Sarah Diem

The intellectual landscape of critical policy analysis

What counts as critical policy analysis in education? Over the past 30 years, a tightening of national educational policies can be seen in the USA and across the globe. Over this same period of time, a growing number of educational policy scholars, dissatisfied with traditional frameworks, have used critical frameworks in their analyses. Their critical educational policy work has contributed to a unique intellectual landscape within education: critical policy analysis. This article presents a qualitative exploration of the critical policy analysis approach to educational policy studies. Participants included scholars known to utilize critical theoretical frameworks and methods in their research. Through a historical approach that makes use of oral history interviews with educational policy, we developed an understanding of the critical approach to policy studies, its appeal among critical education policy scholars, and the rationales driving its use.

Suburban School Districts and Demographic Change: The Technical, Normative, and Political Dimensions of Response.

Purpose: Suburban school districts have undergone significant demographic shifts over the past several decades. The research literature to date, however, has yet to explore how suburban district leaders are responding to such changes, or examine the factors that shape response. In this article, we apply a “zone of mediation” framework to examine how the leaders of one large and rapidly changing suburban school district in Texas responded to its changing student population. In our analysis, we consider the technical, normative, and political dimensions of this district’s response to demographic shifts. Research Methods/Approach: We conducted an in-depth qualitative case study of a large and rapidly changing district in the San Antonio Metropolitan area, which we named “Southern Independent School District.” Our data included interviews with 28 district-level and community actors and interviews with 26 educators across three “focus” schools that were undergoing particularly rapid demographic shifts. Findings and Implications: We found that Southern Independent School District’s response to demographic change focused intensely on technical changes in curriculum and instruction. Such technical changes we found were explicitly adopted to address the needs of the increasing proportion of low-income students and students of color within the district. At the same time, we illustrate how the district failed to address the more challenging normative and political dynamics within the district. This failure, we show, placed significant limits upon the technical reforms that were adopted.

Examining Race-Related Silences Interrogating the Education of Tomorrow’s Educational Leaders

The purpose of this exploratory study is to examine the inclusion of race-related conversations within educational leadership preparation programs. We consider how students and professors within one preparation program conceptualize the ways in which conversations pertaining to race are present and/or missing within their courses. Specifically, we assess how both entities contribute to the silences that often obstruct conversations pertaining to race. Our findings further support the works of researchers who believe the field of education leadership must revisit the conceptual understandings of conversations and the pedagogical tools used to address issues of race within the classroom.

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.

Color Conscious, Cultural Blindness Suburban School Districts and Demographic Change

Suburban school districts have undergone significant demographic shifts over the past several decades. However, limited research exists that explores how suburban district leaders are responding to such changes, and what factors may shape their responses. To better understand how districts within these communities are responding to suburban diversification, we conducted a qualitative case study of a large and rapidly changing suburban district. We interviewed top-level district administrators, principals, and teachers at three case study schools that were undergoing particularly rapid demographic shifts. We found that instead of directly addressing issues of race in the district, the district’s response was colorblind in design: It was racially conscious of changes in student demographics, but its practices to address these changes were race-neutral. Findings suggest that districts must assert a framework for responding to issues of race in the face of demographic change.

Putting critical theoretical perspectives to work in educational policy

The focus of this special issue is critical policy analysis (CPA). Although quantitative methods remain dominant in policy research and federal policy initiatives in the United States have privileged positivism, making experimental designs and randomized field trials the gold standard for policy evaluation research, there is increasing participation in the educational policy field by qualitative and critical scholars (Fischer, Miller, & Sidney, 2007; Lingard, 2009; Sadovnik, 2007). Since at least the early 1980s, a growing number of education policy researchers have interrogated the beliefs, practices, and policies associated with traditional research frameworks and used qualitative methods of inquiry paired with alternative, critical frameworks (see, for example, Aleman, 2007; Anderson, 1989; Ball, 1993, 1997; Brewer, 2014; Dumas & Anyon, 2006; Forester, 1993; Gale, 2001; Marshall, 1997; Maxwell, 2004; Scheurich, 1994; Taylor, 1997; Yanow, 2007; Young, 1999). The work in CPA owes a great deal to some of the early thinkers in this area including Michael Apple (1982), Stephen Ball (1991, 1993), Thomas Popkewitz (1984), and James Scheurich (1994), who problematized traditional approaches to thinking about and analyzing education policy. Following the lead of scholars like Apple, Ball, Popkewitz, and Scheurich, increasing numbers of educational policy scholars are engaged in critical analyses, employing an expanding range of theoretical and methodological approaches (see, e.g., Aleman, 2007; Anderson, 1989; Ball, 1993, 1997; Brewer, 2014; Forester, 1993; Gale, 2001; Hajer, 1995, 2005; Lipman, 2004; Marshall, 1997; Mosen-Lowe, Vidovich, & Chapman, 2009; Scheurich, 1994; Taylor, 1997; Winton, 2013; Young, 1999). In light of this growing level of activity, surprisingly little attention has been devoted to clearly articulating what counts as CPA, critical qualitative policy analysis, or how such analyses are conducted. In this special issue, we sketch out the conceptual terrain of CPA and share a collection of critical educational policy scholarship representing five different theoretical perspectives, including critical race theory (CRT), critical discourse analysis, postmodernism, feminist, and queer legal theory (QLT). In each article, the scholars unpack their definitions, approaches, and methods for conducting CPA as it pertains to their specific theoretical framework. They also provide recommendations for qualitative research and CPA scholars on how to move this work forward in educational research and policy-making. In addition to providing a collection of critical, qualitative policy analyses on educational problems, this special issue serves a second purpose. Specifically, the issue offers an in-depth look at the work of CPA, including how theory shapes research questions, methods, data collection, and analysis. However, this collection is neither an exhaustive set of critical, qualitative approaches to educational policy analysis, nor is it an attempt to engage in an esoteric debate about how best to

