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Over the course of only one generation, American educational policy

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American Educational Research
http://aer.sagepub.com/content/50/2/285
The online version of this article can be found at:
DOI: 10.3102/0002831212471417
Am Educ Res J 2013 50: 285 originally published online 24 January 2013
Jal Mehta
Educational Policy, 1980 −2001
How Paradigms Create Politics : The Transformation of American
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How Paradigms Create Politics:
The Transformation of American Educational
Policy, 1980–2001
Jal Mehta
Harvard Graduate School of Education
American educational policy was rapidly transformed between 1980 and
2001. Accountability was introduced into a sphere that had long been
loosely coupled, both major political parties reevaluated longstanding positions, and significant institutional control over the schooling shifted to the
federal government for the first time in the nation’s history. These changes
cannot be explained by conventional theories such as interest groups, rational choice, and historical institutionalism. Drawing on extensive archival
research and more than 80 interviews, this article argues that this transformation can be explained by a changed policy paradigm which restructured
the political landscape around education reform. More generally, while previous scholars have observed that ‘‘policies create politics,’’ it should also be
recognized that ‘‘paradigms create politics.’’
KEYWORDS: A Nation at Risk, accountability, assessment, No Child Left
Behind, paradigm, politics, school reform
Over the course of only one generation, American educational policy has
been substantially transformed into the system we have today. As
recently as 1980, states and local districts were primarily in charge of schooling; a Republican president was calling for the abolition of the Department
of Education; and the most influential scholarly lens for understanding
schools depicted them as ‘‘loosely coupled systems’’ in which myth and ceremony mattered more than academic outputs (Meyer & Rowan, 1977).
Today, under the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, the federal government
has assumed a greater degree of control over schooling than at any previous
point in the nation’s history. A Republican president led the charge for this
expanded federal role, and demands for accountability for results are so
JAL MEHTA is an Helpant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, 447
Gutman Library, 6 Appian Way, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA, e-mail: mehtaja@gse
.harvard.edu. His research focuses on the policy and politics of creating high quality
schooling at scale, with a particular interest in the professionalization of teaching.
American Educational Research Journal
April 2013, Vol. 50, No. 2, pp. 285–324
DOI: 10.3102/0002831212471417
! 2013 AERA. http://aerj.aera.net
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ubiquitous that even one of the leading theorists of loosely coupled systems
has argued that that framework no longer applies (Rowan, 2006).
What explains this transformation? Traditional approaches that privilege
interest groups, rational choice calculations, or path dependent processes
are unable to explain key features of these changes. The most powerful
interest groups in the domain, teachers unions, have frequently been
opposed to the movement towards accountability.1 Rational choice explanations can explain why politicians emphasize testing and accountability in
a context in which the public favors them, but they cannot explain how
or why that context shifted between 1980 and 2001. Path dependent explanations can explain the persistence of long-standing norms against federal
involvement in schooling, but are particularly unsuited to explaining why
there recently has been such a significant departure from this well-worn
path.
This article suggests that the impetus for the transformation was the creation of a powerful educational paradigm, which crystallized in the famous A
Nation at Risk report. This paradigm, which emerged in the early 1980s and
is still dominant today, holds that educational success is central to national,
state, and individual economic success; that American schools across the
board are substantially underperforming and in need of reform; that schools
rather than social forces should be held responsible for academic outcomes;
and that success should be measured by externally verifiable tests. This paradigm has directed the school reform movement over the last 25 years, producing a variety of policy efforts that are consistent with its tenets, including
charter schools, public school choice, vouchers, and the subject of this article, the growth of state and federal efforts to impose standards and introduce
accountability. These assumptions not only have redirected the policy goals
around schooling; they have restructured the politics of education.
Specifically, under the reign of the A Nation at Risk paradigm, more powerful political actors have entered the domain; interest groups have shifted to
embrace the new paradigm; critics out of step with the paradigm have been
rhetorically marginalized; and the venue in which education policy is discussed has shifted upwards, as the new paradigm has legitimized the claims
of federal and state government to assert increasing control over what had
previously been the province of local districts.2
A Nation at Risk has not been ignored in previous accounts of American
educational history; it is often cited as a critical document in American
school reform (Boyd & Kerchner, 1988; DeBray-Pelot & McGuinn, 2009;
Graham & Gordon, 2003; Guthrie & Springer, 2004; McDermott, 2011).
This article seeks to build on and extend this literature by drawing on
new state-level evidence to explore exactly why A Nation at Risk resonated
so powerfully with such diverse constituencies and how A Nation at Risk reshaped state politics. I also look deeper into the past, finding a more diverse
set of antecedents than is usually identified; and further into the future,
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seeking to specify more precisely how A Nation at Risk affected subsequent
reform efforts.
The article also makes a theoretical contribution by showing the mechanisms through which paradigms can shape politics. In its emphasis on paradigms, this article joins a growing literature that emphasizes the role that
ideational factors play in affecting political outcomes (Beland & Cox, 2010;
Berman, 2001; Blyth, 2002; Somers & Block, 2005; Steensland, 2006; see
Mehta, 2010, for a review). This piece builds upon this growing literature
to illustrate the ways in which a powerful paradigm can restructure the political landscape. Paradigms can shift the direction and boundaries of debate,
which actors are involved, and ultimately can provide the impetus for institutional transformation. In so doing, ideas provide an important complement
to more traditional interest group, rational choice, or institutional explanations. Implications for understanding the role of paradigms in social and
political life are discussed in conclusion.
Changes to Explain
No Child Left Behind is the culmination of nearly two decades of changes
that have transformed American education. Changes are evident in policy, in
institutional responsibility, and in politics. At the policy level, an array of reforms has proliferated at the state level since the 1980s, including charter
schools, public school choice, vouchers, and standards-based reform. All of
these reforms have challenged traditional public schools. The most ubiquitous
of these reforms, and the one that became the template for federal policy, is
standards-based reform. Standards-based reform brought together three elements that its proponents hoped would create systemic change: setting standards for what students should be expected to do, establishing assessments to
measure progress, and holding schools accountable for progress towards
these goals. Standards-based reform spread through the states beginning in
the early 1990s, was encouraged by the federal passage of Goals 2000 and
the Improving America’s Schools Act in 1994, and became a federal requirement under No Child Left Behind.3 Given the pluralism that has traditionally
characterized American schooling—10,000 Democracies, as one prominent
book about local districts labeled it—this movement marks a considerable
shift towards a particular policy vision of school reform.
Not only has a particular vision of schooling become dominant; there is
increasing evidence that the policy emphasis on accountability is penetrating
the technical core of actual school practice, a significant departure from many
previous policy efforts. Historically, educational policy has been seen as pendulum-swinging cycles of policy reform that have done little to alter the
underlying grammar of schooling (Tyack & Cuban, 1995). This view is consistent with Meyer and Rowan’s (1977) famous description of schools as ‘‘loosely
coupled systems’’ that conform to public will in their outward appearance but
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not their internal practice. Recent work on the implementation of test-based
accountability suggests that loosely coupled systems are giving way to more
tightly coupled ones, as the attaching of significant stakes to testing has caused
schools and teachers to direct their efforts towards improving student performance on those tests (Fuhrman, 1999, 2001). While a significant debate rages
about whether these changes have been good (Peterson & West, 2003), bad
(Meier, 2002), or mixed (Elmore, 2004), what matters for these purposes is
that they clearly have been consequential in how the school system functions,
so much so that even Rowan (2006) now argues that loosely coupled school
systems are a thing of the past.
These changes have also marked a considerable shift in who has institutional control over schooling. Since the nation’s inception, schooling in
America has been controlled by local school districts, with states playing an
important but secondary role. The initial break with state and local control
came with the creation of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act
(ESEA) in 1965, which established the precedent of federal involvement in
schooling and created an ongoing federal funding stream for education.
However, these funds were directed primarily to high-poverty schools, did
not ask for accountability for results, and left almost all decisions about the
governance of schools to localities and states. What is notable about the recent
changes encapsulated in No Child Left Behind is the way in which the federal
government has significantly extended its reach: while still footing less than 10
percent of the bill, it has now extended its reach from high poverty schools to
all public schools, specifying the grades in which students need to be tested,
the pace at which schools need to improve, and the series of escalating consequences if schools do not improve. While schooling remains a function
shared across levels of government, the federal government has greatly
increased its role in shaping the day to day life of all public schools
(McGuinn, 2006; Peterson & West, 2003).
Finally, these changes have been possible only because of considerable
political shifts in the positions of the major parties on educational issues.
Democrats retreated from their long-standing position that the role of the
party was to provide greater funding for high-poverty students to a vision
of school reform that emphasizes accountability as much as spending. The
shift was even greater for Republicans, who moved from President Ronald
Reagan’s pledge to abolish the Department of Education in 1980 to the greatest expansion of the federal role in the nation’s history when President
George W. Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act. This article seeks to
explain these policy, institutional, and political changes.
Puzzles Not Fully Explained by Other Approaches
These developments pose a number of problems for the leading theories in political sociology. While the debate between competing approaches
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on education policy is not as fully developed as the debate about the welfare
state, the leading explanations for these changes can be grouped under three
headings: interest groups, rational choice, and historical institutionalism.
Interest group explanations emphasize the role that business groups
have played in demanding standards and accountability (Goldberg &
Traiman, 2001; Murphy, 1990; Odden & Marsh, 1990). Previously a nonfactor
in educational politics, business groups are said to have provided powerful
voices supporting standards and accountability at both the state and federal
levels (Ginsberg & Wimpelberg, 1987; Goldberg & Traiman, 2001). There are
two problems with this view. First, a business-centered approach does not
explain why business groups, which historically have been opposed to
school finance reforms in an effort to keep their taxes down (Mazzoni,
1995), have come in recent years to see their interests as lying with school
reform. Explaining this change is critical to understanding their role in this
transformation. Second, a business-driven view of the changes fails to
explain why business was able to impose its will in an increasingly crowded
interest group landscape. Detailed studies of education politics have suggested that since 1980 the number of groups involved in educational reform
has multiplied, with business being only one group among many that have
sought to make a greater claim over education (Mawhinney & Lugg, 2001;
Mazzoni, 1995). The most important of these groups are the teachers unions:
One study suggested that in 43 of 50 states they were the most powerful actors in educational politics (Thomas & Herbenar, 1991). The larger of these
unions, the National Education Association (NEA), has consistently opposed
efforts to introduce educational accountability. Yet despite its considerable
financial resources and political power, it failed to block movements for
accountability.4 Any interest group explanation has to explain why accountability triumphed (even among Democrats) despite objections from the
strongest interest groups in school politics.
