An (Un)Funded Mandate: Race to the Top in a Phase 3 Winner State

• In Event: 54.080 - Roundtable Session 22
  In Roundtable Session: 54.080-8 - Policy Coherence and School Improvement at Scale

Abstract

Race to the Top (RTT) was designed assuming grant “winners” would have the capacity to see their initiatives through. However, we question whether Phase 3 “winners” were actually “winners,” given they were faced with implementing the reform with much less financial support to do so. Within this context, we focus on Illinois to understand how district leaders both made sense of and implemented the policy. Therefore, we intersect Schoen and Rein’s (1994) concept of frame reflection with a cognitive perspective (Spillane, Reiser, & Gomez, 2006) to conduct a critical discourse analysis that examines how and if at all RTT is framing the policy discourse for districts within an Illinois context.

Authors

• Anjale DeVawn Welton, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Yolanda Davis, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign