Analyzing state school policymaking: An arena model

Case study findings on the politics of public school choice in Minnesota are used to explore an arena perspective on how state governments might legislate controversial school restructuring initiatives. The initial conceptual model, which posits a shift from the subsystem arena to the macro arena as being fundamental to policy breakthroughs, proved to be too narrow. It ignored the innovative potential of the commission arena and particularly the leadership arena. Minne-sota findings suggest that it is in the latter arena where strategically placed lawmakers can exploit their power resources to exert significant leverage on restructuring legislation for American public schools. In the past decade, the United States has witnessed an enormous national movement to upgrade its public schools. Although the educational outcomes of the "excellence movement " are much debated (Chubb, 1988; Firestone, Fuhrman, & Kirst, 1989; Murphy, 1990), the governance impact is strikingly clear. "In a shift of major propor-tion, " Ravitch (1990) writes, "the locus of educational policymaking moved from the federal government and local governments to the states " (p. 48). In the 1980s, the "entre-preneurial states " made improving schools their principal target for policy innovation (Van Horn, 1989). Their intense and perva-sive activism, building on previous decades of more gradual state involvement—notably i