Beyond Standards: The Fragmentation of Educational Governance and the Promise of Curriculum Reform

When facing a book whose title begins with “Beyond,” it is always difficult to tell whether one is reading a eulogy or a call to action. As this book shows, it can also be both.

Morgan Polikoff’s new release is a requiem for the consensus approach to education reform that has dominated U.S. politics and school governance for 30 years. Having listed the reasons that this approach has failed, Polikoff exhorts his audience to face the truth about what it will really take to achieve the longtime goals of the reform movement. In service of that lofty goal, he outlines some concrete steps that would lead us there.

Taking Smith and O’Day’s early 1990s picture of “systemic school reform” as a guide, Polikoff sets out to explain why their vision hasn’t come to pass. ¹ The main reasons, he suggests, is a combination of suboptimal formal governance structures and informally-entrenched habits of state-level deference to the decision-making prerogatives of overburdened local actors, classroom teachers first among them. While research and policy efforts at improving curriculum standards are on the right track, such efforts will never succeed without more fundamental changes. He says this forcefully in both the introduction and the conclusion. “Without a more radical reform that asserts greater state control over what materials teachers use and how they can be supported to use them, we may as well not bother trying to direct instruction through policy” (BS, 13). And, “If we are unwilling to attempt this kind of powerful curricular reform, we may as well not bother with the standards charade” (BS, 141–42).

As far as this view of the stakes goes, it is quite right, and it is genuinely refreshing to have it so clearly stated. In order for standards-driven reform—or any reform—to deliver on its promises, we would have reevaluate the issue of governance itself. This really is a radical proposal, and Polikoff is to be lauded for having the courage to make it. In Polikoff’s view, we have settled for inadequate half-measures rather than forthrightly engaging in the truly difficult work, hoping against hope that we might get lucky, that “policy levers that are far too weak to actually achieve the kind of major instructional improvements needed to boost achievement and narrow gaps at scale” might work anyway (BS, 2, 12). Needless to say, they have not.

I think Polikoff is basically right about the futility of standards-driven reforms as they have been implemented thus far. And I think he is especially right that our approach to governance—including, in particular, the accountability regime through which we have tried to generate system-wide change—is at fault.

But I also think Polikoff goes astray in blaming the fragmentation of governance for the past three decades of standards-based policy failure; and if he is incorrect about the cause of the failure he documents, then his state-empowering fix will not solve the problem. Indeed, the 20^th century history of using state power to drive reform in education and in other public institutions leads me to draw a conclusion that is very nearly the opposite of his, a conclusion that I think is supported by the very evidence Polikoff recounts in his book. It is unnecessary to change the structure of educational governance in order to make ambitious standards-based reforms work, I want to say. And more strongly, concentrating power at the state level would make “at-scale” reform initiatives he supports less likely to succeed.

The root of what I regard as Polikoff’s inference error lies in his framing of the standards movement’s theory of action. In Polikoff’s telling, “Standards come first” and the final result is “better student learning” (BS, 7–8). These standards are based on agreement among state-assembled “experts” about what students should know and be able to do by the end of their P-12 career (BS, 6). Student progress is to be tested by “reoriented” assessments, focused less on vague basic skills than on the concrete standards themselves. He adds, as a final step in this theory of action, a “restructuring of authority among the different levels” of educational governance (BS, 7), citing Smith and O’Day’s work for support. Polikoff’s framing allows him to present his reforms as simply returning to a road not taken.

Like Polikoff, I think Smith and O’Day’s vision for education reform was prescient—it is a surreal experience to revisit those writings 30 years later and to notice how freely policymakers simply seized on the politically easy elements of that vision and discarded the more difficult ones, just as Polikoff says. But in his framing of Smith and O’Day’s vision, I think Polikoff is accidentally repeating this mistake: his version specifically overlooks Smith and O’Day’s emphasis on the importance of local legitimacy in the creation of standards and the assessment of progress.

