ABSTRACT
This chapter analysis the relations between policy and practice, which illuminates how they can influence each other. It discusses the particular relations between recent education policy and the associated formal structure of education governance on the one hand, and teaching, learning, and curriculum on the other. Title I of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) is the chief case people use to illustrate how politics and policy can be a consequence as well as a cause of what some sociologists term the "core technology" of education. The chapter includes the development of the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI). The recent changes to Title I as it moved from the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) to the 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) offer a particularly useful occasion to pursue and extend this analysis, because many elements of ESSA, perhaps even including its very existence, can be traced to the influence of practice.
