Sociology and the Educational Policy Process: Identifying Inequality, Theorizing Schools and Society, and Evaluating Educational Change

Abstract

This chapter provides a brief introduction to the sociology of education and reviews the relationship between educational policymaking and sociological scholarship, focusing particularly on K–12 policymaking in the late 20th- and early 21st-century United States. The authors describe three ways sociology interacts with research and practice in education policy. First, they discuss how sociological thinking and research around the conceptualization and empirical description of class, gender, race, and intersectional inequalities contribute to problem formulation in education policy. Second, they discuss several key sociological tools for the conceptualization of educational systems and the formulations of policy strategies to change those systems. Third, they describe a sociological approach to education policy evaluation which highlights the organizational processes through which education policies unfold to reveal mechanisms through which policies meet their goals or fail to do so.

Keywords: sociology; education; educational policy