Toward a More Robust Approach to Educational Policy Analysis

• In Event: 18.034 - Beyond Interpretation: A Sociocultural Approach to Educational Policy Studies

Abstract

Objectives
Drawing on a literature review of the fields of policy enactment and school discipline, this paper analyzes how policy enactment studies have typically approached the policy process, how sociocultural policy approaches complicate these earlier approaches, and how both the policy enactment and school discipline literatures can make theoretical and empirical contributions to future sociocultural studies of educational policy.

Theoretical Frameworks
Early conceptions of policy analysis in the U.S. relied on linear models of policy formation and enactment that envisioned social scientific research as a tool to discover the rational solutions to social problems (Levinson & Sutton, 2001). More recently, researchers have challenged this techno-rational model, arguing for a sociocultural approach to policy analysis that pays sufficient attention to the role of local actors and dynamics in shaping policy processes (Levinson, Sutton, & Winstead, 2009), unintended consequences and outcomes (Coburn, 2001; Hamann & Lane, 2004), and the connections between the policy creation and implementation processes with the day-to-day experiences of educational policy on-the-ground (Stein, 2004). This paper builds on this theoretical groundwork.

Methods and Data
This literature review draws on previously published literature in the fields of policy enactment and school discipline to articulate how these literatures can inform one another to produce more theoretically and empirically rich accounts of educational policy enactment and school discipline policy.

Findings
After identifying the key ideas that are shared across scholarship that employs a sociocultural policy approach, I argue that a sociocultural approach to policy analysis can contribute to the school discipline literature in two key ways. First, because school discipline policies often involve a great deal of discretion (Lewis & Diamond, 2015), a sociocultural “policy as practice” approach would provide a way of conceptualizing educators’ disciplinary practices as policy (Levinson & Sutton, 2001; Menken & García, 2010). Second, although previous critical school discipline scholarship has importantly shown the disparate disciplinary experiences of students of color, it has largely remained at the school level (Ferguson, 2004; Lewis & Diamond, 2015). Future studies of school discipline should incorporate the multi-scalar approaches taken by recent anthropological policy studies (e.g., Koyama, 2010) to gain a fuller, politically, economically, and socially-situated picture of discipline policy.

The school discipline literature also provides insights for future sociocultural studies of educational policy. In particular, the school discipline literature centers the role of race in shaping inequitable school experiences for children—one cannot understand day-to-day disciplinary policy without attending to race. In contrast, sociocultural studies of education policy rarely examine race head-on (see e.g., Shore & Wright, 1997). This review suggests that future sociocultural studies of educational policy should center the role of race in their studies to develop a more robust understanding of how race and power operate in educational spaces.

Significance
This paper contributes to educational policy studies by connecting two bodies of literature previously not in conversation with one another—school discipline and sociocultural approaches to policy—offering insights for how lessons from both could improve our understanding of policy processes and school discipline.

Author

• Abigail J Beneke, University of Wisconsin - Madison