Directing Blame: Examining Small- and Large-Scale Explanations for a District Dissolution Debate

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Sesion 4
  In Roundtable Session: Toward a Holistic Examination of Educational Policy: Perspectives on Context and Scale

Abstract

Objectives
When one small, rural school district was faced with the possibility of dissolution after a failed funding referendum, community members tended to offer hyper-local explanations for the controversy that centered the individual choices and attitudes of other community members. What those explanations often missed, however, was the way state- and county- level policies shaped the options and incentives available to the district and community members. This paper explores the tension between local understanding and large-scale policy structures in education policy debates through examination of that dissolution debate. It is grounded in literatures that consider rural politics and schooling (e.g. Cramer, 2016; Tieken, 2014; Biddle & Azano, 2016) and uses sociocultural and critical perspectives on policy (see below).

Theoretical Framework
This paper comes from a study that adopts a fundamentally sociocultural perspective on policy, which emphasizes the importance of context, culture, and subjectivity in political and policy processes. This perspective directs attention to motivations, possibilities, and limitations that might be missed by a more techno-rational perspective, including the “norms, beliefs, goals, and pressures” that shape political choices and policy formation (Majone, 1989, p. 146), multiple levels of scale (Datnow, 2006), and processes of framing and categorization (e.g. Edelman, 1985; Gusfield, 1996; Stone, 2012). To make sense of the contradictions and tensions that arose as more details of the dissolution debate and people’s understanding of it were revealed, this paper also draws on critical policy studies (e.g. Apple, 2018; Mettler, 2011).

Methods and Data
This paper’s data come from a larger case study of the district’s dissolution debate and the contexts surrounding it. At the local level, this paper relies on interviews with community members and public statements submitted during the debate over dissolution; at the county- and state-level, it relies on policy documents and analyses offered by actors both within and outside formal policymaking structures. Data collection and analysis was guided by principles from comparative case study (Bartlett and Vavrus, 2017), Weis and Fine’s critical bifocality (2012), and constructivist grounded theory (Charmaz, 2014).

Findings
Community members’ accounts of the dissolution debate and the circumstances leading to it overwhelmingly centered individual choices and local contexts. However, policies enacted at the county and state levels structured and limited the options and incentives available to the district and individuals. Of central importance were the expansion of inter-district school choice (a topic that is largely under-studied; for exceptions see e.g. Lenhoff, 2020; Holme & Richards, 2009) and contrasting land use policies in the two counties whose border the district straddled. While some community members were aware of and concerned about these policies, their impact was not fully explicated during the debate, which had the effect of directing attention away from large-scale policies and towards interpersonal grievance and blame.

Significance
This paper demonstrates how large-scale policies can impact individual districts in ways that may not be recognized by involved individuals, even if those policies are not related to education on their face. It also expands the literatures on inter-district school choice and rural education policy.

Author

• Caitlin Ione Brecklin, University of North Dakota