Kathryn A. McDermott

Dubious Sovereignty: Federal Conditions of Aid and the No Child Left Behind Act

The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) represents the greatest extension to date of Federal authority over public school governance. In NCLB, Congress used its conditional spending power to push states and localities into enacting particular kinds of testing and accountability policies. This article places NCLB in the context of Congresss generally increasing willingness to exert itself via conditions attached to federal financial aid. It also analyzes the implications of NCLB for federalism and intergovernmental relationships in education governance.

The "Post-Racial" Politics of Race: Changing Student Assignment Policy in Three School Districts.

Many school districts have recently revised, or tried to revise, their policies for assigning students to schools, because the legal and political status of racial and other kinds of diversity is uncertain, and the districts are facing fiscal austerity. This article presents case studies of politics and student assignment policy in three large school districts: Boston, Massachusetts; Wake County (Raleigh), North Carolina; and Jefferson County (Louisville), Kentucky. In all three districts, there has been pressure to change student-assignment policies in ways that respond to the priorities of White and middle-class populations, with the potential to worsen the options available to students of color. Our case studies reinforce the criticisms of race-neutral politics and policy that have been made by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and others. Race-neutral politics during fiscal retrenchment tends to reframe privilege as common sense and to obscure some students’ structural disadvantages.

In MINT Condition? The Politics of Alternative Certification and Pay Incentives for Teachers in Massachusetts:

Like many other states, Massachusetts enacted numerous changes to teacher certification policy during the 1980s and 1990s. During the summer of 1998, the state legislature and Department of Education made two especially significant changes: a signing bonus of U.S.

The New Politics of Diversity Lessons From a Federal Technical Assistance Grant

20,000 for an elite group of new teachers, and a state-funded alternative certification program. Alternative certification had been part of state policy for years prior to 1998 but had never been widely implemented. The signing bonus was a new idea. Drawing on the literature on policy formation, implementation, and termination, this article analyzes the process by which the signing bonus was enacted, and how it contributed to creation of the state alternative certification program. Ironically, although alternative certification was not widely implemented until it was coupled with the signing bonus, the alternative certification program survived a state budget crisis that led to termination of the signing bonus.

Educational New Paternalism: Human Capital, Cultural Capital, and the Politics of Equal Opportunity

In 2009, the U.S. Department of Education distributed

Social Science Research and School Diversity Policy

2,500,000 via a competitive grant program, the Technical Assistance for Student Assignment Plans, to 11 school districts. The grants and their local effects provide an opportunity to examine the new politics of diversity in public education. Participants cited a wide range of conceptions of diversity, most of which were race-neutral. Some districts enacted policies deemphasizing their original diversity goals. Even in Technical Assistance for Student Assignment Plans (TASAP) districts, whose leaders presumably value diversity, diversity was not always a compelling goal when competing with priorities such as fiscal austerity, school improvement, and neighborhood school demands. Future federal efforts to increase students’ exposure to diverse peers should recognize that local conditions might create contrary political pressures for local policymakers.

Introduction: Contesting Equity in the Twenty-First Century

Since the 1990s, a growing number of urban schools have gained attention for their distinctive approach to academics and character education. These schools, most of them charters, share the stated goals of closing the racial achievement gap and preparing all of their students for college. In this article, we identify common elements of their approach, which we, following others, label as “new paternalism.” We describe the unique features of new-paternalist urban schools and discuss potential pitfalls of new paternalism that have been absent from mass media coverage of them. We argue that new paternalism appeals to a wide range of diverse political constituencies; however, idealized media accounts of these schools likely overestimate their power to close achievement gaps and produce mobility for urban youth. Although we question the optimism of several media accounts, we argue that either advocacy or criticism of new paternalist schools ought to rest on empirical research conducted in and on them. Our central purpose is to outline an agenda for research on the long-term impact of new paternalist schools and their ability to address issues related to educational equal opportunity.

Incentives, Capacity, and Implementation: Evidence from Massachusetts Education Reform

For decades, policy makers, advocates, and researchers have been engaged in efforts to make educational opportunity more equal for students from different racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic groups. A great deal of research has been conducted on their efforts; however, there is some disagreement on the extent to which the research has been influential. To examine the level of influence that social science research has had on school diversity policy, the authors conducted unstructured interviews with eight activists who use such research in arguments about school diversity. Findings from the study indicate that the influence of social science research is ambiguous, and to have influence, activists felt they had to target specific policy goals over a period of time.

College Persistence among Single Mothers after Welfare Reform: An Exploratory Study:

Equity has long been one of the main goals of public education in the United States, even though public schooling has often fallen short of the ideal in practice. Notions of what educational equity requires have shifted over time. Currently, as this issues articles show, many ideas about educational equity are contending with each other in policy and politics. The political environment is not just complex but also challenging. At a time when resources for public institutions are increasingly scarce, the demographic disparities between the school-aged population and the older population may make the pursuit of equal opportunity especially contentious, particularly as seniors are more likely to vote than younger adults. Our goal for this issue is to participate in the ongoing scholarly debate on equal opportunity, with the ultimate goal of a deeper understanding of how equal-opportunity policies work and what kinds of politics produce and either sustain or undermine these policies.