The Impact of Political Context on the Questions Asked and Answered

Abstract

This chapter examines how the larger political context and policies enacted at different points in American history have affected the questions education researchers asked and answered. The authors argue that while education researchers are often quick to consider how their research should shape policy, they are less likely to contemplate the possible effect of policies on their scholarship. To examine whether the policy–research relationship is indeed bidirectional, the authors conducted a thorough content analysis of six of the most prominent education research journals, some of which date back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The goal was to consider how shifts in racial politics and educational policies may have influenced what was studied, particularly research that examined the role of race and ethnicity in education. The authors looked for shifts between education research examining race and education within a broader social context and research focused on the personal and familial deficits of individual students or families. They argue that if these shifts in research are somewhat synchronized with shifts in racial politics and policies in the United States, this is a potential indicator of the impact that the larger political milieu may have had on education research over the last 100 years. Consideration of this research−policy relationship may raise the awareness of education researchers in terms of the origins of the questions they will ask and answer in the American Educational Research Association’s second century.

The relationship between education research and education policy has always been tenuous, with researchers constantly bemoaning the lack of impact their work has on related policy decisions (Lagemann, 2000; Weiss, 1977, 1991). The topic less often discussed, however, is the opposite effect, or the impact of policy decisions, and of the larger political context of those decisions, on education research. In this chapter, we provide an initial analysis of what that impact could be by focusing on the relationship between policy discourse and research related to racial inequality across several decades to consider whether the effects flow in both directions.

To facilitate more bidirectional exploration of the research–policy connection, we reviewed the education research published in the most prominent journals over the last century to consider how shifts in political discourse on racial inequality and the related educational policies implemented may have affected the education research questions that were asked and answered. While we are not claiming that there is a clear causal link between the policy context and the research, we do think it is important to ponder the possible impact of researchers’ larger context on how they understand what needs to be studied, not to mention what research is funded (see Banks, 1993). According to Aaron’s (1978) analysis of the role of research during the Great Society era, “The findings of social sciences seemed to come after, rather than before, changes in policy, which suggests that political events may influence scholars more than research influences policy” (p. 9).

If Aaron’s (1978) inference is correct—or at least partially so—what does this say about the role of education research in either challenging or perpetuating inequality across policy regimes and contexts? We ask this question, in particular, as it relates to issues of race and ethnicity in education and the research that examines disparate educational experiences and outcomes of students across racial lines. We argue, therefore, that if we consider the arguments of critical race theorists (Bell, 1995; Crenshaw, Gotanda, Peller, & Thomas, 1995; Delgado & Stefancic, 2012), who see issues of race and power embedded in the legal system, and critical policy theorists in education (Ball, 1997; Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995; Lipman, 1998, 2004; Marshall, 2005; Yasso, 2005), who excavate assumptions about race and poverty that are embedded in educational mandates and laws, then this policy-to-research impact may not be so farfetched. Indeed, if the mandates and laws that shape educational practices and fund much of the education research are molded from racially problematic assumptions, then it is highly probable that much of the research shares at least some of these same assumptions.

We believe that helping education researchers think about the policy–research nexus as bidirectional allows them to question how this relationship might have shifted their gaze away from more critical research questions that are worth exploring. In fact, as we explain below, our study of 100 years of education research strongly suggests that in the past 10 to 15 years, more education researchers are asking these critical questions of the policy world and our field. New critical research on issues of race and education may, in fact, help lead many American Educational Research Association (AERA) members from a place of thinking “within the box” of education policy to imagining a world with a more compassionate and healing set of educational policies that are well grounded in solid research evidence on the multiple causes of racial inequality.

For this review of research, therefore, we conducted a detailed content analysis of six of the most widely cited education research journals published in the first 100 years of the AERA. We selected these journals based on their relatively rigorous peer-review process and their status in the field. These publications have published work by some of the most revered researchers in the field, and thus, they represent the valued knowledge in education research.

Four of these journals are published by AERA, and we reviewed them from the time they were first published, in the late 1960s or early 1970s, through 2014. In addition to our thorough content analysis of these four most-cited AERA journals, we reviewed articles in two non-AERA journals—the American Journal of Education and Sociology of Education—that began publication prior to the 1960s, allowing us to examine education research publications across most of the last 100 years.

