Perpetuating Inequalities: The Role of Political Distraction in Education Policy

Reconciling the Politics of Distraction With the Limitations of Law and Policy

While little has been written to date about the politics of distraction within education policy, there is a considerable body of work regarding the limitations of law and policy. Scholars have previously suggested that, at best, policy is able to make incremental changes, rather than fundamental shifts (Lindblom, 1965), while legal reform strategies have been criticized for being “an ineffective or even co-opting and neutralizing force for social movements” (Spade, 2009, p. 290). Others remind us that policy problems are rarely “solved,” particularly when they pertain to complex problems like equity and justice in education (Leonardi & Staley, 2018, p. 4; McLaughlin, 2006, p. 211). Still others use the concept of “wicked problems” to consider why some of society’s problems are particularly complex and challenging to address through public policy (Rittel & Webber, 1973; Weber & Khademian, 2008): These wicked problems are not only difficult to define, but they are also cross-cutting and relentless (Weber & Khademian, 2008), making them nearly unsolvable via standard methods of resolution (Brown et al., 2010).

Because complex societal problems are so difficult to resolve, public policies sometimes have limited consequences for the material conditions of people. In their edited volume, Gottfried and Conchas (2016) take up the question of what happens when policies backfire, or have “the exact opposite effect of what [they were] intended to do” (Gottfried et al., 2016, p. 3). These policy backfires have effects counter to their intention by exacerbating problems they purport to address. Perhaps one of the more persuasive examples—and certainly one of the most well-known in popular culture—is the multi-billion-dollar investment in the Drug Abuse Resistance Education (D.A.R.E.) program in the 1990s. Not only did D.A.R.E. fail to accomplish its primary goal—reducing the prevalence of drug use among America’s school-aged children—but by some accounts it made things worse, and especially for communities of color (Alexander, 2011). Some studies have found that students who participated were more likely to use drugs after the D.A.R.E. program. In this way, Gottfried et al. (2016) argue, “telling children to ‘just say no’ inspired them to ‘just say yes’” (p. 2).

Unlike policy backfire, where policies produce effects counter to their intention, the politics of distraction cannot be completely explained by the insufficiency or inadequacy of policies. And, as the articles included in this issue outline, identifying the limitations or failures of policy and politics does not necessarily uncover the politics of distraction. This is, in part, because uncovering the politics of distraction also requires us to understand how policy discourse—the way policies are framed and constructed—affects the creation and implementation of policy (Lakoff, 2002, 2004; Schön & Rein, 1994; Stone, 2002). The frames used are “at least as a significant as the argument we make about [the policies themselves]” (Ladson-Billings, 2013, p. 13), because frames have consequences for the way we think about policies, propose potential solutions, and identify root causes. In fact, the frames used affect how the public responds to a particular problem—as much or more so than the factual or rational arguments used by advocates (Lakoff, 2002, 2004). To a certain extent, these frames focus attention in particular ways, and in so doing may also distract from a more nuanced or complex understanding of an issue. Moreover, the frames and symbols used to describe a given political or policy problem also serve to define and constrain our understanding of reality. Stone (2002) argues that “the passion in politics comes from a conflicting sense of fairness, justice, rightness, and goodness. . . . The different sides in a conflict create different portrayals of the battle—who is affected, how they are affected, and what is at stake” (p. 34). Those portrayals shape our collective understandings, of the problems at hand but also of the world in which we live.

How these collective understandings define the world around us, as well as reveal or obscure systemic and structural phenomena, is at the heart of the politics of distraction. To uncover some of these implicit understandings and push the field of education to more holistic and transformative change, some scholars have advocated for clarifying or even reconceptualizing the frames used to define common problems (Lakoff, 2002, 2004). For example, Ladson-Billings (2008) advocates that we abandon the apolitical framing of the achievement gap. By constructing differences in performance between white students and students of color as a gap, policymakers focus narrowly on educational outcomes, while ignoring a diverse collection of forces or causes related to those results (Welner & Carter, 2013), including the history of unequal and segregated education, lack of access to education and opportunity, unequal funding, and voter disenfranchisement (Ladson-Billings, 2008, 2013). Instead, Ladson-Billings (2008) argues we should conceive of inequalities in student outcomes as an education debt, which “requires us to think about how all of us, as members of a democratic society, are implicated in creating these achievement disparities” (p. 236). While the achievement gap framing “predictably leads to policies grounded in high-stakes testing, which in turn leads to narrow thinking about groups of students, their teachers, and their schools” (Welner & Carter, 2013, p. 3), Ladson-Billing’s reconceptualization may help educators and society at large take a wider view of educational equity—and the complex and intersecting forces that make it so challenging to find solutions.

A Focused Definition of Policy Distractions

We conceive of policy distraction as a persistent focus on a narrowly defined set of policies or a constrained set of potential solutions to policy problems, that arises in part because of the politics of distraction. Put more simply, policy distractions obscure a deeper understanding of the policy context and the lived experiences of students, families, and communities; in this way, they divert attention from root causes, complex structural forces, and historical and contextual circumstances (Giroux, 2013, 2017; Spade, 2011). As the articles included in the Yearbook highlight, policy distractions can manifest across a variety of disciplines and affect students and communities from a range of identity groups. Across these examples, however, we can identify the following common elements:

Spade (2011) provides many salient examples of political or policy distractions, consistent with our conceptualization, including gun control laws, the detention of immigrants at the borders—a timely and highly relevant critique today—and the creation of anti-discrimination policies for transgender individuals. We summarize the latter to highlight how policy distractions can function to enact and reproduce inequalities at the individual, institutional, and societal/cultural level. Spade suggests the creation of anti-discrimination policies for transgender individuals is too often based on the “the single-vector rhetoric of these campaigns” (p. 64). That is, anti-discrimination policies may distract from and unwittingly narrow the focus to only include potential barriers to employment, eschewing a conversation about the broader context of economic inequalities faced by the trans community. More specifically, he argues that by focusing on anti-discrimination policies, we “erase the systemic exploitation and economic marginalization that produces and maintains a racialized and gendered wealth gap” which in turn reinforces the deception that if people could stop “being fired ‘just for being trans’” we could in turn conclude that “equal opportunity exists and the economy is fair” (Spade, 2011, p. 64). He further argues that these campaigns often prioritize the stories of those trans individuals with comparatively more privilege—white, professional, American citizens—which ignore the additional barriers faced by multiply marginalized individuals and which can ultimately “deepen race, class, national origin and ability divides” (p. 65).

Giroux (2017) similarly criticizes the political discourse and associated policy reactions to the 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman:

Questions concerning what kind of society we have now become, reflected in such a tragic killing, are simply ignored. Such questions are important because they invoke wider social considerations. . . . [Instead] the dominant media seem only capable of asking “who is George Zimmerman and why did he shoot this young man?” Actually, the more purposeful question would be, what kind of society creates a George Zimmerman. . . [We must] look beyond Zimmerman’s dreadful act and see it as a symptomatic of a larger war being waged on poor and minority youth” (Giroux, 2017, p. 95).

While the Black Lives Matter movement has sought to surface this exact conversation, the proposed policy solutions—both by critics and well-meaning activists—have instead focused on ameliorating the effects of that “war”: Encouraging community-based policing, installing and requiring body cameras, and providing consequences to “bad actors” when other shootings inevitably occur.

Overview of the 2021 PEA Yearbook

This collection of articles aspire to take an intersectional approach in “understand[ing] conceptually how various forms of oppression are linked in complex and interlocking ways” (Horsford et al., 2019, p. 39). By exploring one idea—the politics of distraction—across student identities, political contexts, policies, and experiences of students in schools and universities, we endeavored to provide a space for scholars and activists to collaborate and consider how policy distractions may have a common set of characteristics or elements that serve to perpetuate oppressive structures. We organize the articles into three sections defined by their conceptualization and characterization of policy distraction.

The first section, Addressing Symptoms while Ignoring Root Causes, includes three articles that explore a diverse set of education policies—chronic absenteeism (Childs & Lofton, 2021); charter authorization processes (Henry, 2021); and the recruitment and retention of educators of color (Grooms et al., 2021). To a certain extent, each of these issues has been politicized within education and the resultant policies and practices have aimed to improve educational conditions. However, the authors in this section consider how these policies also act as distractions that focus too myopically on the symptoms of persistent challenges and inequalities in education, rather than acknowledging or exploring the root causes that enabled them. For example, Ain Grooms, Ebonee Johnson, and Duhita Mahatmya (2021) argue that a focus on recruiting more educators of color ignores the primary reason so many educators of color leaves schools in the first place: The institutionalized racism and segregation that continues to permeate our school system. Using document analysis and a quantitative analysis of original state-level survey data, their analyses show how racialized school climates may continue to push educators of color out of the profession, particularly within schools without a commitment to diversity issues. Similarly, Joshua Childs and Richard Lofton (2021) conducted a systematic literature review of 62 articles that focus on chronic absenteeism. Their results suggest reform policies related to school attendance miss the bigger picture of students’ life circumstances and almost entirely ignore the root causes of chronic absenteeism (Childs & Lofton, 2021). They ultimately call for more expansive public policy responses that acknowledge the “black box” of chronic absenteeism that highlights those root causes. Finally, Kevin Lawrence Henry (2021) uses Critical Race Theory and the case of post-Katrina New Orleans to examine the charter authorization process. He argues that while research has heavily critiqued charters more generally, there is limited research on the authorization process, which is often constructed as objective, colorblind and benign. Henry argues, however, that the charter authorization process is actually a gatekeeping mechanism, and he offers “an urgent call for reevaluating the charter authorization process for its racialized, exclusionary effects” (p. 250). Collectively, these three articles consider how a small collection of politically palatable solutions comprise much of the discourse or disproportionately “command the limelight” in discussions about education policy solutions (Hattie, 2015, p. 2).

