Hijacking Rhetoric in Federal Educational Policy Reauthorization Debates, 1965-2013

• In Event: 072 - Regular Session. Effects of Accountability on Students, Classrooms, and Public Discourse

Abstract

This paper explores the shifting rhetoric of inequality in reauthorizations of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, up through its most recent reauthorization as No Child Left Behind in 2002 and ongoing attempts to reauthorize the law. I show that in Congressional floor debates and committee hearings, policymakers and witnesses frequently drew on existing rhetoric—including rhetoric institutionalized into prior statutory language and policy debates—and either borrowed or hijacked it, using language originally used to discuss one form of inequality and giving it new meaning to target a different, and sometimes conflicting, form of inequality. I first show how the original ESEA borrowed the rhetoric of prior Impact Aid laws, adapting its rhetoric to a different type of inequality. I then consider three cases of hijacking rhetoric, in which existing language was given new meaning in order to argue for attention to a different, often conflicting, form of inequality: the changing of the meaning of educational deprivation in the 1970s, the appropriation of the language of standards by proponents of opportunity-to-learn standards in the early 1990s, and the hijacking of the mantle of No Child Left Behind to critique the law in hearings surrounding a failed reauthorization attempt in 2007. I conclude with a discussion of potential explanations for why some of these strategies succeeded in bringing about changes to the statutory language while others failed, and what this suggests for both future attempts to reauthorize ESEA and policymaking and interpretive feedbacks more generally.

Author

• Emily Meanwell, Indiana University