Political Institutions and Education Policy: Virginia's Unique Transition to Elected School Boards

Education policy can embed ethnic inequalities in a country. Education in Burundi, with its historically exclusive political institutions and education, represents an important case for understanding these interactions. In this article, I interview twelve Burundians about how they experienced and perceived ethnicity and politics in their schooling from 1966 to 1993. I argue that education contributed to tangible and perceived social hierarchies based on ethnic inequalities. I show that this exclusion reflected both overt and covert policy goals, through proxies used to identify ethnicity in schools and through the exclusive nature of national exams at the time, which promoted members of the Tutsi minority at the expense of the majority Hutus. This study has implications for understanding how perceptions of inequality in education manifest as grievances against the state. It sheds light on the importance of understanding covert education policy as a potential mechanism for generating exclusion and contributing to conflict.

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Won't Back Down Misfires on Parent Trigger, but Gets the Politics, Organizations Right

Public Voices ◽

10.22140/pv.55 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 13 (1) ◽

pp. 134 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Robert Maranto

Keyword(s):

Public Schools ◽

Education Policy ◽

Social Science ◽

School Boards ◽

Policy Instrument ◽

After School ◽

Work Of Art ◽

American Films ◽

Union Leaders ◽

Educational Establishment

This essay briefly discusses recent American films about urban public schools, citingresearch to suggest that the genre accurately captures the dysfunctions of many schools as bureaucracies. This sets up a lengthy review of the most talked about education drama of 2012, Won’t Back Down. On its artistic merits, Won’t Back Down is something of an after school special, with great acting wasted in the service of a melodramatic script. The education policy instrument portrayed, the “parent trigger” enabling parents to take over dysfunctional schools, has questionable utility. That said, the movie captures nonresponsive bureaucracies, school boards indifferent to the interests of children, how bureaucrats can make activist parents and teachers pay a heavy price, and the sort of organizing tactics that can outlast the educational establishment. Most notably, the film excels at explaining the tactics and motivations of union leaders and members. In short, while it fails as a work of art, Won’t Back Down works as work of social science, exploring dilemmas of bureaucracy and democracy.

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When Do Institutions, Policy Sectors, and Cities Matter?

Comparative Political Studies ◽

10.1177/0010414000033002004 ◽

2000 ◽

Vol 33 (2) ◽

pp. 248-268 ◽

Cited By ~ 48

Author(s):

PETER JOHN ◽

ALISTAIR COLE

Keyword(s):

Economic Development ◽

Secondary Education ◽

Education Policy ◽

Political Institutions ◽

Local Economic Development ◽

Policy Networks ◽

The United Kingdom ◽

Nation States ◽

The Impact ◽

British Education

This article explores the relative influence of policy sectors, political institutions, and urban contexts on the operation of contemporary governance. The research compared the membership, structure, governing capacity, and change of local economic development and secondary education policy networks in four cities: Lille and Rennes in France and Leeds and Southampton in the United Kingdom. The main finding is that the type of policy sector mediates the impact of political institutions. There are strong differences between French and British education policy networks but similarities between the economic policy networks. There is variation by city in economic development networks but much less in secondary education. The implication of the findings is that some sectors, such as economic development, tend to be similar across nation-states and permit subnational variation, whereas others retain strong country differences and maintain intrastate uniformity, a finding that is consistent with the longevity of state traditions. In the transition from government to governance, institutional, sectoral, and urban processes become contingent on each other and on their contexts.

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