ABSTRACT
Education and education policy changed dramatically in the decades that followed World War II, notably through the increased role of state and federal governance of education. For most of US history, state and federal policies manipulated familiar resource inputs to schools: money, student attendance, curriculum, and teachers’ qualifications chief among them. Yet as education policymaking and research intensified after World War II, policy began to shift, from the allocation and regulation of resources to the definition and regulation of results. Ever since school systems began, a central policy problem was to identify the important resources and allocate them to schools. Policymakers and educators now operate in an unusual situation. Teaching is the most important educational resource, a point on which nearly all commentators agree.
