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Purpose: Existing research on loosely coupled educational systems has largely ignored the social and affective dimensions of such systems. Drawing on literature from organizational behavior, this study examines how “human” factors, including role identity dynamics, power dynamics, and stereotyping, shape the implementation of state-led education reforms. Research Method/Approach: This study draws on interviews and focus groups with 77 actors from different organizational levels in two states and uses a grounded theory analytical approach. Findings: Our findings indicate that stereotyping is ubiquitous across contexts, that the way actors stereotype and perceive each other depends on their positions in the system, and that stereotypes of higher ups often persist even as higher ups are aware of them and try unsuccessfully to mitigate them. We theorize about the reasons for these outcomes and their consequences for efforts at systemic change. Implications for Research and Practice: This study underscores the importance of social and emotional factors in education reform efforts, which have been under-theorized to this point. It demonstrates that reforms could be more successful when higher ups and lower downs have more frequent and meaningful interactions, which facilitate opportunities to break down social and emotional barriers to successful implementation.

If the future of preK-12 education is going to be better than the past, then we need to rethink our fundamental assumptions about what we want from our schools and what we expect those schools to look like. Educators should embrace three core commitments in particular: 1) to treat students as learners whose agency is respected, whose diversity is embraced, whose selves are deeply known, whose joy is cultivated, and whose holistic growth is the paramount concern of the adults who care for them; 2) to promote learning that is purposeful, authentic, and connected to the broader human domains of which those learners are part; and 3) to create learning communities that enable deep relationships, cultivate democratic values and dispositions, and model the kind of society and environment we want to create.

As a result of the frustration with the dominant “What Works” paradigm of large-scale research-based improvement, practitioners, researchers, foundations, and policymakers are increasingly embracing a set of ideas and practices that can be collectively labeled continuous improvement (CI) methods. This chapter provides a comparative review of these methods, paying particular attention to CI methods’ intellectual influences, theories of action, and affordances and challenges in practice. We first map out and explore the shared intellectual forebears that CI methods draw on. We then discuss three kinds of complexity to which CI methods explicitly attend—ambiguity, variability, and interdependence—and how CI methods seek a balance of local and formal knowledge in response to this complexity. We go on to argue that CI methods are generally less attentive to the relational and political dimensions of educational change and that this leads to challenges in practice. We conclude by considering CI methods’ aspirations for impact at scale, and offer a number of recommendations to inform future research and practice.

Comprender las experiencias de los estudiantes y docentes durante la escolarización durante la pandemia es vital para la recuperación educativa y una mejor reconstrucción. En la primavera de 2021, cuando se acercaba el cierre del año escolar, realizamos tres ejercicios de investigación: 1) invitamos a 200 maestros a entrevistar a sus alumnos sobre el año pasado y compartir sus hallazgos, 2) entrevistamos a 50 maestros de aula y 3) llevamos a cabo diez charlas de diseño de múltiples partes interesadas con estudiantes, maestros, líderes escolares y familiares para comenzar a planificar el año de recuperación 2021-2022. En lugar de un "regreso a la normalidad" o el objetivo de una "pérdida de aprendizaje" estrechamente concebida, los estudiantes y educadores de nuestro estudio enfatizaron temas de curación, comunidad y humanidad como aprendizajes clave del año de la pandemia y valores esenciales para la reconstrucción de las escuelas. . Recomendamos que en el año 2021-2022, las escuelas creen estructuras para que los miembros de la comunidad reflexionen sobre el año de la pandemia, celebren la resiliencia, lloren por lo que se ha perdido e imaginen cómo las lecciones aprendidas de un año tumultuoso pueden informar sistemas escolares más equitativos y resilientes. para el futuro. Brindamos orientación sobre cuatro protocolos de reflexión para usar en las comunidades escolares para avanzar en este trabajo.

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 system-level international learning, but also for all who seek to learn from other nations’ educational policy and practice.

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 has been lost, and imagine how the lessons learned from a tumultuous year can inform more equitable, resilient school systems for the future. We provide guidance on four reflection protocols to use in school communities to advance this work.

In May 2020, we facilitated four online design charrettes with a variety of school stakeholders—students, teachers, principals, district leaders, parents, consultants, state officials, and others—to develop a design process for fall 2020 school planning. We describe these charrettes and provide resources for facilitating similar events in an additional report at https://edarxiv.org/ufr4q: Imagining September: Online Design Charrettes for Fall 2020 Planning with Students and Stakeholders.This report shares insights from those design meetings. First we identified seven themes that emerged from our design charrettes:1. Relationships are the Foundation of Schooling2. Liberatory Approaches to Equity3. Amplifying Student Agency4. Marie Kondo-ing School Priorities5. Building Time will be Gold6. Nurturing Home and Community Learning7. Iterative Organizational LearningFor each of these principles, we developed a small set of “storyboards,” short vignettes of future class- room life in the 2020-2021 school year as told from students and faculty. Through these stories, educators can begin to imagine what hybrid schooling might look like next year.These storyboards range widely in grain size from “tentpole” ideas that could organize a school’s entire reopening plan to smaller programmatic pieces that could fit into many different types of responses. It would be nearly impossible to include all of these design elements in a single reopening plan, and some of them contradict one another. However, reviewing these storyboards can help school communities begin their own process of storytelling about schooling next year.

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, programmatic, and logistical decisions that will need to be made next year. In a linked report-- “Imagining September: Principles and Design Elements for Ambitious Schools during Covid-19”- -we have published “storyboards” for a variety of school reopening ideas and structures inspired by the participants in our charrettes.Re-opening schools in the fall will be a community-wide effort, requiring leadership, innovation, and experimentation from all parts of school systems. Including diverse stakeholders early in the process of imagining September will bring forth a community’s best ideas and invite people through the system to join the work of retooling schools for the challenging year ahead.

Counter to narratives of persistently failed school reform, we argue that reforms sometimes succeed and seek to understand why. Drawing on examples from the founding of public schools to the present, we find that successful system-wide reforms addressed problems that teachers thought they had by being consistent with prevailing norms and values, mobilizing a significant public constituency, and building the needed educational infrastructure. We distinguish between system-wide and niche reforms, suggesting that some—particularly those seeking ambitious instruction—failed system-wide but succeeded by creating protected educational niches. We conclude with a discussion of the implications for the Common Core.

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 methods from production may need to be adapted or reconsidered in service or public sectors. Yet the initial reluctance of scholars to follow the demands of managers in deciding what to study led to the underinvestment in direct research on individual CI methods like TQM, which may have contributed to its hype and rapid spread despite mixed results. This rapid spread was then largely explained by scholars via neoinstitutional theories, wherein organizations adopt CI methods as a way of securing legitimacy, rather than because of their technical value. Over time, scholars have taken up a more integrated role in theorizing, investigating, and evaluating CI initiatives, often grounding their empirical research in theories of organizational learning and using this theoretical foundation to deepen our understanding of the conditions under which and the mechanisms by which CI methods work. Yet, particularly in health care, they have struggled with the appropriate standards of evidence and research designs for evaluating CI methods. Again, theoretical perspectives have helped to delineate the challenges. For example, contingency and neoinstitutional theories raise questions about whether conformity with prescribed practices is the best indicator of effective take-up of CI, or whether adaptation is more desirable. This question arose particularly as methods spread to sectors with more fragmented and turbulent environments, difficult-to-monitor tasks, and uncertain technologies (e.g., many public sectors). Faced with growing understanding of the incompatibility of traditional CI methods with the complexity of many contexts, the latest generation of literature on CI in both the private and public sectors promotes more adaptive, less tightly codified methods.

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 structures (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.

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.

