Rationalizing Schools: Patterns, Ironies, Contradictions

Across the 20th century and now a decade into the 21st, reformers have repeatedly seen the rationalization of schooling as the solution to the nation’s educational ills. Reformers have repeatedly claimed that by setting standards, using tests to measure progress towards those standards, and holding teachers accountable for progress, student achievement would improve and schools would better satisfy the goals of their external constituents. Conversely, educators have repeatedly countered that such a mechanistic model imposes a set of business values that should be foreign to schools; assigns responsibility to schools that belongs in part with families and neighborhoods; and in the name of science, squeezes out critical humanistic priorities of schooling. Round and round we go, with no end in sight. This chapter steps back from the details of such movements to look at the broader patterns, lessons, and implications of the repeated efforts to rationalize schools. One set of questions is about causes and patterns. Why, despite modest results, has so much energy been repeatedly expended in trying to rationalize schools? What patterns are common across time? Are the sources particular to education, or are there common causes that explain the rise of accountability movements in medicine, higher education, and other fields? And why have educators been comparatively less able to resist external accountability than practitioners in other fields? A second set of questions concerns the deeper assumptions embedded in efforts to rationalize schools. Choices we make about how to reform schools reflect a broader set of values about what we want for our students, how we regard our teachers, and what our vision of educational improvement is. More specifically, what are our assumptions about individual psychology, organizational sociology, and human nature? Why, at least in recent years, has the school reform movement combined such an optimistic, even utopian vision of what is possible for students with such a pessimistic, behaviorist view of how teachers need to be incentivized and motivated?

The Transformation of Federal Policy: Ideas and the Triumph of Accountability Politics

Even with the movement of the states toward standards-based reform, there was no reason to think a similar movement would, or even could, take place at the federal level. The defining characteristic of American education was its decentralization: the Republican Party habitually called for the elimination of the Department of Education, and the Democratic Party confined the federal role to providing aid to disadvantaged students. But over the course of fewer than 20 years, all of this was transformed, culminating in the most far-reaching federal education law in the nation’s history, passed under a Republican president no less. What explains this transformation? Three sets of changes need to be explained: how political actors were realigned, how policies were chosen, and how institutions changed. To begin with the political: How did the Republican Party, which had long been philosophically opposed to a federal role in education and had called for the abolition of the Department of Education as recently as 1996 come to support the biggest nationalization of education in the nation’s history? Why did Congressional Democrats, who in 1991 had strongly opposed a proposal by George H. W. Bush for national standards and testing as unfair to minority students, shift by 2001 to embrace a similar proposal offered by another Republican President, George W. Bush? In short, how did an overwhelming bipartisan political consensus form in favor of policies that had been opposed by large majorities in both parties only 10 years earlier? A second set of questions relates to policy choices. Of all the available policy tools, what explains the choice of standards-based reform as the primary federal response to this perceived crisis? The bipartisan embrace of tough accountability in No Child Left Behind seems particularly hard to account for by conventional interest group explanations, given that teachers unions are consistently rated the strongest players in educational politics and have historically been opposed to greater demands for school or teacher accountability. Why were standards and accountability the chosen policy vehicle, and why did they triumph over interest group opposition?

