, as measured herein,should be a given when such large sums of money are distributed, only 63%of reporting states allocated compensatory aid in significant positive relationto expected need, and only 46% of reporting states allocated LEP aid inaccordance with expected need across districts.

A conservative standard was applied to making equity determinations. Astate’s allocation patterns were deemed directly equalizing if that state allo-cated more money to lower income, higher state-dependent, or lower coreexpenditure districts, where two of three significant correlations would suf-fice. A state could also be considered equitable, or at least not directly inequi-table, if allocations were unrelated to capacity measures and if that state’sgeneral instructional expenditures per pupil were highly equitable (coeffi-cient of variation < .10; Hussar & Sonnenberg, 1999), potentially resolvingunbalanced encroachment issues discussed earlier. A state was only labeleddirectly disequalizing or inequitable if the state systematically allocatedmore funds to higher income, higher core expenditure, and lowerstate-dependent (and, thus, more locally autonomous) districts, with two ofthree correlations significant (p < .05). This classification leaves a large num-ber of states in the “questionable” category, where it remains highly likelythat the unequalized fringe aid allocations actually indirectly yielddisequalizing results.

It is surprising that even compensatory aid was not systematically, equita-bly distributed (only 54% of reporting states allocated higher levels of aid todistricts with less capacity) despite the underlying relationship between localcapacity and need pupils. Thirteen percent of reporting states allocated fund-ing for compensatory programming that was directly disequalizing. In thedisequalizing states (New Mexico, Kansas, and Indiana), however, the aidallocated was far from adequate.

Aid for programming for LEP children also was not, as a standard, allo-cated in a directly equalizing manner. Only four states (Colorado, NorthCarolina, New Jersey, and Texas) allocated sufficiently more LEP aid tolower capacity districts. Although Maryland allocated more funds to highercapacity districts, this result is somewhat offset by the strength of the rela-tionships between aid and prevalence in Maryland.

Distribution patterns for aid to gifted education programs raise continuedserious concerns. Only 24% of reporting states allocated aid in a directlyequalizing manner (Indiana, South Dakota, Texas, and Utah). Even thoughthis aid was allocated in an equalizing manner, it was questionably sufficientfor equalizing opportunities. More intriguing is the fact that three states (Illinois,

BRUCE D. BAKER 717

South Carolina, and Wyoming) allocated gifted education funds that weredirectly disequalizing, with South Carolina, as previously discussed, allocat-ing substantial funds to this cause.

States with exemplary programs for fringe populations across the boardwere Texas (where LEP aid fell slightly below the benchmark, 18.6%, butcompensatory aid met minimal adequacy benchmarks and was both rationaland equable, and gifted education aid was allocated in an equalized pattern)and Virginia (where compensatory aid passed on all three measures, andgifted education aid was higher than most and strongly equalized). Floridamight also be considered if it were not for the positive correlation betweengifted education aid and median family income. States with consistently lessthan exemplary records include Kansas, which provided uniformly inade-quate, questionably rational, and partially disequalizing aid for compensa-tory and LEP programs, and New Mexico, whose aid allocations resembledthose of Kansas. It should be noted that the less than exemplary states dis-cussed herein may in fact be far more exemplary than states not reportingdata.

POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS

The findings herein, in conjunction with the growing number of relatedstudies, support three major recommendations for creating adequate, morerational and equitable policies for achieving vertical equity for at-risk, LEP,and gifted children. The recommendations will each be advanced andexplained in detail below.

Recommendation 1: Develop more rational, consistent, but noncumbersomemethods for identifying need populations and create stronger linkages inpolicy between identified populations and programming needs.

Policy makers cannot possibly begin to promote legitimate vertical equityobjectives until they first know who the unequals are who require the unequaltreatment. Though not comprehensively discussed herein, state definitionsfor each fringe population vary widely, and within state policies, definitionsfor funding purposes and definitions for programming purposes may alsovary. Identification seems least problematic for LEP students, who are moreclearly delineated by formal classification alone (e.g., that their English lan-guage proficiency is limited) than either of the other two groups. Lacking anyserious federal legislation, and given disagreement within the field of giftededucation, identification of gifted and talented children remains significantlyproblematic and beyond resolution in these summary statements.


One specific identification approach that remains questionable is the con-tinued use of economic criteria for identifying at-risk children, or for estimat-ing district prevalence of such children, to fund compensatory programs. Anunintended but potential advantage of economic proxy measures for identify-ing at-risk children is that they often promote equity objectives becauselow-income students more frequently reside in low-capacity districts, but thispolicy objective can be accomplished by more direct means.10 As previouslynoted, the economic proxy approach is an outgrowth of federal Title I pro-grams. The most frequent argument for the economic proxy is the“well-known correlation” between economic status and academic achieve-ment. Taking such policies to their extreme, it stands to reason that if one canuse poverty status as a convenience proxy for measuring the need for reme-dial programs, one could similarly use high income as a convenience proxyfor measuring the need for advanced or gifted and talented programming.Obviously, this is simply wrong, both statistically and ethically.

