| The passage of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act in January of 2002 was by all accounts the most significant piece of federal education legislation passed since 1965. That the act was championed by a Republican president and passed by a largely Republican Congress reveals how far education reform had traveled since Reagan vowed to eliminate the Department of Education in 1980. This dissertation seeks to explain how this transformation took place: specifically, how standards and accountability became the prevailing bipartisan approach to education reform, trumping the resistance of teachers' unions, long-standing traditions of local control, and objections from both the left and right. Through a combination of state and federal case studies, based on extensive archival research and more than 80 interviews with key actors, I trace how standards and accountability were able to win passage, first in the vast majority of states and then nationally. I find that a rhetorical context of system-wide crisis restructured the political landscape, strengthening the hand of outside reformers seeking to shift power upwards and away from local schools and weakening an already low-status profession's claims to autonomy and discretion. I find similar patterns in an earlier movement towards accountability in the Progressive Era and look at the two movements together to offer both a general model of educational accountability politics and a broader theory of the role of ideas in policy change. |
