Making policy in the classroom

The concept of street-level bureaucracy (Lipsky, 1980, 2010) examines the form and extent discretion takes in teachers’ and other public policy enactors’ work and how they negotiate their way through sometimes contradictory policy imperatives. It provides a framework for straddling top-down and bottom-up perspectives on policy making. In this article, I argue that comparative education research should take advantage of the analytical framework this perspective offers. It requires, first, mapping out policies resulting in the characteristics of teachers’ discretion in a particular national or local context and, second, to observe how teachers make use of this discretionary space in their daily work. Lipsky has shown strategies employed by street-level bureaucrats to alleviate workload pressures and how they make policy in this way. Applying street-level bureaucracy in comparative education research illuminates why straightforward policy transfer is problematic and how it can be employed to explore practices around inclusion and exclusion.