PUB POL 573A: K-12 Education Policy & Governance
Instructor: Bill Zumeta
Meets: Mon-Wed 3-4:20 PM
Description: This MPA elective will touch on a range of topics in contemporary education policy while providing students an opportunity to apply and extend their knowledge and skills in economics, statistics, policy analysis, evaluation, and management analysis. In the course we will explore why education tends to be publicly provided and also the reasons behind instances where it is not so or where elements of privatization are integrated into public provision – such as public school choice, charter schools, contract schools, and voucher arrangements. We will also look at American federalism in the context of education – the limited but waxing and waning role of the federal government (e.g., in areas like standards and testing such as the Common Core, desegregation policy, and federal efforts to make education policy more evidence based) as well as the role of the states, and of the 15,000 or so local school districts with elected boards embodying “local control” of American public education. How did the U.S. education system come to be governed this way and what consequences does it have? What are the implications of significant changes that have been afoot in recent decades in the locus of governance as well as pushback against them?
We will study in depth the arrangements for K-12 education funding in the U.S. and the consequences these have for equity as well as the current ferment and challenges around policy remedies (e.g., the McCleary Supreme Court case in Washington). We will also study policies related to the most crucial resource related to student achievement: teachers, including their recruitment and training, their effectiveness and evaluation, and related labor market issues. Another topic will be the P-20 education continuum (pre-school to graduate school), which turns out to be a fragile ladder for many because of the way our educational system is structured. What policy remedies are available or have been tried to make the system more seamless for students? Finally, we will take a look at “horizontal” links–or the lack of same–with related social sectors (health, social services, criminal justice) whose links to education could certainly improve performance on both sides. We will touch on why these links are generally weak as well as how these challenges might be overcome.
