Market Mobilities: Place, Politics, and Education Markets in Michigan and Oregon

• In Event: Policy Mobilities and Education Policy Research

Abstract

Objectives
This paper explores how highly mobile market-based schooling models have interacted with the particular social and political dynamics of two American states: Michigan and Oregon. In doing so the objective of the study is to understand how such policies mutate as they interact with local political cultures and institutions. As such, the paper traces how circulating models of market-based education reforms (most notably charter school policies) are promoted in each state and how these reforms are reshaped as they are implemented through political negotiations and interactions with local institutions.

Perspective or theoretical framework
In order to examine both the mobility and fixity of market-based reforms this paper places the literature on policy mobilities (Peck, 2011; Temenos & McCann, 2013) in conversation with the institutional school of the sociology of markets (Fligstein, 1996; Dobbin & Dowd 2000). The policy mobilities literature is drawn upon because, as Baker and Temenos (forthcoming) argue, it allows for an understanding of the ways that policy movement is structured by dominant ideological frames while at the same time being attentive to how this movement interacts with place-based assemblages of policy, culture, and institutions. In is in the latter case that the institutional sociology of markets can help provide an in-depth understanding of how markets in education emerge through political struggle over the institutions that govern them (Fligstein, 1996). Through placing the institutional sociology of markets literature in conversation with ideas of policy mobility, the movement of policy and the construction of local institutions can be understood in relation to each other.

Methods and data sources
This mix of policy mobilities and the institutional sociology of markets will be presented through the analysis of the two case studies (Michigan and Oregon). Data sources for these case studies include legislative documents, recordings of legislative sessions, and media reports as well as extensive qualitative research conducted over the last year. This research consisted of semi-structured interviews with figures shaping education markets in Michigan and Oregon (e.g. politicians, unions, philanthropists, etc.). The Michigan case study includes 24 semi-structured interviews as well as the observation of public events related to education. The Oregon case includes 16 semi-structured interviews asking participants to reflect on the evolution of charter school laws.

Results and scholarly significance
Through these cases this paper will advance an understanding of how highly mobile education policies are simultaneously related to the movement of policies internationally and also embedded in local politics at the sites in which they are implemented. By conducting an exploration of how market-based policies have traveled throughout the United States while paying close attention to how differences emerge in the at the state level, this paper helps advance an understanding of policy characterized by both fixity and flow (McCann, 2011). This is a significant contribution as it is essential that education research be able to understand how policies can be both mobile and situated in an era where education policy is, as Ball (2012, p. 9) writes, characterized by “a proliferation of policy networks nationally and globally.”

Author

• Dan Cohen, University of British Columbia