Richard F. Elmore

Managing the Politics of Decline: School Closures in Seattle.

On February 11, 1981, the Seattle School Board voted to close 18 of the districts 112 schools, 14 of them by June 1981. Since 1962, Seattle schools had lost more than half their children. This action by the board culminated years of debate over how the district should respond to declining enrollments, rising costs, and growing constraints on its financial base. The debate was carried on in the midst of tensions created by unmet public expectations for the schools, significant changes in student population, continuing uncertainty about school funding, and the divisive effects of a massive desegregation program. Seattle is not alone in struggling with retrenchment. Although the problem is national in scope, there are few guides documenting the experience of districts facing the practical problems involved in managing a declining public system. Closing schools is one response to cut back, but few decisions stir so much adverse public reaction. In making closure decisions, school districts must consider impacts on various city government activities, housing and desegregation patterns, and the vitality of local school neighborhoods. The process of decisionmaking is complex when, as is the case in most localities, city and school district are separate jurisdictions. Intergovernmental relations can become strained and destructive when the decisions of one jurisdiction affect the actions of another. The management issues involved in school

Differential treatment of states in federal education policy

The differential treatment problem is usually framed in the following way: Some states are competent implementors of federal policy objectives, others are not. Uniform federal standards are typically framed to assure minimum performance by the least competent. Their effect, the argument goes, is to penalize competent states by subjecting them to requirements that bear no relationship to what they are actually capable of doing. A more flexible and effective strategy would be to grant competent performers more discretion, while subjecting less competent performers to greater scrutiny or finding some way to by-pass them altogether. But this strategy raises problems of political and administrative feasibility. By what objective measures will competence be assessed? How would such measures be translated into administrative practice? Who, at the federal level, would be willing or able, if objective measures existed, to bear the political heat of categorizing some states as competent and others as incompetent? Questions like these have led prudent analysts back to the conclusion that uniform standards, uniformly applied are, on balance, the most practical strategy for the Federal Government (Murphy, 1974). And there the argument seems to rest. Differential treatment appears to be another appealing theory that is infeasible in practice. Yet there is something troubling about the apparent simplicity of this argument. Why, when there is so much variability among states and localities, does differential treatment seem impossible? Simply stated, my argument is that the Federal Government has no choice but to engage in differential treatment on many levels of policymaking and implementation. It may do so more or less skillfully,

Implementation of federal education programs: Implications for future federal policy

The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965 was built mainly on aspirations. Experience with intergovernmental politics and management in education was not abundant before the mid-1960s, and, even if it had been, there is reason to doubt that it would have affected the aspirations of reformers. Now, with more than 15 years of experience in these matters, it is possible for federal action to reflect thoughtful assessment, since the federal role has been subject to close scrutiny for virtually the whole period. The purpose of this paper is to supply some of the analysis that might have occurred when Congress passed the Educational Consolidation and Improvement Act (ECIA) of 1981. We draw upon the major findings of research on the implementation of federal education policy to suggest some principles that might apply in the development of policy in future years. Before considering the conclusions of implementation studies, it is important to make explicit some relatively stable parameters of the federal role in education. First, the Federal Government has, and will continue to have, policy objectives different from those pursued by many states and localities. To assume otherwise is to misunderstand both the nature of the federal system and the differences in political incentives that operate at the national, state, and local levels. The Federal Government tends to pursue equity-producing policies more than states and localities, not because national politicians and bureaucrats are inherently more

Implementation of chapter 2 in Washington State

Abstract This paper reviews the first two years of implementation of Chapter 2 in Washington State. It examines political and economic background factors, state responses to block grant authority and local implementation. It concludes that the state has adapted well and quickly to the shift in federal policy.