A Permanent Crisis

This chapter traces the rocky implementation of Gideon v. Wainwright between 1963 and 1973, continuing the Massachusetts case study begun in chapter 2 and also addressing developments in Philadelphia and other localities. Although states could technically comply with Gideon in a variety of ways (e.g. appointing private counsel case-by-case),many lawyers and reform organizations interpreted Gideon as a broader mandate to establish and expand institutionalized public defender offices. The Ford Foundation and the National Legal Aid and Defender Association (NLADA) embarked upon the National Defender Project, an ambitious nationwide effort. As a result of such efforts, the 1960s witnessed change and growth in public defender offices around the country. In Massachusetts, for example, the organization initially founded as a voluntary defender was converted from a private charity into a statewide public defender agency, hired dozens of new lawyers, and was soon handling tens of thousands of cases each year. Yet, criticisms quickly emerged that public defenders had overwhelming caseloads and resorted too often to plea bargaining, rather than trial advocacy. Reformers diagnosed a new problem, the “indigent defense crisis” that persists today.

The Failed Campaign Against Prostitution

Protestants criticized prostitution because it threatened the family and ultimately civil society, and the Watch and Ward Society devised a campaign to shut down Boston’s red-light districts. These Protestant elites espoused traditional gender roles and Victorian sexual mores and endorsed the “cult of domesticity.” In the late nineteenth century, a number of reform organizations turned their attention to the “social evil,” as it was popularly called. The Watch and Ward Society’s quest to reduce prostitution placed it squarely within the larger international anti-prostitution movement. Moral reformers resisted all forms of policy that officially sanctioned or tacitly tolerated prostitution, instead arguing for its abolition. Their attempt to suppress commercialized sex eventually collapsed because of the lack of public support.

The Trafficking Panic in Late Imperial Austria

This chapter explores a variety of issues central to the turn-of-the-century Austrian panic over trafficking. They include anti-Semitism, Jews as protagonists and victims, and mass migration in an urbanizing world, as well as why particular Austrian cities were associated with the trade in women. The chapter analyzes the government’s domestic and international efforts to combat trafficking, as well as the role bourgeois reform organizations played. It explores the relationship between the trafficker and the trafficked, arguing that these women and girls were not simply victims, but sometimes willing participants, or something in between, in order to sketch a more nuanced picture of turn-of-the-century “white slaving.” The term “trafficker” is employed to reflect the way sources (the state, journalists, reform groups) viewed the issue, not because it can be proved that the problem was as widespread as they claimed.

“The Feeble Strength of One”

The period after the 1995 strike was one during which management regrouped and the Boeing workforce settled in after their victory. To some extent, managerial and official union intimidation, along with the ongoing pressure on workers in the plants, can explain the difficulty that activists had in sustaining their reform organizations. This chapter describes how the activists themselves were caught up in the dilemmas of representation. Their commitment to democracy informed their critique from below of the discourse and practices of union leadership. Yet their taking on the tasks of leading a rank-and-file movement put them in a position to replicate, in form if not in goal, some of the habits they decried. In particular, focusing on getting elected to powerful union posts, making decisions on behalf of members of rank-and-file organizations, using top-down and double-edged legal tools to reform the official union, and decrying the passivity of the membership all contributed to the burnout and eventual retreat from dissident activity of many of the activists whose voices are chronicled here.

Reforming for “all” or for “some”: Misalignment in the discourses of education reformers and implementers

The ways in which the language of reformers intersects with and informs reform implementation is important to our understanding of how education policy impacts practice. To explore this issue, we employed critical discourse analysis (CDA) to analyze the language used by a 21st century skills-focused reform organization to promote its program alongside the language that local actors used to explain its implementation. We examined source materials, field notes, interview data, and publicly available organizational data collected over a five-year period to critically examine how discourse 1) illustrated alignment between the stated and implicit audience for the school reform program and 2) shaped subsequent implementation. Analyses suggest the reform organization promoted itself through a discourse that all students in all reform schools were being prepared for college, career, and civic life. There was a significant misalignment, however, in the discourses regarding the appropriate student audience for the reform. Local actors questioned whether the reform program 1) was suitable for all students and 2) provided necessary supports for all students in all schools. This misalignment led to uneven implementation and resulted in some educators dismissing the goals of the program as unrealistic. Given that educational agencies have considerable freedom to choose among diverse reform programs, our analysis suggests it is important to understand the discourses through which reform organizations advertise models, implementers justify adoption, and educators respond.

Seeing through transparency in education reform: Illuminating the “local”

Utilizing “assemblage,” a notion associated with Actor-Network Theory (ANT), we explore what discourses of transparency can, and cannot, accomplish in a network of education reform that includes schools, government agencies, and community organizations. Drawing on data collected between July 2011 and March 2013 in an ethnographically-informed case study, we interrogate the ways in which notions of transparency illuminate, and also conceal, information, as well as reveal how they reorder power dynamics and relationships, impacting what it legitimized as reform in a city in Western New York. We problematize the linkages between the political conditions in which mandatory transparency and accountability in schooling become connected to voluntary transparency in local education reform, and we examine the investment made by schools and reform organizations in using transparency as a proxy for meeting accountability demands and establishing education expertise. The findings show that discourses and enactments of transparency can be effective in drawing targeted and repeated attention to select things, such as funding inequities. However, such discourses can also be utilized to obscure other issues, such as persistent disparities in academic achievement by race. When used synonymously with accountability, transparency can, and is, incorrectly positioned as an education solution.

The environment of safe care: considering building design as one facet of safety

Patient safety is often considered in a behavioral context – what can someone do differently to improve outcomes? However, as a complex system of interactions, patient safety is better advanced through a systems thinking lens of human factors and ergonomics (HFE). While HFE is sometimes considered in three domains: physical, cognitive, and organizational, research in the area of the design of the physical environment is often limited to products, equipment and furnishings to accommodate a diverse population of users. With an increased focus on reimbursement related to patient safety as part of healthcare reform, organizations are becoming more aware of their own shortcomings and grappling with solutions to improve performance – typically people and processes. Yet the influence of the built environment, the space in which people work and are cared for, can act as a barrier or enhancement to achieving the desired results – physically, cognitively, and organizationally. Latent conditions of the built environment can contribute to hazards and risk within the system and using Reason’s Swiss Cheese Model can also become an additional layer of defense. A consensus-based safety risk assessment (SRA) design decision tool is being developed to address these built environment latent conditions funded through a three-year grant from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ).