Chapter 1 Overview: Liberal learning in centralizing states

Given this casting of the problem, the logical question by the late 1980s had become, how should government craft policy tools to motivate stronger efforts by local educators? A variety of central governments in the West had tried to lift children's learning curves through new funding for particular categories of students, along with tighter regulation of how these dollars must be spent. But this assumed that legislators and education bureaucrats knew how to best organize instructional “inputs” and social relations inside classrooms. The conceptual breakthrough with the new buzz around standards-based or performance-focused reform was that government would concentrate on clarifying learning outcomes, leaving local educators to tailor school inputs and pedagogical practices. (Several chapters in this volume show how, in fact, central governments have difficulty resisting the exercise of control over output standards and input mixes.)