Professionalization is an important but overlooked dimension in education politics, particularly the politics of accountability. To isolate the importance of professionalization, this article compares accountability movements in K-12 education with similar movements in higher education. I draw on three pairs of reports that have sought to impose accountability between 1983 and 2006, in each case comparing a report on K-12 with a similar report on higher education. I find that calls for accountability in both sectors have intensified over the period under study, but that higher education has been much more protected from accountability pressures by its greater degree of professionalization, its reputation, its greater share in the private sector, and its decentralized professional autonomy. In conclusion, I connect the findings to broader debates about professionalism and the future of accountability in the two sectors.

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 that each sought to reduce variation and discretion across schools in favor of increasingly formal systems of standardized top-down control. Findings This impulse to rationalize schools cannot be explained by interest group or partisan explanations since the reformers defy easy ideological categorization.. Instead, the reforms can be understood as a penetration of “technocratic logic” into the educational sphere. In each movement, this process exhibited a similar pattern: (1) the identification of a crisis of quality which destabilized the existing educational status quo; (2) the elevation of a technocratic logic, backed by the knowledge base of a high-high status epistemic community; (3) the rallying of ideologically diverse powerful actors external to the schools behind a commensurating logic that promised control over and improvement of an unwieldy school system; and (4) the inability of education to resist this technocratic logic (and often to be co-opted by it) due to teaching's historical institutionalization as a feminized, weak, bureau-cratically-administered field lacking its own set of widely respected countervailing professional standards. Conclusions/Implications This history suggests that unless teachers are able to develop and organize a stronger field, they will remain at the whim of external actors. It also suggests that top-down accountability-centered approaches are limited if the goal is to consistently produce teaching that can help students engage in higher level academic work. Rather than continuing to pursue these rationalizing strategies, this analysis and emerging international evidence suggest that a more promising approach would be to work towards professionalizing the educational field.

A rigorous board exam for teachers could change who is attracted to the profession, develop a more consistent and higher level of skills among teachers, improve student outcomes, and greatly increase public regard for teachers and teaching.

American educational policy was rapidly transformed between 1980 and 2001. Accountability was introduced into a sphere that had long been loosely coupled, both major political parties reevaluated longstanding positions, and significant institutional control over the schooling shifted to the federal government for the first time in the nation’s history. These changes cannot be explained by conventional theories such as interest groups, rational choice, and historical institutionalism. Drawing on extensive archival research and more than 80 interviews, this article argues that this transformation can be explained by a changed policy paradigm which restructured the political landscape around education reform. More generally, while previous scholars have observed that “policies create politics,” it should also be recognized that “paradigms create politics.”

High Tech High follows a concept of project-based and technology-supported learning in San Diego that leads students to a different kind of learning.

Deconstructing schools and the education system as we know it may offer some enormous challenges and great pitfalls.

Jal Mehta and Scott Davies on expanding ed as a site of analysis.

Why, Mr. Ferguson and Mr. Mehta wonder, does the achievement gap persist 50 years after Brown declared that black children must receive a truly equal education? THE GOOD NEWS is that the achievement gaps between racial and ethnic groups in the U.S. are smaller than they were several decades ago. The bad news is that progress stopped around 1990.1 The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) continues to show large differences between the average scores of blacks and Hispanics on the one hand and those of whites and Asians on the other.2 Now, half a century after Brown v. Board of Education, while progress is evident and many milestones have been achieved - especially in the area of civil rights - policy measures focused on rights, resources, and required testing for students have not achieved their full promise for raising achievement and narrowing gaps between groups of students. And it is the failure to go behind the classroom door and foster high-quality instructional practices for all students, in all classrooms, in all schools that is strongly implicated in these disappointing results. What we need today is a more determined, high-quality, research-based emphasis on improving what happens in classrooms. But before we look at just what sorts of practices we need to adopt, some historical background is in order. Historical Overview One hundred and seven years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the doctrine of "separate but equal" in Plessy v. Ferguson. The conflict was over passenger accommodations on the East Louisiana Railroad. Nonetheless, the doctrine of "separate but equal" was codified in state laws governing schools and virtually all other types of public accommodations in the South, where the majority of African Americans lived. Representing an eight-person majority, Justice Henry Brown wrote the following: "The object of the [14th] Amendment was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law, but in the nature of things it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either." Half a century later, the doctrine of separate but equal still dominated the South, but the question being litigated was whether enforced segregation in public schools deprived black children of equal protection under the U.S. Constitution. On 17 May 1954, Chief Justice Earl Warren issued the Court's decision in the cases subsumed into Brown. The Court's opinion granted that it might be possible with segregation to achieve equality of "tangible factors" - things that money can buy - but the Court rejected the idea that separate could be equal or that laws maintaining segregation could provide equal protection under the Constitution. Informed by the work of social scientists, including the black psychologist Kenneth Clark, the justices wrote the following about the harm that segregation was doing to black children: "To separate them from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone." Thus Brown was not merely about equality of resources; it was also about children's "hearts and minds" and "status in the community." The decision struck down the doctrine of separate but equal. It was a landmark event.3 In challenging the separate-but-equal doctrine of the Jim Crow South, the plaintiffs in Brown aimed to challenge white supremacist ideology and the moral injustice of forced segregation. In addition, they hoped that giving black children access to the schools and classrooms where white children studied would help to equalize educational resources and academic outcomes. Unfortunately, implementation of the court order was exceedingly slow and limited. …

