Shaping Education Policy is a comprehensive overview of education politics and policy, which provides conceptual guideposts for future policy development and strategies for change. Leading scholars explore the interacting social processes and the dynamics of power politics as they intersect with democratic ideals and shape school performance. Chapters cover major themes that have influenced education, including the Civil Rights Movement, federal involvement, the accountability movement, family choice, and development of nationalization and globalization. This edited collection examines how education policy in the United States has evolved over the last several decades and how the resulting policies are affecting schools and the children who attend them. This important book is a necessary resource for understanding the evolution, current status, and possibilities of educational policy and politics.

Shaping Education Policy is a comprehensive overview of education politics and policy, which provides conceptual guideposts for future policy development and strategies for change. Leading scholars explore the interacting social processes and the dynamics of power politics as they intersect with democratic ideals and shape school performance. Chapters cover major themes that have influenced education, including the Civil Rights Movement, federal involvement, the accountability movement, family choice, and development of nationalization and globalization. This edited collection examines how education policy in the United States has evolved over the last several decades and how the resulting policies are affecting schools and the children who attend them. This important book is a necessary resource for understanding the evolution, current status, and possibilities of educational policy and politics.

For almost two centuries, Americans expected that their public schools would cultivate the personal, moral, and social development of individual students, create citizens, and bind diverse groups into one nation. Since the 1980s, however, a new generation of school reformers has been intent on using schools to solve the nation's economic problems. An economic justification for public schools--equipping students with marketable skills to help the nation compete in a global, information-based workplace--overwhelmed other historically accepted purposes for tax-supported public schools.
Private sector management has become the model for public school systems as schools and districts are "downsized," "restructured," and "outsourced." Recent reform proposals have called for government-funded vouchers to send children to private schools, the creation of self-governing charter schools, the contracting of schools to private entrepreneurs, and the partnerships with the business community in promoting new information technologies. But if there is a shared national purpose for education, should it be oriented only toward enhancing the country's economic success? Is everything public for sale? Are the interests of individuals or selected groups overwhelming the common good that the founders of tax-supported public schools so fervently sought?
This volume explores the ongoing debates about what constitutes the common good in American public education, assessing the long-standing tensions between shared purposes and individual interests in schooling. It shows how recent school reform efforts, driven by economic concerns, have worsened the conflict between the legitimate interests of individuals and society as a whole, and demonstrates that reconstructing the common good envisioned by the founders of public education in the United States remains essential and unfinished work.

Like other big city school systems, Chicago's has been repeatedly "reformed" over the last century. Yet its schools have fallen far short of citizens' expectations and left a gap between the performances of white and minority students. Many blame the educational establishment for resisting change. Other critics argue that reform occurs too often; still others claim it comes not often enough.

Dorothy Shipps reappraises the tumultuous history of educational progress in Chicago, revealing that the persistent lack of improvement is due not to the extent but rather the type of reform. Throughout the twentieth century, managerial reorganizations initiated by the business community repeatedly altered the governance structure of schools--as well as the relationships of teachers to children and parents--but brought little improvement, while other more promising reform models were either resisted or crowded out.

Shipps chronicles how Chicago's corporate actors led, abetted, or restrained nearly every attempt to transform the city's school system, then asks whether schools might be better reformed by others. To show why city schools have failed urban children so badly, she traces Chicago's reform history over four political eras, revealing how corporate power was instrumental in designing and revamping the system. Her narrative encompasses the formative era of 1880-1930, when teachers' unions moderated business plans; previously unexplored business activism from 1930 to 1980, when civil rights dominated school reform, and the decentralization of the 1980s. She also covers the uneasy cooperation among business associations in the 1990s to install the mayor as head of the school system, a governing regime now challenged by privatization advocates.

Business people may be too wedded to a stunted view of educators to forge a productive partnership for change. Unionized teachers bridle at the second-class status accorded them by managers. If reform is to reach deeply into classrooms, Shipps concludes, it might well require a new coalition of teachers' unions and parents to create a fresh agenda that supersedes corporate interests.

This study clearly shows that, in Chicago as elsewhere, urban schooling is intertwined with politics and power. By reviewing more than a century of corporate efforts to make education work, Shipps makes a strong case that it's high time to look elsewhere--perhaps to educators themselves--for new leadership.