Federal Educational Reform

A National Model of Standards Reform

Considerable scholarship has been devoted to describing the organization and emergence of standards-based reform as a national movement for educational improvement during the past decade. However, existing empirical treatments generally have been limited in scope, consisting of evaluations of specific programs within a particular state or comparisons across a family of programs in a few states. As a consequence, the extant knowledge base of standards-based reform is limited regarding both the extent to which the standards movement has been adopted nationwide across the states and the degree to which state initiatives have successfully influenced targeted aspects of schooling.

Standards-based reform initiatives promote an ambitious agenda in the sense that they aim to reach into individual classrooms, changing the nature of instruction with the ultimate goal of improving student learning. Earlier educational initiatives of the 1970s and 1980s attempted, largely unsuccessfully, to improve student performance indirectly through the imposition of funding formulas or formal regulatory requirements. Standards-based reform, on the other hand, is founded on a concrete model of educational practice that specifies new high standards curricula and instructional techniques for the classroom. This national model of reformed practice may provide a means for integrating policy at distant levels of the educational system with activities in local classrooms, a capacity generally lacking in earlier reforms. This new wave of reform invites a reconsideration of conventional understandings of the linkages between components of the educational system, like the state and classroom, and the role that these connections play in the development of a broad-based reform movement.

Investigating the relationship between policy and practice at two critical stages in the educational reform process is essential to understanding reform at the federal level. First, a coherent standards movement at the national level has likely produced systematic policy activism across the 50 states. Second, alignment exists between state-level standards activism and teachers' use of standards-based instructional practices within individual mathematics classrooms.

Loose Coupling of Educational Change

For several decades, organizational theorists have described educational organizations as “loosely coupled” organizations. The concept of loose coupling was inspired in part by work on organizational decision making and by studies of the social organization of schools and teaching. Later revisited, expanded, and applied in numerous ways, this idea has become a stock concept for researchers concerned with the dynamics of educational organization, particularly for those with interests in program implementation and effectiveness. Despite minor modifications and reconceptualizations during the intervening period, the basic logic of loose coupling as it applies to educational organizations has continued to hold sway in the field.

...