The black-white gap in achievement, as measured by performance on standardized tests, has received considerable attention from researchers in the past five years. Claude Steele's stereotype threat and disidentification mechanism is perhaps the most heralded of the new explanations for residual racial differences that persist after adjustments for social background are performed. Analyzing data from the National Education Longitudinal Study, we found qualified support for portions of the disidentification explanation. Black students' academic self-evaluations are more weakly associated with their measured academic performances, a difference that could stem from stereotype threat or a belief that the evaluations are racially biased. But this discounting of performance evaluations does not seem to provoke a more complete disidentification with the schooling process or with academic achievement in general. The findings suggest that there is no clear path from being stereotyped to disidentifying, and in conclusion we discuss alternative explanations for why it may be so.

This article considers five methodological challenges in studying rare events such as school shootings. Drawing on the literature on causal analysis in macro-historical and other small-N research, it outlines strategies for studying school shootings using qualitative case studies and illustrates these strategies using data from case studies of two rampage school shootings: Heath High School in West Paducah, Kentucky, and Westside Middle School outside Jonesboro, Arkansas. Strengths and limitations are discussed as well as lessons for studying rare events.

Positivist and interpretivist analytical approaches are frequently believed to be incompatible as research strategies and ways of understanding the world. This article argues that not only may versions of positivism and interpretivism be combined in the analysis of contested events, but this combination can further the goals of both approaches by contributing information that may have been missed by adopting only one perspective. The authors illustrate this using two case studies of lethal school shootings near Paducah, Kentucky, and Jonesboro, Arkansas, and introduce methodological strategies to manage potential biases that may lead to contradictory testimony. However, these same contradictions act as distinct data points from the interpretivist perspective, offering insight into the cultural understandings of a community. The authors develop new forms of triangulation that are tailored to these research goals and illustrate how, just as positivist analysis may be used to aid interpretivism, an interpretive understanding of a community may be necessary to develop causal theories of contested events such as school shootings.

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 Behind. Much as the muckrakers shaped reform efforts in the Progressive Era and the Coleman Report did so to a lesser degree in the 1960s, A Nation at Risk powerfully framed the debate and set off a chain of events that resulted in the largest-ever eff ort to rationalize American schooling. A Nation at Risk has not been ignored in previous accounts of American educational history: it is often cited as a critical document in American school reform. I seek to build on this literature by examining, in more detail than previous work has, the creation, rhetoric, and reception of the report, as well as drawing on new state-level evidence to explore its impact. I also look deeper into the past, finding a more diverse set of antecedents than is usually identified, and further into the future, seeking to specify more precisely how A Nation at Risk affected subsequent reform efforts.