A second explanation draws on the rational choice tradition, particularly
the median voter theorem. McGuinn (2006) has done some of the most
detailed reconstruction of the federal politics of this transformation, and
while he is not a rational choice theorist himself, a number of his observations are consistent with the idea that strategic imperatives have led both
parties to increasingly emphasize education reform. As education rose on
the agenda in recent years, first state and later federal politicians acted strategically to offer plans for education reform in order to win voters to their
cause. There is considerable merit to this strategic rational choice view. It explains why both parties have pursued the education issue, why Democrats
were willing to buck the NEA, and why Republicans were willing to sacrifice
long-standing principles against federal control in favor of short-term electoral advantage. But it is also limited in that it assumes much of what needs
to be explained, offering no account of how the context was created within
which these choices became rational.5 Key aspects of the context that need
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to be explained include the following: Why is education now a high salience
issue for states and the federal government when that was not the case in the
past? What has primed the public to see the problem in terms that make
standards and accountability the logical solution? Overall, while rational
choice approaches can be important in explaining the strategic behavior
of political actors in pursuing education reform, they do not explain how
the context was created within which these strategic actions were carried
out.
If rational choice is overly focused on a short time horizon, historical institutionalism is often the preferred approach for those whose questions are
focused on change over longer periods (Orren & Skowronek, 2004; Thelen
& Steinmo, 1992). But while historical institutionalism can explain the baseline from which the recent changes depart—decentralized federalism that
had long inhibited national action on schools—its long-standing emphasis
on path dependence would seem to foreclose the institutional changes
that are so remarkable about the case under study. In partial answer to
this objection, an important book by Manna (2006) has argued that while
historical institutionalism has traditionally focused on how America’s system
of federalism impedes major policy development, in this case having multiple venues provided opportunities for ‘‘borrowing,’’ with state and federal
developments feeding off one another. Of course, this begs a further question: Given that American education had embraced local control of schooling since its inception and that the arrangements of federalism had always
permitted borrowing between levels of government, what prompted
increased state and federal involvement over the past 20 years? As is often
true of historical institutionalist approaches, the mechanism for change is
not specified (Clemens & Cook, 1999).
Finally, any theory of these changes that gives causal primacy to any
single set of actors is likely to fall short, since the existing literature on
standards-based reform suggests that many different actors were responsible
for initiating the policy. Standards-based reform was driven by business
groups in Texas, a court decision in Kentucky, state legislators in Utah, the
governor’s office in Michigan, and a state superintendent of schools in
Maryland, to name just five.6 Any workable theory would need to explain
how different actors came to advocate similar policies.
To briefly summarize the puzzles unexplained by these approaches:
1. Why did the agenda status of education rise, encouraging ‘‘rational’’ politicians
to make it a central issue?
2. Why did both parties come to support the reforms, despite the long-standing
historical differences on education between the parties?
3. What explains why different actors—courts, legislators, governors, state bureaucrats, business groups—each initiated similar reforms?
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4. Why did standards and accountability triumph despite the opposition of the
strongest interest group in the field?
5. Given predictions of institutional ‘‘lock-in’’ and ‘‘path dependence,’’ why was
there such a significant shift away from the institutional patterns that had characterized American schooling since its inception?
The Power of Ideas: How Paradigms Create Politics
Recognizing the limitations of these approaches, a quickly growing literature on ‘‘ideas and politics’’ has sprung up over the past 15 years (Beland,
2005; Beland & Cox, 2010; Berman, 1998; Campbell, 2002; Hall, 1993; Mehta,
2010; Steensland 2006). Using a variety of different frameworks and language, scholars have invoked paradigms (Hall, 1993; Kuhn, 1962), roadmaps
or worldviews (Goldstein & Keohane, 1993), or simply ideas (Berman, 1998)
as ways to explain actors’ commitments to their chosen ends. In areas as
diverse as human rights policy (Sikkink, 1993), airline and trucking deregulation (Derthick & Quirk, 1985), industrial policy (Dobbin, 1994), and the
welfare state (Berman, 1998), research suggests that ideas provide important
templates that guide policy action. Responding to earlier materialist contentions that ideas are largely epiphenomenal, much of this work has sought to
contrast interest-based and ideational approaches, showing that ideas were
important in creating policy even when interest groups were arrayed against
their triumph (Derthick & Quirk, 1985). This work has had considerable
impact in the field, and even those who were at one time skeptical about
the causal role of ideas have begun to incorporate them into their work.7
If ideationally inclined scholars have succeeded in creating a place at
a table previously dominated by Marxist, pluralist, state-centered, and rational choice approaches, they have only just begun to build a more sophisticated set of conceptual tools that would specify how ideas matter and how
they interact with other forces (such as interests, institutions, and policy entrepreneurs) to affect policy selection and change. In recent years, a few ideationally oriented scholars have started to specify pathways through which
ideas affect politics, but they remain few and far between (Blyth, 2002;
Lieberman, 2002; Steensland, 2006).
In this work, I explore the salience of one particular kind of idea:
a ‘‘problem definition’’ or ‘‘policy paradigm.’’ A problem definition is a particular way of understanding a complex reality. For example, homelessness can
be seen as the product of a housing shortage, high unemployment, or a lack
of individual gumption. Problem definitions resist efforts to separate the normative and the empirical, as they generally evoke both normative and
empirical descriptions in ways that are mutually reinforcing.8 The way
a problem is framed has significant implications for the types of policy solutions that will seem desirable, and hence much of political argument is
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fought at the level of problem definition. During the conflict stage, ‘‘problem
definition’’ is the appropriate term; when one has triumphed and assumes
the status of a master narrative, it can be called a ‘‘policy paradigm,’’ following Kuhn’s view of paradigms as dominant views that preclude significant
dissent.
Here I will focus on paradigms at a middle level of generality—that of
defining a problem within an issue area, in this case education. There are
also shifts in the climate of ideas at the broader level of public philosophies—such as whether the government is seen as the solution or the problem—that are both informed by and shape the way more specific issues are
regarded (Mehta, 2010). While I focus primarily on the story of how the educational problem definition was reshaped, I also discuss in passing the
broader shifts in public dialogue around government and social policy as
they are relevant for fully understanding the story.
In particular, this article uses the educational case to investigate one
strand of how ideas matter; more specifically, how paradigms can create politics.9 While some of the most cited writing about paradigms has focused on
how they shape and reshape the cognitive maps held by key policymakers
(Hall, 1993; Legro, 2000; Weir, 1992), less attention has been devoted to how
paradigms can reshape the political environment around an issue (see also
Baumgartner & Jones, 1993). Once a changed definition of a problem comes
to the fore, I will argue, it has the potential to reshape virtually every aspect
of the politics governing the issue.
One impact of a new problem definition is that it changes the nature of
the debate. A dominant problem definition serves to bound the potential
possibilities of what can be advocated, giving it a powerful agenda-setting
function. Policy entrepreneurs who offer solutions that are consistent with
the broader agenda are elevated, while those whose solutions do not fit
the dominant problem definition are marginalized. The dominant problem
definition also affects who has standing to speak: If the problem is that
schools are not as efficient as for-profits, business leaders become emboldened; if the problem is unleashing students’ creativity, then artists and teachers are empowered. Problem definitions not only provide a template for
their proponents; they also can constrain the positions that their opponents
can take.
Another effect of a new problem definition is that it changes the constellation of actors. When new problem definitions come to the fore, new actors
become involved and new cleavages are created.10 New problem definitions
can motivate the formation of new groups, which in turn can have a significant effect on subsequent debate. Precisely because these new groups
accept the dominant conception of the problem, they are welcomed by
the broader political environment and can play a critical role in shaping policy alternatives. New problem definitions can also create opportunities for
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policy entrepreneurs and experts since existing groups seek guidance on
how to position themselves in a new environment.
A new problem definition can also create an opportunity for major institutional change. Which actors are motivated and legitimated to act in an area
is dependent in part upon how the area is defined. As we will see, when
education became more heavily defined as an economic issue, state and federal actors who had previously seen education as largely a local function
were motivated and enabled to act because the issue was now seen as falling
within their jurisdiction. While institutional theories tend to emphasize stability, idea-oriented theories can provide an account of major shifts in institutional responsibility.
In sum, once crystallized, a new paradigm not only delimits policy options
to conform to that paradigm (Hall, 1993; Weir, 1992), but it can restructure the
political landscape around an issue and change the agenda status of the issue,
the players involved, their standing to speak, and the venue in which the issue
is debated. In recent years, scholars in American political development
(Campbell, 2003; Pierson, 2003) have seized on Schattschneider’s (1935) observation that ‘‘policies create politics.’’ Scholars of paradigm changes should recognize that ‘‘paradigms create politics’’ as well.11
Such a view complements the other explanations above in ways that allows for a fuller explanation of these changes. Interests still matter, but paradigms can help us understand why actors come to assume the positions that
they did. Rational calculations are still useful for understanding why politicians take the positions they do in the short run, but paradigms help to
explain how the context was created in which those positions came to
seem rational. Historical institutional explanations help us understand the
potency of norms against federal action, while ideas can help us understand
how and why federal actors were able to expand their purview.
Data and Methods
There have been three critical events in the transformation of schooling
since 1980. The first was the publication of the blockbuster 1983 report A
Nation at Risk, a catalytic document that crystallized a new paradigm that
would spark an avalanche of efforts to reform American schools. The second
was the states’ adoption of standards-based reform in the 1990s. The third
was the federal move towards standards-based reform, which built upon
the state reforms and culminated in No Child Left Behind. Each of these
events is examined using careful process tracing (Mahoney, 1999), drawing
on documentary and interview evidence that allows for a detailed reconstruction of who advocated what and for what reason. Taken at any given
moment in time, process tracing allows us to see which actors, interests, institutions, and ideas were important in producing a paradigm or a policy outcome. Taken over two decades, it permits an analysis of how actors’
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positions changed over time, a perspective that is critical for an examination
that seeks to understand not only who pushed for what but how they came
to know what to push for.
