An Education in Politics: The Origin and Evolution of No Child Left Behind

Abstract

On substantive grounds, Jesse H. Rhodes's An Education in Politics is yet another detailed account of the history and politics of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the watershed federal legislation adopted in 2001 that sought to bring accountability to the nation's schools. Rhodes's approach, however, is explicitly theoretical—a very good thing—and his aim is to contribute to the “institutional theory of change.” Claiming that other scholars of political institutions have tended to focus either on the “agency of political entrepreneurs” or the “institutional constraints” that limit them, he argues for a unified approach that brings the two together into proper balance. His solution is a theory of “institutionally bounded entrepreneurship,” which he formulates early in the book and then employs to structure the historical analysis that follows. In this analysis, he argues that the political entrepreneurs driving accountability reform during the entire modern era—from the 1980s through NCLB to the present—were business and civil rights groups, and that they succeeded in ramping up federal involvement and bringing a measure of change. But he also argues that the institutional constraints were seriously limiting, and that outcomes took the form of extensive delegation to state and local governments, a disjointed layering upon existing institutions, and the “striking persistence” of traditional structures. A weak and even bizarre incrementalism won out over transformation.