DISSERTATION:
Making the Educational State: The Transformation of Educational Governance in the United States from a Nation at Risk to No Child Left Behind
Committee: Sidney M. Milkis (Chair), Eric Patashnik, Paul Freedman, Brian Balogh, Cathie Jo Martin (Miller Center Mentor)
Why has the education agenda come to be dominated by the demands for high standards and accountability for results?
Why has the federal government come to play such a central role in establishing educational standards, monitoring students’ performance, and holding individuals and institutions accountable for their performance?
In my dissertation, I show how both the new educational agenda and the centralization of educational governance sprang from the interaction between elite agenda-setting and state-level policy feedback. A coalition of elites, pursuing their economic and political interests in a context of social crisis and uncertainty, drew on their extensive rhetorical and organizational resources to set the education reform agenda in the late 1970s and early 1980s. While this agenda was originally focused at the state-level, feedback from state-level implementation, especially in the form of uneven inter-state diffusion and ad hoc policy adoption within states, prompted the reformulation of the reform agenda to emphasize a coherent system of educational standards and accountability for results, as well as the refocusing of reformers’ energies on the national government as a primary agent of reform.
In explaining the sustained shift in both the focus of education policymaking and the locus of educational authority, my account provides a view of the ascendance - and transformation - of American conservatism. While conservative ideas of high educational standards and accountability for results have become much more prominent in American educational discourse, they have been linked, at least rhetorically, to the objective of raising the achievement of the disadvantaged (ensuring that "no child is left behind."). Moreover, this rhetorical development has been accompanied by the most significant expansion of federal authority in education in American history.