Another common rationale for economic proxies is that they are simplymore convenient, hence, more efficient, to use. However, a substantial por-tion of the presumed efficiency gained by the simplified process may be lostby the misallocation of funds toward students and districts whose educationalneeds are not well represented by their economic status.

Recommendation 2: Develop a broader information base on programmingneeds and programming costs.

The second step toward inferring costs and achieving vertical equity isdeveloping a better understanding of the programming needs and requiredresources for providing appropriate services to fringe populations. The workof Chambers (1999b), regarding the resource costs of serving special educa-tion students, and Parrish (1994), regarding the resource costs of serving LEPstudents, set a well-defined standard for developing this information base.Similarly, the work of Odden and Picus (2000, pp. 332-345) regarding thecosts of whole school reforms catering specifically to the needs of disadvan-taged students provides a useful resource-based framework.

The resource cost approach remains superior for promoting verticalequity policies when compared to recent econometric studies, which delin-eate costs solely on the basis of an estimated statistical relationship betweenpoverty rates and school or district aggregate performance. The presumptionthat emerges from the econometric models is that simply applying more aidto high-poverty districts will promote equitable or adequate outcomes. Fur-ther, these models reinforce the false notion that educational need may be

BRUCE D. BAKER 719

directly identified via economic criteria. Finally, these methods may supportthe even more absurd contention that children who surpass standards speci-fied in the models prior to their expected grade level should be assigned a $0or even negative marginal cost. One area in which cost or production functionresearch may inform resource cost analysis is in the consideration of studentoutcomes produced by various service delivery and programming options.

Recommendation 3: Ensure that districts have comparable capacity, throughappropriately equalized aid (given the structure of the general aid pro-gram), to meet the costs of providing appropriate programming to stu-dents with specific, identifiable needs.

Supplemental aid programs are inextricably linked to their underlyinggeneral aid programs. Where a state defines and directly funds both an ade-quate general education for “average” pupils and supplemental education forfringe and special education pupils, uniform or “unequalized” allocations ofstate aid may be reasonable because no district is inappropriately advantagedor disadvantaged by its ability to supplement state aid. Such conditions, how-ever, are practically unlikely, and, although theoretically appealing, theremay be other dangers to fully state-controlled, fixed-price public educationsystems.11 At least in the near term, local capacity differences will continue todrive general education revenue disparities in most states. Therefore, it iscritical for equity objectives that those states take appropriate steps to capac-ity equalize aid for supplemental programs.

CONCLUSIONS

It is by no means the intent of this article to promote further segmentationof student populations into protected classes, leading to further categoriza-tion of programming opportunities and increased divisive competition forfinite resources. In fact, if public education systems in general were suffi-ciently flexible in the provision of individualized education, the marginalcosts of serving fringe populations might be substantially reduced, and thenecessity for supplemental aid to provide vertical equity to many students allbut eliminated. Unfortunately, the current system does not function this flexi-bly. Arguably, the recent standards movement has further reduced that flexi-bility by suggesting that all students should strive to achieve the samebenchmarks by the same year of schooling. In the present context, verticalequity adjustments remain necessary, but, unfortunately, as indicated by thefindings herein, many such adjustments are made poorly with respect to


adequacy and equity concerns. Thus, the need remains to increase attentiontoward the concept of vertical equity and to increase our efforts to betterunderstand the costs of achieving vertical equity for all students.

NOTES

1. In some states, funding for gifted and talented children is governed under special educa-tion program funding rather than as an add-on to general funds.

2. Note that whereas Guthrie and Smith (1998) provided a supplement to the original reportdone by Management Analysis and Planning (Guthrie & Rothstein, 1999) that focused specifi-cally on “disadvantaged, limited English proficient, [and] Gifted” students, the supplement fallswell short of providing a well-defined, empirically based framework for serving fringe popula-tions. On February 23, 2001, the Wyoming State Supreme Court (Wyoming v. Campbell, No.00-120 [Wyo. 2001], at 79) concurred that the proposed program for limited English proficientwas insufficient and that the proposed program for gifted education, while sufficient, was notempirically based (Wyoming v. Campbell, at 84).

3. A recent update of the content of the “reauthorized” Title I may be found at http://www.ed.gov.offices/OESE/ESEA/prospectus/title 1-a.html (retrieved December 12, 2000).

4. See Board of Education of Hendrik Hudson Central School District v. Rowley. The inter-pretation was derived from Imber and Van Geel (1993, p. 316-317). Note that the Rowley deci-sion only applies to cases arguing that P.L. 94-142, or the Individuals With Disabilities in Educa-tion Act (IDEA), provides a federal guarantee that schools should maximize each child’spotential.

5. A recent update of the content of the “reauthorized” Title VII may be found at http://www.ed.gov.offices/OESE/ESEA/prospectus/title7.html (retrieved December 12, 2000).