The three articles in the second section, Tinkering Toward Formal Legal Equality and Access, also examine policies that ignore root causes, but dig deeper into examples where policy distractions explicitly purport to improve the material conditions for traditionally marginalized groups. Collectively, these papers take up some of the issues that have been most politicized within education—all characterized by extensive public discourse and moral disagreement (Moses, 2016). The authors examine how school segregation (Donnor, 2021), access to bathrooms for transgender youth (Farley & Leonardi, 2021), and university reactions to their racist symbols, statues, and histories (Tichavakunda, 2021) often divert to conceptions of formal legal equality (Moore, 2014; Spade, 2011); that is, they “operate to transform systems facing resistance just enough to stabilize things and preserve the status quo” (Spade, 2011, p. 57). For example, Jamel Donnor (2021) examines the legacy effects and policy distractions associated with Southern white resistance to school desegregation. Reviewing documents associated with Shepard v. The Cleveland School District et al, he argues that the ideological roots of White Supremacy and the guise of colorblindness have allowed White Mississippians to thwart school desegregation efforts. Amy Farley and Bethy Leonardi (2021) similarly argue that even policies that appear trans-affirming—like those advocated in the Obama-era Dear Colleague letter that encouraged schools to affirm trans youth and allow them to use bathrooms that match their gender identities—may problematically narrow the discourse around school supports for trans youth. Relying on two years of survey data from the families of transgender and gender expansive youth, their analyses suggest parents desire policies and practices that transform school structures, and that tactical policy changes (Spade, 2011) like those regarding accommodations for existing binary spaces like the bathroom may serve to distract from a broader focus on cis-heteronormative school structures and cultures that negatively impact queer and trans students. Finally, Antar Tichavakunda (2021) argues that university attempts at racial redress (e.g., campus space name changes, removal of statues) are Racial Symbols (Bell, 1992) that divert attention from structural forces and systems that shape Black students’ experiences and outcomes in higher education, and beyond. Like Spade (2011), the authors in Section II collectively warn about the “danger of merely tinkering” (p. 57) while allowing policy distractions to co-opt language from the civil rights movement or narratives around liberation, even though they actually reify oppressive systems and structures. They further argue that in order to enact meaningful change, we need broadened constructions of the political and structural forces that surround the policy issues at hand, rather than obscuring those forces through symbolic gestures or rhetoric around formal legal equality.

The final section, Reinforcing Notions of Deservingness and Merit, builds upon the prior sections to interrogate how policy distractions rely upon, build, or maintain conceptions of students, families, and communities. In particular, these papers explore policies that advance conceptions of merit and protection, and unpack how in doing that, they advance a deserving/undeserving framework (Spade, 2011), and construe certain students, families, and groups as more deserving than others. In the first article of the section, Malerie Barnes & Michele Moses (2021) explore how anti-affirmative action advocates in the Students for Fair Admissions v Harvard case construct Asian-American students as heroes to distract from a more meaningful conversation around merit, opportunity, and inequality. Jennifer M. Wilmot, Valentina Migliarini, and Subini Ancy Annamma (2021) further consider how sexual harassment and anti-bullying policies serve to police, surveil, and regulate identities, particularly for Black girls. They argue that rather than protect Black girls, these policies and educator responses to them “create a nexus of subjugation that makes Black girls increasingly vulnerable to experience racialized sexual harassment.” Cris Mayo (2021) explores similar notions in her work on parental rights and transgender youth, arguing that parental rights claims obscure transphobia and prioritize the rights of conservative families over trans-affirming ones, and almost completely disregard the rights of trans youth. The articles in Section III reveal how policies “operate to mine and control certain populations marked as drains or threats at the population level regardless of a window dressing articulated through individual culpability and individual rights” (Spade, 2011, p. 56). Collectively, these articles also consider how these policies construct perceptions of who needs protection and intervention and reinforce ideas of whose rights are most important.

Significance and Contributions to the Politics of Education Scholarship

The consequences of allowing policy distractions to determine and co-opt the discourse about a policy issue or “problem” are significant, particularly as it relates to educational rights, access, opportunity, and justice. As noted above, policy distractions cause other, “more important issues [to be] buried in the fog of what might be called isolated and manufactured crises” (Giroux, 2013, para. 2). But this fog is not necessarily innocuous, and we push against notions that policy distractions are simply policies that have not gone far enough, but that may be, in fact, positive steps forward. In this era of technology and distracted driving, it seems we have evolved our understanding of distraction to mean something that passively happens to us. It has become nearly synonymous with the notion of a wandering mind or lack of focus. However, distraction is often not passive. That is, when we are distracted, it is because some other things actively required or demanded our attention—diverting it away from something else. Much like distracted driving has been made more dangerous and prolific because of our growing dependence on constant communication via iPhone and smart devices, so too has education become more focused on a smaller subset of potential solutions and less focused on the broader structural barriers to equity.

Thus, education policy distractions obscure—or intentionally distract from—the structural forces of power and privilege, and they reproduce or formalize those structures within law and policy. Because of this narrow focus, they often rely on conceptions of formal legal equality (Moore, 2014; Spade, 2011), or the conception of equality that ignores “oppressive social arrangements, institutional organization, and structural inequalities – a process which then permits the Court to make assertions about equality under the law without enforcing any legal action to alter racially oppressive conditions” (Moore, 2014, p. 68). Finally, the collective impact of these results has potentially disastrous implications for our democracy writ large. Arundhati Roy (as cited in Giroux, 2013) suggests that the politics of distraction has allowed a “theft of language, [and] this technique of usurping words and deploying them like weapons, of using them to mask intent and to mean exactly the opposite of what they have traditionally meant, has been one of the most brilliant strategic victories of the czars of the new dispensation. . . This language heist may prove to be the keystone of our undoing’” (Giroux, 2013, para. 6).

Despite the longstanding acknowledgement of distraction in scholarly and public discourse, a host of factors make it feel particularly salient to uncover these forces today. We feel compelled to use this academic platform, if you will, to reveal what we can about this ongoing “language heist” and the policy distractions in education. The current moment is emotionally wrought for so many of us—a fact that we cannot ignore as an editorial team—and most people are distracted by the realities that exist around us every day. While not an exhaustive list, these realities include the outgoing President of the United States and the legacy of mistrust and spectacle he will leave behind; the COVID-19 global pandemic and what it has revealed about our mortality, our collective discomfort with grief and loss, the precarious nature of childcare and the still-too-patriarchal construction of most families, and the limitations of collective agency and public will to protect one another from harm; and the racial reckoning and political outrage following the rampant murder of unarmed Black men and women across the United States. All of these things layer atop the 24-hour news cycle and the shortening attention span of the American public. Writing for the New York Times, Leibovich (2015) described the current era as the “dazzle-me-now days,” arguing that “there can be grave consequences for a candidate who comes off as gray and plodding and bogged down in nuance.” In such an era, the appeal of distracting policies and politics—and the myriad associated consequence that arise as a result—may be greater than ever before.

At the same time, the American public education system is consistently asked to address an array of competing policy concerns and social issues, not least of which include ameliorating the effects of social and racial inequality, as well as educating a host of minoritized, disenfranchised, and historically underserved student populations. In the current political climate, however, even a symbolic commitment to this work appears to be threatened (Horsford et al., 2019). Despite the promise of a new Secretary of Education and federal administration under President-elect Biden, the Trump Administration’s policy preferences represent a simultaneously longstanding and growing discourse of deservingness (Spade, 2011, 2015). Like the articles in Section III reveal, this rhetoric focuses narrowly on a set of values, assumptions, and rationales that simultaneously target and exclude specific student populations. This combination of factors led Horsford et al. (2019) to argue that “in this climate, we need, more than ever, strong social institutions and the public sphere in which informed deliberation can take place” (p. 15). That need has only intensified in the wake of 2020 and the many challenges it has brought.

This collection of scholarly work, then, is both relevant and timely. It seeks to highlight the various ways that policy distractions problematically narrow the historical and ongoing conversations about education, with very real consequences for our ability to engage in informed deliberation. It presents a compelling argument that the most pervasive discourses within education policy—even when framed using language from the civil rights movement or liberatory theories—often eschew substantive policy concerns regarding systemic racism, structural oppression, and social inequity in favor of politically polarizing issues, such as bathroom bills, affirmative action, and school choice. More importantly, this works seeks to improve the field of education’s understanding on how “policy distractions” not only underscore the bulk of the American policy discourse as it relates to minoritized and underserved student populations, but also explain how they might serve to prevent transformative change. We hope that it may help surface new ways of “conceiving resistance practices” and inspire us to “avoid producing a demand that merely tinkers with the legal processes” (Spade, 2011, p. 56). Instead, by collaborating across our disciplines and areas of foci, we hope this work brings people “into a shared struggle rather than putting them at odds with each other” (Spade, p. 56).