While there has been previous work on the changing federal politics of
education (Cross 2004; DeBray, 2006; Kosar, 2005; Manna, 2006; McGuinn,
2006), there has been far less that has sought to integrate empirical research
on states into a broader account of the national movement towards
standards-based reform. This is a considerable gap in the literature, given
that most scholars agree that long-standing norms against federal involvement in schools meant that the recent federal changes could have happened
only by building on an already existing state movement (Manna, 2006).
Particularly important to the overall account is understanding why states
converged around standards-based reform in the 1990s, before they were
required to adopt it under No Child Left Behind in 2001.12
To understand this convergence, this study considers three states—
Michigan, Maryland, and Utah—and tracks their respective paths to
standards-based reform. I chose these states for two reasons. First, since I
was trying to understand how so many states came to adopt the same policy,
I wanted to choose states that were very different on a number of dimensions
that would presumably affect their education policy choices. These three states
differ on the following dimensions: region, partisanship, timing of adoption of
standards-based reform, minority population, initial test scores, level of local
control, political culture, and per pupil spending (see the appendix). Second,
there has been a lot of work done on a few well-known standard leading states,
particularly Kentucky, Texas, North Carolina, and California. But if the goal is to
understand how 49 states came to adopt standards-based reform before No
Child Left Behind, understanding the politics of lower profile states is also
important. Maryland was an early adopter of standards, thus I have one from
the lead states, but also two that came later to standards. In addition, by researching less well-known states, what I learn about them can be pooled
with others’ research on the more well-known states to create a fuller understanding of the standards movement.13
The data for this work come from a wide range of sources. Interviews
with key participants, examination of primary documents, and use of archival materials allowed for reconstruction of the course of events. Eighty interviews were conducted with informants involved with state and federal
reforms. Interviews ranged in length from 30 minutes to 3 hours, with an
average of 1 hour. Almost all were conducted in person: the author spent
3 to 8 weeks in each of the states and in Washington, D.C. Interviews
were taped and transcribed. Interviewees included state legislators, a former
governor (John Engler of Michigan), federal legislative aides, policy experts,
journalists, interest group representatives, and federal and state department
of education officials. Some of these interviewees also permitted access to
their personal or organizational files, sources that provide a more complete
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record of what they were thinking at the time of key decisions. Several thousand pages of documents were culled from state libraries and archives in
Maryland, Utah, and Michigan, as well as from the Library of Congress.
These primary materials were supplemented with an examination of local
newspapers, published and unpublished dissertations, state and federal legislative records, and a variety of secondary sources. This range of material
allows triangulation (Roth & Mehta, 2002; Yin, 1994) to compensate for
the weaknesses of individual data sources. In general, this study uses the interviews to inform the overall argument, but relies more on documents (and
newspaper accounts) than interviews to reconstruct past events because
they provide a more detailed account of what happened when and why.
The Emergence of a Powerful Paradigm: A Nation at Risk
There was no obvious indication in 1982 that the next two decades
would witness an explosion of reform strategies aiming to increase performance in schooling. An economic recession, severe state budget deficits,
and Reagan’s stated intention to downgrade the federal role in education
policy all pointed to education remaining a low-priority item. In their 1982
textbook on the politics of education, longtime education policy analysts
Michael Kirst and Frederick Wirt pointed to tax revolts, slow national economic growth, the shrinking share of the population with students in the
schools, and the decreasing federal role as factors that likely precluded significant education reform, concluding that ‘‘the 1980s will be a decade of
consolidating and digesting the large number of innovations from the
1970s’’ (Kirst and Wirt, 1982, p. 250).
This prediction proved incorrect, because of the release of the A Nation
at Risk report in 1983. A Nation at Risk was the product of a commission created by Reagan administration Secretary of Education Terrel Bell, whose primary assignment from Ronald Reagan was to find a way to eliminate his own
department. He devised the idea of a national commission to report on the
quality of American education and make suggestions for improvement as
a way of increasing national attention to the important functions of public
education. Finding little support from Reagan’s office for the appointment
of a presidential commission amid criticisms that it might generate a greater
federal role for education, in July of 1981 Bell appointed a commission himself (Bell, 1988). The committee was chaired by University of Utah President
David P. Gardner, and was composed of seven university faculty and administrators; seven state and local school personnel, including principals, teachers, school board members, and superintendents (seven members); one
business leader; one politician; and two others.14 It included some very distinguished educators, including Gardner, Chemistry Nobel Prize winner
Glenn Seaborg, Harvard physics professor Gerald Holton, and Yale
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finding, commissioning dozens of papers and holding six public meetings as
well as a number of regional meetings with a variety of stakeholders, before
producing its analysis.
In a short report that employed bold and ominous language, the report
assailed the nation’s poor educational performance, famously declaring that
the United States was caught in a ‘‘rising tide of mediocrity’’ that imperiled
the nation’s economic future. In support of its case, it cited a variety of academic indicators, most notably high levels of illiteracy, poor performance on
international comparisons, and a steady decline in SAT scores from 1963 to
1980. Quoting analyst Paul Copperman, the report claimed that this would
be the first time in the history of the country that the educational skills of
one generation would not be equal to those of their parents. Contrasting
this declining educational picture with the centrality of skills and human capital in the knowledge-based postindustrial economy, the report linked the
future of the nation’s international economic competitiveness to the reform
of its educational system. The report’s recommendations called for a new
focus on ‘‘excellence’’ for all, which would be achieved through a revamped
high school curriculum with fewer electives and more required courses in
math, English, science, and social studies, a combination that the authors
called ‘‘the New Basics.’’ It also called for a longer school day and school
year, more homework, tighter university admission standards, and more testing for students as indicators of proficiency. For teachers, it recommended
higher standards for entry into the profession, an 11-month professional
year, and market-sensitive and performance-based teacher pay.
The reaction to the report was instantaneous and overwhelming. The
report was released in a Rose Garden Ceremony in which Reagan, disregarding the report’s findings, used it as an occasion to highlight his familiar agenda
of school prayer, tuition tax credits, and the end of the ‘‘federal intrusion’’ into
education. But the media reports of the Rose Garden ceremony highlighted
the claims about the ‘‘rising tide of mediocrity,’’ pushing Reagan’s agenda to
the background (Fiske, 1983, p. A1). The U.S. Government Printing Office
received more than 400 requests for copies in a single hour the following
day and distributed more than 6 million copies over the course of the next
year. The press interest was insatiable: The Washington Post published almost
two articles per week on A Nation at Risk in the year following the report’s
release (Guthrie & Springer, 2004, p. 12). An assessment in 1984 found that
more than 250 state task forces had been put together to study education
and recommend changes (Guthrie & Springer, 2004, p. 14). As we will see
in the discussions of the subsequent state and federal changes below, this
impact proved enduring over many years to come.
The reasons why the report hit such a chord are multifaceted and have
been discussed in more detail by the author elsewhere (Mehta, in press-a).
Since the focus of this article is on the consequences of paradigm changes
and not its causes, here I just briefly note that the following factors were
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important in the report capturing such widespread attention: (a) the brevity
of the report and its hyperbolic language; (b) the citing of alarming indicators, particularly the SAT decline; (c) the news hook created by the conflict
between Reagan’s initial comments and the report’s findings; (d) the high
status and legitimacy of the authors; (e) the timing of the report, as it fell
in the midst of an economic recession, and seemed to explain in part why
the U.S. was being outpaced by international competitors; (f) the linking
of the educational to the economic, which greatly widened the interest in
the report; and, as I will discuss in more detail in the next section, (g) the
way in which the report’s narrative resonated (Binder, 1993) with a variety
of political, economic, and educational developments.
Crystallizing a Powerful Paradigm: The Problem
Definition of A Nation at Risk
As we will see in the pages that follow, the paradigm framed in A Nation
at Risk launched a national school reform movement. But this paradigm was
not created out of whole cloth—its framing of the problem brought together
a number of strands that had been developing during the 1970s and early
1980s. By crystallizing these various strands into a short catalytic document,
it was able to frame an agenda for the future by knitting together a number
of streams from the past. By building on these existing streams, the report
ensured that it would have a significant initial constituency; by powerfully
and evocatively framing an agenda, it built a new and much larger group
of stakeholders who would carry forward its analysis.
Four strands in particular were important (see Table 1). The first
and most important was the economic shift towards a postindustrial
knowledge-based economy. A Nation at Risk defined the purpose of schooling primarily in economic terms, as part of a battle for international competitiveness. This analysis resonated because it was becoming widely apparent
that the economy was shifting to reward skills, a change that meant that
schooling would be increasingly important for international, state, and individual success. The idea that schooling was a key to individual mobility was
not new (Grubb & Lazerson, 2004); nor was the idea of human capital
(Schultz, 1963); what was freshly resonant was the notion that national
(and state) economic success was becoming increasingly dependent upon
the available stock of this human capital. State governors, particularly in
the South, had already begun to see that improving human capital was
becoming increasingly central to their economic standing (Southern
Regional Education Board, 1981; Toch, 1991), a position that was increasingly taken up by governors across the country after A Nation at Risk. The
widespread acceptance of the centrality of the link between educational production and economic growth, at both national and state levels, was the single most important factor in launching the subsequent reform movement.