6. The recent Supreme Court decision in Alexander v. Sandoval (2001) suggests that, infact, the option for limited-English-proficient individuals to use Title VI regulations to seekaction may be more limited than originally stated in Lau v. Nichols (1974).

7. This ignores those states that identify the funding as serving “reading programs” (Cali-fornia), “learning assistance” (Washington), “reading improvement” (Illinois), or others thatgenerally classify the funding as “compensatory.”

8. The 24 states mandating services are defined as those with legislative mandates and notjust administrative rules or Department of Education guidelines.

9. CC 08 and the parenthetical notations that follow in this and the subsequent paragraph areCommon Core of Data variable labels. They are included here for replication purposes.

10. Some have argued that the equalization objective, directing funds to urban districts in theNortheast and Midwest and to poor rural districts in the South, was a significant issue driving thepassage of Title I (Ravitch, 1983, as cited in Odden & Picus, 2000, pp. 199-200).

11. In particular, I refer to the body of literature that indicates that systems more dependentupon state aid and governed by local revenue limits are more likely to see slowed growth inresources over time (Downes & Figlio, 1998).

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Ladd, H. F., & Hansen, J. S. (Eds.). (1999). Making money matter: Financing America’s schools.Washington, DC: National Academy Press.

Lau v. Nichols, 414 U.S. 563 (1974).National Center for Education Statistics. (2000). Common core of data (CCD) school years

1993-94 through 1997-98 (March 2000 release; NCES 2000-370). Washington, DC: U.S.Department of Education, Office of Educational Research and Improvement.

Odden, A. R., & Picus, L. O. (2000). School finance: A policy perspective (2nd ed.). New York:McGraw-Hill.

Parrish, T. B. (1994). A cost analysis of alternative instructional models for limited English pro-ficient students in California. Journal of Education Finance, 19, 256-278.

Parrish, T. B., Matsumoto, C. S., & Fowler, W. J. (1995). Disparities in public school districtspending 1989-90: A multivariate, student-weighted analysis, adjusted for differences ingeographic cost of living and student need (NCES 95-300R). Washington, DC: NationalCenter for Education Statistics.


Parrish, T. B., & Wolman, J. (1999). Trends and new developments in special education funding:What the states report. In T. B. Parrish, J. G. Chambers, & C. M. Guarino (Eds.), Fundingspecial education: 19th annual yearbook of the American Education Finance Association(pp. 203-229). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

Reschovsky, A., & Imazeki, J. (1998, March). Does the school finance system in Texas providestudents with an adequate education? Paper presented at the annual meeting of the AmericanEducation Finance Association, Seattle.

Roe v. Pennsylvania, 683 F. Supp. 929 (E.D. Pa. 1986).Stephens, K. R., & Karnes, F. A. (2000). State definitions for the gifted and talented revisited.

Exceptional Children, 66, 219-238.Wyoming v. Campbell, No. 00-120 (Wyo. 2001).

BRUCE D. BAKER 723

EDUCATIONAL POLICY / November 2001MICHAEL W. APPLEReviewing Policy

Will Standards Save Public Education?

MICHAEL W. APPLE

Will Standards Save Public Education? by Debbie Meier, with Linda Nathan,Abigail Thernstrom, et al. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000. 90 pp.

In education, symbolic politics counts. Using the correct words at the cor-rect time in the correct setting makes a difference in how one’s proposals areread and reacted to. Diametrically opposite policies often are wrapped inexactly the same vocabulary. As Raymond Williams, one of the wisest com-mentators on the politics of culture, noted a number of years ago, there are“keywords” that have multiple meanings and multiple uses (Williams, 1985).Among them are democracy, culture, citizenship, public, and a number ofothers. These concepts are what we might call sliding signifiers. That is, theyhave no necessarily essential meaning but rather are mobilized by differentgroups with different agendas. Because these words are laden with histori-cally important associations that are associated with what Williams wouldcall positive structures of feeling, and because their meanings can be, andoften are, multiple, they can be mobilized by conflicting groups to supporttheir own agendas.

A fine example today is the struggle over the very meaning of democracy.As I have argued at much greater length elsewhere, we are witnessing a majortransformation of our understandings of democracy. Rather than democracybeing seen as a fundamentally political concept, its meaning is being trans-formed into primarily an economic one. Thus, under neoliberal policies ineducation and in society in general, democracy is increasingly being definedas simply consumer choice. The citizen is seen as a possessive individual,someone who is defined by his or her position in market relations. (Think, for


724

example, of voucher plans.) When private is good and public is bad in educa-tion and so much else in this society, the world is seen as basically a super-market, and democracy is seen as making choices in that market. The wither-ing of political and collective or community sensibilities here has lastingeffects, ones not limited to schooling but throughout society (see Apple,1996, 2000, 2001).

