Curriculum Studies in Relation to the Field of Educational Policy

Educational policy frequently impacts the school curriculum, either directly or indirectly, and consequently, should be a major concern of scholars in curriculum studies. The term educational policy refers to the rules and regulations that direct and govern schools, higher education institutions, and other organizations, programs, and initiatives that consciously promote learning. Policies normally are explicitly articulated and formally established; sometimes, however, the norms and standard operating procedures of organizational culture can function as quasi-policies and make formal policies unnecessary.

Although policies can be written more as suggestions than directives, a policy also can spell out significant consequences for complying or failing [Page 259]to comply with policy mandates. A recent example of an educational policy that stipulates negative consequences is the No Child Left Behind Act enacted by the United States government.

Policy making is often equated with governmental action, and indeed, in the United States, some of the most important educational policies are made by school boards, state governments, and increasingly, federal officials. In other countries with more centralized governance structures (and national curriculums), the national government is the primary actor in the policy making arena.

Governmental officials are not the only people who make educational policy, however. Because all groups need at least informal policies to operate, even teachers, who are not normally thought of as policy makers, must develop policies to manage their classrooms. Research suggests that some of these policies (e.g., the policies teachers establish to form small instructional groups in their classes) are among the most significant for promoting—and inhibiting—student learning.

The field of educational policy making is more difficult to define—or even find. To be sure, in recent years the American Educational Research Association established a division called Educational Policy and Politics, but the association members who are most influential in the governmental policy-making process often are not affiliated with the division. In universities, educational policy programs sometimes are subsumed under—and at times indistinguishable from—educational administration programs; in addition, students getting degrees in public policy, public administration, political science, and economics can specialize in education policy and policy making.

To further complicate matters, in recent years some educational foundations programs (i.e., programs whose faculty focus their teaching and scholarship on discipline-based subjects such as educational history and educational philosophy) have rebranded themselves as policy studies programs. In other education colleges, the educational policy label has been affixed to some of the large departmental amalgams created by consolidation initiatives. These departments house a variety of education specializations (including, at times, curriculum studies); some of the specializations are, at best, only peripherally related to educational policy and policy making as these terms normally are defined.

It would be reasonable to assume that most curriculum scholars would be interested in educational policy and that some would be influential in governmental policy making. For the most part, however, curriculum and policy scholars have inhabited separate universes. This separation did not occur accidentally. William Pinar and Madeleine Grumet, for example, explicitly argued that scholars in a reconceptualized curriculum field should, at least initially, ignore policy making and focus their attention on more abstract theorizing. This explicit rejection of policy work is hardly surprising because policy is designed to control and manage situations, and most of those who reconceptualized curriculum studies in the final decades of the 20th century were suspicious of all forms of social control.

...