Straight As: Accountability, Abstinence, and (Queer) Absence in U.S. Education Policy, 1980–2010

• In Event: AERA Graduate Student Research in Progress Roundtable Session Three
  In Roundtable Session: Examining the Experiences of Queer and Transgender Students and Teachers: Safety, Visibility, and Education Policy (Table 7)

Abstract

This study situates Congress' refusal to fund comprehensive sex education from 1980 until 2010, when the AIDS epidemic devastated queer communities especially of color, within scholarship on increased federal control of education reform. I draw on existing scholarship in education and health policy to identify four logics of health education: religiosity, efficiency, citizenship, and dignity. Taking a longitudinal approach to federal education reform, I apply Woulfin et al.'s (2022) mechanisms of institutional change to illustrate the relative purchase of these logics and trace the relationship(s) that emerged between them in the initial decades of accountability policy. In doing so, I develop intersectional queer policy analysis (IQPA), a framework through which I explore how the shifting configuration of logics guided federal policymakers in their enactment of education legislation that (re)institutionalized white cis-heternormativity. Demonstrating how educational reform acted as a vessel for the (re)production of normative sexuality toward nation-building, I posit the preservation of a racial-sexual order as an underlying, albeit tacit, driver of K-12 education reform.

Author

• Andrew Stein, Northwestern University
  Presenting Author