The Politics of Maintaining Diversity Policies in Demographically Changing Urban-Suburban School Districts.

This study focuses on how the demographic change occurring within two county-wide school districts and communities in the South, including the creation of suburban enclaves alongside central cities overwhelmingly made up of low-income students of color, influences community support for diversity policies within two school districts with a history of voluntary integration efforts: Jefferson County Public Schools (Louisville, KY) and the Wake County Public School System (Raleigh, NC). By focusing on two urban-suburban school districts, our research extends prior work examining the politics of diversity in urban school districts to county-wide school districts experiencing rapid suburbanization and stratification.

The influence of values and policy vocabularies on understandings of leadership effectiveness

During the past two decades, shifting discourses have significantly altered professional expectations for educational leaders. Driven by a globalized reconfiguration of the values defining educational purpose, definitions of effective leadership, processes for evaluating them, and the very boundaries of educational policy have narrowed and distilled. Specifically, policy vocabularies focused around marketization and choice, management and surveillance, and performativity and accountability have permeated federal and state educational policies in the USA. This article considers the inscription of these policy vocabularies within the Obama/Duncan Administration’s Blueprint for Reform: The Reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (Blueprint) and Race to the Top (R2T), paying specific attention to the evaluation of public school leaders and determinations of their effectiveness. Utilizing critical discourse analysis, we examined federal and state education policy and highlight how dominant policy discourses have created new parameters for educational leadership along with narrowed conceptualizations of the evaluation of public school principals at state and local levels. Based on our findings, we argue that today, more than ever before, scholars must draw attention to the ways in which the values that traditionally shaped education policy are being displaced by globalized neoliberal discourses.

Considering critical turns in research on educational leadership and policy

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the use of critical policy analysis (CPA) in the fields of educational leadership and policy. In addition to exploring how CPA compares to traditional research approaches in educational leadership and policy, the authors consider the influence of long-established ways of knowing, why scholars choose to engage in CPA and how and why scholars who utilize this approach decide on specific methods. Design/methodology/approach – The exploration draws primarily on the use of CPA in the USA, though the authors also examine how scholars working within the UK utilize CPA. Findings – In the review of critical policy literature, the authors identified a number of assumptions common to traditional and critical policy research theories and approaches. For example, systems theory and analysis, structural analysis, cost-benefit analysis, technicist models, and political models were commonly used within traditional literature. In comparison, critical policy researchers rel...

Regional Educational Policy Analysis: Rochester, Omaha, and Minneapolis' Inter- District Arrangements

Although regional equity scholars have demonstrated how cross-jurisdictional collaboration on transportation, housing, and employment can promote opportunity for low-income families, few have paid serious attention to the potential of regional educational policy to improve opportunity for children. This study seeks to address this gap by examining inter-district “collaboratives” or cooperative agreements between school districts within a metropolitan area. These collaborative arrangements address two inter-related demographic shifts: the rising level of segregation in public schools and the shift from within district segregation to between-district segregation. This article examines three regional collaboratives (Rochester, NY, Omaha, NE, and Minneapolis, MN) that involve varying degrees of cooperation, funding, and legal force. Drawing on 60 in-depth interviews across the three sites, this analysis considers how each program’s design features interact with local political dynamics to shape the degree to which these collaboratives are able to achieve policy goals.