Jennifer Rippner’s The American Education Policy Landscape (2016) is a comprehensive summary of how policy is instituted in our nation’s schools, from Pre-K though college. It contains a wealth of statistics and sources, and is a good starting point for anybody who needs to research why our schools are run in often-inexplicable ways. This book was an easy and compelling read, but quickly became frustrating as I became more aware of how inefficient our system is how and disconnected policymakers are from what teachers and administrators are expected to do.
Because of the way America was founded and its rapid expansion across the continent, there is little federal oversight and a disjointed hodgepodge of state educational policies and procedures. Exacerbating this situation is that many decisions are made by politicians and appointees who have little (or no) educational experience, and with no real understanding of the background of why current policies were implemented. This means that the country’s policies are created and implemented a little bit at a time, without a holistic view of what the true goal of education should be, and with no pedagogical rationale.
One of the more obvious examples is the 2002 legislation, the No Child Left Behind Act, which set reading and math standards for states to meet by 2014. The stated goal was to close achievement gaps, and improving reading and math skills are one part of the way to meet this goal, but the federal government was not looking at the situation holistically when this policy was written, so standards were set with no guidance or oversight on how this was to happen. When this policy was enacted at the state level it was up to each state to decide how to implement the policy, and each state had to write its own rules. As Furgol and Helms stated, “Stakeholders must adopt strategies and approaches to rulemaking that reflect the dynamics and realities of the policy environment of the individual state in which they operate” (2012, p. 805). As each state has a different demographic it is important that they had the freedom to create their own rules for implementation and assessment, but in many cases subjects other than reading and math were marginalized, and how will this affect learners’ college readiness preparation?
When looking at the four steps of policymaking, information gathering, policy definition, policy implementation, and policy evaluation, in some sense each of these is taking place for No Child Left Behind. But do reading and math scores tell the whole story about achievement gaps? Probably not, so what could the government have done differently? Hopefully we will be able to learn more about this during the next semester!
Furgol, K. E., & Helms, L. B. (2012). Lessons in leveraging implementation: Rulemaking, growth models, and policy dynamics under NCLB. Educational Policy, 26(6), 777-812.
Rippner, J. (2016). The American education policy landscape. New York, NY: Routledge.
