Despite major advances in the past half-century, significant issues such as educational inequality persist in American education. Accountability policy has become a central, resilient approach for addressing such issues. We see this in the ongoing enactment of the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) and the recent adoption of the Common Core Standards. However, accountability and measurement can breed unintended consequences that alters the phenomena being measured, thereby corrupting the meanings and practices accountability policies set out to promote. Education scholars have largely examined these unintended consequences by studying policy implementation from its start, or from the first day a policy is implemented. In this dissertation, I take the logically prior step and study the early stages of institutionalization when accountability based meanings and practices are taking form. I argue that these meanings and practices set the groundwork for policy implementation and play an important role in the form policy eventually takes. I study the early stages of institutionalization at three levels, using three datasets, and employing distinct methods for each datasets. Study One is situated at the macro-level of political discourse. I use political party platforms, 1952 to 2012, to study the ways that Democrats and Republicans introduced, negotiated, and eventually codified notions of accountability into public policy. I employ a novel methodological combination of theoretical qualitative coding and computational linguistics to chart the ways that accountability-based meanings pulled apart and came together as elements of high-level institutions and political ideologies interacted to create meanings in education. Study Two is situated at the meso-level of American public schools. I use the Schools and Staffing Survey, 1987-2012, and a regression analysis technique to describe the degree to which schools were participating in standards-based practices, pre- and post-NCLB and whether and how their level of engagement differed between schools that were eventually categorized as at-risk or not at-risk under NCLB. This study provides a picture of the national landscape of standards-based practice before NCLB’s implementation and describes the types of scripts that were activated for different categories of actors after NCLB’s implementation. Study Three is situated at the micro-level of one high stress, urban school. I employ a case study technique and qualitative coding to examine how this school makes sense of and enacts policy messages about upcoming policies. I use two field datasets – a pre-NCLB dataset that covers 1998-2003 and a pre-Common Core dataset that covers 2012-15 – to study the ways preemptive reactivity and sensemaking interact as Adams leadership strives to improve their struggling school’s academic achievement. Taken together, the three studies provide insight into how meanings, practices, and structures are filtered and reshaped during the early stages of institutionalization.

Last modified

• 02/19/2018

Creator

• Debbie Kim

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/N2BH5P

Subject

• Human Development and Social Policy

Keyword

• institutional theory
• education policy
• accountability policy

Date created

• 2016-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright