Politics and Policy of Federal Education Policy Research: A Call to Widen the Theoretical and Methodological Periscope

This chapter assesses research paradigms for the federal role in education policy and politics. The past two decades brought a large paradigmatic shift in K–12 education in the United States. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 constituted a sea change in politics and policy. The U.S. Department of Education’s role was altered from compliance monitor to compliance enforcer. Its new policies created new politics in the form of deep-rooted opposition and backlash against its accountability regime, which in turn led to the Every Student Succeeds Act. By contrast, efforts to pursue greater accountability in higher education in recent decades have been stymied. With the 2008 reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, not only did the law fail to impose greater accountability on postsecondary institutions, as some policymakers hoped; it also prohibited some future accountability measures. In light of these changes, the authors of this chapter consider the future of education policy research on federal policy, assessing epistemologies that undergird existing work and those that might be employed in future research. They emphasize major trends influencing federal educational policymaking that will likely have a continuing impact on scholarship: partisanship, devolution (in K–12), privatization, and the rise of intermediaries and nontraditional interest groups. They consider what has been missing from the past two decades of research literature on federal policymaking, and call for a broadening of methodological and theoretical approaches to the study of those phenomena, to include sociological analysis, critical legal and policy analysis, and network analysis.

Keywords: federal policy; Congress; higher education; P–12 education