Samantha Cocco-Klein
At the end of October, President-elect Donald Trump laid out a plan for his first 100 days in office that aims to radically transform Washington politics and the Federal government. Included within the plan, is the proposed School Choice and Education Opportunity Act, which will redirect education funds to give parents the right to send children to the school of their choice and end the Common Core initiative, reinforcing local supervision of education standards and quality.[i] The act goes right to the heart of ongoing and often acrimonious debates on education reform within the United States. This precis focuses on the Common Core debate, and examines how ‘bottom-up’ theories of policy implementation can help us to understand the dynamics underlying the reform effort – and why it has proven so controversial.
Theories on policy implementation are generally categorized in three ‘generations’. A first generation considered implementation to be straight-forward: civil services would implement policy prepared by governments according to their design. A second generation of theorists, building on the failure so many of the progressive ‘Great Society’ programs of the 1960s and 1970s, explored how implementation could go wrong. These split between the ‘top-down’ theorists, concerned with the effective implementation of the policy, in keeping with its original intent, and ‘bottom-up’ theorists, interested in how the people active in implementing and received policies engaged with them. A prominent ‘bottom-up’ theorist was Michael Lipsky, who highlighted the role that street level bureaucrats, including teachers, play in determining how policy is delivered.[ii] Many of the observations he built into his model resonate with the experience of the Common Core Standards Initiative.
For Lipsky, teachers’ influence is embedded within a core feature of street level bureaucrats: a high-level of discretion and autonomy. Given the complexity of the situations in which basic services are delivered and the human dimension involved, street level bureaucrats have considerable scope to apply personal judgement in the course of their work. Complexity and the human dimension not only make it difficult to standardize delivery, but also make measurement of individual performance difficult. And given the difficulty of firing or sanctioning pubic sectors workers, managers will generally accommodate these interests in exchange for performance. However, efforts to lift the quality of services provided, is constrained by another core feature of basic services: limited time and resources. Caseloads are often too large to be managed to a high standard, and additional resources are generally insufficient to make a noticeable difference. When additional resources improve or expand access to services, the new demand this creates will generally erode quality improvements. According to Lipsky, this core features of how street-level bureaucrats implement policy will often keep basic services stuck in a ‘mediocrity trap’[iii].
Escaping the ‘mediocrity trap’ and lifting the quality of public education in the US, has been at the heart of reform efforts. The Common Core introduced rigorous standards in English language and math instruction for students in grades K-12. An initiative of governors and state school superintendents, it built on previous bipartisan efforts to address a perceived deficit in high school graduates readiness for college and careers.[iv] On the surface, school and teacher discretion to teach as they judged best was retained, with the standards setting out only what children should know, and not what and how they should be taught. The reality was very different. The standardized testing, which accompanied the Common Core, created pressure for teachers to ‘teach to the test’, reducing their discretion on what and how to teach. Moreover, the introduction of value-added teacher evaluation, which uses the test scores to determine how effective schools and teachers are, reduced their autonomy. The informal contract described by Lipsky, in which discretion and autonomy are exchanged for performance, was broken. Schools and teachers saw a demand for standardized performance and accountability for new ambitious goals, with inadequate addition of resources, together with a significant loss of discretion and autonomy. As Lipsky would have likely predicted, support for the Common Core fell from 76 percent of teachers at its introduction in 2013 to 46 percent by 2014.[v]
Beyond increasing the accountability of public education providers, the Common Core also attempted to rewrite the relationship between schools and families. As noted by Lipsky, public service providers often hold a monopoly and as such have little incentive to improve client satisfaction. The use of standardized tests was intended to create a way for parents to hold schools to account, particularly for underperforming poor and minority students. However, parental support for the Common Core and standardized tests fell just as fast as the teachers, with opt-out movements springing-up around the country. Parents saw the tests as too demanding or unfair, and it affected another key aspect of the provider-client relationship described by Lipsky; teachers’ role in determining how children think about themselves. Teachers will often accommodate and reward individual differences, such as effort and creativity, to foster children’s positive images of themselves as students. Common core testing, with its focus on testing, undermined this relationship, and in turn, likely reduced parental satisfaction with schools, particularly for white, middle-class parents, who were less concerned with under-performing schools to begin with.