E Pluribus Unum: How Standards and Accountability Became King

In the years following A Nation at Risk, a storm of educational reform activities swept across the states, as governors and state legislatures tried everything they could think of to improve their schools. But beginning in the late 1980s and continuing through the 1990s, one idea became more popular than the rest. Standards-based reform—setting standards, creating assessments, and imposing accountability—became the most widely preferred school reform strategy; it was enacted in 42 states before federal legislation began to encourage it in 1994 and in 49 states before it became required under No Child Left Behind in 2001. Furthermore, since norms against federal involvement in education made it difficult for Congress to act in the absence of a state-level consensus, understanding how this consensus came to be formed is critical to understanding how standards-based reform became federal law as well. When a policy spreads across the majority of states in the absence of strong federal requirements, it is reasonable to hypothesize that diffusion processes are at work. Some states develop models, and their success begets adoption in other states. There is some evidence of such a process at work here, particularly in the case of later-adopting states copying some of the leaders. But the possibility of adopting a diffusing policy template still begs the question of state politics—why, exactly, did so many different states choose to put their eggs in the standards-based-reform basket? In this chapter I argue that the key to the widespread success of standards and accountability is the way that the policy crossed ideological divides. Democrats and Republicans, who had long been divided over issues such as vouchers and increased aid to schools, found themselves on the same side of the fence when it came to standards-based reform, if not always for the same reasons. The pages that follow trace the trajectory of three very different states in moving toward standards-based reform—blue Maryland, where a coalition of Democratic reformers championed standards as a way to gain leverage on failing schools in high-poverty districts; purple Michigan, where a mixed coalition of left and right came to support the same policy for different reasons; and red Utah, where an angry Republican legislature saw in standards-based reform a way to hold a recalcitrant educational establishment to account.

Beyond Rationalization: Inverting the Pyramid, Remaking the Educational Sector

Over and over again across the 20th century and a decade into the 21st, Americans have sought to rationalize their schools, with limited results. Is there a better way? In the pages that follow, I argue that there is. At base, you could say that the entire American educational sector was put together backwards. Beginning early in the 20th century, teaching became institutionalized as a highly feminized, low-status field; universities, unwilling to associate with training low-status teachers, trained instead a set of male administrators to control and direct those teachers; failures of schools prompted additional levels of control and regulation from afar, further diminishing autonomy and making the field less attractive to talented people. Successful systems from abroad essentially do the reverse. They choose their teachers from among their most talented students; they train them extensively; they provide opportunities for them to collaborate within and across schools to improve their practice, they provide the needed external supports for them to do this work well; and they support this educational work within stronger welfare states. This is true of East Asian countries like Korea and Japan, but it is also true of non-Confucian countries like Canada and Finland. While it is not yet clear how much of this success are due to which of these factors, it is clear that many of the world’s leading countries take a fundamentally different approach than the one favored in the United States. As a recent Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) volume sums up what it sees as the lessons from nations that lead the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) rankings: “The education development progression is characterized by a movement from relatively low teacher quality to relatively high teacher quality; from a focus on low-level basic skills to a focus on high-level skills and creativity; from Tayloristic forms of work organization to professional forms of work organization; from primary accountability to superiors to primary accountability to one’s professional colleagues, parents and the public; and from a belief that only some students can and need to achieve high learning standards to a conviction that all students need to meet such high standards.”

The Forgotten Standards Movement: The Coleman Report, the Defense Department, and a Nascent Push for Educational Accountability

The late 1960s and early 1970s are remembered for many things, but educational accountability is not foremost among them. A time when the nation was ripped asunder by fights over Vietnam, when women burned bras, and when African Americans took to the streets seemed hardly a propitious moment for an educational movement emphasizing technocratic rationality to come to the forefront. Yet although overshadowed in the educational arena by conflicts over desegregation, community control, free schools, and open classrooms, a relatively quiet movement led primarily by state bureaucrats did in fact initiate the beginnings of an educational accountability movement. Between 1963 and 1974, no fewer than 73 laws were passed seeking to create standards or utilize a variety of scientific management techniques to improve schooling. These efforts at rationalization in some ways followed the same trajectory as the efficiency reforms five decades earlier and the standards movement to follow two decades later. First came the invocation of a crisis, this time born of rising demands for greater equity and increasing dissatisfaction with the quality of the schools. Second, into this void stepped the new logic of rationalizing reform, this time drawn from a set of techniques pioneered by the Rand Corporation and popularized by the Department of Defense, which promised a new approach to defining objectives, measuring goals, and aligning available resources. And third, humanists and educators were once again the primary opponents of the reform, objecting to the quantification of schooling and the limited view of educational improvement that underlay the rationalizing reform. In all of these respects, the now almost forgotten accountability efforts of the 1960s and 1970s resembled the other two accountability movements of the 20th century. However, the other two movements mobilized a broad range of elites behind their reforms, whereas in this case real political support remained thin. The narrow base of support kept the programs from spreading or being implemented more widely; this effort never gained the kind of power or traction that the earlier and later ones did.

A “Semiprofession” in an Era of Accountability

While changes in the way that education was defined were key to subsequent policy debate, the movement toward educator accountability also drew its impetus from a broader movement toward the rationalization and lay control of professionals that has affected medicine, law, higher education, and many other fields. Viewing educational politics through this broader lens of the sociology of the professions explains why similar movements toward accountability arose simultaneously across fields, as well as why the teaching profession was particularly vulnerable to these external demands. Previous scholarship on the educational accountability movement has largely ignored the perspective offered by the sociology of the professions on the dynamics of reform. Political scientists who seek to explain the movement toward educational standards and accountability have focused on state and particularly federal legislative history, seeking to understand the key decisions that have propelled education reform. They have paid little attention to similar movements toward accountability in other fields or to how the “semi-professional” status of education may have affected the dynamics of reform. Sociologists who study schooling have noted what they perceive as a trend towards the deprofessionalization of teaching, but their interest is less in the causes of deprofessionalization and more in its consequences for teachers’ work. They also have shown little concern with the question of how professionalization affects the politics of reform or, more sociologically, of what explains the success or failure of teachers’ attempts to increase the professionalization of their practice. This chapter seeks to fill this void and address a series of questions about the movement toward educational accountability from the perspective of the sociology of the professions. This perspective brings several key questions to the fore: Why has there been an increasing demand for accountability across the professions? How does the low status of K–12 education in comparison with other professions affect the demands made by external reformers? How have teachers sought to increase their professional status and power in light of these external demands? And finally, how successful have teachers been in their efforts to professionalize their practice, and what explains their success or lack thereof?

Setting the Problem: The Deep Roots and Long Shadows of A Nation at Risk

Developments in the 1960s and 1970s brought schools under fire, but the modern American school reform movement began with the release of the famous A Nation at Risk report in 1983. Sponsored by the US Department of Education but largely written by a group of prominent academics, A Nation at Risk invoked crisis and framed a narrative so far reaching in its impact that it still governs the way we think about schooling 30 years later. Emphasizing the importance of education to economic competitiveness and the failings of American schooling in comparison with international competitors, A Nation at Risk presented a utilitarian and instrumental vision of education. It argued that schools, not society, should be held accountable for higher performance and that performance should be measured by external testing. As will be seen in the chapters to come, these assumptions underlay the state standards movement in the 1980s and 1990s and persist today in federal policy through No Child Left Behind. Much as the muckrakers shaped reform efforts in the Progressive Era and the Coleman Report did so to a lesser degree in the 1960s, A Nation at Risk powerfully framed the debate and set off a chain of events that resulted in the largest-ever eff ort to rationalize American schooling. A Nation at Risk has not been ignored in previous accounts of American educational history: it is often cited as a critical document in American school reform. I seek to build on this literature by examining, in more detail than previous work has, the creation, rhetoric, and reception of the report, as well as drawing on new state-level evidence to explore its impact. I also look deeper into the past, finding a more diverse set of antecedents than is usually identified, and further into the future, seeking to specify more precisely how A Nation at Risk affected subsequent reform efforts.

Taking Control from Above: The Rationalization of Schooling in the Progressive Era

