The impact that district, state, and federal policies have on decision-making at a school site

In the 1980s and 1990s, schools, school districts, and states introduced wide-ranging reforms that shared a philosophical focus in striving for excellence and accountability through standards and testing programs. These reforms were reflective of two contradictory trends in the educational field at the time. On one hand, educational decision-making was becoming more hierarchic as school districts and state legislatures increased their oversight over the educative process. On the other hand, policymakers and educational theorists called for greater local control of schools and horizontal models of school governance were advocated as a way of involving educational stakeholders in the decision-making process. Since district, state, and federal policies and regulations supersede decisions made in schools, the motivation for this study was to understand how decision-making in schools takes place within an externally imposed framework of mandatory policies and regulations. Policy-makers at the district, state, and federal levels of decision-making, informed with an understanding of how their decisions impact schools, might use this information to create prudent policies that both increase student achievement and nurture local decision-making.; A case study was conducted in an elementary school in a large urban school district. The study site was located in a community of low socioeconomic status that had traditionally had low test scores on both district and state tests. Data were collected through interviews, review of documents, and observations. Theme analysis was used to find the significant themes evidenced in the data.; There were three significant findings in this case study. The first finding was that decision-making was hierarchic, even within the school's governance council. The second was that the focus of decision-making at the school site is the California mandated Stanford 9 test. The third finding was that the focus on the Stanford 9 test led to dubious student achievement outcomes. While the school's Stanford 9 test scores rose significantly, the curriculum was narrowly focused on mathematics and language arts, the subjects that were assessed by the Stanford 9 test. Other subjects, such as science, social studies, art, music, and physical education, when taught, were only addressed superficially.