• Corpus ID: 15434477

Complexity and Policy Implementation Challenges and Opportunities for the Field

@inproceedings{Honig2006ComplexityAP,
  title={Complexity and Policy Implementation Challenges and Opportunities for the Field},
  author={Meredith I. Honig},
  year={2006}
}

• Meredith I. Honig
• Published 2006
• Education

Education policy implementation as a field of research and practice for decades has amounted to a sort of national search for two types of policies: “implementable” policies—those that in practice resemble policy designs—and “successful” policies—those that produce demonstrable improvements in students’ school performance. This focus on what gets implemented and what works makes sense especially in education. After all, education has become a high-stakes, big-budget policy arena. Education commands a lion’s share of state and local budgets to levels that beg hard questions about the feasibility and value added by education policies. Given its promise to serve as a significant lever of change in an institution intended to serve all children and youth, education policy affects multiple dimensions of social welfare. And given these high stakes, education policy implementation warrants careful scrutiny. However, recent trends in education policy signal the importance of reexamining what we know about what gets implemented and what works. In practice, education policy demands arguably have become more complex. School systems now are held accountable for demonstrable improvements in the academic achievement of all students in ways barely imagined just 20 years ago. Across the country, the increasing ethnic and racial diversity of public schools (Ladson-Billings, 1999; Villegas & Lucas, 2002), a shrinking base of resources for education in many states and districts, and new systems of negative sanctions for underperforming schools (Massell, 2001; O’Day, 2002) only add to the urgency and challenge of meeting those standards. Contemporary public school systems vie for resources in competitive and contentious political arenas against projects for roads and sewers, prisons, and health care as well as school alternatives such as vouchers, charters, private schools, and home schooling. Research and experience continue to deepen knowledge about how students’ experiences in school are highly dependent on conditions in their neighborhoods, families, and peer groups in ways that up the ante on school