Given that these ‘bottom-up dynamics’ have been understood since the late 1970s, it is not clear why state governors and the Federal government embraced a top-down approach. A possible answer lies with the third generation theories, such as the Advocacy Coalition Framework developed by Sabatier, that considers the broader range of actors involved in the policy sub-system.[vi] In the case of education reform, large philanthropies, with considerable funds at their disposal, became important actors in education policy over the past decade. The Gates and Broad Foundations in particular advocated for education reform that included common state standards and value-added teacher evaluation. To this end, the foundations focused their considerable resources and advocacy on governors, state-level education officials and national education reform leaders. These efforts were bipartisan, but they were also driven by ‘policy elites’ and high-level decision-makers, and consciously sought to avoid the messiness of “the democratic process”. The failure of the foundations and policy elites to engage in broad-based and grassroots advocacy with parents, and to engage the primary implementers, teachers, in developing a shared agenda for action ultimately doomed their reforms. By December 2015, President Obama signed the Every Student Succeeds Act into law, returning education authority to state and district level, and effectively ending federal support for the Common Core. [vii]
Moving forward, education reform guided by theories of policy implementation should balance top-down measures, such as clear directives and standards, which the Common Core provided, with the engagement of a broad range of stake-holders in developing a shared causal theory of action, and seek the support of implementing agencies, namely teachers, and the people most affected, parents and children.[viii] Unfortunately, as the President elect’s 100 day agenda suggests, the possibility for this type of reform initiative at the national and even the state level has been seriously damaged, for education and other complex, social issues. As noted by Wilsky, most people’s experience of government will come through contact with basic services, which is dominated by education at the local level. The perception of the Federal government aligning with elites to dictate education reforms perceived as harmful to their schools and children will continue to reverberate with a large share of the electorate for years to come.
Discussion Questions
Returning to President-elect Donald Trump’s agenda for the first 100 days in office, how do frameworks and theories on policy implementation inform your understanding of the proposed agenda? For example: How has the implementation of policies under previous administrations, including policies on trade, health, policing and the environment shaped the current agenda? What are the implication of proposed cuts in resources and staff for Federal agencies and climate change programs? And what space do Federal agencies, States and local governments have for modifying policies through approaches to implementation?
[i] Amita, Kelly and Sprunt, Barbara. Here Is What Donald Trump Wants To Do In His First 100 Days, NPR, November 9, 2016 http://www.npr.org/2016/11/09/501451368/here-is-what-donald-trump-wants-to-do-in-his-first-100-days
[ii] Howlett, Michael, M. Ramesh and Anthony Perl. Studying Public Policy: Policy Cycles andPolicy Subsystems, Oxford University Press, 2009 (3rd Edition)
[iii] Lipsky, Michael, Street Level Bureaucracy, Russell Sage Foundation, 1980.
[iv]Wikipedia. Common Core Standards Initiative, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Core_State_Standards_Initiative
[v] Green, Peter. How the Common Core Lost Teacher Support, The Huffington Post, August 20, 2014 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-greene/how-the-common-core-lost-_b_5694139.html
[vi] Koontz, Tomas M. and Jens Newig. From Planning to Implementation: Top-Down and Bottom-Up Approaches for Collaborative Watershed Management, The Policy Studies Journal, Vol. 42, No. 3, 2014
[vii] Tompkins-Stange, Megan. What Gates and Broad Could Have Learned From Ford, HistPhil, June 22, 2016, https://histphil.org/2016/06/22/what-gates-and-broad-could-have-learned-from-ford/
[viii] Koontz, Tomas M. and Jens Newig. From Planning to Implementation: Top-Down and Bottom-Up Approaches for Collaborative Watershed Management, The Policy sSudies Journal, Vol. 42, No. 3, 2014
At the end of October, President-elect Donald Trump laid out a plan for his first 100 days in office that aims to radically transform Washington politics and the Federal government. Included within the plan, is the proposed School Choice and Education Opportunity Act, which will redirect education funds to give parents the right to send children to the school of their choice and end the Common Core initiative, reinforcing local supervision of education standards and quality.[i] The act goes right to the heart of ongoing and often acrimonious debates on education reform within the United States. This precis focuses on the Common Core debate, and examines how ‘bottom-up’ theories of policy implementation can help us to understand the dynamics underlying the reform effort – and why it has proven so controversial.
