Historians and Policy MakingHistory and Educational Policymaking. Maris A. Vinovskis

Abstract

On January 19, 1999, President Bill Clinton, during his nationally televised State of the Union Address, declared a commitment to ending practices of social promotion in American schools, citing the example of Chicago's policy of retaining students who did not pass a standardized test. While Clinton had tried to emphasize the importance of remedial instruction for retained students, his remarks revived a national debate on the merits of grade retention as a matter of educational policy (Bronner 1999). Among long-time researchers in the area of retention, the controversy following Clinton's remarks evoked a sense of deja vu. Similar debates had occurred nearly two decades earlier, and a spate of studies have demonstrated that retaining students offered few educational benefits (Owings and Magliaro 1998). Yet retention was back on the educational policy agenda, despite its checkered past. Politicians and other policy makers, it appeared, had once again chosen to overlook history in formulating a future course for American schools. It is a commonplace today for policy makers to ignore history or to revise it to suit their own purposes (When the Past Is the Master Plan 1999). Such observations often are made in connection with foreign policy debates, but also in regard to economic policy and other areas where key decisions hold great potential for influence (May 1975; Neustadt and May 1986). Until recently, however, little attention has been given to this issue in connection with education. In History and Educational Policymakin$ Maris Vinovskis considers the absence of historical perspective in formulating educational policy, particularly at the federal level. In doing this, he also points to the possibility that history could be quite useful in the development of new policies. The resulting book is a somewhat curious mixture: part observation, part critique, and part brief for the productive use of historical perspective. While each of these themes is