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Table 1
A Nation at Risk and Redefining the Educational Problem
Dimension
Previous Problem
Definition
Problem Definition in A
Nation at Risk
Factors That Fed Into Changing
Problem Definition
Purpose of
education
Diverse, no one purpose
dominant
Education a tool of
economic development
National perception that education is key for
international economic competition
State perception that education is key for
economic development (particularly
Southern governors)
Increase in individual returns to schooling
Goals of reform Categorical programs for
disadvantaged groups;
increased performance
of low performing
students (minimum
competency movement)
Higher standards for all
students, ‘‘excellence’’
State economic competition, spurring higher
standards
Standards a reaction to perception of 1960s
progressivism in schools
Excellence for all an antidote to perceived
excesses of equity emphasis
Responsibility
for schooling
Shared between parents,
schools, and
government
Educators primarily
responsible for
schooling
Rise of conservative political economy and
retreat from social responsibility for
schooling
Effective schools research
Outcome
measure / site
of
accountability
Qualitative standards set
by local school and
school board
External tests, accountable
to state
Minimum competency testing
Greater state spending/perception that
increasing spending not producing results
Changing image of teachers as interest groups
(unionization, collective bargaining, teacher
strikes)
Declining public view of schools; low
performance on international tests; other
dyspeptic reports on American education
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Second, A Nation at Risk marked the crystallization of a different set of
goals for schooling, which shifted from moderately improving the lowest
performing students to increasing performance across the board under the
banner of higher standards for all. High standards for all drew its power
through a kind of symbolic boundary drawing (Lamont & Molnar, 2002),
counterposing itself to a variety of trends it took to be inauspicious. At the
policy level, it represented a reaction against ‘‘back to basics’’ that seemed
not ambitious enough to match the scale of the problem; at the social and
political level, it reacted against what many (particularly on the right) perceived as an overemphasis on equity stemming from the 1960s; at the pedagogical level, it reacted against ‘‘child-centered’’ pedagogical views that had
gained prominence in the 1960s in favor of a more traditional view of
schooling as teaching material that needed to be mastered.
Third, A Nation at Risk placed the responsibility for addressing the problem of poor school performance on the schools, crystallizing a retreat from
a broader social responsibility for education that had been on the rise since
the 1960s.15 The political ill will engendered by desegregation through busing left politicians fearful of educational reforms that would require broader
societal commitment (Rieder, 1985), particularly in a period of growing skepticism of government and a shift towards a more conservative political economy (McGuinn, 2009; Wells, 2009). At the same time, research on ‘‘effective
schools’’ (Edmonds, 1979) seemed to suggest that schools could make significant differences in outcomes even for high-poverty students, providing
a boost to the idea that school characteristics, including higher expectations,
could be the first step toward change.
Fourth, A Nation at Risk accelerated a shift in the site of accountability
for schooling. Schools had long been primarily accountable to local school
boards for whatever those boards felt was important; A Nation at Risk
increased the emphasis on schools being held accountable by the state on
standardized tests. Part of this shift was directly attributable to A Nation at
Risk’s analysis: since the problem was underperformance on international
tests, success would be measured by higher performance on quantitative
tests. But the need for external markers was also related to a growing distrust
of educators’ expertise. Rising rates of unionization among teachers in the
1960s and 1970s undermined their claims to be guardians of the public
good and increased legislator skepticism about their claims of professional
expertise (Toch, 1991). The rise and spread of minimum competency tests
in the 1970s presaged the standards and accountability movement to
come, as it reflected the growing skepticism among legislators about the failings of schools and the need for measurable accountability (Guthrie, 1981).
Finally, fiscal issues contributed to the growing demand for external
accountability. The share of total education spending by the states as
opposed to localities had increased to the point where states were now contributing the plurality of the total funds. The combination of greater state
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spending and the economic pressures and tax revolts of the 1970s meant that
state legislators were becoming increasingly likely to demand accountability
for their limited state resources.
A Nation at Risk integrated these four strands into a short and catalytic
document. As we will see, by linking the educational to the economic and
shifting the problem from poor students to all students, the document called
into existence a broad public backing for school reform. But the analysis was
built on more than just the economic rationale. The commission took a variety
of existing developments—the shift to the postindustrial economy, the rise of
international economic competitors, the cultural backlash against the permissiveness of the 1960s, the political backlash against the Great Society and busing, the decline in test scores, the rising distrust of educators—and integrated
them into one master narrative that seized the nation’s attention and would set
the terms of subsequent debate.
The Impact of Paradigm Change in the States: Changing Goals,
Restructuring Politics, Transforming Policy
The paradigm change described above sparked a series of changes in
educational policy and politics and eventually in the institutional responsibility for schooling. These changes spread across the states first, a development
that then enabled federal reform.
Changing goals of education. The impact of the paradigm described in A
Nation at Risk was apparent throughout the states. Research on the national
impact of A Nation at Risk revealed that 45 states initiated or increased graduation requirements for course taking, and two thirds of states increased teacher
testing (Firestone, 1990, p. 145). But more than specific initiatives, the A Nation
at Risk paradigm framed the very ends that schooling was seeking to accomplish. As evidence on this point, consider the discussion of education in governors’ State of the State addresses in the three case study states. In each of the
states, the discussion of education after 1983 reflects the new paradigm’s
emphasis on education as part of a broader strategy for human capital.
The shift was most apparent in Michigan. In the pre-1983 addresses,
education is largely characterized as an end that is important in itself rather
than as a means to a broader goal of economic development. The 1982 State
of the State address, for example, has sections on school finance, educational assessment, compensatory education, and special and bilingual education, but it has no mention of the economic purpose of education.
Instead, the 1982 address lists as primary educational objectives for the state:
ensuring equal opportunity, distributing the tax burden equitably, and devising systems of testing that ensure the effectiveness of educational programs
(William Milliken, ‘‘State of the State Address,’’ 1982). The 1984 State of the
State address, by contrast, begins to talk of education in human capital terms,
opining that if state support for education continues to decline, ‘‘this
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disinvestment in the future, if left unchecked, would undermine our efforts to
spur economic development, create jobs and improve our quality of life’’
(James Blanchard, ‘‘State of the State Address,’’ 1984). Subsequent addresses
would reaffirm this theme, with economic and educational sections of the addresses merging into one another. For example, by 1989, the section on economic development included a lengthy discussion of ‘‘developing a skilled
workforce,’’ and the education section in turn devoted one third of its pages
to ‘‘our workers, our future’’ (James Blanchard, ‘‘State of the State Address,’’
1989). Governor John Engler continued this theme in his State of the State addresses, arguing that with the decline of manufacturing in Michigan, building
a stronger workforce was a critical part of inter-state competition. For example, he titled his 1999 address ‘‘The Smart State First in the 21st Century’’
(John Engler, ‘‘State of the State Address,’’ 1999). From 1984 to the present,
schooling in Michigan has been seen primarily in human capital terms.16
The Maryland addresses show a similar shift, although given that the
state is less reliant on manufacturing, the economy-education link is not as
pronounced. The 1984 address by Democrat Harry Hughes calls for the
‘‘greatest increase in State aid to education in the history of our state’’
(Harry Hughes, ‘‘State of the State Address,’’ 1984). Subsequent addresses
include mentions of the need for greater quality and excellence in education,
reflecting the concerns of A Nation at Risk. Maryland more fully embraced
the idea that its state economy was dependent upon the quality of its education system in the 1990s, when Governor Parris Glendening began to discuss
the importance of ‘‘all our citizens reach[ing] their full potential in the knowledge-based economy of the future’’ (Parris Glendening, ‘‘State of the State
Address,’’ 1999). As the economy frame for education became more prominent in Maryland, the share of the agenda devoted to education increased,
providing further evidence for the link between the two.
Similar trends are evident in Utah. Early State of the States focus on the
basic goal of expanding access to secondary education: The 1975 address
called for making free public education available to all students in Grades 9
to 12. In 1981, in the midst of a crisis of rising school population and diminishing revenues, Republican Governor Scott Matheson’s focus was on finding
a way to provide minimally adequate funding for the basic upkeep of state
schools. In Matheson’s 1983 address, he spoke eloquently about the coming
changes to a postindustrial society, noting the decline of smokestack industries and the projected growth of professional, managerial, technical and clerical jobs.17 He concluded, ‘‘Education then—an investment in our human
capital—is the key to economic growth in this new era. Utah has long been
among the leading states in the literacy of its people. . . . Our challenge is
to sustain our commitment to education and prepare our people to participate
in the new technological age’’ (Scott Matheson, ‘‘State of the State Address,’’
1989). In 1989, Governor Norman Bangerter spoke of education as an important part of ‘‘our economic development team,’’ making education, along with
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the economy, efficiency, and the environment, the key priorities of his terms
as governor (Norman Bangerter, ‘‘State of the State Address,’’ 1989). In 1996,
Governor Leavitt made the economy-education link explicit, declaring that
key businesses were settling in Utah because of the quality of its schools
(Michael Leavitt, ‘‘State of the State Address,’’ 1996). In 2003, Leavitt launched
yet another round of school reforms, arguing that ‘‘in the economic race of this
century, the society with the best-educated people wins. Period. End of conversation’’ (Michael Leavitt, ‘‘State of the State Address,’’ 2003).
The changes in Utah’s goals and objectives for schooling, before and
after A Nation at Risk, show clearly the impact that this increasing emphasis
on the economy had on the direction of the school reform debate. The official state goals and objectives for education, as formulated in 1972 through
a process that involved statewide community input, reveal a very different
view of educational purpose from the human capital approach. This view
still prevailed as recently as 1982. A state curriculum plan for the years
1982 to 1988 summarizes the overall purpose of schooling as follows:
‘‘The education system is seen as a vehicle which provides for the growth
of each individual as he searches for meaning and builds competencies in
these eight important areas of his life.’’ The eight areas are ‘‘intellectual maturity,’’ ‘‘ethical-moral-spiritual maturity,’’ ‘‘emotional maturity,’’ ‘‘social maturity,’’ ‘‘physical maturity,’’ ‘‘environmental maturity,’’ ‘‘aesthetic maturity,’’
and ‘‘productive maturity.’’ The 1982 goals show a concern with the spiritual,
ethical, social, and even existential purposes of schooling.
Shortly after A Nation at Risk, the Utah State Board of Education (1984,
p. 1) reformulated its aims in a single sentence on the first page of its new
‘‘action goals.’’ The goals read, ‘‘The Utah State Board of Education sets as
its primary goals the attainment of excellence in education and the improvement of productivity as expressed in the following objectives.’’ To the word
productivity is appended a footnote, which reads,
The State Board of Education considers productivity in education to
have several definitions, all of which are important in providing excellence in education: (1) teaching an increased number of students for
a given amount of money while maintaining current quality, (2) increasing quality for a given amount of money and a given number of students, and (3) increasing quality through increasing expenditures.