Across the 20th century and now a decade into the 21st, reformers have repeatedly seen the rationalization of schooling as the solution to the nation’s educational ills. Reformers have repeatedly claimed that by setting standards, using tests to measure progress towards those standards, and holding teachers accountable for progress, student achievement would improve and schools would better satisfy the goals of their external constituents. Conversely, educators have repeatedly countered that such a mechanistic model imposes a set of business values that should be foreign to schools; assigns responsibility to schools that belongs in part with families and neighborhoods; and in the name of science, squeezes out critical humanistic priorities of schooling. Round and round we go, with no end in sight. This chapter steps back from the details of such movements to look at the broader patterns, lessons, and implications of the repeated efforts to rationalize schools. One set of questions is about causes and patterns. Why, despite modest results, has so much energy been repeatedly expended in trying to rationalize schools? What patterns are common across time? Are the sources particular to education, or are there common causes that explain the rise of accountability movements in medicine, higher education, and other fields? And why have educators been comparatively less able to resist external accountability than practitioners in other fields? A second set of questions concerns the deeper assumptions embedded in efforts to rationalize schools. Choices we make about how to reform schools reflect a broader set of values about what we want for our students, how we regard our teachers, and what our vision of educational improvement is. More specifically, what are our assumptions about individual psychology, organizational sociology, and human nature? Why, at least in recent years, has the school reform movement combined such an optimistic, even utopian vision of what is possible for students with such a pessimistic, behaviorist view of how teachers need to be incentivized and motivated?

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 decades later. First came the invocation of a crisis, this time born of rising demands for greater equity and increasing dissatisfaction with the quality of the schools. Second, into this void stepped the new logic of rationalizing reform, this time drawn from a set of techniques pioneered by the Rand Corporation and popularized by the Department of Defense, which promised a new approach to defining objectives, measuring goals, and aligning available resources. And third, humanists and educators were once again the primary opponents of the reform, objecting to the quantification of schooling and the limited view of educational improvement that underlay the rationalizing reform. In all of these respects, the now almost forgotten accountability efforts of the 1960s and 1970s resembled the other two accountability movements of the 20th century. However, the other two movements mobilized a broad range of elites behind their reforms, whereas in this case real political support remained thin. The narrow base of support kept the programs from spreading or being implemented more widely; this effort never gained the kind of power or traction that the earlier and later ones did.

How can we best understand the repeated eff orts to rationalize schools across the 20th century? Traditional approaches to explaining political phenomena—interest groups, institutions, partisan theories, and rational choice—are limited in their ability to explain this recurring impulse. Instead, a complementary set of cultural lenses—ideas, professions, fields, logics, moral power, and institutional vantage points—can shed more light on these repeated movements. Together, these perspectives also offer a different way of thinking about the nature of social and political contestation, one that is deeply cultural in its ontology and that integrates ideas, interests, and institutions, links the social and the political, and explains both continuity and change. In one sense, movements to “rationalize” schools have cycled across the 20th century. As will be discussed in more detail in the chapters to come, at three different times reformers have embraced the rationalization of schools. In the Progressive Era, a group of reformers, comprising mostly businessmen, city elites, and university professors, sought to shift power from large, local ward boards, which they viewed as parochial and unprofessional, to smaller boards controlled by professional elites. They made the superintendent the equivalent of the CEO of the school system and directed him to use the latest in scientific methods and modern management techniques to measure outcomes and to ensure that resources were being used efficiently to produce the greatest possible bang for the buck. The newly emerging science of testing was widely employed to ensure that teachers and schools were meeting standards and to sort students into appropriate tracks, with the aim of “efficiently” matching students with the curriculum appropriate to their ability. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a second accountability movement sought to take hold of American schooling. Seeking to realize both a civil rights agenda of improving the quality of schooling and to satisfy more conservative concerns about the efficient spending of public dollars, state after state passed laws designed to inject greater accountability into the school system.

