Patrick McGuinn

Stimulating Reform: Race to the Top, Competitive Grants and the Obama Education Agenda.

This article offers an analysis of the origins, evolution, and impact of the Obama administration’s Race to the Top (RTTT) competitive grant program and places it in the broader context of the debate over the No Child Left Behind Act and the shifting intergovernmental relations around education. RTTT is fundamentally about two things: creating political cover for state education reformers to innovate and helping states construct the administrative capacity to implement these innovations effectively. The program has had a significant impact on the national political discourse around education and pushed many states to propose or enact important policy changes, particularly around charter schools and teacher-evaluation processes. However, we should remain realistic in our expectations about what RTTT can accomplish; although the program’s approach may be different from that of earlier federal education programs, many of the political and institutional obstacles to sustaining meaningful reform at the federal and state levels remain largely the same. RTTT will struggle to surmount these obstacles in the short term, even as it hopes to transform them over the longer term.

The New Politics of Education Analyzing the Federal Education Policy Landscape in the Post-NCLB Era

This article develops a framework, drawn from earlier work by education scholars, as well as broader theoretical insights on advocacy and policymaking developed by political scientists, for thinking about education politics in the post-No Child Left Behind era. The authors use this framework to examine the evolution of the national education policy arena over the past ten years. The authors describe the key political dynamics and actors which drove education policymaking at the national level for forty years after the passage of ESEA in 1965; and then explain the forces which transformed this educational status quo in the 1990s and led to the passage of NCLB in 2001. Finally, the article analyzes how the law itself has altered the national politics of education, including the growth and diversification of the think tank sector in the inter-reauthorization period. Implications for the future of federal education policy and politics are considered.

States as change agents under ESSA

Under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), federal education mandates will be decreasing, which means states will have more flexibility and authority than they’ve had in decades. State education agency (SEA) leaders are confronting great change and great opportunity as many agencies move away from a focus on compliance with federal regulations, state statutes, and programmatically dictated uses of funds and toward a broader focus on supporting districts and schools in improving outcomes for all students. As the definition of – and responsibility for – success changes in this new environment, the roles of state agencies deserve reconsideration. The authors explore which roles are essential for SEAs to lead, which roles SEAs might possibly take on, and which roles are unsuitable.

Complicated politics to the Core

People dislike the Common Core for several different reasons, and so it is important to disaggregate the sources of opposition and to assess and then to dispel some of the myths that have built up around it. It also is important to understand the unusual political alliances that have emerged in opposition to Common Core implementation and how they may play out over the longer term. Further, social media has had an unanticipated role in the fray that has made it less likely for adversaries to actually talk to one another and resolve their differences over the Core.

Interest Group Activity in the Context of Common Core Implementation

This article analyzes the messages and strategies of a sample of education interest groups, and assesses their interpretations of the political context to understand how the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) lost both political and public support during the crucial period of 2013-2014. Based on interviews with representatives of 19 interest groups who were actively involved in communicating about the standards, it focuses on the arguments, communication strategies, and targeted audiences of professional advocacy groups, policy membership organizations, and testing organizations. Our findings identify six themes that contributed to the climate of increased partisanship and politicization, and helped shape perceptions about the Common Core, both within the education sector and among the broader public. We argue that these policy factors, strategic factors, and contextual factors played an important role in shaping the environment within which the CCSS were being understood and implemented.

The Tall Task of Education Governance Reform

We welcome the opportunity to summarize the main findings from our recent volume, Education Governance for the Twenty-First Century (Brookings, 2013) and to respond to the two thoughtful reviews in this journal by John Merrifield (2013) and Michael Ford (this issue). Education governance in the United States is fundamentally broken. On that point the contributors to our volume—along with many others across the ideological spectrum, including scholars, policymakers, education leaders, school officials, teachers, and parents—readily agree. Several decades of intense school reform efforts in the United States have produced at best marginal gains in student achievement, and there is a mounting sense that the nation’s unique and fragmented system of education governance may well pose a major barrier to greater improvement. Our volume makes three fundamental arguments. First, existing education governance arrangements have impeded the quest for school reform and improvement. Second, these arrangements have received inadequate attention from scholars and policymakers. Third, a variety of potentially promising governance reforms have emerged here and abroad that offer viable alternatives to the status quo. Reforming education governance will not solve all the problems that plague education. However, there is deep and varied dysfunction in how the United States allocates decision-making authority for elementary and secondary schools. So while improving governance of K– 12 education may not be sufficient on its own to improve the management and performance of America’s schools, it is a necessary precondition for the kind of transformative change and improvement that has to date proved so elusive. Taken together, the book offers three broad conclusions. The first emphasizes that governance by multiple masters has created incoherence in the nation’s elementary and secondary school system. Separation of powers and federalism has combined with an attachment to local control to produce a cacophony of actors and institutions with some power over American schools. As a result, no single leader (or even a small number of easily identifiable leaders) has the ability to lead effectively or is held accountable for results. No one can reasonably claim that “the buck stops here,” for in reality