This careful and labor-intensive content analysis of six education research journals over several decades was aimed at finding peer-reviewed, published research on issues of race and education across time. In other words, we wanted to see whether and when education researchers changed the ways they wrote about these issues over the last century, as the larger political discourse on race and inequality changed. We were particularly attuned to how researchers were writing about broader issues of structural inequality and cultural dominance and their impact on students’ educational experiences over time. Thus, we were analyzing whether researchers used a contextual framework for studying issues of race and education, as opposed to explaining racial disparities in educational outcomes as the result of Black and Latino students’ personal and familial deficits. The contrast between a contextual and a deficit framing of issues of race and education is important in efforts to understand the effect of politics on research because of what we know from the research about how the politics of race in the United States changed over the 20th and early 21st centuries. Indeed, what is remarkable about U.S. racial politics is the way in which it fluctuates between framing racial inequality in terms of a history of systemic racism and framing it more simply in terms of cultural or behavioral deficiencies of individual members of a racial/ethnic minority (J. D. Anderson, 2007; Lopez, 2014).

The central question explored in this review, therefore, is the extent to which this fluctuation in the larger political discourse on racial inequality and the effect it has had on educational policy has also had an impact on education research. Our content analysis of six prominent journals over the last 100 years suggests that the changing political context has an impact on the questions asked and answered, suggesting that the research–policy relationship in the field of education is bidirectional. The point of doing this review is to encourage researchers to think more critically about the relationship between the rhetoric and the research, allowing us to reframe our scholarship more independently from rhetorical policy discourse and more tightly connected to the needs of the field. We can hope that such reframing will enhance the agency of education researchers vis-à-vis the politics, which could, ironically enough, have the potential to strengthen the impact of the research on the policy.

The Bidirectional Research–Policy Connection

We begin our review of research by examining the “research utilization” or “uses of research” literature, which explores the relationship between social science research and public policy. In the applied and professional fields, such as education, researchers’ commitment to speak to policymakers is of utmost significance (Finnigan & Daly, 2014; Lagemann, 2000; Weiss, 1977, 1991; Weiss & Bucuvalas, 1980). As a result, the research-to-policy relationship is closely examined in education and related fields, but as we note, far less has been written about the impact of policy on research (Whitty, 2006).

According to Weiss and Bucuvalas (1980), over the last century, most of the discussion about research utilization has focused on questions about how to increase the use of social science research in governmental bodies. Lagemann (2000) notes that beginning in the Progressive Era, American reformers have had faith in the power of social science research to further their causes. But between the Progressive Era and the late 1970s, when Weiss and Bucuvalas (1980) were writing their analysis of government officials, they found that these officials were often advised to heed the wisdom that social scientists offered. This was also the era in which the federal government, in particular, began funding more social science research, especially in the field of education.

The influence of researchers on policymaking appears to have hit its peak in the 1960s, at the time of the Great Society programs (Lagemann, 2000). This was the era in which government support for social science research expanded, as did the contributions of research findings to the development and enactment of many government programs, including Medicare, equal employment opportunity, legal services for the poor, urban aid, community mental health centers, and several other programs, including educational programs designed to redress historically based racial inequalities (Aaron, 1978). Weiss and Bucuvalas (1980) describe this era as a time when many programs designed to address the nation’s social problems were “being based on social science research, or at least on social science concepts and values” (p. 6).

Lagemann (2000) has also written about this Great Society era and how education and social science researchers were conducting studies that profoundly enriched the policymaking process in education. Yet, as we quoted Aaron (1978) saying above, the research, in turn, was affected by the subsequent policies that emerged. In other words, as the federal government’s role in K–12 public education policy and funding grew exponentially, the influence of these more centralized policies on education called for research that examined their impact.

As part of the new federal role in education, authorities in Washington became more involved in education research. Much of the research had to do with the evaluation of new federal programs, which became a major growth industry beginning in the late 1960s. (Lagemann, 2000, p. 162)

After this tighter relationship between the researchers and the policymakers developed in the 1960s, however, came a period of disillusionment with the research and the programs it fostered to address poverty, discrimination, and other problems. Aaron (1978) noted a distinct shift between the early 1960s and late 1970s in the relationship between the research and political action, as the social science research on the causes of poverty became more complex and thus less conclusive (Kantor & Lowe, 2014).

