ABSTRACT
Waves of reform have altered the politics of education over the past three decades, substituting one stratifi ed governance system for another. New actors now dominate educational policy arenas. Parents, locally elected school boards, and community groups are less vital policy actors than they were in the decades before 1980. They have been replaced by coalitions of policy elites-notably political executives, corporate leaders, think tank advocates, and foundation offi cials-who are accustomed to wielding infl uence in state capitals and Washington D.C. Simultaneously, much educational decision making has been relocated from local districts to higher levels of government. Local authority to make policy has been reduced while state and federal government authority is enhanced and the United States now has a national education policy. This chapter explains those momentous changes as reactions to widespread social disruption following reform in mid-20th century and reformers’ dissatisfaction with weak implementation and results of court-ordered civil rights gains. I argue that the combination of new actors and new policy arenas has altered how policy is made and, consequently, what is possible. This change in the policy process has political feedback: It reinforces the credibility of unorthodox ideas about school reform that would have been unthinkable only three decades ago, and provides unprecedented opportunities for nationally organized interest groups to infl uence educational policy.
