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Political Culture in Education Policy
one of the political cultures (pages 81-89 in Fowler) and develop a 150-200 word position statement suggesting how organizational leaders should work within it.
Political Culture and Education Policy
In the late 1980s, Marshall, Mitchell, and Wirt (1989) conducted a cross-state comparative study of education policymaking, using a cultural framework for their analysis. One portion of their research specifically explored the impact of political culture on both policymakers and education policy. Indeed, they selected the six states for their study to include two states with a predominantly traditionalistic culture (Arizona and West Virginia), two with a predominantly moralistic culture (California and Wisconsin), and two with a predominantly individualistic culture (Illinois and Pennsylvania). Marshall et al. (1989) made two major findings with regard to political culture and education policy. First, they discovered that powerful national policy movements can overwhelm the importance of political culture in state-level policymaking. For example, the impact of national movements in such policy areas as school desegregation and special education was apparent in all six states, regardless of their political cultures. Their second major finding, however, was that in the absence of a national movement, policy differences related to political culture do emerge. For example, policymakers in the traditionalistic states reported that their legislatures were considering reforms in areas such as student testing, stronger student discipline, and weakening the power of education professionals.
More recently, Karen Seashore Louis and her colleagues studied how the political culture in ten states shapes both their education policies and their policy processes. They found that political culture exercises a considerable influence in both areas. For example, traditionalistic states like Texas, Mississippi, and North Carolina had relatively closed policy processes, dominated by elite insiders, and policymaking tended to be centralized. In contrast, moralistic Oregon and Iowa used open processes that involved numerous participants. Differences in political culture also influenced how states constructed their policies. Both North Carolina and moralistic Minnesota adopted accountability policies. However, the approach in North Carolina was centralized, in contrast to that used in Minnesota, which gave schools considerable freedom to interpret and use test score data as they wished (Febey & Louis, 2008; Louis et al., 2006, 2008). The authors concluded that in order to understand state education policy, it is necessary to “move beyond descriptive reports . . . by using the lens of political culture to interpret the types of policies . . . , stakeholders involved, and the specific mechanisms . . . employed” (Febey & Louis, 2008, p. 69). Thus, political culture seems to be an important variable in education policymaking at the state level, but it is constrained by the national education policy agenda.