Even with the movement of the states toward standards-based reform, there was no reason to think a similar movement would, or even could, take place at the federal level. The defining characteristic of American education was its decentralization: the Republican Party habitually called for the elimination of the Department of Education, and the Democratic Party confined the federal role to providing aid to disadvantaged students. But over the course of fewer than 20 years, all of this was transformed, culminating in the most far-reaching federal education law in the nation’s history, passed under a Republican president no less. What explains this transformation? Three sets of changes need to be explained: how political actors were realigned, how policies were chosen, and how institutions changed. To begin with the political: How did the Republican Party, which had long been philosophically opposed to a federal role in education and had called for the abolition of the Department of Education as recently as 1996 come to support the biggest nationalization of education in the nation’s history? Why did Congressional Democrats, who in 1991 had strongly opposed a proposal by George H. W. Bush for national standards and testing as unfair to minority students, shift by 2001 to embrace a similar proposal offered by another Republican President, George W. Bush? In short, how did an overwhelming bipartisan political consensus form in favor of policies that had been opposed by large majorities in both parties only 10 years earlier? A second set of questions relates to policy choices. Of all the available policy tools, what explains the choice of standards-based reform as the primary federal response to this perceived crisis? The bipartisan embrace of tough accountability in No Child Left Behind seems particularly hard to account for by conventional interest group explanations, given that teachers unions are consistently rated the strongest players in educational politics and have historically been opposed to greater demands for school or teacher accountability. Why were standards and accountability the chosen policy vehicle, and why did they triumph over interest group opposition?

Ted Kennedy and George W. Bush agreed on little, but united behind the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). Passed in late 2001, it was hailed as a dramatic new departure in school reform. It would make the states set high standards, measure student progress, and hold failing schools accountable. A decade later, NCLB has been repudiated on both sides of the aisle. According to Jal Mehta, we should have seen it coming. Far from new, it was the same approach to school reform that Americans have tried before. In The Allure of Order, Mehta recounts a century of attempts at revitalizing public education, and puts forward a truly new agenda to reach this elusive goal. Not once, not twice, but three separate times-in the Progressive Era, the 1960s and '70s, and NCLB-reformers have hit upon the same idea for remaking schools. Over and over again, outsiders have been fascinated by the promise of scientific management and have attempted to apply principles of rational administration from above. Each of these movements started with high hopes and ambitious promises, but each gradually discovered that schooling is not easy to "order" from afar: policymakers are too far from schools to know what they need; teachers are resistant to top-down mandates; and the practice of good teaching is too complex for simple external standardization. The larger problem, Mehta argues, is that reformers have it backwards: they are trying to do on the back-end, through external accountability, what they should have done on the front-end: build a strong, skilled and expert profession. Our current pattern is to draw less than our most talented people into teaching, equip them with little relevant knowledge, train them minimally, put them in a weak welfare state, and then hold them accountable when they predictably do not achieve what we seek. What we want, Mehta argues, is the opposite approach which characterizes top-performing educational nations: attract strong candidates into teaching, develop relevant and usable knowledge, train teachers extensively in that knowledge, and support these efforts through a strong welfare state. The Allure of Order boldly challenges conventional wisdom with a sweeping, empirically rich account of the last century of education reform, and offers a new path forward for the century to come.

The progressive era saw a massive rationalization of American schooling; its imprint stretches into the present day. Drawing on the ideas of (then) modern management techniques, a heterogeneous group of elites transformed a localized and highly varied system of schooling into what David Tyack famously called “the one best system.” This movement both created the form and structure of the school system that would profoundly shape later events and, as the benefit of hindsight makes evident, was driven by much the same underlying vision and set of forces that recurred in subsequent eff orts to rationalize schools. What motivated the Progressive Era transformation of schooling was the image of a rationally organized system of production. Whether in the public or private sector, the hallmarks of this approach are distinct organizational categories of work, clear delineation of roles and responsibilities, specialization of labor, and hierarchical control of workers by more powerful superiors. In the case of the school system, this meant a shift from one-room school-houses of age-mixed groups, with instruction and assessment largely decided by the teacher, to larger schools, with grades sorted by age, Carnegie units to measure student progress, and teachers’ work structured and assessed by their administrative superiors. In the larger context, one might say that this is just the story of the shift from preindustrial to industrial society, from small-scale institutions in which social connections and individual discretion were paramount to larger social organizations with systems, roles, and rules. But there are different versions of modernity, and the American school system was decisively shaped by a particularly rationalistic, scientific, and hierarchical approach to social organization. As we will see, the Progressive Era reformers were enthralled by the emerging power of scientific and business techniques that, they were convinced, would make schooling more efficient and effective. In particular, the brand of management techniques they embraced sought to shift power upwards from frontline workers (teachers) to administrative superiors, who would set goals, prescribe desired strategies, and use an early form of assessment to hold teachers accountable for their performance.

