Chapter 3: Actors, Interests, and Actions in Shaping State Education Policy

The current educational policy landscape across the United States stands in stark contrast to its form 40 years ago. Since the publication of A Nation at Risk (National Commission on Excellence in Education [NCEE], 1983), which created a great sense of urgency about academic achievement and possible consequences for U.S. global competitiveness, a “new politics of education” has emerged (DeBray-Pelot & McGuinn, 2009), culminating in the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA) as the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) and most recently as the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015 (ESSA). Ellison and Aloe (2018) described the new politics of education as an “integrated, mutually reinforcing policy paradigm informed by orthodox neoclassical economic theory and neoliberalism” with bipartisan consensus about “choice, standards, testing, and accountability” (p. 2). In tandem, these policies create a quasi-market for educational services that purportedly provides political power to students and parents by positioning them as rational actors who choose to attend a particular school based on the relative quality of education provided, operationalized to a great extent by aggregated test scores. However, as Petracca (1991) acknowledged, rationality is often treated narrowly as self-interest and, thus, “values, ethics, and ideas on individual motivation are alien to rational choice theories of human nature” (p. 297). Furthermore, Jabbar (2011) described how concepts from behavioral economics (e.g., status quo bias, the paradox of choice, and framing effects) can complicate parent and student decisions about schools.