Smith and O’Day’s theory of change begins with a process of deriving standards from shared values and ends with a process of assessing school performance (Smith & O'Day, 1990, pp. 240–243). They recognize that “shared values” are not the exclusive domain of content experts and cannot simply be imposed from above. Their version of assessment is not focused only on what students have learned but on institutional performance as a whole—and they crucially recommend that evaluation be conducted by and with professional educators. Their wider lens acknowledges that if reform efforts are to change actual instruction, “they must be seen as legitimate by the instructional staff in the schools”—and so their theory of change includes “bottom-up” work to build buy-in (O’Day & Smith, 1993, pp. 280–281). Polikoff is correct in saying that Smith and O’Day do call for “restructured governance,” but this restructuring focuses on clarifying the positive responsibilities of local institutions, rather than radically disempowering them (Smith & O'Day, 1990, pp. 34–35). I ultimately think that underrating the importance of local-level legitimacy leads Polikoff all too hastily to turn to a structural solution that treats local buy-in as a kind of luxury rather than a necessary ingredient of successful reform.

Polikoff is clear-eyed and right to see that continuing to tinker with the approach we’ve adopted over the past few decades will only bring us closer to an inevitable dead end. But his analysis, which passes over an important part of Smith and O’Day’s theory of change, is incomplete. And that leads him to draw the wrong conclusion. Call this review, then, two wrongs and a right.

Beyond Standards is an important book for several reasons, not the least of which is what it represents for its author. Over the past decade, Polikoff has established himself as a model scholar and an undisputed leader of a rising generation of academics working on education policy and leadership. This is due not only to his more traditional research, for which he won AERA’s Early Career Award in 2017, but also for his role in bringing that research to bear on public policy itself, for which he has also been officially recognized. He has written amicus curiae briefs around the educational ramifications of legal cases, served as an expert presenter at community forums, aided state education agencies in a consulting capacity, edited Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, and spearheaded an open letter to the U.S. Department of Education on the advantages of using average scale scores rather than proficiency rates as a measure of school performance. His work on curriculum-driven reform has garnered significant funding support from the Gates Foundation, the William T. Grant Foundation, and various federal agencies, including IES and the NSF. And in the spirit of disclosure, he has also generously taken the time to speak to my own doctoral classes on education reform. Beyond Standards represents an effort to step back and reflect upon his findings, to take stock of the big picture and to say something about what it all means. Given his well-earned stature, people will rightly sit up and take note.

Polikoff divides Beyond Standards into eight chapters, but these chapters really seem to reflect a three-part argument. First, in chapters 1 and 2, he provides a reminder of why we needed education reform in the first place and the role that curriculum standards were intended to play in improving the system in general. Second, in chapters 3–5, he synthesizes a number of studies that he has done, studies that reveal the structural fragmentation of the system and the ways fragmentation frustrates reform efforts. Third and finally, in chapters 6–8, Polikoff outlines some proposals that would remove these impediments and allow curriculum standards—or any reform—to do their jobs.

Polikoff’s proposals are a response to a rhetorical question he poses: what would we do “if we were building a new system from scratch—if we didn’t have hundreds of years of history, law, and racism setting problematic precedent”? The answer, in keeping with his view of how fragmentation obstructs reform, is: “greater state control in almost all areas, beginning with funding” (BS, 137). This would allow, he says, for a more equitable distribution of resources, for a more equitable distribution of good teachers, and for the reorganization of school district boundaries to prevent segregation and resource-hoarding. Concentrating control at the top would limit the discretionary power of local actors to defy, distort, misinterpret, or misunderstand reformers’ intentions, thus paving a more linear and less contingent path to the kinds of improvements he wants to see. This is what we have been missing.

The studies Polikoff has done over the past decade suggest that rumors of our education system’s “standardization” have been greatly exaggerated. Despite rolling out curriculum standards and assessments backed by accountability measures that threaten individual teachers’ livelihoods and individual schools’ continued existence, teachers report feeling as though they have more control over curriculum now than they did prior to the passage of NCLB. Teachers feel little pressure from districts to use any particular curriculum materials, districts often duplicate curriculum vetting work already done by the state, and the state is often in the dark about exactly how districts, schools, and teachers are implementing the state’s standards (BS, 50–65).

New York and Louisiana are the exceptions to this pattern of states deferring to local districts and individual teachers—and Louisiana is the model that Polikoff holds up by way of proof-of-concept (BS, 47–49). At the state level, Louisiana not only vets potential curriculum materials, giving a top rating only to a handful of materials, but it also communicates in some detail the rationale for these ratings. This gives districts more guidance than is typical elsewhere. The state also assists local districts with the costs and procedures of procuring the best materials; it designs and develops materials when publishers’ offerings are insufficient; and it evaluates and approves vendors who offer professional development training on these materials.

