What "Counts" as Educational Policy? Notes toward a New Paradigm

Abstract

In my first article as a young PhD, which was published in the Harvard Educational Review, I argued that high school U.S. history curriculum, as represented in widely used textbooks, excises and thereby defines out of existence radical responses American workers have had to the problems they face on the job and in their communities (Anyon, 1979). This educational excision is one way that schooling mitigates against the development of working-class consciousness. In empirical and theoretical work since then, I have investigated knowledge and pedagogical experiences made available to students in different socialclass contexts (1980, 1981), and have attempted to understand the consequences of ways we conceptualize urban education, urban school reform, and neighborhood poverty. Recent arguments have aimed at unseating simplistic notions of the causes of urban poverty and low achievement in city districts, and explicating unexplored relations between urban education and movements for social change (e.g., 1995, 1997, 2005). In this chapter I think about education policy over the seventy-five years of Harvard Educational Review publication. During these decades, many K–12 policies have been written and implemented by federal, state, and local governments. Some of these have aimed at improving education in America’s cities and are my primary focus. Over the years, dominant strategies called upon to improve urban schools have included curricular, administrative, and funding reforms, as well as increases in educational opportunity and district/school accountability. A historical examination of policies can inform decisions we make today. Policy failures, for example, may demonstrate that we need to rethink strate-