Among the key concepts now sliding around the map of meaning is stan-dards. I can think of no one who believes that having standards is bad, whobelieves that educators should not have high expectations for all of their stu-dents, or who believes that what we should teach and whether we are success-ful in teaching it should not be taken very seriously. Thus, standards are“good.” However, this is basically a meaningless position. What counts asstandards, who should decide them, where they should come from, what theirpurposes should be in practice, how they are to be used, what counts as meet-ing them: These are the real issues.

All too often, these kinds of questions are either not asked in a seriousenough manner or they are answered with sets of assertions that have littleempirical warrant. However, these questions cannot simply be answeredempirically. The answers that we may find satisfying depend on what wethink education should do, and, whether we like it or not, there are very realdifferences in our positions on this that need to be taken seriously and pub-licly debated.

Thus, many people almost automatically think that having standards andtesting them rigorously will lead to higher achievement, especially amongour most disadvantaged children. By, in essence, holding schools’and teach-ers’ feet to the fire, so to speak, there will be steady improvement in achieve-ment. Yet, the empirical evidence for this assertion is weak at best. Indeed, aconsiderable amount of international literature should make us very cautiousabout assuming that this will be the case. Such policies have been shown tojust as often stratify even more powerfully by class and race, no matter whatthe rhetorical artifice used to justify these policies (Apple, 2001; Gillborn &Youdell, 2000).

In all too many cases, the situation that has been created is the equivalentof an Olympic-length swimming pool in which a large number of childrenalready drown. The response is to lengthen the pool from 100 meters to 200meters and give everyone an “equal opportunity” to stand at the far end of thepool, jump in, and then swim the doubled length. However, some childrencome from families who are affluent enough to have given their childrenswimming lessons or have sent them to expensive summer camps, whereasothers could not even swim the earlier length because of not having such

MICHAEL W. APPLE 725

economic advantages. Yes, we guaranteed equality of opportunity, but basi-cally all we really did was put in place another stratifying device that ratifiedprior advantages in cultural and economic capital. Given the role of socialDarwinist influences historically in education, influences that were nearlyalways described in democratic language (Selden, 1999), we need to be cau-tious not to assume that the overt intent to use standards to improve schoolswill actually improve them when these standards are instituted in institutionsthat are already starved for sufficient financial resources and have large num-bers of teachers who are teaching in areas in which they are not certified, andwhere economic and social policies have literally destroyed the employment,health, and housing of entire urban communities. Lengthening the pool inthese instances may not have anywhere near the effect we desire, unless thesepolicies are accompanied by serious economic and social policies that alsochange the life circumstances and chances of families and children in thesecommunities.

Yet, there are other reasons to be cautious, and these have to do with some-thing I mentioned earlier: the very different answers to the questions aboutstandards among equally committed educators. As I noted already, standardstalk is an example of sliding signification. Aside from thinking that educatorsshould have standards, there actually are wide disagreements amongthoughtful educators concerning what education should be about and how weshould assess it. Will Standards Save Public Education? is a fine place to seewhat these disagreements are and to get a feel for the differing visions of whatcounts as a good education among the various contenders.

The book contains a very clear and nicely written essay by an educator forwhom I have a good deal of respect, Deborah Meier, the former director ofCentral Park East Middle and Secondary School in New York City and morerecently the principal of the Mission Hill School in Boston, one of ten “pilot”democratic schools in that area. Meier’s position is clear. The standardsmovement as it currently functions is basically misguided educationally. Itmisconstrues the crisis we are facing in schools and the larger society andprovides inappropriate educational responses to this crisis.

There are then commentaries from a number of others, including AbigailThernstrom, Bob Chase, Gary Nash, Linda Nathan, Richard Murnane, Wil-liam Ayers, and Ted Sizer. These responses represent very different positionson the meaning and use of standards. Some commentators such asThernstrom, in a biting style that speaks volumes about the ways in whichneoconservative-oriented authors assume the correctness of their positionsand treat principled differences with something close to contempt, supportstandards and testing unquestioningly. Others take more nuanced but still


supportive positions on the ways standards are currently used, whereas stillothers agree with the major claims Meier makes.

Meier’s position is clearly stated in the following quote:

Even in the hands of sincere allies of children, equity, and public education, the cur-rent push for far greater standardization than we’ve ever previously attempted is fun-damentally misguided. It will not help to develop young minds, contribute to a robustdemocratic life, or aid the most vulnerable of our fellow citizens. By shifting the locusof authority to outside bodies, it undermines the capacity of schools to instruct byexample in the qualities of mind that schools in democracy should be fostering inkids—responsibility for one’s own ideas, tolerance for the ideas of others, and acapacity to negotiate differences. Standardization instead turns teachers and parentsinto the local instruments of externally imposed expert judgment. It thus decreases thechances that young people will grow up in the midst of adults who are making harddecisions and exercising mature judgment in the face of disagreements. And itsqueezes out those schools and educators that seek to show alternate possibilities,explore other paths. (pp. 4-5)