Polikoff is astute here in pointing out the untapped potential of state leadership that Louisiana reveals. Districts and teachers often lack the capacity in both person-hours and expertise to evaluate curriculum materials, assess professional development, and coordinate implementation well (BS, 66–67). And Louisiana doesn’t prohibit districts from doing any of this. But by subsidizing only those curriculum materials and professional development trainings that it has rated “Tier 1,” the state presents its districts with a proposition of mutual benefit. And it works. As Polikoff says, “districts have made those adoption choices, teachers are implementing the adopted materials, and teachers display higher knowledge about the standards than teachers in other states” (BS, 49). This is a pretty unambiguous win.

But this example also troubles the logic of Polikoff’s largest claim—that “it is impossible” to do reform at scale without structurally reducing the power of districts and school personnel. The Louisiana case demonstrates that professionals across levels can overcome formal fragmentation to achieve coherence without overhauling any governance structures. This cannot both happen and also be impossible. Perhaps Polikoff’s “impossibility” claim has to do with propagating Louisiana’s model across the rest of the states. But there is still no explanation of why governance structures must be reformed in order to facilitate this kind of propagation. Every other state has the same powers and responsibilities vis-à-vis education that Louisiana does. Nothing is structurally preventing them from following suit. Louisiana has aligned its 70 districts under the same authority that every other state possesses and without eliminating, consolidating, or otherwise stripping power from those districts. If the suggestion is that the Louisiana model wouldn’t work elsewhere, that argument isn’t made in the book. And if Louisiana is a success, I cannot see how our existing governance structures necessarily impede reform efforts.

Furthermore, Polikoff’s own evidence suggests that we should be wary of funneling power upward to the state—this might kneecap rather than streamline efforts to reform schools at scale. State-level capacity-building is necessary but not sufficient for new initiatives to change entrenched practices at the level of the school, as Polikoff’s evidence shows. In an anonymous West Coast district, Polikoff finds an exemplary “curriculum culture” consisting in true teacher-to-teacher collaboration. Excerpts from interviews with teachers in the district bring out the extensive co-planning and co-reflection work that PLC time allows—labor that keeps teachers on the same page and ensures that only the best curricular modifications and supplementation make it into the classroom. Teachers cannot overcome the traditional isolation within the profession unless they have the time, space, and encouragement to collaborate, which state capacity can furnish. High-quality curriculum materials, focused professional development, and access to coaching are also necessary, and state capacity can furnish those as well. But actually cultivating a strong “curriculum culture” still requires close-to-the-ground leadership and buy-in—in short, the reality of “distributed leadership” (DeMatthews, 2014; Spillane, 2005, 2006). ² It is not clear to me that the state can take the place of this local leadership or ensure a requisite level of legitimacy simply by edict. ³ If the idea of empowering the state is to make it easier to replicate the West Coast district’s success everywhere, that result doesn’t seem entailed or even particularly likely in the absence of the consensual involvement of local agencies.

But by far the most compelling argument against arrogating local power to the state in order to make reform initiatives more irresistible at the local level—particularly for reformers sincerely invested in Polikoff’s goal of “achieving equity at scale”—is that concentrated power is more easy to capture by people whose substantive values run contrary to that goal.

I should say this more strongly—and I say this as a dyed-in-the-wool progressive, myself: the progressive dream of empowering the state to promulgate good policy and to allocate and coordinate resources as a means of achieving general social goals is simultaneously unworkable in principle, unsuccessful in history, and devoutly to be feared.

It is simply Polikoff’s bad luck that the release of his book coincides with real-world events tailor-made to illustrate the danger in handing states greater control of educational matters. As of this writing, 21 state governments have taken steps toward banning whatever it is they mean by “critical race theory” in public schools, sometimes including higher education (Stout & LeMee, 2021). Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis has gone as far as to say, “We are going to get the Florida political apparatus involved so we can make sure there’s not a single school board member who supports critical race theory” (Ceballos, 2021). Polikoff’s proposed changes assume an uncontroversial set of goals for schools to accomplish, but recent events reveal a dramatic fracturing on this score. It is by no means clear that the old bipartisan consensus on educational aims remains intact. And some such consensus—a specific account of how our society’s expectations of schools are related to the actual standards we adopt—is absent from Polikoff’s theory of change, despite the fact that the proposition that greater state control will bring about more equitable outcomes absolutely depends on it.

