This article examines the loosely coupled nature of the US educational system and explores recent systemic reform initiatives designed to improve education through more tightly coupled education policy and practice. The utility and limitations of loose coupling as an organizational construct are examined and critiqued. A number of significant forces are exerting ever‐greater pressure on policymakers to more tightly couple US education, including environmental pressures, the emergence of powerful new institutional actors, an emergent institutional capacity, and institutional isomorphism. After reviewing the effectiveness of systemic reform initiatives in several states, the article concludes that education in the USA is moving toward a system of fragmented centralization in which policymakers have greater opportunity to craft more coherent, systemic education policy amidst competing demands for limited resources.
With its overriding emphasis on accountability, testing, sanctions, rewards, and public school choice, the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) raises both the hopes and fears of educators concerned with the impact of the legislation on minority groups, on multicultural curricula, and on equity issues within public education. Drawing on evidence from state-level systemic-based accountability initiatives, coupled with a detailed analysis of the legislation itself, this article assesses the potential positive and negative effects of NCLB on diversity, multiculturalism, and equity issues in schooling. After examining the strengths and weaknesses of the legislation, this article concludes that the promise of NCLB to enhance equity and opportunity by reducing the achievement gap will likely remain unfulfilled due to insufficient funding and an overly simplistic definition of the achievement gap.
The purpose of this comparative case study was to explore the ways educators at the school level experience the Common Core Standards and examine the contextual factors that impacted the way it was initially implemented. Qualitative data were gathered through teacher surveys, faculty focus groups, and interviews with each school principal and the two district Race to the Top coordinators. Analysis of the collected data uncovered common themes, including interpreting and framing the change, professional collaboration, impact of the change on teachers’ professional and personal lives, and pacing, communication, and training.
In December 2015, President Obama signed the Every Student Succeeds Act, which was a long overdue reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. What is remarkable about this new federal legislation is that it explicitly reverses the decades-long federal effort to more tightly couple the U.S. educational system. While not removing testing requirements, the legislation dramatically reduces the federal role in shaping education policy, returning significant power to the states to design educational systems as they best see fit. The law places sharp limits on the use of federal executive power over education and has the potential to remove the federal government from oversight and accountability over schools, raising questions about the equity implications of this policy change. Research Method: Utilizing public documents, including legislation, speeches by federal officials, analyses by policy organizations, and news accounts, the authors trace the evolution of federal efforts from a more tightly coupled educational system to one with greater state and local flexibility in order to estimate the equity impact of efforts to decentralize governance. Findings: While certain provisions of the Every Student Succeeds Act may reduce inequity and improve educational outcomes for all
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