State government possesses the resources and authority to directly shape urban education policy but regime theorists understate the roles governors, state legislatures, and other state actors play as members of urban education regimes. This article examines the state takeover of schools in Newark, New Jersey to demonstrate why and how a state government leads an urban education regime. The Newark case illustrates how politics and structural conditions motivated state government to change the nature of the education regime and directly shape education policy at the local level. It highlights the role state government played in reshaping an educator-centered coalition that operated a poorly performing school district. Despite the existence of a new regime, Newark students' achievement scores have not significantly improved, and in some instances they have declined under the state-led regime. This article encourages scholars of city politics to continue to investigate state government's role in urban governing coalitions because state political players maintain the capacity and motivation to join urban regimes.Most regime theorists focus upon how local actors affect changes to education policy when they examine urban education reform. By concentrating primarily upon the effect of local interests on urban education, many regime theorists understate state government's direct influence on education reform. Regime theory does not specifically include governors, state legislatures, state departments of education, and other state-level actors as education regime members, and this oversight represents a gap in our understanding of urban governance and education reform in cities. In this article, I use an examination of New Jersey's takeover of the Newark school system to demonstrate why and how a state government can join an urban education regime. The Newark case illustrates how politics and structural conditions encouraged New Jersey's state government to change the nature of the education regime and shape education policy at the local level. It highlights the role state government played in reshaping an educator-centered coalition that operated a poorly performing school district. This work also adds to the state takeover literature, which emphasizes the importance of the structural factors but overlooks the role politics plays in state interventions.
International evidence shows that research is increasingly being carried out in organisational forms built around cross‐sectoral (government, academic and business) and transdisciplinary teams with well‐defined national social, economic or environmental objectives in view. As a result, new and unfamiliar forms of organisational arrangements for research are emerging within universities and elsewhere. These collaborative research centres have been variously termed ‘hybrid’ or ‘parasitic’. This paper draws upon around 30 in‐depth interviews with participants from selected Australian Cooperative Research Centres (CRC). It examines how researchers reconcile the many demands of their dual role, first, as a government researcher or academic, and second as a committed participant in an industry‐collaborative research centre. These collaborations go beyond ‘applied research’ to span fundamental research and immediately useful knowledge. But reward systems and performance measures for academic researchers are still founded largely on ‘discovery’, while those for government researchers are based upon ‘application’. The risk is that researchers will be deflected by the collaboration in ways that conflict with their institutional responsibilities. The paper reports work analysing the management strategies used by the CRCs and their public sector partners to ensure that their common goals are achieved while preserving their institutional interests and the expectations of their research staff. The aim is to identify effective ways of managing the various ‘risks’ of cross‐sector collaborative research and development (R&D) in Australia and more widely.
Regime theorists have not included state government as a member of urban governing coalitions even though governors and state legislatures have the constitutional authority and fiscal resources that can facilitate local governance. In this research, I analyze economic development and education policies in Hartford, Connecticut to illustrate that the governor is a leader of Hartford's regime. Like other regime actors, the governor provides selective inducements to other coalition members to gain support for his policies. The Hartford regime came to include the governor because the city lost much of its business and political leadership, and management and accountability problems crippled public policy. Because governors have the capacity to act as a powerful regime partner, it is important to study the effect they have on urban governance. "Has anyone done more for [this city] than I have?"
State takeovers of local school districts represent one of the most recent kinds of education reform. Americans favor both local control over education and state takeovers of failing schools. African American leaders tend to oppose takeovers, but survey data suggest that African American citizens support greater state influence over local education. To explain these paradoxes, this study examines conditions under which jurisdictions support state intervention. It concludes that opposition to this reform emanates from jurisdictions where large percentages of African American voters turn out at high rates. The percentage of a jurisdiction’s schools eligible for takeover because of academic deficiencies exerts a statistically insignificant effect on aggregate-level votes for intervention.
Regime theory argues that local actors shape city politics even though state government sets the rules under which urban players act. Regime theorists typically do not focus on conditions under which governors assume important roles in local regimes. The authors examine major economic development projects in New Orleans to highlight conditions under which extralocal actors, namely, governors, become involved in local regimes. A scarcity of both resources and business leaders in New Orleans, competition with other states, and political considerations motivated Louisiana governors to increase their participation in New Orleans’s urban development regime. Governors constituted part of the mobilization effort to move the city from a caretaker regime to a progrowth regime. They used their authority, fiscal resources, and leadership skills to assume this greater role. Gubernatorial participation in the regime benefited governors, New Orleans mayors, and major businesses at the expense of tourists, working-class and poor residents, the state legislature, and the state’s business reputation.
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