According to Weiss and Bucuvalas (1980), as the American economy slowed in the late 1970s, economists were seen to be fallible creatures. Meanwhile, many of the vaunted social programs created with input from social scientists were falling far short of expectations. Thus, Weiss and Bucuvalas (1980) noted, a certain ambivalence came to prevail in Washington agencies about the contributions of social science research to the development of social welfare policy and programs.

Similarly, Lagemann (2000) wrote about the retrenchment of the federal role in education during the 1970s, even as researchers were engaged in studies that would have profoundly enriched our knowledge and understanding of the shortcomings of federal education programs. She connected this political retrenchment to the concept of “anti-educationalism,” which she derived from Hofstader’s concept of anti-intellectualism, or skepticism toward intellect and a preference for more instrumental knowledge. Lagemann (2000) argued that anti-educationalism is an extension of anti-intellectualism, but focused more directly on the presumed lack of knowledge, skill, ambition, and competence needed and possessed by educators and education researchers (Lagemann, 2000).

Coinciding with Lagemann’s (2000) chronology of educational policy and research, Aaron (1978) documented a change of heart in the political world between the early 1960s and the 1970s, regarding the perceived role of education in reducing poverty. In the early 1960s, he wrote that education was seen as an all-powerful transformer of the economic potential of poor children. But by the early 1970s, it was seen as an ineffective instrument that had few, if any, predictable consequences on poor children’s earning potential. Such perspectives, Lagemann (2000) noted, supported arguments that excellence could be achieved in education without major investments in personnel, research, materials, and equipment.

Lagemann (2000) connected this anti-educationalism perspective to a sharp decline in federal funding for education research. She noted, for instance, that after the 1970s, although much remained to be learned from the research, the politics of that time jeopardized federal activities in education, especially those related to education research. “In no other way were antieducationist attitudes more starkly revealed than in congressional debates about legislation pertaining to education research” (Lagemann, 2000, p. 185).

What followed this era of backlash against the field, beginning with the report A Nation at Risk (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983) during the Reagan administration, was an accountability movement within the educational policy world that both pushed for the use of “evidence” in instructional decision making (see Finnigan & Daly, 2014) and grotesquely narrowed the measures that counted as evidence in evaluating academic achievement and success, for schools and individual students (Wells & Holme, 2005). In this context, systematically conducted education research that asks not only “what works” but also “why,” “how,” “for whom,” and “under what conditions” is less valued. Such research is less likely to be supported, or taken up into a policy context driven by short-term test scores and easy-to-report data that can be collected and analyzed by “researchers” with no expertise in education or research (DeBray, Scott, Lubienski, & Jabbar, 2014; Lagemann, 2000).

In the current context, therefore, the old school “knowledge utilization” or “uses of research” literature seems somewhat quaint, harkening back to a time when researchers truly believed they could speak “truth to power” and that power would listen.

The Impact of Context on Researchers

The question of the impact of the political and policy context on scholarship is answered in part by examining the U.S. Department of Education’s priorities for funding education research, and how that has changed over time, through congressional elections and presidential administrations (Lagemann, 2000; Weiss & Bucuvalas, 1980). Beyond federal funding per se, we argue that there may well be larger ripple effects on the questions that many researchers ask and answer as the policies shift in sync with the political context and the ways that the “problems” to be solved in education are defined in the media and public opinion.

In Aaron’s (1978) analysis of the relationship between politics and professors, he pointed out the various ways in which researchers are influenced by prevailing political interests and preconceptions. He stated that research agendas are certainly “not immune to currents of intellectual fashion, which are related to prevailing political moods” (p. 157).

The argument that prevailing political moods can affect research agendas certainly fits with research on how all people—not just researchers—come to make sense of the world around them and how the larger context of their sense-making matters. For instance, in the literature on qualitative research methods, scholars note that the social context affects people’s understanding of their reality. This is why qualitative researchers study how people make sense of particular phenomena across different contexts (see Merriam & Tisdell, 2016). Similarly, some research has more directly examined the relationship between context and meaning making, including a study by Xu and Garland (2010) that looked at the connection between people’s understanding of income inequality and their context. They found that people living in states with greater income inequality perceived more inequality than those living in more equal states.

