ABSTRACT
"Policy activity", as a unit of analysis, is inordinately large and complex, from the passage of state laws and adoption of administrative regulations to the evolution of schools' social networks around perceived threats to educators' practical choices. In this chapter, the author focuses on policy instruments and activities that aim to impact teaching and learning more than, say, school leadership or financial operations. He also focuses on the academic domains of science, mathematics, and literacy because they have commanded the lion's share of policy efforts to affect curriculum, instruction, and assessment. Intersections of policy and practice represent decisional crossroads—places at which policy agents choose how to proceed, hopefully on the grounds of improving learning and teaching. Math education researcher Jeffrey Choppin used the term "by orthodoxy" to characterize the "political backlash" toward the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) standards, suggesting that actors' conceptions of education policies can be just as ideological as they are practical or empirical.
