Jal Mehta - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Jal Mehta
The Allure of Order
The late 1960s and early 1970s are remembered for many things, but educational accountability is ... more The late 1960s and early 1970s are remembered for many things, but educational accountability is not foremost among them. A time when the nation was ripped asunder by fights over Vietnam, when women burned bras, and when African Americans took to the streets seemed hardly a propitious moment for an educational movement emphasizing technocratic rationality to come to the forefront. Yet although overshadowed in the educational arena by conflicts over desegregation, community control, free schools, and open classrooms, a relatively quiet movement led primarily by state bureaucrats did in fact initiate the beginnings of an educational accountability movement. Between 1963 and 1974, no fewer than 73 laws were passed seeking to create standards or utilize a variety of scientific management techniques to improve schooling. These efforts at rationalization in some ways followed the same trajectory as the efficiency reforms five decades earlier and the standards movement to follow two decade...
The Allure of Order
In late 2001, three months after the September 11 attacks, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) pa... more In late 2001, three months after the September 11 attacks, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) passed both House and Senate with strong bipartisan majorities and was signed by a Republican president. Promising to use the power of the state to ensure that all children were proficient in reading and math by 2014, proponents heralded the act as the greatest piece of federal education legislation since the creation of the original Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 1965. By requiring the states to set high standards, pairing them with assessments that measured whether students were achieving those standards, and holding schools accountable if students failed to do so, NCLB, in the eyes of its sponsors, would close achievement gaps and make America’s schools the envy of the world. A decade later, the bloom is off the rose. While almost everyone today continues to share the aim of leaving no child behind, the act itself has come in for criticism from many quarters, to the point tha...
The Allure of Order
While changes in the way that education was defined were key to subsequent policy debate, the mov... more While changes in the way that education was defined were key to subsequent policy debate, the movement toward educator accountability also drew its impetus from a broader movement toward the rationalization and lay control of professionals that has affected medicine, law, higher education, and many other fields. Viewing educational politics through this broader lens of the sociology of the professions explains why similar movements toward accountability arose simultaneously across fields, as well as why the teaching profession was particularly vulnerable to these external demands. Previous scholarship on the educational accountability movement has largely ignored the perspective offered by the sociology of the professions on the dynamics of reform. Political scientists who seek to explain the movement toward educational standards and accountability have focused on state and particularly federal legislative history, seeking to understand the key decisions that have propelled educatio...
The Allure of Order, 2013
Developments in the 1960s and 1970s brought schools under fire, but the modern American school re... more Developments in the 1960s and 1970s brought schools under fire, but the modern American school reform movement began with the release of the famous A Nation at Risk report in 1983. Sponsored by the US Department of Education but largely written by a group of prominent academics, A Nation at Risk invoked crisis and framed a narrative so far reaching in its impact that it still governs the way we think about schooling 30 years later. Emphasizing the importance of education to economic competitiveness and the failings of American schooling in comparison with international competitors, A Nation at Risk presented a utilitarian and instrumental vision of education. It argued that schools, not society, should be held accountable for higher performance and that performance should be measured by external testing. As will be seen in the chapters to come, these assumptions underlay the state standards movement in the 1980s and 1990s and persist today in federal policy through No Child Left Beh...
Understanding the experiences of students and teachers during pandemic schooling is vital to educ... more Understanding the experiences of students and teachers during pandemic schooling is vital to educational recovery and building back better. In the spring of 2021 as the school year was coming to close, we conducted three research exercises: 1) we invited 200 teachers to interview their students about the past year and share their findings, 2) we interviewed 50 classroom teachers, and 3) we conducted ten multistakeholder design charrettes with students, teachers, school leaders, and family members to begin planning for the 2021-2022 recovery year. Rather than a "return to normal" or the targeting of a narrowly-conceived "learning loss," the students and educators in our study emphasized themes of healing, community, and humanity as key learnings from the pandemic year and essential values to rebuilding schools. We recommend that in the 2021-2022 year, schools create structures for community members to reflect on the pandemic year, celebrate resilience, grieve what...
