The United States has required formal standardized testing and set a minimum standard of curriculum in public education since 1965 with the “Elementary and Secondary Education Act”. It was in 2001 that the “No Child Left Behind Act” tied school funding to students performance on the test, which has become an issue of contention between policy makers and service providers and beneficiaries. This past week, a new standardized test was provided to New York City students that was based on the recently developed and rolled out Common Core Standards with supplemental curriculum. The test was developed by the National Governors Association’s (NGA) Center for Best Practices in conjunction with the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) and adopted by almost every state.
The NGA is a collective organization of the 55 governors of states, territories and commonwealth in the United States and public policy experts who advice policy makers on a range of issues of state and national importance including public education provision. The Education division of the NGA is made up of roughly six experts who have economics, and/or public policy backgrounds.[i] The CCSSO focuses mainly on education policy and is made up of key education policy makers from each state, for instance John King Jr. the Commissioner of Education in New York, and boasts of an Executive Director who is accredited with playing an integral role in the development of the Common core standards, “…directed the Council’s standards program- the work that would later become the Common Core State Standards”.[ii] The director was also a long time employee of Pearsons, the program that provides the testing and profits off the test preparation materials.
In the area of standardized testing, there does not seem to be room for doubt that policy analysts play a role in directing policy. Both, the standards that have been set and the evaluative measures to be taken, have been developed (in the very least) collaboratively with the NGA and CCSSO and public policy makers. In these instances the two organizations acted as experts in the education field and directed policy makers, and were nothing short of instrumental in the policy process.
Nancy Shulock contends that analysts are providers of ideas, “policy analysis has changed, right along with the policy process, to become the provider of ideas and frames, to help sustain the discourse that shapes citizen preferences, and to provide the appearance of rationality in an increasingly complex political environment” (Shulock, p240). With this definition of policy analysis, one cannot argue that analysts who provide information and set standards of a public service, as the NGA and CCSSO has, these organizations have seized a part of the decision making process, if only the provision of alternatives presented to the decision maker.
This seizure of the policy process in education, from standard setting to evaluation, creates a new environment where policy analysts can influence decision making, very different than the requirements that Lawrence Mead set out in his article The Interaction Problem in Policy Analysis. Mead argues analysts need, “goals that can be sharply defined, separated from programs, or distinguished from subsidy of the affected interests” (Mead, 54). The goals of the standard setting and testing have not only held up through economic reasoning, but are pushed through by such logic: it is a low cost assessment tool that is objective and provides the state the ability to compare the success of a large scale public service provision, unlike any other program. [iii] Since the organizations themselves defined the goals, and coordinate the implementations of the programs, these requirements cannot apply to them.
The perennial debate about whether policy analysts influence policy-making might only be solvable when one looks at a policy decision through a defined lens. For standard setting and evaluation in public school provision, two organizations that supply policy makers with expert information also played a major role in designing and determining standards and the evaluation measures that would be taken to determine the success of those standards, and thus were instrumental in the policy making process. Although other stakeholders, like teachers, parents and administrators, were consulted after the adoption of these policies for adaptation in the implementation stage, the main tenets of the policies were developed and implemented at the recommendation of policy “informers” or analysts in both the agenda setting and decision making stages.
[i] NGA Website: http://www.nga.org/files/live/sites/NGA/files/pdf/NGAOrgChart.pdf
; http://www.nga.org/cms/home/about/contact-info.html
[ii] CCSSO Website: http://www.ccsso.org/Who_We_Are/Leadership_Team.html
[iii] Hoxby, Caroline. “The Cost of Accountability”. NBER Working Paper. April 2002. http://standardizedtests.procon.org/sourcefiles/the-cost-of-accountability.pdf
Shulock, Nancy, “The Paradox of Policy Analysis: If It Is Not Used, Why Do We Produce so Much of It?” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 18(2), 1999.
Mead, Lawrence M., “The Interaction Problem in Policy Analysis,” Policy Sciences, 16(1), 1983.
The NGA is a collective organization of the 55 governors of states, territories and commonwealth in the United States and public policy experts who advice policy makers on a range of issues of state and national importance including public education provision. The Education division of the NGA is made up of roughly six experts who have economics, and/or public policy backgrounds.[i] The CCSSO focuses mainly on education policy and is made up of key education policy makers from each state, for instance John King Jr. the Commissioner of Education in New York, and boasts of an Executive Director who is accredited with playing an integral role in the development of the Common core standards, “…directed the Council’s standards program- the work that would later become the Common Core State Standards”.[ii] The director was also a long time employee of Pearsons, the program that provides the testing and profits off the test preparation materials.
In the area of standardized testing, there does not seem to be room for doubt that policy analysts play a role in directing policy. Both, the standards that have been set and the evaluative measures to be taken, have been developed (in the very least) collaboratively with the NGA and CCSSO and public policy makers. In these instances the two organizations acted as experts in the education field and directed policy makers, and were nothing short of instrumental in the policy process.
Nancy Shulock contends that analysts are providers of ideas, “policy analysis has changed, right along with the policy process, to become the provider of ideas and frames, to help sustain the discourse that shapes citizen preferences, and to provide the appearance of rationality in an increasingly complex political environment” (Shulock, p240). With this definition of policy analysis, one cannot argue that analysts who provide information and set standards of a public service, as the NGA and CCSSO has, these organizations have seized a part of the decision making process, if only the provision of alternatives presented to the decision maker.
This seizure of the policy process in education, from standard setting to evaluation, creates a new environment where policy analysts can influence decision making, very different than the requirements that Lawrence Mead set out in his article The Interaction Problem in Policy Analysis. Mead argues analysts need, “goals that can be sharply defined, separated from programs, or distinguished from subsidy of the affected interests” (Mead, 54). The goals of the standard setting and testing have not only held up through economic reasoning, but are pushed through by such logic: it is a low cost assessment tool that is objective and provides the state the ability to compare the success of a large scale public service provision, unlike any other program. [iii] Since the organizations themselves defined the goals, and coordinate the implementations of the programs, these requirements cannot apply to them.
The perennial debate about whether policy analysts influence policy-making might only be solvable when one looks at a policy decision through a defined lens. For standard setting and evaluation in public school provision, two organizations that supply policy makers with expert information also played a major role in designing and determining standards and the evaluation measures that would be taken to determine the success of those standards, and thus were instrumental in the policy making process. Although other stakeholders, like teachers, parents and administrators, were consulted after the adoption of these policies for adaptation in the implementation stage, the main tenets of the policies were developed and implemented at the recommendation of policy “informers” or analysts in both the agenda setting and decision making stages.
[i] NGA Website: http://www.nga.org/files/live/sites/NGA/files/pdf/NGAOrgChart.pdf
; http://www.nga.org/cms/home/about/contact-info.html
[ii] CCSSO Website: http://www.ccsso.org/Who_We_Are/Leadership_Team.html
[iii] Hoxby, Caroline. “The Cost of Accountability”. NBER Working Paper. April 2002. http://standardizedtests.procon.org/sourcefiles/the-cost-of-accountability.pdf
Shulock, Nancy, “The Paradox of Policy Analysis: If It Is Not Used, Why Do We Produce so Much of It?” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 18(2), 1999.
Mead, Lawrence M., “The Interaction Problem in Policy Analysis,” Policy Sciences, 16(1), 1983.
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