Lorraine M. McDonnell

Getting the Job Done: Alternative Policy Instruments.

A major challenge for the next generation of policy research will be to apply the lessons of past implementation studies in building a more powerful conceptual framework and at the same time, in producing more useful information for policymakers. This article begins to build such a framework by focusing on the notion of alternative policy instruments, or the mechanisms that translate substantive policy goals into concrete actions. It examines four different types of instruments and attempts to specify key relationships among problem definition, instrument choice, organizational context, implementation, and effects.

Assessment Policy as Persuasion and Regulation.

Policymakers continue to view student assessment as an appealing instrument of education policy, and they have found a wider variety of uses for it over the past two decades. This article explores the policy uses of assessment, focusing particularly on its persuasive role in encouraging higher levels of educational performance and on its accountability and regulatory functions. The purpose is to provide a framework that will help explain the reasoning of policymakers who continue to insist that assessments can be used for multiple purposes, even in light of their own prior experience and expert evidence to the contrary.

Evidence Use and the Common Core State Standards Movement: From Problem Definition to Policy Adoption

Despite calls for research-based policies, other types of evidence also influence education policy, including personal experience, professional expertise, and normative values. This article focuses on the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) initiative, examining how research use varied over stages of the process and how it was integrated with other types of evidence. By drawing on elite interviews, we find that CCSS promoters and developers used evidence in much the way that policy analysis research would predict and that while research evidence was a major resource, it was combined with other types of evidence depending on political and policy goals at different stages of the CCSS process.

Organized Interests and the Common Core

Among the notable aspects of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) is the diverse array of interest groups supporting them. These organizations must now apply the strategies they used so effectively in advancing the Common Core to stem mounting opposition to it. This article draws on theories of political and policy learning and interviews with major participants to examine the role that CCSS supporters have played in developing and implementing the standards, supporters’ reasons for mobilizing, and the counterarguments and strategies of recently emerging opposition groups.

Deliberation with a Purpose: Reconnecting Communities and Schools

This chapter examines a trio of deliberative experiments, alternative realizations of a general template that aspired, as its title proclaimed, to “Reconnect Communities and Schools” in South Carolina. Reconnecting sought not only to foster citizen deliberation but also to influence the decisions of school and community elites. In the end, Reconnecting succeeded in mobilizing parents of students along with community residents who had no direct connection to the schools, and in fostering a series of penetrating discussions whose civility and equality surprised seasoned local observers. These South Carolina forums take their place among the steadily cumulating body of cases showing the constructive potential of citizen deliberation over significant, contested public issues. But unlike other deliberative assemblies, the citizens who participated in Reconnecting were not content simply to discuss the current state of their public schools; their intention was to develop an action plan, and to see that their recommendations received a hearing and visibly moved school policy and community practice. Neither the rich theoretical literature nor empirical research on deliberative democracy yields much insight about the conditions under which a citizen deliberative forum can preserve its autonomy and yet influence policymaking in a political context typified by adversarial bargaining.