Over the past 50 years, the federal government's efforts to reform
American public education have transformed U.S. schools from
locally-run enterprises to complex systems in which federal, state
and local actors jointly construct the educational environment of
U.S. children. Through struggles over school integration, the
growth of special education, the teaching of English learners and
the rise of accountability politics, the federal role in U.S.
education has meant a profound reconstruction of local
expectations, roles and political alignments. Seeking to construct
the federal schoolhouse - an educational system in which there are
common national expectations and practices - has meant the creation
of new modes of education within local institutions. The creation
of this "education state " has also meant that federal educational
initiatives have collided with - or reinforced - local political
regimes in cities and suburbs alike. To the extent that "all
politics is local, " the federal role in public schools has changed
both the conduct and the norms of local educational politics.
Building the Federal Schoolhouse examines how increasing federal
authority over public education in the U.S. changes the practices
of 'operational localism' in education and how local regime
commitments implement, thwart, or even block federal policy
initiatives. The book examines these issues through an in-depth,
fifty year examination of federal educational policies at work
within one community, Alexandria, Virginia. The home of T.C.
Williams High School, memorialized in the Hollywood movie Remember
the Titans, Alexandria has been transformed within two generations
from a Jim Crow school system to a new immigrant gateway school
district with over 20 percent of its students English learners.
Along the way, the school system has struggled to provide quality
education for special needs students, sought to overcome the
legacies of tracking and segregated learning and simultaneously
retain upper-middle class students in this wealthy suburb of
Washington, DC. Most recently, it has grappled with state and
federally imposed accountability measures that seek to boost
educational outcomes. All of these policy initiatives have
contended with the existing political regime within Alexandria, at
times forcing the local regime to a breaking point, and at times
bolstering its reconstruction. At the same time, the local
expectations and governing realities of administrators, parents,
politicians and voters alike have sharply constrained federal
initiatives, limiting their scope when in conflict with local
commitments and amplifying them when they align. Through an
extensive use of local archives, contemporary accounts, school data
and interviews, Reed not only paints an intimate portrait of the
conflicts that the creation of the federal schoolhouse has wrought
in Alexandria, but also documents the successes of the federal
commitment to greater educational opportunity. In so doing, he
highlights the complexity of the American education state and the
centrality of local regimes and local historical context to federal
efforts to reform education.
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