In the years following A Nation at Risk, a storm of educational reform activities swept across the states, as governors and state legislatures tried everything they could think of to improve their schools. But beginning in the late 1980s and continuing through the 1990s, one idea became more popular than the rest. Standards-based reform—setting standards, creating assessments, and imposing accountability—became the most widely preferred school reform strategy; it was enacted in 42 states before federal legislation began to encourage it in 1994 and in 49 states before it became required under No Child Left Behind in 2001. Furthermore, since norms against federal involvement in education made it difficult for Congress to act in the absence of a state-level consensus, understanding how this consensus came to be formed is critical to understanding how standards-based reform became federal law as well. When a policy spreads across the majority of states in the absence of strong federal requirements, it is reasonable to hypothesize that diffusion processes are at work. Some states develop models, and their success begets adoption in other states. There is some evidence of such a process at work here, particularly in the case of later-adopting states copying some of the leaders. But the possibility of adopting a diffusing policy template still begs the question of state politics—why, exactly, did so many different states choose to put their eggs in the standards-based-reform basket? In this chapter I argue that the key to the widespread success of standards and accountability is the way that the policy crossed ideological divides. Democrats and Republicans, who had long been divided over issues such as vouchers and increased aid to schools, found themselves on the same side of the fence when it came to standards-based reform, if not always for the same reasons. The pages that follow trace the trajectory of three very different states in moving toward standards-based reform—blue Maryland, where a coalition of Democratic reformers championed standards as a way to gain leverage on failing schools in high-poverty districts; purple Michigan, where a mixed coalition of left and right came to support the same policy for different reasons; and red Utah, where an angry Republican legislature saw in standards-based reform a way to hold a recalcitrant educational establishment to account.

Over and over again across the 20th century and a decade into the 21st, Americans have sought to rationalize their schools, with limited results. Is there a better way? In the pages that follow, I argue that there is. At base, you could say that the entire American educational sector was put together backwards. Beginning early in the 20th century, teaching became institutionalized as a highly feminized, low-status field; universities, unwilling to associate with training low-status teachers, trained instead a set of male administrators to control and direct those teachers; failures of schools prompted additional levels of control and regulation from afar, further diminishing autonomy and making the field less attractive to talented people. Successful systems from abroad essentially do the reverse. They choose their teachers from among their most talented students; they train them extensively; they provide opportunities for them to collaborate within and across schools to improve their practice, they provide the needed external supports for them to do this work well; and they support this educational work within stronger welfare states. This is true of East Asian countries like Korea and Japan, but it is also true of non-Confucian countries like Canada and Finland. While it is not yet clear how much of this success are due to which of these factors, it is clear that many of the world’s leading countries take a fundamentally different approach than the one favored in the United States. As a recent Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) volume sums up what it sees as the lessons from nations that lead the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) rankings: “The education development progression is characterized by a movement from relatively low teacher quality to relatively high teacher quality; from a focus on low-level basic skills to a focus on high-level skills and creativity; from Tayloristic forms of work organization to professional forms of work organization; from primary accountability to superiors to primary accountability to one’s professional colleagues, parents and the public; and from a belief that only some students can and need to achieve high learning standards to a conviction that all students need to meet such high standards.”