The new goals showed a dramatic shift to a more practical, economic, and
utilitarian view of schooling’s purpose, consistent with the view outlined in
A Nation at Risk.
18
Increasing agenda status and involving new actors. The change in how
education was discussed led almost immediately to a change in how political
attention was accorded to schooling. We can roughly track the lasting impact
of A Nation at Risk on states’ political priorities by considering the space
devoted to education in governors’ State of the State Addresses. Figure 1
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displays the relative importance of education as an issue in governors’ State
of the State addresses in each of the case study states between 1973 and
2005. The Y-axis measures the proportion of the total lines in the State of
the State address devoted to elementary and secondary education. Note
that in Utah, where the legislature met every other year until 1985, the
State of the State address was also a biannual event until 1985.
This graph indicates a clear break in 1983. On average, Michigan governors
devoted 4.8% of their addresses to education up through January of 1983,
whereas in the period since A Nation at Risk they have devoted 19.2% to education. Results are similar in Utah: 4.8% of space in the addresses was devoted
to education before A Nation at Risk, and 21% since. In Maryland, where the
addresses are on average significantly longer and the number of topics covered
greater, the total space devoted to education is less, but the fourfold rate of
increase is similar: 2.7% before A Nation at Risk, and 10.8% since.
The shift cannot be explained by partisanship. Table 2 provides a breakdown of the share of each address devoted to K-12 education, by governor.
Governors of both parties devoted relatively little attention to education
before A Nation at Risk and have devoted significantly more since. The
most striking change was in Michigan, perhaps not surprisingly given that
0
0.1
0.2
0.3
0.4
0.5
0.6
1973
1975
1977
1979
1981
1983
1985
1987
1989
1991
1993
1995
1997
1999
2001
2003
2005
Percentage Devoted to Education
Years
Michigan
Utah
Maryland
Figure 1. Proportion of Michigan, Utah, and Maryland State of State addresses
devoted to elementary and secondary education, 1973–2005.
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its troubled automobile industry was ripe for the A Nation at Risk message.
Republican Governor William Milliken devoted 5.4% of his addresses
between 1974 and 1982 to education and Democratic Governor James
Blanchard did not devote any of his address to education in 1983. This
shifted quickly after A Nation at Risk, as Blanchard devoted 14% of his
address to education in 1984, and 16.6% of his total space to schooling
between 1984 and 1990. Reflecting the raised agenda status of schooling,
Republican Governor John Engler (1991–2002) devoted 20.4% of his addresses to education, and Democratic Governor Jennifer Granholm (2003–
2005) devoted 18.6% of her addresses to education. Similar trends are evident in Utah, where greater attention was paid to education in the addresses
after A Nation at Risk under a string of almost exclusively Republican governors; and in Maryland, where an increase in agenda status after A
Nation at Risk was evident in the addresses of the state’s almost exclusively
Democratic governors.
The shift in the definition and agenda status of the issue also brought in
other new actors, particularly state legislators and business groups. As education became more central to economic growth, state legislators and business
groups were no longer willing to leave schooling in the hands of local or state
school boards. As one Michigan legislator dismissively put it in discussing education reform in the 1990s: ‘‘The State Board of Education wasn’t a player. The
Department of Ed wasn’t a player’’ (Personal interview, October 2004). The
key players were now the governor, the state legislature, the unions, and, in
some states, business coalitions demanding educational reform. By 1990,
Maryland and Michigan had state outposts of the national Business
Roundtable that were beginning to advocate standards-based reform. These
business leaders, like many state legislators, had gradually shifted their priorities in wake of A Nation at Risk. While they previously had opposed school
reform as an expensive undertaking that would necessitate higher taxes, they
were increasingly persuaded that a better bet would be to essentially socialize
the costs of training their workers. By linking the educational and economic
spheres, the paradigm of A Nation at Risk had weakened the long-standing
claims of local school boards to have the final say on educational policy,
and brought in more powerful state political and economic elites who now
increasingly saw education policy as part of their purview.
Changing politics and policy: Democrats, Republicans converge; schools,
teachers, unions resist. Inevitably, the changes described above in who was
involved in education and what was debated would manifest themselves in
a series of policy reforms. Looking across the three states, we will see that
the A Nation at Risk paradigm affected the goals of policymakers initiating
reform, weakened the hand of unions who sought to resist the reforms,
and created the broader public and interest group support that helped
pass and sustain standards-based reform. The power of this paradigm thus
helps to explain several of the puzzles listed above, including why a set of
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Table 2
Proportion of Michigan, Utah, and Maryland State of State Addresses Devoted to K-12 Education, by Governor, 1973–2005
Michigan Utah Maryland
Before A Nation at Risk
William Milliken (R), 1974–1982 5.4% Calvin Rampton (R), 1973–1978 3.0% Marvin Mandel (D), 1973–1977 3.1%
James Blanchard (D), 1983 0.0% Scott Matheson (R), 1979–1983 6.6% Blair Lee (D), 1978 2.4%
Harry Hughes (D), 1979–1983 2.4%
After A Nation at Risk
James Blanchard (D), 1984–1990 16.6% Norman Bangerter (D), 1985–1992 23.4% Harry Hughes (D), 1984–1986 5.7%
John Engler (R), 1991–2002 20.4% Michael Leavitt (R), 1993–2003 18.4% William Donald Schaefer (D), 1987–1994 6.4%
Jennifer Granholm (D), 2003–2005 18.6% Olene Walker (R), 2004 29.9% Parris Glendening (D), 1995–2002 17.5%
James Huntsman (R), 2005 20.3% Robert Ehrlich (R), 2003–2005 9.5%
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reforms triumphed despite the opposition of the strongest interest groups in
its domain (Puzzle 2), and why there was such wide policy convergence
around standards-based reform among different actors (Puzzle 3) and
from both sides of the political spectrum (Puzzle 4).
Across the three states, the initiating actors for standards-based reform came
from the left and the right,19 although the rationales for reform on both sides
grew out of aspects of the paradigm crystallized in A Nation at Risk. Two distinct, but overlapping, visions emerged. One vision, mostly championed by
mainstream Democrats on the left, emphasized the way that the changed economy would require higher skills for all students, particularly poor and minority
students, if they were to have a decent shot at competing in a postindustrial
economy. These equity liberals consistently supported standards as a way of
seeking to ensure that all students gained these skills, and sometimes supported
accountability as a top-down mechanism that would seek to ensure that schools
were making the needed changes to improve students’ skills. A second vision,
championed by those on the right, focused less on the equity implications of A
Nation at Risk’s analysis, and gave greater attention to the idea that state or
national competitiveness would be threatened if workers did not gain higher
skills. Coupled with this economic rationale was an emphasis on the need
for accountability, as, in the right’s view, external pressure was needed to force
a recalcitrant educational establishment to change. Both of these views shared A
Nation at Risk’s assumptions about the relationship between education and the
economy, the need for across the board rather than targeted improvement, the
emphasis on schools as opposed to society as the locus of change, and the need
for external accountability for results.
Maryland provides an example of the movement for standards from the
left. The impetus in Maryland was a 1989 commission report known as the
‘‘Sondheim Report,’’ named after its chair, Walter Sondheim. The report called
for a public accountability system for all of Maryland’s schools, driven by high
standards set by the state, to be enforced by a system of accreditation that
would evaluate whether each school was meeting those standards. The commission was appointed and given its charge by Democratic Governor William
Donald Schaefer, who was drawing upon an earlier memo written by
Maryland State Superintendent David Hornbeck. Hornbeck’s goals, as expressed in a 1987 memo and in an interview with the author, were to utilize
the newfound emphasis on school accountability both to spur improved practice in failing Baltimore city schools and to convince legislators to increase
their funding with the promise of greater results for those dollars. In
Maryland, one of the ‘‘bluest’’ states in the nation, the push for accountability
came out of a desire of those on the left at the state level to take control over,
and increase funding for, what state actors saw as failing high-poverty schools.
In Utah, by contrast, the movement for standards-based reform was
largely championed by the political right. Utah developed some early
standards-based policies in the wake of A Nation at Risk,
20 but these policies
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were underdeveloped in comparison to the comprehensive models that had
been developed in some other states. An influential white paper by former
Utah State Superintendent John Bennion summarized the efforts of three of
these leading states (Maryland, Texas, Kentucky), and his work was picked
up under the accountability banner by Republican State Representative
Tammy Rowan. Rowan had become convinced that the school system was
unduly lax in its standards as she watched her own daughter being passed
from grade to grade despite her weak reading skills (Haney, 1999). After reading Bennion’s paper, Rowan began to advocate a Texas-style system of
accountability, initiating a legislative task force that laid the groundwork for
what would become Utah’s standards-based system. Reflecting impatience
with the rate of improvement in the school system, Republicans in both the
governor’s office and the legislature argued for a system that placed heavier
emphasis on outcomes. Republican State Senator Howard Stephenson, the
cochair of the task force, argued in its initial meeting that a greater emphasis
on results was needed: ‘‘We’ve done a lot . . . but where are the results?’’ he
asked (Toomer-Cook, 1999b). Republican Governor Mike Leavitt supported
this view at a conference sponsored by the commission, stressing that ‘‘we
see the results in the inputs but not the results we want to see in the outputs’’
(Toomer-Cook. 1999c). In a heavily Republican state with few minority students, the rationale for reform lay not in preparing disadvantaged students
for the new economy, but rather in a desire to hold an underperforming
school system accountable for results.