Similarly, reflexive sociology explains how our understanding of the social context in which we live and make decisions affects our thoughts, judgments, and classifications. According to Bourdieu, social structures such as racial segregation lead “a double life”—existing first in the unequal distribution of material resources and second in the systems of classifications or templates for the conduct, thoughts, feelings, and judgments of social agents (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992). In other words, researchers’ understandings of the right questions to ask and answer exist both in real, measurable “tangible factors,” such as research funds, and in the “intangible factors” or thoughts, judgments, and classifications of what the problems that need studying are (see also Burawoy, 2009).

Researchers, therefore, like those they research, are strongly influenced by the cultural and political contexts in which they live. In writing about this relationship between the context of researchers and the scholarship they produce about race more specifically, Banks (1995) argued that “knowledge reflects both the reality observed” by the researcher and “the subjectivity of the knower” (p. 15).

For instance, Banks (1995) noted that a researcher’s location in the social structure, which is partially based on relations of race, social class, and gender, frames what he or she sees and views as significant. Banks used a historical case study of the construction and reconstruction of race between the late 19th century and the 1940s to document the ways in which the social, cultural, political, and historical contexts in which researchers are embedded influence our social locations and thus, the knowledge we construct and reconstruct. Similarly, Ladson-Billings (2012) wrote that, even beyond the social location of individual researchers, the different social science disciplines that contribute to the field of education have a history of racialized understandings that influence both research and practice.

In connecting the research with the policy context, Stevens (2007) analyzed how sociologists in England studied racial/ethnic inequalities in secondary education between 1980 and 2005. He concluded that the development of particular research traditions can be explained by pointing to more general developments in the social policy and intellectual climate in England. He wrote that research on race/ethnicity, and on educational inequality, more specifically, appears to be informed by developments in social policy. Stevens (2007) cited a set of policy reports released during the 1980s in England that put issues of racial and ethnic minority students’ disadvantages, especially racism and discrimination, firmly on the agenda of English education research. “As a result,” Stevens (2007) noted, in that era, “English educational research focused its attention increasingly on processes of racism and discrimination in schools” (p. 171).

In other words, Stevens (2007) found that the broader social, political, and intellectual context of these researchers influenced the framework, including the questions they asked and answered when conducting their research. Similarly, Aaron (1978), in his study of the use of social science research in the development of programs to address poverty, lack of education, and unemployment, concluded that in many cases, social science findings came after, rather than before, changes in policy, which “suggests that political events may influence scholars more than research influences policy” (p. 9).

Furthermore, in writing about the shift in public attitudes regarding the role of the federal government in solving poverty and other social problems in the early 1970s, Aaron (1978) viewed the research of that era as both part of the rationale for the shift and a reflection of the shift. He argued that prevailing political interests and preconceptions influenced the topics that researchers chose to study during that era—most notably, disillusionment about the potential good to be achieved by government.

In the U.S. context, many argue that the backlash against government antipoverty programs that Aaron (1978) discussed was related to racial politics. For instance, an argument that poor people of color—the so-called “undeserving” poor—were the primary recipients of these social welfare policies, even if that was not the case, allowed conservative politicians to use racial politics as a way to garner votes from the White working class (see Edsall & Edsall, 1992).

It is also important to remember that this backlash, discussed in more detail below, came in the aftermath of the controversial and infamous 1965 report issued by then Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan, titled, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. Moynihan drew heavily from social science research and, in fact, made an argument in the report that research should play a more prominent role to address ongoing racial inequality. The problem with the report was its strong focus on the dissolution of the Negro family and its relationship to a culture of poverty that he claimed developed from the abundance of single-mother-headed households in the Black community. Even though Moynihan couched this concern in a context of structural inequalities and several historical factors well beyond the control of individual Black families, the takeaway from the report and the media coverage of it focused primarily on dysfunction within the Black community.

The response to this perception created a powerful chilling effect on the social science community (Gergen & Bauer, 1968). According to Wilson (1990), the acrimonious debate that emerged after African Americans’ response to the report intimidated social scientists, especially liberal scholars.

In the aftermath of this controversy and in an effort to protect their work from the charge of racism or of ‘blaming the victim,’ liberal social scientists tended to avoid describing any behavior that could be construed as unflattering or stigmatizing to racial minorities. (Wilson, 1990, p. 6)

A major problem with the Moynihan report, therefore, was that this chilling effect on social science research created a knowledge-based vacuum, allowing the “culture of poverty” argument to run amok. And as we know, this argument did indeed enjoy a powerful resurgence in the late 1970s and 1980s. We also know that the culture of poverty claim was as much about race as it was about poverty, and that it was part of a larger backlash against the social welfare policies of the 1960s and early 1970s.

