1
RESEARCH ESSAY
Research Essay
Julia Renberg
EDLE 813
GeorgeMasonUniversity
December 9, 2012
Abstract
The paper focuses onthe often difficult process of translatingeducationalpolicy intopractice[u1]. The essay examines the issue through the assessment of a debate that is currently unfolding in Virginia (VA) due to revisions in the commonwealth’s Standards of Learning (SOL) program[u2]. The author argues thatpolitical and social forces that influence state policy substantially differ from those affectinglocal educational organizations. A disconnect between those who plan for dramatic changes in learning outcomes and those who carry out the strategy into practice becomes evident when it leads to a distorted implementation of state mandated initiatives and sets up the possibility of conflict. Theauthor’s proposal for intervention includes recommendation to improve the knowledge communication between policy makers and practitioners, placing an accent[u3] on capacity building and altering the sanction nature and top-bottom orientation of the accountability-driven policies[u4].
Key words: policy, implementation.
Argument[u5]
In the United States, the most immediate hierarchical authority for public school systems is the state government. Since the United States has neither a national curriculum nor a national test, each state has its own process for developing, adopting, and implementing standards (Kober, 2006). This, however, does not take place in a vacuum; educational policy is shaped by a complex fusion of social and political forces.Over the past 40 years, the public expressedconcerns over the quality of education and the equality of educational opportunitiesin the United States.As the country entered a new level of capitalist advancement, typically captured under the term globalization, the competition for jobs began spreading from the national to the worldmarket. Accordingly, critics both in and out of government voiced their worry about weak academic standards and arguedthat students arenot educated forthe complexities of life and work in an “information age,” and that educators should be held accountable for what schools produce. Today,school accountability is at center stage of both political and societal arenas. No Child Left Behind Act, the latestfederal initiative, is a case in point. It requires significant gains and elimination of racialand social class differences in student achievement in an incredibly short period of time[u6].
Consequently, states respond to these amplified nation-wide pressuresand escalate their own accountability-driven demands.Yet while educational policies aim to solve identified and voiced problems, their success depends greatly on the implementation at the lower level. Socio-political factorsthat affect neighborhood public schools and districts, however, substantially deviate from the driving forces behind federal and state legislature. This disparity hinders the realization of educational policy aslocal educational organizationshustle to modify state-mandated initiatives to fit local contextual dynamics. Certainly, the situationwith recent changes in the VirginiaSOL assessment program clearly supports this argument[u7].
The Virginia case
State-mandated changes
Virginia's system of accountability is founded on the SOL program that was introduced in 1995 in response to the nation-wide demands to ensure that young people “can compete in the international economy of the 21st century and that students are responsible citizens of our democracy” (Thayer, 200). The new standards were to curtail the practice of promoting students before they were academically ready, addressing “the demands of Virginia’s business community that all high school graduates have demonstrated ability in such essential skills as reading, writing, and mathematics” (Thayer, 200). The recent changes “to meet national benchmarks for college- and career-ready content and rigor established by the national Common Core State Standards and the College Board” (VDOE, 2012) can also be viewed as a direct result of the latest developments in social and political field in the United States[u8]. Perceptibly, the new initiative seemsto have answered previously acknowledged concerns about thestates setting achievement standards too low in an effort to assure earning of Adequate Yearly Progress(AYP) and accreditation (Biddle, 2012) and thereby finding strong support among VA central political players. Furthermore, the revisions have likely served as an advantage during the process of obtaining a two-year waiver from certain provisions of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, which Virginia received in the summer of 2012,whichhelped the state in securing the federal American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) stimulus funds to blunt the effects of budget cuts in K-12 education(Rentner & Usher, 2012).
Local socio-political tensions
VA has been in the process of developing and administering new end-of-course SOL assessments for testing students on thenew content standards beginning with Mathematics in the 2011-12 school year and following up with Science and English in the 2012-13 school year. When new SOL assessments were administered across Virginia in 2012, however, the scores plummeted. For example, state-wide pass rate in Algebra I dropped from 84 percent in 2010 to 49 percent in the fall of 2011. Back in 1997, when SOL tests were first introduced, the Virginia Board of Education decided that passing these assessments will not become a graduation requirement until the class of 2004 and that no school could lose its accreditation because of poor performance on the tests until the 2007-2008 academic year. This was not a case in 2012.
The 2011-12 dramatic downward turn in math scorescreated anxiety and caused frustration among various groups of stakeholders: students, parents, teachers and educational leaders at district level. High school students had to pass the end-of-course SOL tests to earn verified credits for graduation, yet the majority were unsuccessful on the new mathematics test and had to take the assessment two or three times[u9]. Parents, although pleased that the new tests required students to think critically and be more analytical, worried that the state brought the changes all at once and had concerns with trying to understand the modifications that have been made, wondering how these changes would ultimately affect the future of their children (Richardson, 2012).Parents also reported that their children, who did not have much trouble with the practice SOL items posted on the VDOE website, said that “actual test was much harder” (DC Urban Moms and Dads, 2012). Without providing any specifics, Wright acknowledgedthat“the results of an unprecedented June survey of 11,000 VA teachers” and pledged to follow up by “creating new channels for direct communication of SOL-related information and resources in all content areas from VDOE to the classroom” (VDOE, 2012). Finally, district leaders expressed concern that the new tests could affect schools’ accreditation (Cutright, 2012).In fact, the VDOE press release of September 26, 2012 did reveal that the percentage of schools earning full accreditation for 2012-2013 was three points lower than the percentage that earned the highest rating for the previous academic year.
Districts’ Response
While Governor Robert F. McDonnell commended“all of our teachers and students for their excellent efforts in adapting to and embracing these new challenges ” (VDOE, 2012), districts across VA beganannouncing various plans for addressing the situation by focusing on professional development or data analysis, taking a close look at best practices and monitoring individual teachers whose results are exemplary, holding a summer academy for those students who do not pass the SOL, modifying division and classroom assessments, offering IT courses, or simply counting on more time for teachers and students “to get used to the broader curriculum and more challenging tests” (Prince William County Public Schools, 2012), anxiously awaiting the arrival of the new Science and English SOL in 2012-2013 school year.
The picture that emergedexemplifiedhow local educational organizations attempted to adequately respond to their own social and political pressures while staying in compliance with the state-mandated policy[u10]. And yet, there is little evidence that policy makers noticed any of this. On August 14, 2012 Superintendent of Public Instruction Patricia I. Wrightoptimistically announced that the scores indicate that the drop was expected and is temporary, and that the results “represent a good start and provide a solid foundation for further progress in 2012-2013” (VDOE, 2012).
Argument Development[u11]
In the days of “condemnation of the nation’s public schools” (Orci, 2011) and economic uncertainty, VA basically did what it had to do, as made evident in the statement by Board of Education President David M. Foster: “This is a necessary step in ensuring that Virginia students are ready to excel in our globally competitive economy” (VDOE, 2012). Large-scale political and social dynamics[u12], coupled withfederal legislature and monetary incentives offered by the national government, affected VAand,consequently, the state channeled its policy toward accountability-driven educational reform, following-on with the significant changes in the commonwealth’s SOL program. As this chain reaction continued, however, the new ambitious goals at the state level became stress factors for the local educational organizations that had to deal with the local politico-social tensions among students, parents, teachers, and district and school leaders. These visiblymixed outcomes created a wave of educational dispute concerned primarily with the impact of state-instigated educational policy and the responses of school systems to changes within their legislative boundaries.
Regrettably, the research dialog on policy implementation at the local level is rather limited. The relations between policy and practice are now somewhat controversial and there are doubts about the efficacy of policy. Many researchers suggest that the overall success of the accountability reforms depends greatly on practicality. Carl J. Friedrich (1941) wrote: “Public policy, to put it flatly, is a continuous process, the formation of which is inseparable from its execution. Public policy is being formed as it is being executed, and it is likewise being executed as it is being formed”. If that is so, then the quality of use willbe influenced by practitioners’ understanding and acceptance, and by the circumstances thatinfluence that approval. Policy makers’ legitimacy and interests seem to be directly dependent on the fate of reforms in practice, so they have reasons to accommodate practitioners’ concerns and capabilities. Yet policy and practice are often portrayed in opposition – policy makers attempt to secure compliance from implementerswho ignore, evade, or attemptto buffer themselves from policy (Cohen,Moffitt & Goldin, 2007; Honig and Hatch, 2004). This seems to beg a fundamental question: What is the root of this opposition?
I argue, that politico-social framework allows us to answer this query as we distinguishbetween stirring forces at the state level and the ones affecting local educational organizations. State educational agencies traditionally devote their efforts to deal with macro-scale demands coming from community and special interest groups, to assure compliance with federal and state, and to distribute resources. The resulting policy - labeled in literature as “top-down” - is concerned primarily with oversight and it gravitates heavily to a sanctions side. And so, states traditionally lack both the staff and the expertise to reform schools and pass the responsibility for school improvement to the lower levels of the educational system (Mintrop & Sunderman, 2009).
Research data suggest that local educational organizations readily acknowledge the legitimacy of state policies. Nevertheless,the well-being of any district, and of high-level district actors, is dependent on the district's conformity to neighborhood societal expectations and on its skill in managing local political realities (Hannaway, 1993). Districts and schools must cope with their own socio-political influences and find a way to utilize state-mandated initiatives to enlarge their own influence in given settings (Burch, 2007; Leithwood & Seashore, 2012). As seen in VA, no district has publicly questioned the legitimacy of the revisionsto the SOL program, yet there is also a plenty of evidence to support the notion of stress, confusion, and frustrationswaying acrossthe state. Thus, dealing with state-initiated policies necessitates a laborious undertaking for school districts,as they strive to comply with demands that do not always make sense in the local context (Spillane, 2004; Hannaway, 1993). Although some discretion or adaptation of is unavoidable, implementers’ discretion is believed to weaken policy (Cohen, Moffitt & Goldin, 2007[u13]).
What’s more, scholars declare that conceptualization of policy by individuals in different positions and at different levels of the system influence how districts respond and how policy plays out (Coburn & Talbert, 2006; Burch 2007). The issue of questionable legitimacy of the federal accountability system with those who are critical to its success – educators, who are often torn between assuming guilt for poor academic achievement of their students on widespread and publically appraised standardized tests and their professional discount of these measures. Certainly, this phenomenon could explain some of the confusion palpably evident in the statements made by educational leaders in VA who express their worries and yet enthusiastically claim that the results are“a good start and provide a solid foundation for further progress”(VDOE, 2012).
While many experts agree thatstate accountability systems are successful at focusing schools’ and districts’ attention on state assessments, whether systems’ responses ever progress beyond “compliance” stage to produce deeper changes in practices required by educational reform mandatesand whetherstudents actually learn more is doubtful (Terry, 2010; Mintrop and Sunderman, 2009; Honig and Hatch, 2004). Thisjumble of responses, aimed to meet district’s own local objectives while satisfying state-mandated initiatives, might be insufficient for the situations where more rigorous and cognitively complex performance demands have been introduced, resulting in an unproductive and unplanned turbulence with uncertain prospects for improvement. Any potential discontent that follows might set up a possibility fora conflict between policy makers and practitioners.
Proposal for Intervention
Standard-based reform, a dominant paradigm in the current federal and state governance,has createda new frame for education policy in which both educators and policymakers have an unprecedented need for much better knowledge about teaching,learning, and schoolimprovement (Cohen, Moffitt & Goldin, 2007). The case study of the current situation in Virginia concerned with the recent revisions in the commonwealth’s SOL program is an example of how the adverse character of the top-down reforms often places impractical demands on its lower levels. It is still unknown if public school districts in VA would be able to decrease instability and soften the impact of thesecompulsory changes by exploiting loopholes in its enforcement or, perhaps, negotiating policy design changes with the state, or they will continue “jumping through the hoops” and simply rely on schools to improve on their own. As 2012 comes to an end, it seems that policy has generatedanundesired disturbance. So, what can and should be done to alleviate the situation? First[u14], one enduring source of tension between policy andpractice is inadequate knowledge; therefore, improved knowledge could inform effortsto manage conflict increasing legitimacy and encouragepractitioners to adjust their interpretation of policy to something closer to conventionalpractice (Cohen, Moffitt & Goldin, 2007). When practitioners know little about what to do, there is a risk ofimplementation failure or service delivery disruption or resistance. The new on-line Teacher Direct page,designed “to provide a way to share new instructional resources created by VDOE staff as well as make teachers aware of professional development and grant opportunities, and other information of special interest to teachers and their students,” is a step in a right direction; however, it has yet to fulfill its promise of “direct communication of SOL-related information and resources in all content areas from VDOE to the classroom” and serves primarily as a spring board for the VDOE headline news. Next, policy makers must be less ignorant of practice and become directly involved, placing an accent on capacity building – direct material support and creation of an adequate school improvement infrastructure. Finally, the very character of the accountability reform should shift so that “state tests become a feedback device rather than an automatic sanctions trigger” (Mintrop and Sunderman, 2009, p. 361),and so individuals and agencies working at the local level are able to initiate the “bottom-up” transformation of policy.
Conclusion
As the continuingstory of Virginia’s accountability program and its revisions demonstrates, translation of educational policy into practice is not a smooth operation. The divergence of socio-political forces that drivethe actions of educators at the state level and those who are tasked with executionof policy leads to a problematic situation - initiatives, strategically designed to improve our schools, are being modifiedto meet local needs of those who, apparently, cause these problems at the first place. This dilemma lies at the heart of relations between policy and practice. To resolve it, measures must be taken to enable local educational organizations to do as policies propose by improving the knowledge communication between policy makers and practitioners, placing an accent on capacity building and altering the sanction nature and top-bottom orientation of the accountability-driven policies.
.Julia,
This is solid work and this essay has come a long way from earlier iterations. Your argument is much clearer. This work has great potential here. However, I still want to encourage you to make better use of the social and political framework. While you mention social and political forces, you don’t specifically say what they are, where they come from or what impact they have. You need to be more explicit. Read through my comments above for some places where you can push your analysis further. I hope you stick with this topic as you move forward in your doctoral work.
The rubric posted to taskstream by our tech people was incorrectly formatted. Based on the rubric in the syllabus, you earn an A- on this essay. Well done. Thank you for your hard work this semester.