If Maryland and Utah represent the ‘‘blue state’’ and ‘‘red state’’ versions
of the drive for standards-based reform, the story in Michigan was that of
a ‘‘purple state’’ in which Democrats and Republicans alternated in the
push for standards-based reform, but with different rationales and policy
tools. The need for reform of some sort was accepted by both parties beginning in the mid 1980s, as the message of A Nation at Risk resonated with the
declining Michigan automobile industry. A prominent 1987 Michigan commission on school finance comprised of leaders from business, industry,
agriculture, labor, education and government echoed the declensionist rhetoric of A Nation at Risk: ‘‘Michigan has a long and honored tradition of providing quality, equitable educational services for all of its people. This
tradition is now in jeopardy’’ (Michigan School Finance Commission,
Edgar Harden and Phillip Runkel, cochairs, p. 4). In response to this crisis,
Michigan political leaders took a series of steps towards standards-based
reform that can be roughly grouped into two movements: a movement
focused around standards, led by Democrats in the early part of the
1990s; and one for accountability, pioneered by Republican Governor
John Engler in the later part of the 1990s. The first movement was embodied
in the push for a state core curriculum, which many, particularly on the left,
saw as a mechanism to create greater similarity and therefore equity among
Michigan’s many districts. Over the objections of some conservatives who
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thought that a state curriculum impeded local control, the Michigan legislature passed a voluntary core curriculum in 1990, and a mandatory core curriculum in 1993. When Republicans took full control of the state legislature as
part of the 1994 Gingrich revolution, they abolished the core as an infringement upon local control. However, Governor Engler continued to demand
accountability through performance on state tests, seeking to tighten state
accreditation standards and close schools that were not making sufficient
progress on these tests. The push for accountability reflected a familiar conservative belief about the unwillingness of schools and unions to make needed
changes. As one Republican legislator said, ‘‘The schools are not going to
change unless change is forced upon them’’ (Vergari, 1996, p. 213). Overall,
while some important differences between the parties remained, both supported some version of standards or accountability, drawing upon A Nation
at Risk’s assumptions about the schools as the primary source of economic
decline and the corresponding need for system-wide reform.
That many Democrats and Republicans had converged did not mean
that there was consensus around educational accountability. Rather, the
new cleavages were institutional rather than partisan, with the central divisions now between state politicians and officials who were holding the
accountability strings, and teachers, who were the ones being held to
account. In all three states, teachers unions vehemently protested the
move for greater accountability, arguing that accountability by testing was
unfair or unproductive. A survey by the Maryland State Teachers
Association (Maryland’s largest teachers’ union and the state affiliate of the
NEA) found that its members thought the proposed accountability and
accreditation measures had ‘‘limited value’’ and that a better approach would
be to help tackle the problems they faced by removing disruptive students,
providing help for clerical chores, and freeing teachers from tasks such as
monitoring lunchrooms. MSTA leader Jane Stern publicly challenged the
merits of the program in a joint appearance with commission chair Walter
Sondheim on the Today Show in 1989 shortly after the Sondheim report
was released.21 Similarly, the Michigan Education Association (MEA), one
of the most powerful teachers unions in the country, argued in the early
1990s that standardized testing, particularly for minority students, was likely
to be harmful, and ‘‘encourag[ed the] curtailment or elimination of group
standardized, aptitude or achievement assessments until such time as a critical appraisal of current testing programs [has] taken place.’’ The MEA also
asserted that ‘‘teachers must have a say in determining who will be assessed,
when, and on what; which assessments to use and why.’’ In Utah, almost
a decade later, a similar pattern prevailed, as the Utah Education
Association appropriated their opponents’ favorite word and argued that
legislators needed to be ‘‘held accountable’’ as well. Phyllis Sorenson, president of the Utah Education Association, made this argument repeatedly:
‘‘For me, the bottom line is: If they want to hold schools accountable,
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then, by darn, legislators should be held accountable for the amount that is
spent on education’’ (Haney, 1999). Teachers also argued that the scores
would simply reflect the backgrounds from which their students came.
‘‘This can be compared to students being graded according to their height
and father’s yearly income, and it is unfair,’’ said sixth-grade teacher Amy
Martz. ‘‘Your threats . . . will only disrupt students, demoralize teachers
and disable communities’’ (Kapos, 1999). Finally, teachers also argued that
they were professionals whose authority and discretion should be respected.
Teachers were not shy about voicing what they felt was an unwarranted
abrogation of their authority. ‘‘You people need to quit threatening us and
come into the classroom and see what it is we do,’’ said teacher Deanna
Johnson at a public forum on the proposed reforms’’ (Kapos, 1999). ‘‘I would
never tell a doctor or lawyer how to run his practice,’’ she added. ‘‘You need
to come spend more time in the classroom’’ (Toomer-Cook, 1999a).
But on each of these grounds—that tests were not good measures of
school quality, that funding was the key to improvement, that society and
not schools should be responsible for test scores, and that teachers should
be trusted to improve their own practice—the arguments of the teachers
and their unions were running in the face of the paradigm set by A
Nation at Risk. In Michigan, Engler was able to effectively create a distinction
between teachers, to whom he pledged respect and admiration, and teachers’ unions, which he fought as an enemy of excellence and free enterprise
(Boyd, Plank, & Sykes, 2000). A September 1993 Free Press poll found that
58% of the Michigan citizenry either strongly agreed or somewhat agreed
with the statement that teachers’ unions were too powerful (Vergari, 1996,
p. 173). In Maryland, Governor Schaefer repeatedly portrayed teachers in
the media as agents of the status quo. On the day the report was released,
he said, ‘‘Whenever you try to shake up education, you immediately run
into a lot of problems because people love the status quo. I just hope the
report shakes up education and sends us in a new direction’’ (Lally, 1989).
Editorials in The Baltimore Sun, The Evening Sun, and The Washington
Post all endorsed the commission’s recommendations using similar reasoning, further rhetorically isolating the education community and emboldening
the reformers.22 Finally, in Utah, arguments for professional control were rebuffed by critics like Rowan, who, using the ‘‘no excuses’’ framework, were
not mollified by the appeal to professional expertise. ‘‘The task force’s ultimate goal is to no longer make or accept excuses about why children can’t
learn but instead to do whatever it takes to help every child learn the basics
of math, reading and language,’’ wrote Rowan in The Deseret News. ‘‘This is
the very minimum of what we should expect from our schools’’ (Rowan,
1999). By labeling the impact of social background as an excuse rather
than a legitimate difficulty in the schooling process, Rowan was mobilizing
one of the critical assumptions of A Nation at Risk against criticisms from
teachers. In all three states, standards and accountability legislation was
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victorious, as the material resources of the unions were negated by a rhetorical climate that undermined many of their strongest arguments.
Finally, the paradigm of A Nation at Risk not only put teachers on the
rhetorical defensive; it also created a set of allies for the standards and
accountability movement. The paradigm had convinced legislators from
left and right; it also had been embraced by the business community, state
departments of education, some civil rights groups, and the public across
the three states. These groups, despite their differences, sat on the right
side of the institutional divide—demanding accountability rather than being
subject to it. The lead actors varied considerably across the states—a state
superintendent in Maryland, a policy entrepreneur and a state legislator in
Utah, state legislators and a governor in Michigan—but what appears to
be theoretical chaos from the perspective of an actor-based theory instead
appears theoretically ordered from the perspective of an ideational one.
All of these actors shared an overlapping view of the problem drawn from
A Nation at Risk, and, more broadly, they sat on one side of a set of institutional cleavages created by the new paradigm.
The Transformation of Federal Policy: The Long
Shadows of A Nation at Risk
The consensus around standards-based reform at the state level paved the
road for federal standards legislation, first in two pieces of legislation in 1994
(Goals 2000 and the reauthorization of the ESEA) and then in the 2001 No
Child Left Behind Act. Table 3 briefly summarizes the trajectory of federal
reform. Unlike the state reforms, the details of the federal reform have been
well-described by previous scholars (see DeBray, 2006; Jennings, 1998;
McGuinn, 2006), so I focus here briefly on four conceptual points about the
power of the A Nation at Risk paradigm in setting the direction for reform
and particularly in enabling a major shift towards federal control (Puzzle 5).23
First, A Nation at Risk provided the impetus and basis for what became
the federal movement for reform. The meeting between President George
H.W. Bush and the nation’s governors at Charlottesville (the Charlottesville
Summit) in 1989 is widely agreed to be the first step at the federal level
towards standards-based reform (McGuinn, 2006; Vinovskis, 1999). For the
governors, it reflected an effort to create national support for a state school
reform movement which had been developing since A Nation at Risk. For
the president, it provided a way to stake his claim to an issue that had
been rising in voters’ concerns since A Nation at Risk (Hess & McGuinn,
2002). While there has been some disagreement about whether the governors or the president initiated the meeting,24 the important point from this
perspective is that the two groups were able to come together because
they had a similar understanding of the educational problem, as the joint
communique´ released at the end of the meeting suggested: ‘‘The President
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Table 3
Developments of Federal Education Policy, 1989–2001
Year Event Details
1989 National Education
Summit
Governors and President George H.W. Bush meet in Charlottesville. Agree to National Education
Goals, including goals to improve performance in math and science (first in the world by 2000);
also agree to assess students’ performance at 4th, 8th, and 12th grades.
1991 America 2000
(failed legislation)
Proposed creation of voluntary national standards.
Was not enacted.
Championed by President George H.W. Bush; opposition from Republicans to federal control and
Democrats to testing defeats legislation.
1994 Goals 2000 Congressional legislation that provides seed money for states to voluntarily develop standards.
Avoids fight over national standards by focusing on state standards.
Championed by President Bill Clinton, supported by Democratic Congress; opposition from
Republicans seeking to limit federal role in schools.
1994 Improving
America’s Schools
Act (1994
reauthorization of
the ESEA)
Passed after Goals 2000.
Conditions Title I money on the development of state standards and assessments. Introduces idea
that states should show ‘‘adequate yearly progress’’ in return for Title I funds.
Avoids fight over national standards by letting states set standards.
Sets policy framework for what would become No Child Left Behind.
Championed by President Bill Clinton, supported by Democratic Congress; opposition from
Republicans seeking to limit federal role in schools.
2001–2002 No Child Left
Behind (2001
reauthorization of
the ESEA)
Evolution, not revolution, from 1994 ESEA. Same framework of federal government building on
state standards-based reform.
Adds harder edge of accountability: annual student testing in grades 3–8, escalating set of sanctions
if schools do not make ‘‘adequate yearly progress.’’
