Posted: November 29th, 2014

reading response

reading response

Order Description

This week we’re thinking about the development and expansion of federal influence in state and locally administered schooling. Through what modes did federal actors exert influence over state and local forces from the 1960s onward? What complicated or impeded their efforts?

You may choose to structure your response in one of five
ways:
a. Respond to the prompt for the week
b. Reflect on how the reading relates to the major thematic questions of the course.
c. Respond to the reading based on an area of interest or concern of your own.
d. Propose a question for discussion about the readings, and explain why this question
emerged for your and why you think it is worth consideration as a class.
e. Respond to the post submitted by another student, keeping the focus on the content
of the reading and your interpretation of it.

3. The Early Federal Role in Education (to 1988)—ESEA and the Equity Regime
The U.S. Constitution does not mention education. In fact, before the 195os, edu-cation policymaking in our federal system was viewed primarily as a state and local responsibility. As a result, schooling in the United States—in contrast to Eu-rope and much of the rest of the world—has historically been a very decentralized and locally run affair.’ Education would not assume a prominent place in national politics until the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision de-clared segregated schools unconstitutional and initiated a long and controversial effort to integrate public education. The Brown decision, together with the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), initiated a new era of federal activism in education and laid the foundation of a policy regime that was to last for approximately thirty years. At the heart of the ESEA regime was a powerful equity rationale for federal government activism to promote greater economic op-portunity through more equal access to more equally funded schools. Initially ESEA was intended to provide additional resources to disadvantaged students with little federal involvement as to how the resources were utilized by state and local education authorities. Over time, however, federal legislative en-actments, bureaucratic regulations, and court mandates in education became increasingly numerous and prescriptive, and federal influence over schools grew significantly. As a result, the political debate shifted from whether the federal gov-ernment had an obligation to promote educational opportunity to making these efforts more effective and/or less intrusive. By the 198os the contentious politics of desegregation and growing skepticism about the efficacy of federal education programs led to a backlash against ESEA and fueled a reform movement that pro-moted administrative flexibility, parental choice, and outcome standards.
THE FEDERAL ROLE IN EDUCATION PRIOR TO ESEA
Federal involvement in school governance had little public support in the eigh-teenth and nineteenth centuries, and states and localities jealously guarded their prerogatives in education.’ The federal government helped spur the construction
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156 1 ELIZABETH DEBRAY-PELOT
40. M. McGuire, personal communication, April 21, 2007. 41. See DeBray-Pelot &McGuinn (forthcoming). 42. Quoted in Olson, “Standards get boost on the Hill.” 43. David Hoff, “NCLB panel calls for federal role in setting national standards.” Education Week February 13, 2007 [online edition]. 44. Quoted in Amit Paley, “‘No Child’ commission presents ambitious plan,” Washington Post, February 14, 2007, p A03. 45. Quoted in Amit Paley, “GOP bills would relax test requirements of ‘No Child’ law.” The Washington Post, March 16, 2007, A6. 46. Patricia Sullivan, personal communication, November 2005. 47. Allison Klein, “Governors enter fray over NCLB: State chiefs, boards join plan for revisions to law.” Education Week, April 11, 2007, 1. 48. Patricia Sullivan, personal communication, November 2005. 49. Quoted in Klein, “Governors enter fray over NCLB,” 28. 50. Lance Fusarelli, Gubernatorial reactions to No Child Left Behind: politics, Pressure, and educa-tion reform, Peabody Journal of Education, 80, 124. 51. Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith, Policy change and learning, 5. 52. Sabatier, “Policy change over a decade or more,” p. 31. 53. DeBray-Pelot &McGuinn (forthcoming). 54. Frank Baumgartner and Bryan Jones, Agendas and Instability in American Politics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
CHAPTER EIGHT
Equity AND Special Education
Some Historical Lessons FROM Boston
ADAM R. NELSON
What has the keyword equity meant in contemporary educational policy debates? Common sense might suggest that, substantively, the word equity should carry the same meaning for all students, but in fact, the word has substantively dif-ferent meanings for different groups. Owing to a series of exigencies that have emerged in state and federal law, the substantive meaning of equity differs, for example, for students in regular and special education. In a sense, all students in public schools are entitled to equitable, adequate, or appropriate education, but in an Orwellian twist, some are entitled to more equitable, adequate, or appropriate education than others. To explain how different groups came to warrant different services in public schools, this chapter looks at evolving concepts of “equal educational opportunity” in one urban district. Specifically, it uses the case of special education to examine the meaning of equity for diverse groups in Boston since the 1960s. Over, time, various policies arose at the local, state, and federal levels to guide the provision of special education services in Boston, but these policies did not serve all groups equally; more often than not, they perpetuated inequalities in the schools. The result has been confusion about the meaning of equity in both special and regular education. Embedded in special education debates in Boston have been complex questions about race and social class, as well as difficult questions about the best way to

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