I should say that I am more sympathetic to Meier’s position than I am tothose of her critics. This is due in part because her educational vision is muchmore productive and responds to the best of our intuitions about what wewant for our children in terms of a substantive and critical education. It is alsodue to the fact that she has a much greater awareness of what has been calledthe “hidden curriculum” of schooling—the norms, values, and dispositionsthat are powerfully taught in schools whether we are conscious about teach-ing them or not—than most educators, and certainly greater than thoseincluded in this volume who are the most critical of her position. For Meier,any school that does not embody the building of a caring and mentoring com-munity, critical understandings, and a disciplined but questioning attitude onthe part of all the people in that institution—teachers, students, parents, andso forth—does not provide the opportunities that enable us to teach and tolearn the most important lessons for a fully functioning citizenry. These arecommitments I fully share, and, with others, I have tried to bring examples ofthe many such successful public schools to the attention of a wide audience(see, e.g., Apple & Beane, 1995).

Having said this, however, some of the points raised by supporters of ourusual understanding of standards cannot be totally dismissed. When LisaDelpit, for example, notes in her own work that the cultural capital needed toadvance in this society is often denied to poor people and to people of color,she is clearly correct about how schools function in the field of cultural power(Delpit, 1995). It is also clear that too many schools in too many urban and


rural areas seem to act as if they do not believe that working-class and poorstudents are capable of serious understanding. I can’t but think that Meieralso agrees with these criticisms. Her argument is in large part a pedagogicone. How would we expect students to engage in activities that lead to suchserious understanding if they and their teachers are constantly treated in amanner that denies them opportunities to act in ways that actually teach themost important things schools should be about?

Lest one think that this is simply a rhetorical concern, Linda McNeil’s(2000) recent book, Contradictions of Reform, powerfully demonstrateswhat happens when standards, curricula, and testing are imposed from out-side. Although these “reforms” are expressly aimed at improving the educa-tion of our most disadvantaged students, the effects are often disastrous forexactly these students and their teachers. Indeed, I would couple these twobooks together. First read Will Standards Save Public Education? to get abetter sense of the multiple arguments for and against current dominant mod-els of thinking about standards and testing, and then go directly to McNeil’svolume for a clear picture of the ways in which these policies and practicesmay work in real schools and real communities. As we were wont to say in theeconomically poor neighborhoods of the city where I first was a teacher, “Itain’t pretty.”

Recent research by Mary Lee Smith and her colleagues (Smith, Heinecke, &Noble, 1999) on the ways in which standards talk has worked as a form ofsymbolic politics is also of considerable importance here. Standards talk hasvery often been used to generate sympathy for ideological, political, and eco-nomic agendas whose ultimate effects did not cohere with the democraticrhetoric employed to gain public support for such agendas.

There are lessons to be learned from all of this. Do not confuse intentionswith effects. Symbolic politics are real politics, in that language makes adifference—often by enabling quite different ideological commitments andtheir attendant educational policies to be couched in language that makes itdifficult to see what is actually entailed in these commitments and policies.Finally, rhetorical solutions, no matter what the fine sounding language intowhich they are packed, may not be solutions at all. Education is hard work. Ifforced to choose an educator whose intuitions I’d trust about what we mightdo in the schools and classrooms of the United States, I’d probably selectDeborah Meier. She’s done the work.

REFERENCES

Apple, M. W. (1996). Cultural politics and education. New York: Teachers College Press.Apple, M. W. (2000). Official knowledge (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge.


Apple, M. W. (2001). Educating the “right” way: Markets, standards, god, and inequality. NewYork: Routledge.

Apple, M. W., & Beane, J. A. (Eds.). (1995). Democratic schools. Washington, DC: Associationfor Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Delpit, L. (1995). Other people’s children. New York: New Press.Gillborn, D., & Youdell, D. (2000). Rationing education. Philadelphia: Open University Press.McNeil, L. (2000). Contradictions of reform. New York: Routledge.Selden, S. (1999). Inheriting shame. New York: Teachers College Press.Smith, M. L., Heinecke, W., & Noble, A. J. (1999) Assessment policy and political spectacle.

Teachers College Record, 101, 157-191.Williams, R. (1985). Keywords. New York: Oxford University Press.


EDUCATIONAL POLICY / November 2001CONTRIBUTORS

Contributors

Marian Amoa received her M.A. from the University of Maryland, Balti-more County, in intercultural communication. She is a research assistant atthe Johns Hopkins University Center for Social Organization of Schools.

Michael W. Apple is the John Bascom Professor of Curriculum andInstruction and Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Among his most recent books are Official Knowledge (2nd ed.,2000) and Educating the “Right Way”: Markets, Standards, God, andInequality (2001). He is a member of the Educational Policy advisory boardand regularly produces the journal’s “Reviewing Policy” feature.