Freedom in America
Morality and power are often taken to be opposites, with morality grounded in altruism and a comm... more Morality and power are often taken to be opposites, with morality grounded in altruism and a commitment to the common good, and power located in self-interest. Our contention is that moral power, seemingly an oxymoron, is actually a widely present and important factor in social and political life. Moral power is the degree to which an actor, by virtue of his or her perceived moral stature, is able to persuade others to adopt a particular belief or take a particular course of action. We argue that moral power is a function of whether one is perceived as morally wellintentioned, morally capable, and whether one has moral standing to speak to an issue. In this paper, we introduce the concept of moral power, situate it theoretically, offer a theory of how it is generated, and give a range of examples to illustrate its relevance.
Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education, 2013
Context No Child Left Behind is only the most recent manifestation of a longstanding American imp... more Context No Child Left Behind is only the most recent manifestation of a longstanding American impulse to reform schools through accountability systems created from afar. While research has explored the causes and consequences of No Child Left Behind, this study puts the modern accountability movement in longer historical perspective, seeking to identify broader underlying patterns that shape this approach to reform. Purpose and Research Design The study explores the question of the short and longer-term causes of the movement to “rationalize” schools by comparing three major movements demanding accountability in American education across the 20th century: the efficiency reforms of the Progressive Era; the now almost forgotten movement toward accountability in the late 1960s and early 1970s; and the modern standards and accountability movement, culminating in No Child Left Behind. This paper considers the three movements as cases of school “rationalization” in the Weberian sense, in ...
American Journal of Education, 2021
Education, 2020
The body of literature on continuous learning and improvement is divided into applied research do... more The body of literature on continuous learning and improvement is divided into applied research documenting or evaluating specific codified methods, and a more theoretical literature about how organizations can learn and improve. Both literatures emerged in the 1970s, and they remained distinct for some time. On the applied side, consultants to industry began to codify the approaches of high-performing companies, producing a set of methods that combined continuous improvement (CI) with a customer orientation, emphasis on teamwork, tools for structured decision making, and systems thinking. One of the earliest and most studied packages of these methods is called Total Quality Management (TQM). Studies documented consistent evidence of associations between TQM implementation and performance in the private sector, but a weaker relationship in the public sector. Theoretical research increasingly explained why this might be so, drawing productively on contingency theory to explain why met...
In May 2020, we conducted four online design charrettes with school and district leaders, teacher... more In May 2020, we conducted four online design charrettes with school and district leaders, teachers, students, parents, and other stakeholders to translate design-based practices for leading school change into an online context. In this report, we present two meeting protocols: one for multi-stakeholder meetings and one primarily for students. To accompany these protocols, we have sample agenda, online workbooks, and sample notes and exercises from our discussion to help school and district leaders facilitate these kinds of meetings in their own local contexts.The goal of these meetings was to identify shared values and priorities for reopening schools, to build stakeholder engagement, to seed stakeholder leadership and involvement, and to develop new ideas and structures for reopening schools. In particular, we were interested in “tentpole” ideas, structures and routines that could define a reopening plan and provide an organizational frame for the hundreds of smaller curricular, pr...
Journal of Educational Change, 2019
The past decade has seen increasing international education activity and interest from policymake... more The past decade has seen increasing international education activity and interest from policymakers and think tanks in looking to other countries for educational reform strategies. This "new isomorphism"-the notion of global best practices in education-has been the subject of intensive debate between advocates and critics. But missing from this debate is an empirical account of what actually happens when global leaders gather, whether these leaders accept or resist borrowing from abroad, and, more constructively, how such gatherings might be organized to promote productive learning. Given these gaps, our research examines the emergence of what we call International Learning Communities (ILCs), which are sustained efforts to support public education leaders in ongoing cross-national learning. In this paper, we describe the nature of these communities and re-evaluate their role in the new isomorphism. Drawing on observations of two such communities and interviews with 30 ILC participants, we conclude that this model offers three types of learning: borrowing, co-construction, and systems thinking. While we view each as useful, we suggest that systems thinking is critical if international lessons are going to be effectively assimilated into coherent, contextually-appropriate strategies. Our findings are relevant not only for the continued study and development of systemlevel international learning, but also for all who seek to learn from other nations' educational policy and practice.