Theories on policy implementation are generally categorized in three ‘generations’. A first generation considered implementation to be straight-forward: civil services would implement policy prepared by governments according to their design. A second generation of theorists, building on the failure so many of the progressive ‘Great Society’ programs of the 1960s and 1970s, explored how implementation could go wrong. These split between the ‘top-down’ theorists, concerned with the effective implementation of the policy, in keeping with its original intent, and ‘bottom-up’ theorists, interested in how the people active in implementing and received policies engaged with them. A prominent ‘bottom-up’ theorist was Michael Lipsky, who highlighted the role that street level bureaucrats, including teachers, play in determining how policy is delivered.[ii] Many of the observations he built into his model resonate with the experience of the Common Core Standards Initiative.
For Lipsky, teachers’ influence is embedded within a core feature of street level bureaucrats: a high-level of discretion and autonomy. Given the complexity of the situations in which basic services are delivered and the human dimension involved, street level bureaucrats have considerable scope to apply personal judgement in the course of their work. Complexity and the human dimension not only make it difficult to standardize delivery, but also make measurement of individual performance difficult. And given the difficulty of firing or sanctioning pubic sectors workers, managers will generally accommodate these interests in exchange for performance. However, efforts to lift the quality of services provided, is constrained by another core feature of basic services: limited time and resources. Caseloads are often too large to be managed to a high standard, and additional resources are generally insufficient to make a noticeable difference. When additional resources improve or expand access to services, the new demand this creates will generally erode quality improvements. According to Lipsky, this core features of how street-level bureaucrats implement policy will often keep basic services stuck in a ‘mediocrity trap’[iii].
Escaping the ‘mediocrity trap’ and lifting the quality of public education in the US, has been at the heart of reform efforts. The Common Core introduced rigorous standards in English language and math instruction for students in grades K-12. An initiative of governors and state school superintendents, it built on previous bipartisan efforts to address a perceived deficit in high school graduates readiness for college and careers.[iv] On the surface, school and teacher discretion to teach as they judged best was retained, with the standards setting out only what children should know, and not what and how they should be taught. The reality was very different. The standardized testing, which accompanied the Common Core, created pressure for teachers to ‘teach to the test’, reducing their discretion on what and how to teach. Moreover, the introduction of value-added teacher evaluation, which uses the test scores to determine how effective schools and teachers are, reduced their autonomy. The informal contract described by Lipsky, in which discretion and autonomy are exchanged for performance, was broken. Schools and teachers saw a demand for standardized performance and accountability for new ambitious goals, with inadequate addition of resources, together with a significant loss of discretion and autonomy. As Lipsky would have likely predicted, support for the Common Core fell from 76 percent of teachers at its introduction in 2013 to 46 percent by 2014.[v]
Beyond increasing the accountability of public education providers, the Common Core also attempted to rewrite the relationship between schools and families. As noted by Lipsky, public service providers often hold a monopoly and as such have little incentive to improve client satisfaction. The use of standardized tests was intended to create a way for parents to hold schools to account, particularly for underperforming poor and minority students. However, parental support for the Common Core and standardized tests fell just as fast as the teachers, with opt-out movements springing-up around the country. Parents saw the tests as too demanding or unfair, and it affected another key aspect of the provider-client relationship described by Lipsky; teachers’ role in determining how children think about themselves. Teachers will often accommodate and reward individual differences, such as effort and creativity, to foster children’s positive images of themselves as students. Common core testing, with its focus on testing, undermined this relationship, and in turn, likely reduced parental satisfaction with schools, particularly for white, middle-class parents, who were less concerned with under-performing schools to begin with.
