The Apple Doesn’t Fall Far from the Tree: How Family Morality Drove Educational Accountability Policy

• In Event: Challenging Power in Education: Policy, Discourse, and Resistance in Local and Global Contexts

Abstract

Research has examined how race-neutral quality education reform can reproduce racialized inequities, but less understood are whether and how gender ideology operates in these processes. I conduct historical-political analysis of archival data from Title IX (1972) to Education Secretary Bennett’s national curriculum (1987) and conceptualize quality reform as a moral and intersectional process of (re)defining the purpose and tools of public education governance. I find that, in accountability politics, as social-conservatives positioned family values as a pillar of the national social order, progressives accepted parental rights and academic standards as linked vessels for achieving racial and (binary) gender equality. This provides theoretical insights into how the intersectional politics of reform creates or circumscribes possibilities for public education governance.

Author

• Andrew Stein, Northwestern University