Wilson (1990) documents the longevity of this chilling effect on social science research, lasting until at least the early 1990s, despite the growing problems of urban poverty concentration, joblessness, and other social dislocations in the inner-city ghetto that were progressing during that period, the 1970s and 1980s. This dearth of systematic empirical research on urban poverty, in particular, hindered the development of thoughtful policy solutions to worsening conditions in many inner-city neighborhoods.

Thus, if social scientists ignore the process by which the larger society produces subjectivity and influences the construction of knowledge, we are unlikely to interrogate established knowledge that contributes to the oppression of marginalized and victimized groups (Banks, 1995).

Our goal in the next two sections of this review of research, however, is to do the exact opposite of ignoring the process by which the larger society produces subjectivity and thus influences the construction of knowledge about race and education. We begin with a description of the key findings from our review of the education research published over the last 100 years, followed by our analysis of the research on the political context in which this education research was being conducted.

The Iterative Relationship Between Context and Questions: Racial Politics and Education Research Over Four Decades

In order to analyze the relationship between the larger political context and the focus and content of education research over the last 100 years, we conducted a thorough content analysis of six peer-reviewed journals and a brief review of literature on racial politics in the United States over the past century. We began by reviewing four of the most frequently cited education research journals according to the 2014 Journal Citation Reports. These four journals—(a) Review of Educational Research (RER), (b) Educational Researcher (ER), (c) Review of Research in Education (RRE), and (d) American Educational Research Journal (AERJ)—are all published by AERA. Two of them—RER and RRE—publish comprehensive reviews of research in a particular area. Educational Researcher, meanwhile, is sent to all members of AERA and publishes articles on salient issues for education researchers. AERJ publishes some the most widely recognized empirical research in the field. All four of these journals were ranked in the top 15 journals (out of 219) for citations in the Education and Educational Research categories of the Journal Citation Reports.

Unfortunately, of these four AERA journals, only RER has been published for more than 52 years. Thus, in order to discuss these themes going back further in the history of education research, we added two older, also widely read journals to our analysis: the American Journal of Education (formerly known as School Review Journal), which began publication in 1867, and Sociology of Education (formerly known as the Journal of Educational Sociology), which was first published in the 1920s (see Table 1 for a list of journals reviewed and their initial publication dates).

Table 1

Journals Reviewed and Their Initial Publication Dates

Titles of Journals Reviewed	Year First Published
American Educational Research Journal	1964
American Journal of Education (formerly School Review Journal)	1867
Educational Researcher	1972
Review of Educational Research	1931
Review of Research in Education	1973
Sociology of Education (formerly Journal of Educational Sociology)	1927

Thus, to explore our thesis about the ways in which research on the social context of racial inequality in education responds to the policy context, we conducted content analyses of the articles published by AERJ, American Journal of Education, ER, RER, RRE, and Sociology of Education from 1867 to 2014. As we noted above, extensive content analysis was aimed at mapping published research on issues of race and education across time as the larger political discourse on race and inequality changed. To do this, we analyzed whether or not researchers used a contextual framework for studying issues of race and education, as opposed to framing racial disparities in educational outcomes as the result of Black and Latino students’ personal and familial deficits to explain achievement gaps. As stated, this contrast between a contextual and a deficit framing of issues of race and education is key to understanding the effect of politics and policy on education research, as the politics of race in the United States has changed dramatically in terms of how issues of racial inequality are framed.

The first step of our review entailed using the advanced search function for each of the six journals to come up with a list of feature articles that contained the search terms “racial equity” or “equal educational opportunity,” especially as the latter related to race. This process required methodically reviewing each journal and listing any articles related to issues of race and education in an Excel file, with the citation information and the abstract. The Excel file was broken down by journal and included the following information for each article: the topic; publication date, volume, and number; authors’ full names; full title; and full abstract. Book reviews, editorials, commentaries, and response papers were excluded from analysis. A total of approximately 14,000 articles across the six journals were reviewed.

Next we categorized each of the articles into two distinct ways of framing issues of racial inequality in education: (a) A contextual way of framing racial inequality in terms of the larger social context and student disadvantages, including racial bias and other socioeconomic variables that affect student learning, or (b) a deficit framing of racial inequality in terms of students’ differentiated educational outcomes, namely, achievement gaps usually narrowly measured by standardized tests, with only individualistic explanation as to why. In other words, we were trying to distinguish the researchers who considered factors related to social structures and systemic racism for at least some of the differences in students’ educational experiences.

