Neo-democracy in educational policy making

Abstract

This dissertation explores the many, complex changes to educational policy making in recent years. I conduct a critical policy analysis of a Massachusetts law that limits seniority-based job protections for public K-12 teachers. Garnering considerable controversy, the law was the result of private negotiations between the state's largest teachers' union and Stand for Children, a national Education Reform Advocacy Organization (ERAO). I use data from interviews with policy stakeholders, observations of public meetings and policy artifacts to explore struggles over public engagement in what unfolded as a highly undemocratic policy development process. My theoretical framework combines Stephen Ball's "policy cycle" (Ball, 1993; Bowe, Ball & Gold, 1992) with deliberative democratic theory. Aligned with Ball's work, I explore the ways that political discourses shaped struggles in various "contexts" of the policy development process. I demonstrate that policy development was a messy, non-linear process that involved complicated argumentation about teachers' unions, ERAOs, and community organizing. Informed by deliberative democratic theory, I focus on concrete efforts taken to include, or exclude, the public from the policy debate, and I highlight discourses that appeared to justify these political decisions. I argue that the case is indicative of what I am calling "neo-democratic" decision making, in which high-level interest group conflict leads to narrow forms of democratic engagement. I trace changes in each organization's political identity over the course of the conflict, and I demonstrate that identity was connected in important ways to underlying beliefs about policy making and public engagement. Fueled by interest group conflict, both Stand for Children and the Massachusetts Teachers' Association sought to promote the organizational identity that best suited their political interests. In the process, each organization pursued narrow forms of democratic engagement that clashed with their own organizational mission statements. I use findings from the case to offer suggestions for moving beyond the "neo-democratic" era and towards a system of policy making that aspires to higher democratic ideals.