Paul Manna

Congressional Campaign Spending and the Quality of Democracy

Nearly all research on campaign finance overlooks important intermediaries between candidate spending and electoral outcomes. We consider the effects of campaign spending on a variety of factors important to the health of any democracy and political community: trust, efficacy, involvement, attention, knowledge, and affect. Our analysis of the 1994 and 1996 U.S. House elections shows that the effects of campaign spending lie more on the side of democratic boon than democratic bane. Campaign spending increases knowledge of and affect toward the candidates, improves the publics ability to place candidates on ideology and issue scales, and encourages certainty about those placements. Rather than permit House members to mask their voting records, incumbent spending helps improve the accuracy of citizen perceptions of the incumbents ideology. Spending neither enhances nor erodes trust and efficacy in politics or attention and interest in campaigns. We conclude that campaign spending contributes to key aspects of democracy such as knowledge and affect, while not damaging public trust or involvement.

Control, Persuasion, and Educational Accountability: Implementing the No Child Left Behind Act.

This article examines early implementation of the No Child Left Behind Acts (NCLB) accountability provisions. Theoretically, the author explains how executing education policy in the United States requires federal officials to employ tactics designed to assert control over state implementers while persuading them to adopt federal priorities as their own. Empirically, the main objective is to reveal how control and persuasion have been integral to early federal efforts to keep NCLB on track. The data come from several sources describing state implementation of NCLB and federal efforts to influence state actions during 2002 to 2004. Overall, the author argues that understanding NCLB implementation as a series of control and persuasion challenges confronting federal officials will enable observers to better assess the laws performance.

The Signals Parents Send When They Choose Their Children’s Schools

How clear are the signals that parents send when they choose to leave a public school to take advantage of a voucher program? This study explores this question in the context of Milwaukee’s Parental Choice Program from 1990 to 1995. Two broad findings are discussed. First, parents do not always send clear signals about their levels of satisfaction when they express an interest in removing their children from public schools. Second, these signals have important implications for the design of voucher programs or other quasi-markets for education, for inferences school officials might draw from parents’decisions, and for the way scholars study choice programs.

State Education Governance and Policy: Dynamic Challenges, Diverse Approaches, and New Frontiers

State governments are crucial actors in the nations system of education governance. This issue of the Peabody Journal of Education underscores the wide-ranging roles that state governments play in the oversight, development, and implementation of elementary and secondary education policy in the United States. In this article, I consider these individual analyses by reflecting on the broader themes and patterns that they suggest. I argue that at the dawn of the 21st century, the 50 U.S. states face dynamic challenges that are testing their institutions of governance. States are also simultaneously crossing new frontiers that will influence future policy and opportunities for the nations students.

Could You Explain My Grade?” The Pedagogical and Administrative Virtues of Grading Sheets

The scenario is as unpleasant for the teacher as it is for the student. After spending countless hours trudging through a stack of mind-numbingly repetitive bluebooks, the teacher has finally returned graded midterm exams to her class. With grading safely in the past, she gleefully returns to other teaching, publishing, and personal responsibilities. At least she tries to—until a concerned student appears at the office door asking her to explain the points she assigned to a given answer. She flips to the relevant page of the bluebook and discovers no comments in the margin. The teacher is now on the spot to rack her brain for the reasoning that justified the score she assigned several days or even weeks before and explain to the student clearly and accurately why he did not receive full credit. The student is in a likewise awkward position, wondering how much thought went into the grade the first time around.

Governance and Educational Expectations in the U.S. States

This article analyzes the relationship between U.S. state governance and policies designed to enhance educational expectations. It examines three policy areas: state participation in voluntary National Assessment of Educational Progress testing, state testing requirements for new teachers, and state high school graduation requirements in math and science. In general, it identifies associations between state institutional and political characteristics and the state policies under study. In particular, state policies that impose higher demands on local school districts are more likely to be present in states with more centralized control of their K–12 systems. Furthermore, state partisanship appears to suggest that Republicans favor policies that push power to lower levels of the U.S. intergovernmental system.

Learning in Harm’s Way: Neighborhood Violence, Inequality, and American Schools

Is a school’s geographic proximity to violent crime related to characteristics of its student body and to students’ academic performance? Our understanding of the educational impacts of students’ exposure to violence has been constrained because of various technical and financial limitations that have made research in this area problematic. The work presented here leverages advances in the availability of geo-coded data on incidents of crime to overcome the limitations of prior research in this area, showing that a school’s proximity to violent crime is associated with common measures of educational inequality and also with school performance. We discuss the implications of our findings for future research and public policy.

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

The Great Society in Education: A Persistent National Consensus?

This article reviews Gareth Davies, See Government Grow: Education Politics from Johnson to Reagan (Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Press, 2007). The commentary focuses on the authors discussion of federalism and ideological change in the nations education politics.