The frequencies of articles that fit within the first topic area, on the social context of racial inequality in education, were calculated for further analysis according to their chronology. Out of 14,000 total articles searched, 647 articles fit the topic of interest during the 100-year time period (see Figure 1). Finally, both authors read the abstracts and frequently the full text of the articles in order to cite examples and support the themes that were emerging. Our guiding question, therefore, was what impact did political shifts have on the questions asked and answered in the research? Were there certain periods in which education researchers placed less focus on these critical contextual factors and the belief systems that justified them?

Figure 1

Articles on the Social Context of Racial Inequality in Education

As we illustrate in Figure 1, in these six journals there has been wide variation over time in the number of articles published that discuss the social context of racial inequality. For the years we studied in which all six of these journals were published (1970–2014), a total of 148 research/feature articles were published each year. Thus, over each of the 5-year periods we examined, these six journals published a total of 780 articles combined.

Looking more closely at the ebb and flow over time, several trends in our detailed content analysis stand out, leading us to argue that while more analysis is needed, the research–policy relationship in the field of education appears to be bidirectional. Thus, we see dips in the average number of articles per journal on the social context of racial inequality during historical moments when the politics and policies were counter to such a framing. For instance, in the late 1930s and early 1950s and then again from the late 1970s through the 1990s, the average number of articles per journal that focused on the context of racial disparities in education declined, coinciding with a sharp political shift in the United States in how politicians were defining the nature and causes of ongoing racial inequality (Murray, 1984; Quadagno, 1994).

Meanwhile, we see an increase in the number of articles on the social context of racial inequalities in the 1940s, the late 1950s, and the early 1970s, followed by a steep decline in the number of such articles in the late 1970s through the 1980s and well into the 1990s. There were two inexplicable dips in the number of articles focused on the social context of educational inequality in the early 1950s, in the years leading up to the Brown decision and in the late 1960s, as some of the most important federal legislation in the field of public education designed to ameliorate unequal social contexts was being passed. But these dips were short-lived and may have had more to do with uncertainty regarding policy than with a distinct split from it.

In fact, as we discuss in the following two sections—the first covering the period from the 1920s to the 1970s and the second covering the 1970s through 2014—there is ample evidence that the relationship between the research and the larger social–political context in which it was produced flows in both directions. We demonstrate this finding by interspersing the content analysis of education research published in these top journals with a review of political and historical research on racial politics in the United States during different eras of the last 100 years covered by the content analysis.

Pre–Civil Rights Era to the Late 1970s: The Ebb and Flow of Research on Racial Inequality

In analyzing the journal content in the early to mid-20th century, we were able to examine only three journals that began publication prior to 1964 and only four that began before the 1970s. But even within this limited number of publications, we saw a notable dearth of research on the social context of racial inequalities in education prior to the 1940s. In fact, most of the “research” on issues of race and education in the 1930s was descriptive analysis of the social assimilation or social betterment of marginalized racial/ethnic groups, including Jews, Native Americans, and “Negroes.” The bulk of this early literature was published in the Journal of Educational Sociology (now Sociology of Education) and included a special issue in 1933 focused on the Tuskegee Institute and its role in educating Negroes. The backdrop to many of these articles was a discussion—or at least an acknowledgment—of racial oppression and ongoing inequality. Still the analysis remained highly functional and pragmatic in a manner that generally oversimplified the insidious nature of the systems of oppression in the United States.

For instance, in a 1938 article in the Journal of Educational Sociology on health education among Negroes, health was defined as

the quality of life that renders the individual fit to live most and serve best. Its principle involves keeping the body and mind at the highest levels in order to give and take the best that life has to offer. (Nathan, 1938, p. 532)

The article discussed the relationship between the conditions in which Negros lived and their health problems, demonstrating how several contextual factors, including poverty, poor housing, lack of medical care, prejudice, and ignorance, all accounted for the health plight of the Negro. But the authors also noted that virtually all the causes of diseases in the Negro community could be traced back either to ignorance on the part of members of the community or to poverty. This either–or framework struck us as odd, given that the lack of public health information in communities without economic resources.

