Since 1997, revisions to the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) have shown promise for addressing special education equity concerns: For example, states have the option to use response to intervention (RTI) for determining and thus reducing inappropriate disability determination, and states and districts are required to assess and address disproportionality in special education eligibility and placement. Yet, despite policy revisions, equity concerns endure. Apparent policy inadequacies necessitate that special education research explores policy as a process whereby it is appropriated by local actors. Accordingly, we draw from critical policy scholarship to propose a framework for study of special education policy appropriation. The approach centers equity and attention to actors' agency and structural forces. We discuss relevance of this framework and its theoretical tools for special education research concerned with how local actors enact federal special education policy. Finally, we provide suggestions for RTI policy research as a case-in-point.
This article reports on the challenges facing public school leadership in southern Thailand, a region destabilized by renewal of a longstanding insurgency. Seeking to implement national educational reforms on shifting social, political and cultural terrain, educators in this region face extraordinary challenges as they reconsider and renegotiate an institutional position once perceived as secure. Focusing on two schools in one province, this article offers an account of the variety of challenges reported by principals working in this difficult environment. We find the principals employing number of bridging and buffering strategies as improvisational efforts to re-organize, re-establish and re-position the schools in their respective communities. In the concluding discussion, we surface concerns regarding the nature and naturalness, reason and reasonableness of these strategies within local administrative hegemony premised on market and colonial ideologies that may obscure impending legitimation issues.
This qualitative case study focuses on factors mediating an urban school's enactment of Response to Intervention (RTI). Over one school year, we (a) observed weekly RTI meetings, (b) debriefed observations weekly, (c) interviewed RTI team members, and (d) examined procedural documents. Analyses included post-observation debriefing and coding fieldnotes and interview transcripts; categorical meaning and themes were coded recursively. Informed by critical policy studies research and theory, findings indicated limited supports and minimal technical understandings of RTI. Educators appeared to replicate pre-RTI special education eligibility determination processes, manifested in scripts about student diagnoses based on minimal "interventions" and deficit-laden representations of students/families. Findings highlight challenges with urban schools' RTI enactment and justify future critical qualitative research regarding learning in schools shifting practice under policy directives. Although the study focuses on RTI as a case-in-point, findings have implications for future research that utilizes critical practice approaches to analyze ways local contexts mediate policy enactment.
The authors place the evolution of politics in education and the politics of education field in historical context and introduce a framework for understanding how three theoretical streams-micropolitics, political culture, and neoinstitutionalism-emerged as the behavioralist movement receded. They argue that although there may appear to be a messy center lacking a single disciplinary paradigm, the field has been advancing by means of integrative and aggregative drives that are, indeed, complementary as well as competitive and result in a healthy and productive state of the field.
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