Other big change is new support from Republicans. Championed by President George W. Bush;
overwhelming bipartisan approval in both Senate and House.
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and the nation’s Governors agree that a better educated citizenry is the key
to the continued growth and prosperity of the United States. . . . [A]s a Nation
we must have an educated workforce, second to none, in order to succeed
in an increasingly competitive world economy.’’ The key outcome of the
meeting was a set of National Education Goals, a series of educational targets
that the nation would aim to meet by 2000. These goals also reflected the
paradigm defined by A Nation at Risk in that they focused primarily on output targets rather than increased inputs. Most notably, they promised that
America would be first in the world in international tests of math and science
by 2000, a goal that was consistent with the focus on international competition in A Nation at Risk.
Second, the convergence of a redefined educational paradigm with
broader changes in party politics in the 1990s and early 2000s created a context in which leaders of both parties saw advantage in pushing a centrist
agenda of standards-based reform at the federal level. The push to embrace
federal standards-based reform came in two movements: President Clinton
brought Democrats on board for Goals 2000 and the 1994 ESEA legislation,
and President George W. Bush brought along Republicans for No Child Left
Behind in 2001. For President Clinton, federal support for standards was
a natural extension of the work he had done on standards in Arkansas
and as the governor’s cochair at the Charlottesville Summit. It also supported
his claim to be a New Democrat, as holding schools accountable and challenging the teachers unions enabled him to separate himself from old-style
liberals’ argument that fixing schools meant sending more money. Taking
on a Democratic Congress who wanted the 1994 ESEA reauthorization to
be primarily about funneling greater resources to high-poverty students,
Clinton successfully argued, consistent with both A Nation at Risk and his
New Democrat philosophy, that the path to improved performance was
not more money but higher standards and greater accountability for results.
For President George W. Bush, education proved to be the perfect issue on
which to stake his claim to be a ‘‘compassionate conservative,’’ mixing traditionally liberal ends of creating opportunities for disadvantaged students
with conservative means of standards and accountability. Bush renounced
the longtime Republican stance in favor of abolishing the Department of
Education in favor of a Texas-style regime of more tests and accountability,
substantially erasing the nearly 30-point edge that Democrats had previously
held on the educational issue. When he made education reform his primary
domestic initiative during his first year, he was able to bring over
Republicans in Congress who had previously been hostile to greater degrees
of federal control (see DeBray, 2006; Rudalevige, 2003, for more detail on
the congressional politics). Overall, both presidents did tack to the center
as the median voter theorem would predict, but A Nation at Risk is important
in explaining the context in which it came to be rational to do so. A Nation at
Risk set the parameters for what seemed like sensible centrist education
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reform, and it triggered the state reform movement that gave these former
governors experience with standards in the first place.25
Third, the new paradigm created a wide basis of support behind the
standards-based vision at the federal level. This coalition, developed in the
early 1990s, was critical to the passage of the 1994 ESEA, and was similarly
supportive of No Child Left Behind. As in the states, these groups came
from left and right, with concerns ranging from economic competitiveness
to greater equity—they supported similar policies, but not for the same reasons. Business groups, including the Chamber of Commerce, the National
Alliance of Business, and most prominently the Business Roundtable, began
to throw their support behind educational reform as a central input in the battle for international economic competitiveness. The National Governors
Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers were each composed of many members who were pursuing some version of standards
and accountability in their states; these collective associations in turn advocated federal Helpance to state standards-based reform. Equity-driven groups
like the Education Trust and the Citizens Commission on Civil Rights also
became strong backers of standards-based reform. Influential policy academics came on board, most notably Stanford’s Marshall ‘‘Mike’’ Smith, who is
credited with an influential early formulation of standards-based reform
(Smith & O’Day, 1991), and the Fordham Foundation’s Checker Finn, perhaps
the best-known conservative commentator on education reform. These
groups and individuals helped to develop the framework for standards
based-reform in the early 1990s and provided critical direction and support
for federal standards legislation. When Clinton drew together his policy
team, much of its expertise came from those who had been extensively
involved in the standards movement, including Secretary of Education
Richard Riley, the former governor of South Carolina; Undersecretary of
Education Mike Cohen, who had been the NGA’s lead education staffer at
Charlottesville and was former copresident of the National Alliance for
Restructuring Education; and Mike Smith, the coauthor of the systemic reform
framework. As was the case in the states, this wide coalition was able to overcome the objections of the NEA to greater accountability.26
Fourth and finally, the paradigm enabled the expansion of the federal
role (Puzzle 5) because the paradigm had created a convergence among
state reforms on which the federal government could piggyback without
seeming overly intrusive. Forty-two states had some version of standards
by 1994, and the federal legislation was crafted to expand upon these existing efforts. Goals 2000 funded the development of state standards; and the
Improving America’s Schools Act, which was the 1994 reauthorization of
the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, predicated the delivery of
Title I funds on the development of state standards-based reform. While
George H.W. Bush’s proposal for national standards had gone down to
political defeat, Clinton was able to head off the most virulent objections
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to national control by building on state standards. No Child Left Behind in
turn built upon the framework established in the 1994 reforms—an ‘‘evolution’’ not a ‘‘revolution’’ as one scholar put it (McDonnell, 2005)—but added
a harder edge of accountability. In a neat move of jujitsu, federal policymakers and advocacy groups simultaneously drew upon the existence of
state action to claim legitimacy for federal reforms that built on top of
them, but criticized the slow and uneven pace of state reforms to argue
that more stringent federal measures were necessary.27 The result was No
Child Left Behind, which simultaneously deferred to states in the content
of the standards and the cut scores for success, but also created a series of
requirements—mandating annual tests in grades 3 through 8 and creating
an escalating series of sanctions for schools that did not improve—that substantially increased federal requirements for states and schools. In the longer
view, by creating a movement of state reform, A Nation at Risk enabled the
federal government to gradually expand its influence in a previously local
realm by creating a state consensus (49 states had adopted standards by
2001) upon which the federal government could piggyback.
Discussion and Conclusion
American educational policy was transformed between 1980 and 2001.
Standards and accountability rose to the top of the state and federal political
agenda, long-standing cleavages between Democrats and Republicans diminished as the two parties united behind top-down reform, and long-standing traditions of local control gave way to unprecedented state and then federal
involvement. These changes were sparked by the emergence of a newly dominant paradigm, which emphasized schooling’s economic importance, the need
for across-the-board improvement, the responsibility of schools rather than society for tackling the reform challenges, and measurement of success by test
scores. This powerful paradigm sparked changes throughout the political landscape around education reform, raising the agenda status of the issue, bringing
in powerful actors who previously were uninterested in the issue, and setting
and delimiting the direction of the debate. At both the state and federal level,
it created new cleavages between political elites and advocacy groups demanding greater accountability and standardization from above, and teachers and
their representatives seeking to maintain greater autonomy and discretion at
the school level. Over time, first states and then the federal government settled
on standards-based reform as the vehicle for these changes; standards and
accountability were consistent with the new paradigm, and drew support
from left, center, and right, although not always for the same reasons.
This idea-centered account can explain the puzzling aspects of these
changes that are unexplained by other approaches. The shift to a postindustrial
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economy, with an accompanying claim that individual, state, and national
economic viability depended on improved educational performance, accounts for the increase in the attention devoted to education reform (Puzzle
1). The paradigm contained themes from the mainstream left and right:
from the left a desire to promote equity by increasing standards, particularly
in high poverty schools; from the right a sense that the system was averse
to change and required external pressure for reform. Both of these strands
were captured in A Nation at Risk and in standards-based reform,28 making
the paradigm and the policy attractive to elites on both sides of the political
spectrum (Puzzle 2). The key actors pushing standards-based reform varied
from case to case because they were all operating within a paradigm that
gave them a similar definition of the problem; what looks like theoretical
chaos from an actor-centered perspective looks relatively straightforward
from an ideational one (Puzzle 3). The combination of this coalition and
a changed rhetorical climate that depicted teachers unions as defenders of
an increasingly defunct status quo effectively neutralized the unions’ considerable material power, explaining why the reforms ran counter to the desires of
the single strongest actors in the system (Puzzle 4). Finally, the new paradigm
explains the institutional shifts that resulted in greater state and later federal
involvement (Puzzle 5). By emphasizing the economic effects of schooling,
the new paradigm gave state legislators a stake in an arena that had been outside of their scope; and by setting a common direction for the debate, it created enough similarity among state reforms for the federal government to
extend its reach by building on these reforms.
This argument fills gaps left by other accounts of these same changes.
Much previous work has focused on the federal politics of education
(Cross, 2004; DeBray, 2006; Kosar, 2005; Manna, 2006; McGuinn, 2006),
while paying little empirical attention to the state origins of the reforms
(but see McDermott, 2011). The account presented here develops evidence
on the states, showing how states with different political histories came to
take similar approaches, which in turn enabled federal reforms. Previous accounts, particularly Manna’s (2006), have shown how America’s federal system provides opportunities for borrowing of educational policy between
levels of government; but in their emphasis on institutional structures,
they offer less of an account of the timing of the reforms or their substantive
content. In contrast, by focusing on how the emergence of a paradigm structured subsequent policy reform, this argument offers an explanation of why
the reforms emerged when they did and why they took the particular substantive form that they did. Finally, previous accounts have emphasized
how strategic politicians on both left and right moved to claim the center
on educational policy (DeBray, 2006; Kosar, 2005) and have briefly alluded
to the historical context in which these shifts took place. The argument presented here moves the history of this changing context to center stage,
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offering a theoretical account of exactly how and why the context shifted
such that accountability and federal control become mainstream policy
positions.
This piece also seeks to contribute to the literature on ideas in politics by
closely documenting how a new paradigm was able to reshape a variety of
aspects of the social and political landscape, eventually resulting in new policy and major institutional shifts in responsibility. The new paradigm affected
the content of what was being discussed, the agenda status of the issue, the
players involved, their standing to speak, and the venue in which the issue
was debated. Paradigms create politics, and can explain major shifts not only
in what key policymakers think, but also in the social and political landscape
that surrounds an issue.