Harvard Educational Review, 2013
In this essay, Jal Mehta examines the challenges faced by American schooling and the reasons for ... more In this essay, Jal Mehta examines the challenges faced by American schooling and the reasons for persistent failure of American school reforms to achieve successful educational outcomes at scale. He concludes that many of the problems faced by American schools are artifacts of the bureaucratic form in which the education sector as a whole was cast: “We are trying to solve a problem that requires professional skill and expertise by using bureaucratic levers of requirements and regulations.” Building on research from a variety of fields and disciplines, Mehta advances a “sectoral” perspective on education reform, exploring how this shift in thinking could help education stakeholders produce quality practice across the nation.
Educational Leadership, Feb 1, 2013
American Enterprise Institute For Public Policy Research, Nov 1, 2012
Nation at Risk, the United States has been seized by a blizzard of school reform strategies: Stan... more Nation at Risk, the United States has been seized by a blizzard of school reform strategies: Standards. Vouchers. Charters. Merit pay. Alternative teacher certification. More money, more data, and more accountability. These strategies have been embraced by districts, states, and, eventually, even the federal government with great gusto. But if we were to honestly appraise all of this activity, we would have to conclude that the results have not been what we had hoped. Here are a few facts, likely numbingly familiar, but no less important for being so. In a post-industrial economy, good schooling is the ticket to middle-class life, but huge swaths of students continue to drop out of school-as much as 40 to 50 percent in some urban districts-and many students do not graduate from high school ready for a fouryear college. 1 Large gaps in student skills persist by race and class: National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) results suggest that the average black twelfth grader scores lower than an average white eighth grader. 2 Among American schools as a whole, recent studies continue to suggest low levels of cognitive challenge in classrooms: the most recent Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) results show that the United States ranks 14th in reading, 17th in science, and 25th in math, trailing
Journal of Educational Change, 2015
Perhaps the most daunting challenge in building good educational systems is generating quality pr... more Perhaps the most daunting challenge in building good educational systems is generating quality practice consistently across classrooms. Recent work has suggested that one way to address this dilemma is by building an educational infrastructure that would guide the work of practitioners. This article seeks to build upon and complicate this work on infrastructure by examining why two very different schools are able to achieve consistency of practice where many other schools do not. Findings suggest that infrastructure is not self-enacting and needs to be coupled to school level design in ways that are coherent and mutually reinforcing if infrastructure is going to lead to consistency of outcomes. At the same time, we find that the schools differ substantially in their visions of knowledge, learning, and teaching (purposes), which in turn imply very different kinds of organizational designs (practices). In conclusion, we suggest that the notion of infrastructure is plural rather than singular, and that different designs are appropriate for different pedagogical visions and social contexts. Bringing Values Back In: How Purposes Shape Practices in Coherent School Designs One of the most daunting challenges in building good educational systems is generating quality teaching practice consistently across the nation's many classrooms (Elmore 1996). Study after study reveals what American parents long have known: that teachers are the most important non-family input into students' academic successes, and that there is considerable variation in teacher quality from classroom to classroom (Sanders and Rivers 1996). Despite images of successful suburban schools and failing inner city schools, research consistently suggests that there is more variation among teachers within schools than across them (Rivkin, Hanushek, and Kain 2005). Researchers and reform advocates advance two different interpretations of this reality. For some, it suggests that the American K-12 sector needs systems that can measure individual teacher's contributions to student outcomes, which can in turn allow administrators to identify weak teachers and remove them from the field. Others argue that the problem lies less in "teachers" than in "teaching" (Hill and Herlihy 2011), meaning that the field as a whole needs to develop certain features that would enable ordinary teachers to produce quality practice. David Cohen and his colleagues, in particular, argue that the major challenge is to build the kind of "infrastructure" that exists in other professions and that functions to create more consistency of practice across individual practitioners (Cohen and Moffitt 2009, Cohen 2011, Cohen and Bhatta 2012, Cohen et al. 2014, Mehta 2013a, Mehta 2013b). From this vantage point, the wide variation in instructional quality that exists within schools reveals that schools as organizations are weak interventions, lacking the kind of robust mechanisms that would produce more consistently strong practice from classroom to classroom.
Choice Reviews Online, 2013
The Allure of Order
The late 1960s and early 1970s are remembered for many things, but educational accountability is ... more The late 1960s and early 1970s are remembered for many things, but educational accountability is not foremost among them. A time when the nation was ripped asunder by fights over Vietnam, when women burned bras, and when African Americans took to the streets seemed hardly a propitious moment for an educational movement emphasizing technocratic rationality to come to the forefront. Yet although overshadowed in the educational arena by conflicts over desegregation, community control, free schools, and open classrooms, a relatively quiet movement led primarily by state bureaucrats did in fact initiate the beginnings of an educational accountability movement. Between 1963 and 1974, no fewer than 73 laws were passed seeking to create standards or utilize a variety of scientific management techniques to improve schooling. These efforts at rationalization in some ways followed the same trajectory as the efficiency reforms five decades earlier and the standards movement to follow two decade...
The Allure of Order
In late 2001, three months after the September 11 attacks, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) pa... more In late 2001, three months after the September 11 attacks, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) passed both House and Senate with strong bipartisan majorities and was signed by a Republican president. Promising to use the power of the state to ensure that all children were proficient in reading and math by 2014, proponents heralded the act as the greatest piece of federal education legislation since the creation of the original Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 1965. By requiring the states to set high standards, pairing them with assessments that measured whether students were achieving those standards, and holding schools accountable if students failed to do so, NCLB, in the eyes of its sponsors, would close achievement gaps and make America’s schools the envy of the world. A decade later, the bloom is off the rose. While almost everyone today continues to share the aim of leaving no child behind, the act itself has come in for criticism from many quarters, to the point tha...
The Allure of Order
While changes in the way that education was defined were key to subsequent policy debate, the mov... more While changes in the way that education was defined were key to subsequent policy debate, the movement toward educator accountability also drew its impetus from a broader movement toward the rationalization and lay control of professionals that has affected medicine, law, higher education, and many other fields. Viewing educational politics through this broader lens of the sociology of the professions explains why similar movements toward accountability arose simultaneously across fields, as well as why the teaching profession was particularly vulnerable to these external demands. Previous scholarship on the educational accountability movement has largely ignored the perspective offered by the sociology of the professions on the dynamics of reform. Political scientists who seek to explain the movement toward educational standards and accountability have focused on state and particularly federal legislative history, seeking to understand the key decisions that have propelled educatio...
The Allure of Order, 2013
Developments in the 1960s and 1970s brought schools under fire, but the modern American school re... more Developments in the 1960s and 1970s brought schools under fire, but the modern American school reform movement began with the release of the famous A Nation at Risk report in 1983. Sponsored by the US Department of Education but largely written by a group of prominent academics, A Nation at Risk invoked crisis and framed a narrative so far reaching in its impact that it still governs the way we think about schooling 30 years later. Emphasizing the importance of education to economic competitiveness and the failings of American schooling in comparison with international competitors, A Nation at Risk presented a utilitarian and instrumental vision of education. It argued that schools, not society, should be held accountable for higher performance and that performance should be measured by external testing. As will be seen in the chapters to come, these assumptions underlay the state standards movement in the 1980s and 1990s and persist today in federal policy through No Child Left Beh...
Understanding the experiences of students and teachers during pandemic schooling is vital to educ... more Understanding the experiences of students and teachers during pandemic schooling is vital to educational recovery and building back better. In the spring of 2021 as the school year was coming to close, we conducted three research exercises: 1) we invited 200 teachers to interview their students about the past year and share their findings, 2) we interviewed 50 classroom teachers, and 3) we conducted ten multistakeholder design charrettes with students, teachers, school leaders, and family members to begin planning for the 2021-2022 recovery year. Rather than a "return to normal" or the targeting of a narrowly-conceived "learning loss," the students and educators in our study emphasized themes of healing, community, and humanity as key learnings from the pandemic year and essential values to rebuilding schools. We recommend that in the 2021-2022 year, schools create structures for community members to reflect on the pandemic year, celebrate resilience, grieve what...
