Disrupting Tidy Distinctions in Design and Implementation: Reforming General and Special Education Policy

• In Event: Sheraton Roundtable Session Three
  In Roundtable Session: Achieving Equity in Implementation: Interrogating State Policy Makers' Intentions and Decisions (Table 6)

Abstract

When policymakers set out to create a statewide education policy that would bridge general and special education, support struggling students, and change the way students were identified with specific learning disabilities, their ambitious aims collided with the weak capabilities of their environment. In this qualitative case study, I describe the ways one state’s Response to Intervention policy came into being and changed over time, responding to political and organizational circumstances. In doing so, I argue that the story of this policy’s design is one of both distribution and evolution: the distribution of policy over a network of resources (people, ideas, materials, and interactions), and the evolution of the policy over time, both necessitated by the ambition-capability problem policymakers faced.

Author

• Michaela Krug O'Neill, University of Michigan
  Presenting Author