The progressive era saw a massive rationalization of American schooling; its imprint stretches into the present day. Drawing on the ideas of (then) modern management techniques, a heterogeneous group of elites transformed a localized and highly varied system of schooling into what David Tyack famously called “the one best system.” This movement both created the form and structure of the school system that would profoundly shape later events and, as the benefit of hindsight makes evident, was driven by much the same underlying vision and set of forces that recurred in subsequent eff orts to rationalize schools. What motivated the Progressive Era transformation of schooling was the image of a rationally organized system of production. Whether in the public or private sector, the hallmarks of this approach are distinct organizational categories of work, clear delineation of roles and responsibilities, specialization of labor, and hierarchical control of workers by more powerful superiors. In the case of the school system, this meant a shift from one-room school-houses of age-mixed groups, with instruction and assessment largely decided by the teacher, to larger schools, with grades sorted by age, Carnegie units to measure student progress, and teachers’ work structured and assessed by their administrative superiors. In the larger context, one might say that this is just the story of the shift from preindustrial to industrial society, from small-scale institutions in which social connections and individual discretion were paramount to larger social organizations with systems, roles, and rules. But there are different versions of modernity, and the American school system was decisively shaped by a particularly rationalistic, scientific, and hierarchical approach to social organization. As we will see, the Progressive Era reformers were enthralled by the emerging power of scientific and business techniques that, they were convinced, would make schooling more efficient and effective. In particular, the brand of management techniques they embraced sought to shift power upwards from frontline workers (teachers) to administrative superiors, who would set goals, prescribe desired strategies, and use an early form of assessment to hold teachers accountable for their performance.

The Cultural Struggle for Control over Schooling: The Power of Ideas and the Weakness of the Educational Field

How can we best understand the repeated eff orts to rationalize schools across the 20th century? Traditional approaches to explaining political phenomena—interest groups, institutions, partisan theories, and rational choice—are limited in their ability to explain this recurring impulse. Instead, a complementary set of cultural lenses—ideas, professions, fields, logics, moral power, and institutional vantage points—can shed more light on these repeated movements. Together, these perspectives also offer a different way of thinking about the nature of social and political contestation, one that is deeply cultural in its ontology and that integrates ideas, interests, and institutions, links the social and the political, and explains both continuity and change. In one sense, movements to “rationalize” schools have cycled across the 20th century. As will be discussed in more detail in the chapters to come, at three different times reformers have embraced the rationalization of schools. In the Progressive Era, a group of reformers, comprising mostly businessmen, city elites, and university professors, sought to shift power from large, local ward boards, which they viewed as parochial and unprofessional, to smaller boards controlled by professional elites. They made the superintendent the equivalent of the CEO of the school system and directed him to use the latest in scientific methods and modern management techniques to measure outcomes and to ensure that resources were being used efficiently to produce the greatest possible bang for the buck. The newly emerging science of testing was widely employed to ensure that teachers and schools were meeting standards and to sort students into appropriate tracks, with the aim of “efficiently” matching students with the curriculum appropriate to their ability. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a second accountability movement sought to take hold of American schooling. Seeking to realize both a civil rights agenda of improving the quality of schooling and to satisfy more conservative concerns about the efficient spending of public dollars, state after state passed laws designed to inject greater accountability into the school system.

The Allure of Order: Rationalizing Schools from the Progressives to the Present

In late 2001, three months after the September 11 attacks, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) passed both House and Senate with strong bipartisan majorities and was signed by a Republican president. Promising to use the power of the state to ensure that all children were proficient in reading and math by 2014, proponents heralded the act as the greatest piece of federal education legislation since the creation of the original Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 1965. By requiring the states to set high standards, pairing them with assessments that measured whether students were achieving those standards, and holding schools accountable if students failed to do so, NCLB, in the eyes of its sponsors, would close achievement gaps and make America’s schools the envy of the world. A decade later, the bloom is off the rose. While almost everyone today continues to share the aim of leaving no child behind, the act itself has come in for criticism from many quarters, to the point that Bush’s former Education Secretary Margaret Spellings declared that NCLB is now a “toxic brand” in American politics. Careful studies of the implementation of NCLB have shown that it has done what less bullish observers might have predicted from the outset. It has increased the focus on the education of poor and minority students, but it has not provided schools with needed tools to create higher quality schooling for these students. There has been improvement in some national test scores (e.g., 4th and 8th grade math), while others have remained largely unchanged (e.g., 4th and 8th grade reading). Even accounting for the progress in math, there is no sign that the reforms have had a significant impact in closing achievement gaps or in improving America’s mediocre international educational standing. Particularly in the most troubled schools, there has been rampant teaching to the test and some outright cheating. In-depth studies have shown that some schools now devote a large part of their year to test prep; Atlanta and DC public schools have both contended with widespread cheating scandals.