And even if states were committed to such ends, our very history of and with racism is replete with evidence of the ineffectiveness of using centralized power to simply overcome local opposition. The history of education itself is full of examples. We should not forget that it was originally state law taxing Black citizens as equals while funding Black schools unequally. ⁴ And that is before we get to the diabolically creative reactions of former Confederate states to Brown v. Board of Education. In one case, Virginia passed a law forbidding integrated schools from receiving state funds, and it provided for the executive closure of any school that allowed Black children to enroll (Rooks, 2017, p. 81). Even when federal power forced schools to integrate, this often entailed the disastrous side effect of casting Black teachers and principals out of the profession (Thompson, 2017; Dougherty, 2004; Todd-Breland, 2018). ⁵ More recently, it has been state-level resistance to federal mandates—states’ attempts to shield their systems from the scale of transformation that the spirit of the law demands while still superficially complying with the letter of the law—that has created the most intractable problems with NCLB and ESSA (Gottlieb, 2020). Why should we believe that greater power at the state level will be wielded for the general good? And even if it is, why should we believe that greater state power will be sufficiently compelling to make lower-level buy-in irrelevant?

I don’t need to belabor the crushingly similar histories of other public policy domains in order to make my point, but suffice it to say that whether we’re talking about criminal justice reform (Murakawa, 2014; Schoenfeld, 2018; Hinton, 2021), or Social Security Act administration (Tani, 2016; Glickman, 2019); or labor law (Lee, 2014); or housing policy (Rothstein, 2017; Taylor, 2019), there simply is no historical model in this country of successfully making the state intentions behind large-scale reforms impervious either to capture or to undermining by local actors if the exercise of state power is locally understood to lack legitimacy. It has not mattered, in this respect, whether large-scale reforms are mandated by the courts, pushed out by the executive branch, or duly legislated by elected officials. Differences in specific governance structures across policy areas have likewise mattered little. Every attempt to impose a reform agenda by disempowering local actors has made regulatory capture all the easier to accomplish without actually closing the local-discretion loophole.

When Polikoff suggests that we cannot do education reform at scale unless we make these structural changes, then, I think we need to take very seriously the possibility that we cannot do education reform at scale, full stop.

But perhaps there is a silver lining here. Perhaps we ought simply to rethink our working sense of the “scale” at which the work of education reform is done. To that end, we might return to Smith and O’Day’s ideas about systemic school reform to locate a different account of why the past decades of reform have failed. Polikoff is, of course, right about the inappropriateness of the mechanisms by which we have tried to change instructional practices broadly. But “weakness” wasn’t their problem—plenty of closed schools and dismissed teachers, rewritten state laws and revamped tests, can testify to their power (Ewing, 2018; O’Neil, 2016). Rather, our policy mechanisms have represented a technocratic shortcut around one of Smith and O’Day’s most important insights: If reforms are going to work at scale, they need to be understood as legitimate by ground-level education professionals quite generally (O’Day & Smith, 1993, pp. 280–281). Smith and O’Day’s original work specifically stressed three necessary elements geared toward establishing and maintaining legitimacy that neither NCLB nor its progeny took seriously enough, and that Polikoff’s framing also overlooks.

First, “state activities would focus on the challenging tasks of developing consensus about learning goals” (Smith, O’Day & Fuhrman, 1992, p. 34). These are the standards, which were to be rooted in “important sets of values” that the authors name: “collective democratic values critical to our society” and academic virtues like free inquiry, a “rigor in thinking,” and “sustained intellectual effort” (Smith & O'Day, 1990, p. 246). Second, “stakeholders”—not just experts—must be actively involved in developing the standards and the content of curriculum materials. They don’t cite Joseph Schwab (1973, 1983), but this is basically his picture of “deliberation” in curriculum-making. Such creative deliberation among stakeholders gives rise to what Smith and O’Day call a “reinforcing effect” that facilitates alignment throughout the system (O’Day & Smith, 1993, p. 269). And third, “the assessment of school standards must rest primarily on professional judgment,” by which they mean “careful investigation and reflection by teachers and other practicing educators” about whether standards are being met (O’Day & Smith, 1993, p. 280). They warned us in 1993 that relying on testing as a primary instrument of accountability would lead to superficial gaming rather than to fundamental instructional change precisely because that mechanism is reductive and lacking in legitimacy (O’Day & Smith, 1993, p. 281). We didn’t listen (Koretz, 2017).

