ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Kevin W. Meuwissen's response to Paul Fitchett's commentary. It is hard to determine—though we must try—what goods education policy serves, for whom, and to what ends in the midst of enactment, given its evolution through a perpetual churn of contextualized negotiations among stakeholders. Fitchett's commentaries on mathematics reforms in California and Michigan demonstrate the agreement about this; and his "balanced literacy" discussion led the author to consider what lessons social studies education might draw from that phenomenon, comparatively. Synthesizing scholarship in these two domains, the chapter suggests that collectively knowing good education policy, despite persistent flux, involves maintaining inextricable relationships among all elements of the model, through persistent funding and interaction. Without any one of the elements, the process of learning from policy—and thus, of imagining and enacting better policies in the future—faces considerable obstacles.
