State efforts to reform schools: treading between a regulatory swamp and an English garden’, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis

Since 1983, education has risen to the top of many states ' policy agendas. The level of state policy activity is unprecedented in the history of American education. While states have assumed responsibility for educational policymaking, little is known about the effects of various reform policies or strategies associated with their implementation. The authors argue that the current reform effort which aims at educational excellence will fail unless the policy culture shifts the strategic focus from regulation and compliance monitoring to mobilization of institutional capacity. This article examines reform strategies of three states—Texas, California, and South Carolina—and how those strategies relate to reform outcomes. The school reform movement is peopled at one extreme by hyper-rationalists who believe that schools are infinitely manipu-late, and at the other extreme by romantic decentralists who believe that if left alone, schools will flourish. The rationalists ' strat-egy for fixing schools is to create new policie