Bruce D. Baker is assistant professor in the Department of Teaching andLeadership at the University of Kansas. His work is primarily in the areas ofschool finance policy and the economics of education and has been publishedin the Economics of Education Review, Educational Evaluation and PolicyAnalysis, the Journal of Educational Finance, the Journal of Higher Educa-tion, and Educational Policy.

Arlene Bloom is assistant professor at New Jersey City University. Herresearch has focused on the integration of technology into teacher educationand the use of technology in early childhood settings. She coordinates the ele-mentary education program at New Jersey City University.

Althea Hall is chair of the Department of Administration, Curriculum, andInstruction at New Jersey City University. Her scholarly work and teachingare informed by her deep involvement in community-based organizations inNew York City. Her teaching specializations are elementary mathematicsand social foundations.

Tiffany Meyers received an M.A. from the Writing Seminars at JohnsHopkins University. She was a research assistant at the Johns Hopkins Uni-versity Center for Social Organization of Schools.


730

Michael Mintrom is associate professor in the Department of PoliticalScience at Michigan State University. He has written extensively on the poli-tics of policy reform. He is the author of Policy Entrepreneurs and SchoolChoice (Georgetown University Press, 2000). His studies of policy networksand the diffusion of policy innovations have been published in the Journal ofPolitics and International Studies Quarterly.

Roselynn Obi is an associate professor in the College of Education at NewJersey City University. Her specialty is in educational psychology, and herresearch interests are in the areas of identity formation, mentoring, andteacher development.

Alicia Pagano is an early childhood specialist who focuses on interna-tional education, both formal and informal. She worked for UNICEF and theGirl Scouts of the U.S.A. before joining the teacher education faculty of theNew Jersey City University.

Muriel Rand, assistant dean in the College of Education at New JerseyCity University, is a specialist in early childhood education. Her researchfocus is on the use of case-based pedagogy in teacher education.

Gail L. Sunderman is a research analyst for the American Institutes ofResearch in Washington, D.C. Her research interests include educationalpolicy and the politics of education.

Lois Weiner coordinates the secondary education program at New JerseyCity University. She writes widely about urban teacher education and schoolreform. Her most recent book is Urban Teaching: The Essentials (TeachersCollege Press).

CONTRIBUTORS 731

EDUCATIONAL POLICY / November 2001ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the many people who have provided valuableassistance to Educational Policy by reviewing manuscripts, suggestingappropriate referees, and offering editorial guidance. We rely on them as wellas on the members of our editorial advisory board to provide insights in manyareas and to help us maintain quality. The evaluation of potential articles isone of the most important functions of a scholarly journal, requiring exper-tise, insight, and diplomacy. It is also a responsibility that receives little rec-ognition. We take this opportunity to express our appreciation and gratitude.


732

Charles M. AchillesKern AlexanderDorothea M. AnagnostopoulosSouson ArafehJoan Baratz-SnowdonLarry D. BartlettNina BasciaHal W. BederClive BelfieldLee Anne BellGeoffrey D. BormanEllen A. BrantlingerHank J. BromleyAnthony S. BrykMartin BurlingameJames C. CarperDeborah F. CarterCynthia G. CoburnCarolyn ColvinRobert L. CrowsonLinda Darling-Hammond

David W. DavareAnn DillerDan DippoElizabeth H. FennemaGustavo E. FischmanE. Scott FletcherRobert E. FlodenKenneth A. FrankMary H. FutrellMargaret A. GallegoThomas J. GentzelTerry G. GeskeMargaret E. GoertzStephen GorardEric A. HanushekRobert M. HauserJ. R. HenigDiana HessJay P. HeubertBrian JacobSusan Moore Johnson

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 733

Carolyn KelleyMichael W. KirstStephen LawtonKaren Seashore LewisFrank W. LutzBetty MalenHelen M. MarksJane R. MartinKathryn A. McDermottKenneth J. MeierJeffrey F. MilemMichael A. MintromHeinrich MintropLouis MirónBarbara Scott NelsonNel NoddingsJeannie OakesAllan R. OddenRodney OgawaAaron M. PallasThomas B. Parrish

Ernest T. PascarellaLaura W. PernaLawrence O. PicusSenta A. RaizenStephen W. RaudenbushJennifer K. RiceJames J. ScheurichBarbara SchneiderPenny SebringThomas J. SergiovanniStephen G. SireciThomas M. SkrticDavid S. SternNelly P. StromquistJohn TaylorKenneth J. TraversDaniel A. WagnerGeoffrey WalfordHarold WenglinskyJohn F. WittePerry A. Zirkel

EDUCATIONAL POLICY / November 2001INDEX

INDEX

to

EDUCATIONAL POLICY

Volume 15

Number 1 (January-March 2001), pp. 1-224Number 2 (May 2001), pp. 225-336Number 3 (July 2001), pp. 337-496Number 4 (September 2001), pp. 497-612Number 5 (November 2001), pp. 613-740

