Andrea
Urban school districts across the US have long struggled to close the achievement gap for poor students in low-performing schools. Over the past decade, there has been an increasing turn to what Osborne and Gaebler might call “public entrepreneurial management” (4), as school districts have been reorganized, and charter schools have created competition for traditional public schools.
Last fall, Tennessee created an Achievement School District — a special state-run district for the state’s lowest performing schools. This district was created as part of the state’s effort to qualify for a federal Race to the Top grant, which is given to states making strides towards innovative education policy reform. The New York Times calls Tennessee’s Achievement School District is “a petri dish of practices favored by date-driven reformers across the country.” The majority of the schools in the district will be run by charter school operators, and will emphasize frequent testing and data analysis.
Encouraging policy innovation to change dysfunctional systems is certainly an improvement from the status quo of failing schools, but at the same time, the question of feasibility and the ability to effect long-term positive change hangs over all policy decision-making. Implementation strategies must achieve the balance between visionary, often idealistic, policy proposals, and existing realities on the ground. Change to the status quo is often resisted by people currently in-trenched in the system, both the “street-level bureaucrats” (in this case, educators and school administrators) and consumers (parents, students, taxpayers) of the public school system.
The first wave of implementation theory literature, produced in the 1970s, criticized the “top down” approach to policy implementation. Pressman and Wildavsky’s 1973 text Implementation spoke to the fact the policy reforms being passed at the “top” level, by politicians and senior bureaucrats are often not carried out as prescribed on the ground, and that policies are often developed without sensitivity to local cultural circumstances or histories. Resentment towards new authority and fear of exclusion often drive much of the opposition to sweeping policy reform at the “bottom,” or local level. Four decades later, Tennessee’s Achievement School District is plagued by much of the same “top down” criticism. Despite signs of progress in student achievement in the first seven months of the district’s existence, the community has also voiced concern about racially insensitive policies, and the sidelining of experienced teachers.
Yet, in Tennessee, all stakeholders, no matter whether they support or oppose the reforms, also know that the current system is not working. The need for innovation is evident. In their discussion of how to successfully implement change, Howlett and Ramesh (2009) outline policy subsystems as an important component of successful implementation; subsystems shape the evolution of the programs for implementing policy decisions (161). Bureaucrats are the primary actors of implementation, along with multiple levels of government, which support the executionary power of the bureaucrats.
In the Tennessee Achievement School District, charter schools operators act as implementation bureaucrats. They run the schools in collaboration with the state; with the authority of the state behind them, the chart operators have implemented new disciplinary policies, including some that have been interpreted as racially or culturally insensitive. They have hired new teachers, many young and inexperienced recruits from a state fellowship program and Teach for America. In some Achievement School District schools, no teachers remain from the previous academic year.
While some actions have rightfully provoked community criticism, the successful push to improve student test scores demonstrates the positive outcomes of this goal-driven entrepreneurial approach to government, which focus on improving tangible outcomes like higher test scores. The new policy bureaucrats have been inarguably successful in introducing innovative policies that have helped produce desired results. Next, perhaps, policymakers must work to develop implementation strategies that produce measurable improvements and improved without sacrificing cultural sensitivity.
Resources
Howlett, Michael and M. Ramesh. Studying Public Policy: Policy Cycles and Policy Subsystems, Oxford University Press, 2009 (3rd Edition).
Osbourne, David and Ted Gaebler, Reinventing Government: How the Entrepreneurial Spirit is Transforming the Public Sector, Introduction and Chapter 11, Addison-Welsey, 1992.
Pressman, Jeffrey L. and Aaron Wildavsky. Implementation, University of California Press, 1984
Rich, Motoko. “Crucible of Change in Memphis as State Takes On Failing Schools.” The New York Times. April 2, 2013.
Urban school districts across the US have long struggled to close the achievement gap for poor students in low-performing schools. Over the past decade, there has been an increasing turn to what Osborne and Gaebler might call “public entrepreneurial management” (4), as school districts have been reorganized, and charter schools have created competition for traditional public schools.
Last fall, Tennessee created an Achievement School District — a special state-run district for the state’s lowest performing schools. This district was created as part of the state’s effort to qualify for a federal Race to the Top grant, which is given to states making strides towards innovative education policy reform. The New York Times calls Tennessee’s Achievement School District is “a petri dish of practices favored by date-driven reformers across the country.” The majority of the schools in the district will be run by charter school operators, and will emphasize frequent testing and data analysis.
Encouraging policy innovation to change dysfunctional systems is certainly an improvement from the status quo of failing schools, but at the same time, the question of feasibility and the ability to effect long-term positive change hangs over all policy decision-making. Implementation strategies must achieve the balance between visionary, often idealistic, policy proposals, and existing realities on the ground. Change to the status quo is often resisted by people currently in-trenched in the system, both the “street-level bureaucrats” (in this case, educators and school administrators) and consumers (parents, students, taxpayers) of the public school system.
The first wave of implementation theory literature, produced in the 1970s, criticized the “top down” approach to policy implementation. Pressman and Wildavsky’s 1973 text Implementation spoke to the fact the policy reforms being passed at the “top” level, by politicians and senior bureaucrats are often not carried out as prescribed on the ground, and that policies are often developed without sensitivity to local cultural circumstances or histories. Resentment towards new authority and fear of exclusion often drive much of the opposition to sweeping policy reform at the “bottom,” or local level. Four decades later, Tennessee’s Achievement School District is plagued by much of the same “top down” criticism. Despite signs of progress in student achievement in the first seven months of the district’s existence, the community has also voiced concern about racially insensitive policies, and the sidelining of experienced teachers.
Yet, in Tennessee, all stakeholders, no matter whether they support or oppose the reforms, also know that the current system is not working. The need for innovation is evident. In their discussion of how to successfully implement change, Howlett and Ramesh (2009) outline policy subsystems as an important component of successful implementation; subsystems shape the evolution of the programs for implementing policy decisions (161). Bureaucrats are the primary actors of implementation, along with multiple levels of government, which support the executionary power of the bureaucrats.
In the Tennessee Achievement School District, charter schools operators act as implementation bureaucrats. They run the schools in collaboration with the state; with the authority of the state behind them, the chart operators have implemented new disciplinary policies, including some that have been interpreted as racially or culturally insensitive. They have hired new teachers, many young and inexperienced recruits from a state fellowship program and Teach for America. In some Achievement School District schools, no teachers remain from the previous academic year.
While some actions have rightfully provoked community criticism, the successful push to improve student test scores demonstrates the positive outcomes of this goal-driven entrepreneurial approach to government, which focus on improving tangible outcomes like higher test scores. The new policy bureaucrats have been inarguably successful in introducing innovative policies that have helped produce desired results. Next, perhaps, policymakers must work to develop implementation strategies that produce measurable improvements and improved without sacrificing cultural sensitivity.
Resources
Howlett, Michael and M. Ramesh. Studying Public Policy: Policy Cycles and Policy Subsystems, Oxford University Press, 2009 (3rd Edition).
Osbourne, David and Ted Gaebler, Reinventing Government: How the Entrepreneurial Spirit is Transforming the Public Sector, Introduction and Chapter 11, Addison-Welsey, 1992.
Pressman, Jeffrey L. and Aaron Wildavsky. Implementation, University of California Press, 1984
Rich, Motoko. “Crucible of Change in Memphis as State Takes On Failing Schools.” The New York Times. April 2, 2013.
RSS Feed