“Straight” As: Accountability & Abstinence in U.S. Educational Policy, 1980-2002

• In Event: Celebrating Fifty Years of Queer Scholarship at APSA Mini-Conference: Negotiating Queerness in Policy and Politics

Abstract

This study situates Congress’ resistance to funding comprehensive sex education from 1980 until the Affordable Care Act in 2010 – during which time HIV/AIDS devastated queer communities (especially queer communities of color) – within the substantial literature on increased federal control of education reform. Education policy scholars disagree about the cause(s) of standards-based education reform, but a consensus foregrounds three texts that reflect the subfield’s emphasis on increasing federal power: A Nation at Risk (1983); Goals 2000 (1994); and No Child Left Behind (2001). Absent from this standard narrative is health education, specifically sex education (Fine, 1988). Concurrently, however, the AIDS epidemic catapulted consequential debates about the function and form of sex education into the federal K-12 education policy-making arena. Although public health experts recommended education about condom use for students as young as 3rd graders, Congress established through the Helms Amendment it would not fund such programming and adhered to this precedent for over two decades. Instead, Congress directed funds to abstinence-only until marriage (AOUM) education to encourage “chastity and self-discipline,” through the Adolescent Family Life (1981), Welfare Reform Act (1996), and Community Based Abstinence Education (2000). This language reveals discursive links between accountability and AOUM and hints at ideological ones; both movements inscribed attitudes toward young people’s learning about their bodies and values, with the aim of regulating and surveilling short and long-term behavior, for the purported strengthening of the nation-state (Burns & Torre, 2004). Yet, at the same time standards-based reform literature has sidelined health education, histories of federal sex education policy largely omit accountability policies.
I treat sex and sexuality as grounded in the terrain of health and view health education as planted in the ostensibly nonsexual ecosystem of accountability politics. I draw on education politics and policy scholarship to identify four logics of health education in the federal policy environment: religiosity, efficiency, citizenship, and dignity. Taking a historical institutionalism approach to federal education reform, I apply Woulfin et al.’s (2022) mechanisms of institutional change in education reform to illustrate the relative purchase of these logics and trace relationship(s) that emerged between them. In doing so, I develop a novel framework — what I call intersectional queer policy analysis (IQPA) — to illuminate how the relationships between health education logics guided policymakers toward enacting education legislation that (re)institutionalized white cis-heternormativity. This approach exposes the exclusion of LGBTQ+ students in No Child Left Behind; while the law identified students of color, students with disabilities, low SES students, and ELL students as targets, it neither acknowledged nor addressed LGBTQ+ youth experiences. Given increasing federal power over education, schooling emerged as a mechanism through which the state could project its concerns onto children’s bodies—or, onto certain racialized, gendered, and sexualized bodies (Leonardo, 2007; Fine & McLelland, 2006). This study examines arguments marshaled by federal-level advocates and opponents of accountability and AOUM to understand whether, and if so, how and why, each movement contributed to the success of the other. 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 driver of K-12 education reform.

Author

• Andrew Stein, Northwestern University