Freedom in America
Morality and power are often taken to be opposites, with morality grounded in altruism and a comm... more Morality and power are often taken to be opposites, with morality grounded in altruism and a commitment to the common good, and power located in self-interest. Our contention is that moral power, seemingly an oxymoron, is actually a widely present and important factor in social and political life. Moral power is the degree to which an actor, by virtue of his or her perceived moral stature, is able to persuade others to adopt a particular belief or take a particular course of action. We argue that moral power is a function of whether one is perceived as morally wellintentioned, morally capable, and whether one has moral standing to speak to an issue. In this paper, we introduce the concept of moral power, situate it theoretically, offer a theory of how it is generated, and give a range of examples to illustrate its relevance.
Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education, 2013
Context No Child Left Behind is only the most recent manifestation of a longstanding American imp... more Context No Child Left Behind is only the most recent manifestation of a longstanding American impulse to reform schools through accountability systems created from afar. While research has explored the causes and consequences of No Child Left Behind, this study puts the modern accountability movement in longer historical perspective, seeking to identify broader underlying patterns that shape this approach to reform. Purpose and Research Design The study explores the question of the short and longer-term causes of the movement to “rationalize” schools by comparing three major movements demanding accountability in American education across the 20th century: the efficiency reforms of the Progressive Era; the now almost forgotten movement toward accountability in the late 1960s and early 1970s; and the modern standards and accountability movement, culminating in No Child Left Behind. This paper considers the three movements as cases of school “rationalization” in the Weberian sense, in ...
American Journal of Education, 2021
Education, 2020
The body of literature on continuous learning and improvement is divided into applied research do... more The body of literature on continuous learning and improvement is divided into applied research documenting or evaluating specific codified methods, and a more theoretical literature about how organizations can learn and improve. Both literatures emerged in the 1970s, and they remained distinct for some time. On the applied side, consultants to industry began to codify the approaches of high-performing companies, producing a set of methods that combined continuous improvement (CI) with a customer orientation, emphasis on teamwork, tools for structured decision making, and systems thinking. One of the earliest and most studied packages of these methods is called Total Quality Management (TQM). Studies documented consistent evidence of associations between TQM implementation and performance in the private sector, but a weaker relationship in the public sector. Theoretical research increasingly explained why this might be so, drawing productively on contingency theory to explain why met...
In May 2020, we conducted four online design charrettes with school and district leaders, teacher... more In May 2020, we conducted four online design charrettes with school and district leaders, teachers, students, parents, and other stakeholders to translate design-based practices for leading school change into an online context. In this report, we present two meeting protocols: one for multi-stakeholder meetings and one primarily for students. To accompany these protocols, we have sample agenda, online workbooks, and sample notes and exercises from our discussion to help school and district leaders facilitate these kinds of meetings in their own local contexts.The goal of these meetings was to identify shared values and priorities for reopening schools, to build stakeholder engagement, to seed stakeholder leadership and involvement, and to develop new ideas and structures for reopening schools. In particular, we were interested in “tentpole” ideas, structures and routines that could define a reopening plan and provide an organizational frame for the hundreds of smaller curricular, pr...
Journal of Educational Change, 2019
The past decade has seen increasing international education activity and interest from policymake... more The past decade has seen increasing international education activity and interest from policymakers and think tanks in looking to other countries for educational reform strategies. This "new isomorphism"-the notion of global best practices in education-has been the subject of intensive debate between advocates and critics. But missing from this debate is an empirical account of what actually happens when global leaders gather, whether these leaders accept or resist borrowing from abroad, and, more constructively, how such gatherings might be organized to promote productive learning. Given these gaps, our research examines the emergence of what we call International Learning Communities (ILCs), which are sustained efforts to support public education leaders in ongoing cross-national learning. In this paper, we describe the nature of these communities and re-evaluate their role in the new isomorphism. Drawing on observations of two such communities and interviews with 30 ILC participants, we conclude that this model offers three types of learning: borrowing, co-construction, and systems thinking. While we view each as useful, we suggest that systems thinking is critical if international lessons are going to be effectively assimilated into coherent, contextually-appropriate strategies. Our findings are relevant not only for the continued study and development of systemlevel international learning, but also for all who seek to learn from other nations' educational policy and practice.