Authors:AMOA, MARIAN, see Sunderman, G. L.APPLE, MICHAEL W., “The Rhetoric and Reality of Standards-Based School Reform”

[Reviewing Policy], 601.APPLE, MICHAEL W., “Standards, Subject Matter, and a Romantic Past” [Reviewing Policy],

323.APPLE, MICHAEL W., “Will Standards Save Public Education?” [Reviewing Policy], 723.BAKER, BRUCE D., “Living on the Edges of State School-Funding Policies: The Plight of

At-Risk, Limited-English-Proficient, and Gifted Children,” 698.BECK, FRANK D., see Rau, W. C.BJÖRK, LARS, and JANE CLARK LINDLE, “Superintendents and Interest Groups,” 76.BLOOM, ARLENE, see Weiner, L.BOUMAN, JEFFREY P., see Nidiffer, J.BOYD, WILLIAM L., see Mitchell, D. E.BRANDON, PAUL R., see Heck, R. H.CIBULKA, JAMES G., “The Changing Role of Interest Groups in Education: Nationalization

and the New Politics of Education Productivity,” 12.FARAHMANDPUR, RAMIN, see McLaren, P.GAMSON, DAVID, see Mintrop, H.GITLIN, ANDREW, “Bounding Teacher Decision Making: The Threat of Intensification,” 227.GORARD, STEPHEN, see Selwyn, N.HALL, ALTHEA, see Weiner, L.HECK, RONALD H., PAUL R. BRANDON, and JONATHAN WANG, “Implementing

Site-Managed Educational Changes: Examining Levels of Implementation and Effect,” 302.HESS, FREDERICK M., and DAVID L. LEAL, “The Opportunity to Engage: How Race, Class,

and Institutions Structure Access to Educational Deliberation,” 474.


734

JOHNSON, BOB L., JR., “Micropolitical Dynamics of Education Interests: A View FromWithin,” 115.

KELLEY, CAROLYN, and STEVEN M. KIMBALL, “Financial Incentives for National BoardCertification,” 547.

KIMBALL, STEVEN M., see Kelley, C.LEAL, DAVID L., see Hess, F. M.LINDLE, JANE CLARK, see Björk, L.LUGG, CATHERINE A., “The Christian Right: A Cultivated Collection of Interest Groups,” 41.LUGG, CATHERINE A., see Mawhinney, H. B.MALEN, BETTY, “Generating Interest in Interest Groups,” 168.MARTÍNEZ ALEMÁN, ANA M., “The Ethics of Democracy: Individuality and Educational

Policy,” 379.MARTÍNEZ ALEMÁN, ANA M., “Introduction,” 339.MAWHINNEY, HANNE B., “Theoretical Approaches to Understanding Interest Groups,” 187.MAWHINNEY, HANNE B., and CATHERINE A. LUGG, “Introduction: Interest Groups in

United States Education,” 3.MCDANIEL, JULIE E., CELIA H. SIMS, and CECIL G. MISKEL, “The National Reading Pol-

icy Arena: Policy Actors and Perceived Influence,” 92.MCDERMOTT, KATHRYN A., “Diversity or Desegregation? Implications of Arguments for

Diversity in K-12 and Higher Education,” 452.MCLAREN, PETER, and RAMIN FARAHMANDPUR, “Educational Policy and the Socialist

Imagination: Revolutionary Citizenship as a Pedagogy of Resistance,” 343.MCLAUGHLIN, MILBREY, see Mintrop, H.MEYERS, TIFFANY, see Sunderman, G. L.MINTROM, MICHAEL, “Educational Governance and Democratic Practice,” 615.MINTROP, HEINRICH, DAVID GAMSON, MILBREY McLAUGHLIN, PIA LINDQUIST

WONG, and IDA OBERMAN, “Design Cooperation: Strengthening the Link BetweenOrganizational and Instructional Change in Schools,” 520.

MISKEL, CECIL G., see McDaniel, J. E.MITCHELL, DOUGLAS E., and WILLIAM L. BOYD, “Curriculum Politics in Global Per-

spective,” 58.MORRIS, JEROME E., “Forgotten Voices of Black Educators: Critical Race Perspectives on the

Implementation of a Desegregation Plan,” 575.NIDIFFER, JANA and JEFFREY P. BOUMAN, “The Chasm Between Rhetoric and Reality:

The Fate of the ‘Democratic Ideal’ When a Public University Becomes Elite,” 432.OBERMAN, IDA, see Mintrop, H.OBI, ROSELYNN, see Weiner, L.OPFER, V. DARLEEN, “Beyond Self-Interest: Educational Interest Groups and Congressional

Influence,” 135.PAGANO, ALICIA, see Weiner, L.RAND, MURIEL, see Weiner, L.RAU, WILLIAM C., N. MARK SHELLEY, and FRANK D. BECK, “The Dark Engine of Illi-

nois Education: A Sociological Critique of a ‘Well-Crafted (Testing) Machine,’” 404.SELWYN, NEIL, STEPHEN GORARD, and SARA WILLIAMS, “Digital Divide or Digital

Opportunity? The Role of Technology in Overcoming Social Exclusion in U.S. Education,”258.