This perspective reflects a cultural ontology that both complements and
challenges interest group approaches. It complements these perspectives in
that it does not seek to deny that interest groups matter or that the nature of
decision rules affects outcomes. But, at a deeper level, it challenges the
notion that groups have preset ‘‘interests’’ or that institutions have given
realms of authority. Rather it suggests that the content of interests need to
be defined, as do the scope of institutional responsibilities. Ideas are not
opposed to interests and institutions. Interests and institutions are ideas
about what we should be for and who should decide what.
Understanding how paradigms shape politics illustrates concretely the way
in which a changing menu of ideas can recast the purposes and goals of
interest groups and institutions.
Finally, understanding the causes and consequences of new paradigms
can help to explain the vexing questions of ‘‘path-shaping’’ change. Path
dependent forms of historical institutionalism have been critiqued as seeming to foreclose the potential for significant change, as actors’ agency is constrained by historical choices often made decades ago (Clemens & Cook,
1999). This account, by contrast, joins some recent institutionalist scholars
(Lieberman, 2002; Streeck & Thelen 2005; Thelen, 2004) in emphasizing
how a multiplicity of ideas, logics, or orders are always at play (Binder,
2007; Davies & Binder, 2007), creating recurring opportunities for change.
Once these diverse strands are linked together into a powerful master narrative, they can reverberate outwards, creating changes in the politics, policy,
institutional control, and substantive direction of entire policy arenas.
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Notes
1
There is one important exception to this claim. The national American Federation of
Teachers (AFT), when led by Al Shanker, was for the most part supportive of standards
and accountability. Elsewhere I have argued that Shanker’s support was also a by-product
of the paradigm created by A Nation at Risk (Mehta, in press-a). 2
The paradigm was ‘‘new’’ in the sense that it crystallized a master narrative that was
different from what had come immediately before. At the same time, as I have argued elsewhere, the way in which the educational problem was defined here is quite similar to the
way it has been defined at other times in our nation’s history (see Mehta, in press-a, in
press-b). It is also the case that the most recent paradigm resonated in part because it built
upon strands that had been developing in the period that preceded it, but gained its
impact by bringing these strands together in a particularly forceful way. 3
Technically, states could choose to opt out of the requirements of No Child Left
Behind by refusing the money that comes with federal support of education through
Title I. While some states threatened to pull out, no state did so. 4
It should be noted that the national AFT has shown greater support of standards and
accountability, due in large part to the leadership of Albert Shanker, although local AFT
affiliates have not been as supportive. 5
As Paul Pierson (2003) has emphasized, rational choice theories are among the
modes of political science explanation that employ a short time horizon, with the consequence of minimizing potentially more important longer term causes. 6
Evidence on Maryland, Michigan, and Utah comes from this study; on Kentucky and
particularly Texas, see Toch (1991). 7
For example, compare Skocpol (1979) to Rueschemeyer and Skocpol (1996).
8
On the necessity of integrating the normative and the empirical, see Putnam (2002).
9
Baumgartner and Jones (1993) also discuss the effects of changing issue definition
on politics—the difference here is that this article seeks to more specifically map the different dimensions that are changed when a problem definition changes. 10See also Schattschneider (1960) and Baumgartner and Jones (1993). 11This view differs from other accounts of the policy process. It complements John
Kingdon’s (1984) well-known account of the way in which policy entrepreneurs link
the problem, policy, and politics streams in key policy windows. Kingdon’s account
Appendix
Variation Among States Chosen for Case Studies
State Utah Michigan Maryland
Initial test scores High Moderate High
Initial per pupil spending Low (lowest in the nation) Moderate High
Minority population Low High High
Political context Republican Mixed Democratic
Level of local control Moderate High Low
Finance equity cases No Yes Yes
Political culture Moralistic Moralistic Individualistic
Initial state educational capacity Low High High
Note. Test scores, per pupil spending, and minority population are from the State Politics
and Policy Quarterly Database. They are measured as of 1988, before the movement to
standards-based reform. Political culture is from Elazar (1984), and finance equity data
comes from Reed (2001). Political context refers to control of the legislature and the governorship. Political context is for the 1990s, the period when the reforms took place.
Classifications of initial state capacity are based on interviews with my respondents.
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does well to explain the politics of enactment in the short-term; the approach I have
developed here explains why there is continuity in the agenda over the longer run and
how the context is created in which actors make their short-term calculations. The
Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) (Sabatier &Jenkins-Smith, 1993) has some similarities in that it too is also concerned with actors and ideas, but this framework gives more
emphasis to the way that ideas in the problem space inspire, frame and delimit the positions actors’ take, whereas ACF is more about actors using ideas to find allies and build
coalitions. Baumgartner and Jones’s (1993) punctuated equilibrium model is perhaps
the closest to the argument developed here, and I build on their work, but this piece differs by specifically delineating the array of mechanisms through which new paradigms can
reshape politics. 12The 1994 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act premised
Title I aid on development of standards-based reform, but subsequent reports showed that
states were uneven in their development of standards, and no money was ever taken
away.13Thus in total, this study considers four case studies of the movement to standardsbased reform, three at the state level, and one at the federal level. Increasing the number
of cases within the larger case study provides for greater confidence in the Assessment of
causal inferences (King, Keohane, & Verba, 1994). 14The other two were Charles A. Foster, who was the immediate past president of the
Foundation for Teaching Economics; and Annette Y. Kirk, wife of conservative intellectual
Russell Kirk, whose affiliation at the time was given as ‘‘Kirk Associates.’’ 15As they write, ‘‘We conclude that declines in educational performance are in large
part the result of disturbing inadequacies in the way the educational process itself is often
conducted.’’ While the report repeatedly mentioned the importance of a wide variety of
stakeholders, including parents, students, unions, business groups and legislatures, its
call for excellence focused primarily on schools themselves as the prime enforcers of
a new set of expectations (National Commission on Educational Excellence, 1983). 16Given the growing conflation of educational and economic ends, the share of the
addresses devoted to education would grow even further if discussion of schooling in
the sections on economic development were included in the count. (To allow for comparability over time, the measure used in the charts and figure is limited to the sections that
are devoted only to education, excluding mentions of education in the sections on the
economy.) Roughly 30% of the 2000 address, for example, was devoted to education if
mentions of education in the economic development section are included. 17This address actually came shortly before the publication of A Nation at Risk in
April of 1983. My full argument in a book in press (Mehta, in press-a), which is necessarily
abridged here, suggests that while the agenda status of education showed a sharp and discontinuous change after A Nation at Risk, the change in the problem definition was happening more gradually. Specifically, changes to the economy made it clear to a wide
variety of analysts that schooling would become more important economically; A
Nation at Risk was the report that crystallized this message and gave it much wider currency, but it was not the first to identify these developments. 18While it is of course true that economic mobility has always been one of the major
purposes of schooling, the period since A Nation at Risk has shown an elevation of the
economic purpose over the other purposes of schooling. 19‘‘Left’’ and ‘‘right’’ here are broad terms that encompass elected officials, advocacy
groups, and others on each side of the American political spectrum who came to support
the standards movement for different reasons. This was a coalition of mainstream liberals
and conservatives in the middle against those further to the left and right. In contrast to the
majority coalition, there were a smaller number of actors further to the left who opposed
the standards movement because it held students accountable without supplying sufficient
opportunities to learn, and a similar group on the far right that opposed the standards
movement for overextending state and federal reach into local schools. 20Beginning shortly after A Nation at Risk, the state developed a core curriculum
(1984); norm-referenced tests for all 5th, 8th, and 11th graders (1990); and criterionreferenced tests (1990s) for a sample of students.
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21In Stern’s telling, the primary problem was resources; accountability was a way of
deferring legislative responsibility. Politicians ‘‘have it backward,’’ she said in her yearly
address to the MSTA in November of 1989. ‘‘When they tell us that there’s no more money
for education, we should tell them they’re not really trying and that they should try harder’’
(Merwin, 1989). 22The Baltimore Sun wrote that the report’s recommendations were ‘‘so commonsensical they are bound to be controversial. Educators, after all, are often distinguished by
professional arrogance,’’ which has ‘‘put them increasingly at odds with the politicians
who hold the purse strings.’’ The Evening Sun picked up on the resources theme, arguing
that ‘‘how money is spent can be as important as how much is spent.’’ See The Baltimore
Sun (1989, p. 18A), The Evening Sun (1989, p. A20), The Washington Post (1989, p. A20). 23It also provides an additional case for understanding why left and right converged
(Puzzle 2), why a variety of actors supported reform (Puzzle 3), and why unions were
unable to defeat it (Puzzle 4). 24The conventional understanding is that Bush initiated the meeting; Manna (2006)
argued that the impetus came from the governors. 25For Bush in particular, he inherited a state movement that was already under way:
the Texas school accountability system, which was put in place shortly after A Nation at
Risk and which Bush continued when he became governor in 1994 (Rudalevige, 2003,
p. 50, note 28). 26Of the two major unions, the NEA has been particularly publicly opposed to
accountability; the story of the AFT is more complicated. For details, see Koppich (2005). 27A 1999 report from the Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights sharply criticized the
lack of implementation of the 1994 ESEA. Their analysis revealed ‘‘wide variance in the
degree to which states have complied with the new Title I,’’ with some states still resistant
to adopting standards-based reform. Arguing that these states were subverting the intention of the law, the Commission noted, ‘‘Many states and local officials have received the
impression that the new Title I is largely a deregulation law that will free them from bothersome federal conditions, and have failed to understand that the tradeoff in the law is
higher standards and accountability for results’’ (Yu & Taylor, 1999). 28Standards-based reform was thus a centrist policy vehicle that appealed to both left
and right. Other policy proposals, particularly market-based approaches, were also consistent with some of the assumptions of A Nation at Risk (as well as a broader conservative
shift in the political economy), but were not able to win as widespread support as standards because they drew supporters from the right but were opposed by portions of the
left. At both the state and federal levels, conservatives like Engler and George W. Bush jettisoned market-based proposals in favor of standards-based ones in order to pick up
enough support from the left to assure passage.
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Manuscript received February 8, 2012
Final revision received September 7, 2012
Accepted October 18, 2012
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