Harvard Educational Review, 2013
In this essay, Jal Mehta examines the challenges faced by American schooling and the reasons for ... more In this essay, Jal Mehta examines the challenges faced by American schooling and the reasons for persistent failure of American school reforms to achieve successful educational outcomes at scale. He concludes that many of the problems faced by American schools are artifacts of the bureaucratic form in which the education sector as a whole was cast: “We are trying to solve a problem that requires professional skill and expertise by using bureaucratic levers of requirements and regulations.” Building on research from a variety of fields and disciplines, Mehta advances a “sectoral” perspective on education reform, exploring how this shift in thinking could help education stakeholders produce quality practice across the nation.
Educational Leadership, Feb 1, 2013
American Enterprise Institute For Public Policy Research, Nov 1, 2012
Nation at Risk, the United States has been seized by a blizzard of school reform strategies: Stan... more Nation at Risk, the United States has been seized by a blizzard of school reform strategies: Standards. Vouchers. Charters. Merit pay. Alternative teacher certification. More money, more data, and more accountability. These strategies have been embraced by districts, states, and, eventually, even the federal government with great gusto. But if we were to honestly appraise all of this activity, we would have to conclude that the results have not been what we had hoped. Here are a few facts, likely numbingly familiar, but no less important for being so. In a post-industrial economy, good schooling is the ticket to middle-class life, but huge swaths of students continue to drop out of school-as much as 40 to 50 percent in some urban districts-and many students do not graduate from high school ready for a fouryear college. 1 Large gaps in student skills persist by race and class: National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) results suggest that the average black twelfth grader scores lower than an average white eighth grader. 2 Among American schools as a whole, recent studies continue to suggest low levels of cognitive challenge in classrooms: the most recent Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) results show that the United States ranks 14th in reading, 17th in science, and 25th in math, trailing
Journal of Educational Change, 2015
Perhaps the most daunting challenge in building good educational systems is generating quality pr... more Perhaps the most daunting challenge in building good educational systems is generating quality practice consistently across classrooms. Recent work has suggested that one way to address this dilemma is by building an educational infrastructure that would guide the work of practitioners. This article seeks to build upon and complicate this work on infrastructure by examining why two very different schools are able to achieve consistency of practice where many other schools do not. Findings suggest that infrastructure is not self-enacting and needs to be coupled to school level design in ways that are coherent and mutually reinforcing if infrastructure is going to lead to consistency of outcomes. At the same time, we find that the schools differ substantially in their visions of knowledge, learning, and teaching (purposes), which in turn imply very different kinds of organizational designs (practices). In conclusion, we suggest that the notion of infrastructure is plural rather than singular, and that different designs are appropriate for different pedagogical visions and social contexts. Bringing Values Back In: How Purposes Shape Practices in Coherent School Designs One of the most daunting challenges in building good educational systems is generating quality teaching practice consistently across the nation's many classrooms (Elmore 1996). Study after study reveals what American parents long have known: that teachers are the most important non-family input into students' academic successes, and that there is considerable variation in teacher quality from classroom to classroom (Sanders and Rivers 1996). Despite images of successful suburban schools and failing inner city schools, research consistently suggests that there is more variation among teachers within schools than across them (Rivkin, Hanushek, and Kain 2005). Researchers and reform advocates advance two different interpretations of this reality. For some, it suggests that the American K-12 sector needs systems that can measure individual teacher's contributions to student outcomes, which can in turn allow administrators to identify weak teachers and remove them from the field. Others argue that the problem lies less in "teachers" than in "teaching" (Hill and Herlihy 2011), meaning that the field as a whole needs to develop certain features that would enable ordinary teachers to produce quality practice. David Cohen and his colleagues, in particular, argue that the major challenge is to build the kind of "infrastructure" that exists in other professions and that functions to create more consistency of practice across individual practitioners (Cohen and Moffitt 2009, Cohen 2011, Cohen and Bhatta 2012, Cohen et al. 2014, Mehta 2013a, Mehta 2013b). From this vantage point, the wide variation in instructional quality that exists within schools reveals that schools as organizations are weak interventions, lacking the kind of robust mechanisms that would produce more consistently strong practice from classroom to classroom.
Choice Reviews Online, 2013