Given that these ‘bottom-up dynamics’ have been understood since the late 1970s, it is not clear why state governors and the Federal government embraced a top-down approach. A possible answer lies with the third generation theories, such as the Advocacy Coalition Framework developed by Sabatier, that considers the broader range of actors involved in the policy sub-system.[vi] In the case of education reform, large philanthropies, with considerable funds at their disposal, became important actors in education policy over the past decade. The Gates and Broad Foundations in particular advocated for education reform that included common state standards and value-added teacher evaluation. To this end, the foundations focused their considerable resources and advocacy on governors, state-level education officials and national education reform leaders. These efforts were bipartisan, but they were also driven by ‘policy elites’ and high-level decision-makers, and consciously sought to avoid the messiness of “the democratic process”. The failure of the foundations and policy elites to engage in broad-based and grassroots advocacy with parents, and to engage the primary implementers, teachers, in developing a shared agenda for action ultimately doomed their reforms. By December 2015, President Obama signed the Every Student Succeeds Act into law, returning education authority to state and district level, and effectively ending federal support for the Common Core. [vii]
Moving forward, education reform guided by theories of policy implementation should balance top-down measures, such as clear directives and standards, which the Common Core provided, with the engagement of a broad range of stake-holders in developing a shared causal theory of action, and seek the support of implementing agencies, namely teachers, and the people most affected, parents and children.[viii] Unfortunately, as the President elect’s 100 day agenda suggests, the possibility for this type of reform initiative at the national and even the state level has been seriously damaged, for education and other complex, social issues. As noted by Wilsky, most people’s experience of government will come through contact with basic services, which is dominated by education at the local level. The perception of the Federal government aligning with elites to dictate education reforms perceived as harmful to their schools and children will continue to reverberate with a large share of the electorate for years to come.
Discussion Questions
Returning to President-elect Donald Trump’s agenda for the first 100 days in office, how do frameworks and theories on policy implementation inform your understanding of the proposed agenda? For example: How has the implementation of policies under previous administrations, including policies on trade, health, policing and the environment shaped the current agenda? What are the implication of proposed cuts in resources and staff for Federal agencies and climate change programs? And what space do Federal agencies, States and local governments have for modifying policies through approaches to implementation?
[i] Amita, Kelly and Sprunt, Barbara. Here Is What Donald Trump Wants To Do In His First 100 Days, NPR, November 9, 2016 http://www.npr.org/2016/11/09/501451368/here-is-what-donald-trump-wants-to-do-in-his-first-100-days
[ii] Howlett, Michael, M. Ramesh and Anthony Perl. Studying Public Policy: Policy Cycles andPolicy Subsystems, Oxford University Press, 2009 (3rd Edition)
[iii] Lipsky, Michael, Street Level Bureaucracy, Russell Sage Foundation, 1980.
[iv]Wikipedia. Common Core Standards Initiative, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Core_State_Standards_Initiative
[v] Green, Peter. How the Common Core Lost Teacher Support, The Huffington Post, August 20, 2014 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-greene/how-the-common-core-lost-_b_5694139.html
[vi] Koontz, Tomas M. and Jens Newig. From Planning to Implementation: Top-Down and Bottom-Up Approaches for Collaborative Watershed Management, The Policy Studies Journal, Vol. 42, No. 3, 2014
[vii] Tompkins-Stange, Megan. What Gates and Broad Could Have Learned From Ford, HistPhil, June 22, 2016, https://histphil.org/2016/06/22/what-gates-and-broad-could-have-learned-from-ford/
[viii] Koontz, Tomas M. and Jens Newig. From Planning to Implementation: Top-Down and Bottom-Up Approaches for Collaborative Watershed Management, The Policy sSudies Journal, Vol. 42, No. 3, 2014