The critical challenge: Policy networks and market models for education (original) (raw)
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Foro de Educación, 2021
Previous research has illustrated that advocacy organizations play a crucial role in education policy networks by communicating educational reform agendas to public and private stakeholders. In the United States, an interstate consortium of these advocacy organizations has formed their own network. The Policy Innovators in Education (PIE) network is a formal, centrally coordinated policy network that connects state-level advocacy organizations to one another and to national advocacy organizations, think tanks, and philanthropic foundations. Despite more than doubling in size since 2016, little is known about the policy preferences of PIE members. In this paper, we use social network analysis to identify and describe the ideological dimensions of advocacy that structure the PIE Network and to examine how these ideological dimensions have changed as the network has expanded. We find that the central areas of emphasis among these organizations have coalesced around neoliberal ideologies that promote accountability and standards. However, there is an underlying tension within the network that unfolds along two dimensions. On the one hand, preferences for choice and autonomy (e.g., charters, general choice, and autonomy & deregulation) are contrasted to those favoring equitable funding for low-income schools and early childhood education. On the other hand, members emphasize policies involving factors internal to schools (student interventions, leadership standards and accountability) to those external to schools (e.g., familial support, funding-based equity). These tensions within the network have grown more pronounced over time as the network has expanded to include new members with a more ideological narrow set of market-based policy preferences.
In recent years, a new breed of political organizations has had remarkable influence in American educational policymaking. Proponents of neoliberal reform, these groups have been labeled as Education Reform Advocacy Organizations, or ERAOs. I situate these organizations within the larger network of Intermediary Organizations (IOs). To understand the ways that ERAOs influence the policymaking process, I explore the role of Stand for Children, a national ERAO, in helping to pass neoliberal reform of teacher job security in Massachusetts. Using the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF), I explore common frames evident in debate about the organization’s role in the state, and I rely on data from key stakeholder interviews, observations and policy artifacts to characterize competing arguments about the organization’s poli- tical motives. I pay particularly close attention to how the organi- zation’s political identity shaped, and was shaped by, its attempts to build an advocacy coalition in the state. Throughout the case, I investigate how competing identities bumped up against each other in ways that would have a major impact on the policymak- ing process, and I use my analysis to generate questions about what it means for ERAOs to sustain their success over time.
2017
Within the disciplines of education and political science, the phenomenon of the voluntary transfer of policy ideas or practices from elsewhere, or "policy borrowing", is often the topic of intense debate and study. The study of policy transfer also has strong links with the field of diffusion. Scholars in these fields Reconstructing the Emergence of Teach First Page III DECLARATION I, Emilee Rauschenberger, declare this thesis is of my own composition, based on my own work, with acknowledgement of other sources, and has not been submitted for any other degree or professional qualification.
Financing the education policy discourse: philanthropic funders as entrepreneurs in policy networks
Interest Groups and Advocacy, 2018
We examine the spread and influence of ideas supported by philanthropic foundations within the context of a broader policy network. Our case focuses on the development of policy related to teacher quality—a field involving academic research, think tank involvement, and interest group participation. We conduct discourse network analysis of testimony from 175 Congressional hearings from 2003 to 2015 to examine network ties based on shared policy preferences expressed in hearings, which were used to create networks linking policy actors via shared policy preferences. We also conducted 51 interviews with funders, grantees, and policy-makers involved in the policy debate over teacher quality. We examine the spread of a key policy reform promoted by several large foundations, particularly the Gates Foundation: test score-based evaluation of teachers, with a focus on value-added evaluations. We show that expert witnesses in hearings who were funded by foundations shared policy preferences with regard to teacher evaluation at a statistically significant level, compared to non-grantees. We find that a group of major national foundations were sponsors of the advocacy groups that were central in Congressional hearings. We show that these funders were acting as policy entrepre-neurs—strategically promoting the spread of favored ideas to encourage uptake by policymakers.
The advocacy coalitions of educational policies
This article presents and tests a conceptual framework for the analysis of educational policies from a political science perspective. Based on the works of Sabatier y Jenkins Smith, it is contended that actors in this subsector of policies tend to build “advocacy coalitions” between those who share different levels of “beliefs”, with the objective of influence the content of policies. Afterwards, this conceptual framework is applied to the study of a national case: the field of educational policies in Uruguay.
Where Critical Policy Meets the Politics of Education: An Introduction
Educational Policy, 2018
The study of educational politics and policy through a critical frame allows for a more nuanced, holistic understanding of the complexities associated with education policy, from creation through implementation to evaluation. The contributions to this special issue of Educational Policy illustrate the work of critical education policy scholars engaged in research focused at the federal, state, and local levels. In this introductory article, we introduce basic elements of critical policy analysis (CPA), including fundamental ontological and epistemological claims and their implications for investigating educational policy. From this foundation, we preview the articles included in this collection, highlighting their frameworks, methods, and focus.
education policy analysis archives
In this special issue, Researching 21st Century Education Policy Through Social Network Analysis, authors use social network analysis (SNA) to explore policy networks, broaden the current literature of sociological approaches to SNA, and/or incorporate new lenses for interpreting policy networks from political science or other academic disciplines. This editorial introduction first provides an overview of policy networks and their relevance in education. Then, the editors describe existing work applying the tools of SNA to education policy and highlight understudied areas before describing the articles included in this issue. These articles apply SNA to a variety of education policy issues, including large scale policies such as the Every Student Succeeds Act and the Common Core State Standards, charter schools, and the relationship between system and non-system actors. Articles highlight multiple applications of SNA, including how SNA can be used to advance theory, as well as descr...
The context for education policy making has changed dramatically in recent years. Policy-making at the state-level has become characterized by near-unprecedented enactment of neo-liberal education policies, increased influence of so-called Education Reform Advocacy Organizations (ERAOs) and increased challenges to unions’ political influence. In this article, I explore the news media’s characterization of power and political influence in this new policy making arena. I offer case study analysis of a Massachusetts law, passed in the summer of 2012 with support from a non-profit advocacy group called Stand for Children, that limits seniority-based tenure for public school teachers. I use Critical Discourse Analysis to explore how themes, or discourses, common to this new context of policy making played out in the media coverage of the law, and I identify and characterize differences between media coverage of the law and the historical account as told in stakeholder interviews with major players involved in policy debate and development. Ultimately, I suggest that differences between media and interview data can tell us a lot about power and political influence in a time of dramatic policy change.
Beyond States and Markets: Centralised and Decentralised Networks In Education
NZARE/AARE conference, Auckland, November, 2003
This work in progress is intended as a contribution to the current politics of education. I attempt to identify strategic points of intervention in the current context that might help to reconsolidate education’s role as a social institution that orchestrates learning and advances social justice. My aim is to move beyond current characterisations of education politics, best seen in debates about markets in education and the Third Way, by disaggregating developments in the organisation of education and interrogating their implications for the politics of education policy and practice. I argue that the critical challenge for education research in advancing this intervention is to generate better understandings of: the relationships between centralised and decentralised networks; their articulations with both state and market forms of coordination and governance; and the infrastructure required to support networks that can anchor and protect educational values and commitments.