In short, reforms capable of generating systemic change “at scale” are reforms that include mechanisms and opportunities for incorporating “bottom-up” perspectives. Incorporating such perspectives makes state leadership both appropriately legitimate and appropriately prudent. ⁶ Smith and O’Day’s original vision of reform “requires leadership and long-term perspectives on the part of policymakers as well as the support and involvement of professionals who would participate in developing the state instructional guidance system and take responsibility for high-quality programming at the school level” (Smith, O’Day & Fuhrman, 1992, p. 36). Avoiding the shortcuts and dead ends that prevent education reforms from sticking requires “both top-down and bottom-up” work (Smith, O’Day & Fuhrman, 1992, p. 31). The state should play a leading role, just as Polikoff suggests. But to play this leading role, the state needs no new powers, and the local level must retain its existing capacities.

I read once—though I cannot remember where, and google is no help here—that every work of genius acknowledges two genres: the old one it transcends and the new one it inaugurates. Polikoff is not trying to write a work of genius; he is only synthesizing and extrapolating from a decade’s worth of research. But the book nonetheless shares this feature. It is the absolute fulfillment of a certain way of approaching questions of education reform, and I mean that as a compliment. Polikoff courageously just says the truth necessary to breaking the wheel of reform churn: tweaking technical things will never work, and we should do something radically different. If we don't, “we may as well not bother trying to direct instruction through policy” (BS, 13). I think this is a consideration we ought to take literally and seriously. When I disagree with Polikoff’s suggestion that greater state control is a viable alternative to our earlier attempts, it is mainly because I don't think this suggestion is different enough.

Beyond Standards is a necessary read both for the straight shooting it does, and also for the light it shines in the direction of what a new genre of education policy scholarship ought to address. We stand in need of a genre of policy scholarship that isn't only thinking big, but is also thinking widely—one that is ready to return to fundamental questions about the educational and social values our schools are to embody, the mission that our education system serves.

Public education is ultimately and intimately linked to a common world that we inhabit with our neighbors as well as with our compatriots thousands of miles away. It is an institution through which we ideally come to share one another’s fate (Stitzlein, 2019). There is an idea running amok through the landscape that our schools are sapping our national strength by indoctrinating children to hate themselves and their country, the only solution to which is “patriotic education.” If we are not ready to think and write explicitly about the values that make progressive goals such as gap closure and equity worthwhile, then handing decision-making power to the state will do no work for Polikoff’s substantive equity aims at all. This power will either lack the ground-level legitimacy to succeed or it will be free to pursue other, decidedly less progressive outcomes.

To support a new kind of policy scholarship, we really ought to unwind the fragmentation that has grown up in colleges of education, in which policy scholars, historians, sociologists, curriculum theorists, psychologists, philosophers, measurement experts, and so on are incentivized to focus on their own specific problems without sufficient reference to wider literatures or aims. We ought to bring together, in academic circles and in high-level policy conversations, a wider range of discipline-based reasoning styles in the interest of producing solutions likely to make sense to a broad swath of the public whose support and action these solutions will need (Colander & Freedman, 2019; Berman, 2022).

The danger in our habitual disciplinary parochialism is that every real-world problem comes to look like a nail for which we each, separately, are sure we have the right hammer. The danger in our habitual parochialism is that “thinking big” comes to refer only to the scale of our self-evident policy recommendations rather than to the scale of ambition, generosity, or creativity in the intellectual pursuit of workable solutions. The danger in our habitual parochialism is that—as has happened over the past 30 years—we will become increasingly skilled at designing elaborate and elegant reforms while giving increasingly little regard to the constituencies that will either make these reforms run or subvert them. We have come to entertain a perfectly technocratic vision of policymaking that disavows its relation to political life, a relation on which policy success or failure inevitably depends. Polikoff’s Beyond Standards is astute in telling us explicitly how easy it has been to fall into this trap. The book also, to my mind, stands as evidence of how difficult it will be to escape it.