SHELLEY, N. MARK, see Rau, W. C.SIMS, CELIA H., see McDaniel, J. E.

INDEX 735

SMITH, ANDREW K., and PRISCILLA WOHLSTETTER, “Reform Through School Net-works: A New Kind of Authority and Accountability,” 499.

STONE, CLARENCE N., “Powerful Actors Versus Compelling Actions,” 153.SUNDERMAN, GAIL L., MARIAN AMOA, and TIFFANY MEYERS, “California’s Reading

Initiative: Constraints on Implementation in Middle and High Schools,” 673.WANG, JONATHAN, see Heck, R. H.WEINER, LOIS, MURIEL RAND, ALICIA PAGANO, ROSELYNN OBI, ALTHEA HALL,

and ARLENE BLOOM, “Illuminating the Impact of State Educational Policy PromotingSchool Reform on Curriculum and Instruction in Programs of Urban Teacher Preparation,”643.

WILLIAMS, SARA, see Selwyn, N.WOHLSTETTER, PRISCILLA, see Smith, A. K.WONG, PIA LINDQUIST, see Mintrop, H.YOUNGS, PETER, “District and State Policy Influences on Professional Development and

School Capacity,” 278.

Articles:“Beyond Self-Interest: Educational Interest Groups and Congressional Influence,” Opfer, 135.“Bounding Teacher Decision Making: The Threat of Intensification,” Gitlin, 227.“California’s Reading Initiative: Constraints on Implementation in Middle and High Schools,”

Sunderman et al., 673.“The Changing Role of Interest Groups in Education: Nationalization and the New Politics of

Education Productivity,” Cibulka, 12.“The Chasm Between Rhetoric and Reality: The Fate of the ‘Democratic Ideal’ When a Public

University Becomes Elite,” Nidiffer and Bouman, 432.“The Christian Right: A Cultivated Collection of Interest Groups,” Lugg, 41.“Curriculum Politics in Global Perspective,” Mitchell and Boyd, 58.“The Dark Engine of Illinois Education: A Sociological Critique of a ‘Well-Crafted (Testing)

Machine,’” Rau et al., 404.“Design Cooperation: Strengthening the Link Between Organizational and Instructional

Change in Schools,” Mintrop et al., 520.“Digital Divide or Digital Opportunity? The Role of Technology in Overcoming Social Exclu-

sion in U.S. Education,” Selwyn et al., 258.“District and State Policy Influences on Professional Development and School Capacity,”

Youngs, 278.“Diversity or Desegregation? Implications of Arguments for Diversity in K-12 and Higher Edu-

cation,” McDermott, 452.“Educational Governance and Democratic Practice,” Mintrom, 615.“Educational Policy and the Socialist Imagination: Revolutionary Citizenship as a Pedagogy of

Resistance,” McLaren and Farahmandpur, 343.“The Ethics of Democracy: Individuality and Educational Policy,” Martínez Alemán, 379.“Financial Incentives for National Board Certification,” Kelley and Kimball, 547.“Forgotten Voices of Black Educators: Critical Race Perspectives on the Implementation of a

Desegregation Plan,” Morris, 575.“Generating Interest in Interest Groups,” Malen, 168.“Illuminating the Impact of State Educational Policy Promoting School Reform on Curriculum

and Instruction in Programs of Urban Teacher Preparation,” Weiner et al., 643.


“Implementing Site-Managed Educational Changes: Examining Levels of Implementation andEffect,” Heck et al., 302.

“Introduction: Interest Groups in United States Education,” Mawhinney and Lugg, 3.“Introduction,” Martínez Alemán, 339.“Living on the Edges of State School-Funding Policies: The Plight of At-Risk, Limited-

English-Proficient, and Gifted Children,” Baker, 698.“Micropolitical Dynamics of Education Interests: A View From Within,” Johnson, 115.“The National Reading Policy Arena: Policy Actors and Perceived Influence,” McDaniel et al.,

92.“The Opportunity to Engage: How Race, Class, and Institutions Structure Access to Educational

Deliberation,” Hess and Leal, 474.“Powerful Actors Versus Compelling Actions,” Stone, 153.“Reform Through School Networks: A New Kind of Authority and Accountability,” Smith and

Wohlstetter, 499.“Superintendents and Interest Groups,” Björk and Lindle, 76.“Theoretical Approaches to Understanding Interest Groups,” Mawhinney, 187.

Reviewing Policy:“The Rhetoric and Reality of Standards-Based School Reform,” Apple, 601.“Standards, Subject Matter, and a Romantic Past,” Apple, 323.“Will Standards Save Public Education?” Apple, 723.

INDEX 737

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