Similarly, a 1939 article, also in the Journal of Educational Sociology, examined vocational education and guidance for Negro students. The author noted that these Negro youth were an “ambitious lot” but, at the same time, were bewildered by the “morass of social and economic confusion and the impasse presented to them as a group” (Patterson, 1939, p. 298). Yet the author also claimed these students were unable to make a decision regarding their vocational choice and that, when they did make a decision, it often represented a “stereotyped veering in the direction of the usual professions without the slightest notions of their probabilities of success” (Patterson, 1939, p. 298).

This author called for more counseling at the precollegiate stage to help convey the facts to Negro youth about their vocational possibilities. Never mentioned in this article was the larger context of Jim Crow in the South and a national trend of racial discrimination and violence. And this article was not unique.

To the extent that “context” is discussed at all in education research during this pre-1940s era, it was mostly connected to issues of poverty and the problems of poor families and students. Absent from most of the education research articles of that time was discussion of severe racial segregation in housing and schools, in both the North and the South, or the rampant lynching and assaults suffered by Black workers at the hands of working-class White workers competing for good jobs.

For instance, as Gilmore (2008) and other scholars noted of this time, although violence, oppression, and discrimination against Blacks, in particular, was rampant, there was little discussion of racial injustice in the media or on the part of political leaders (see also Gilmore, 2008; Klarman, 2004). Derrick Bell (2004) refers to this post–Reconstruction Era segregation as affecting virtually every aspect of Black’s lives. “Blacks deprived of the law’s protection were vulnerable to economic exploitation and physical intimidation. Violence included literally thousands of lynching and pogroms by white mobs” (p. 81).

The researchers publishing in the limited number of education research journals of this time made no direct connections to this larger context that we could see. Indeed, many of the early 20th-century education research articles that examined issues of race and education focused primarily on the benign topic of social mobility as a marker of equality and not, for the most part, on the complicated nature of the structural and cultural factors that worked against that mobility. For instance, one 1929 article in the Journal of Educational Sociology examined the social assimilation of the American Indian. The purpose of this study was to interpret and evaluate the cultural relations between Indians and dominant Euro-Americans within U.S. territories. The author acknowledged that the character of the Indians had been misrepresented by Euro-Americans who held extreme attitudes, “ranging from warlike hatred to philanthropic zeal, or even to total indifference” (see Blackmar, 1929, p. 7). The author’s solution to this misrepresentation, however, appears to be assimilating Native Americans to the more Americanized “language and domestic science, family improvement, and religious life” in preparation for independent life.

By the 1940s and 1950s, however, as the U.S. came out of World War II and into the Cold War, the content analysis shows that education researchers were looking more closely at the causes of ongoing racial inequality. For example, in the 1950s, articles in what was then called The School Review (now the American Journal of Education) examined everything from racial differences in educational attainment to racial prejudice in schools and cultural sensitivity related to students’ racial/ethnic backgrounds and how those affected their experiences in schools.

Indeed, one of the articles published in the School Review in 1946 proclaimed that issues of intercultural understanding across racial and ethnic groups constituted the dominant area of educational sensitivity at that time. Citing the end of World War II and the manner in which the world is more connected on a global level—referred to as the “shrinking world”—the author calls on educators and education researchers to focus on helping students learn to get along across cultural boundaries. When talking about the importance of this educative work on the domestic front in the United States, the author notes:

A war was fought to safeguard our shores from invasion and to preserve or restore the democratic way of life in the far corners of the world. Our present sense of moral obligation for perfecting that way of life in our own country as a beacon light to the rest of the world plays no small role in making intercultural and international relations the dominant area of educational sensitivity in our schools today. (E. L. Anderson, 1946, p. 378)

Noting the need and desire to improve the democratic way of life in the United States and to expand Americans’ concept of democracy here to include social and economic democracy for members of all racial and ethnic “minority” groups, E. L. Anderson (1946) admitted our own shortcomings as a nation in exemplifying to the world the democratic way of life. He saw the growing popularity of curriculum and educational materials to further students’ intercultural understanding as a clear sign that the field of education, with the support of key researchers writing for this issue of his journal, was taking a lead in the effort to further the democratic way of life in the United States and thus enhance our political credit on the world stage.

What E. L. Anderson (1946) and several other researchers during the 1940s and into the 1950s were doing was drawing more attention to issues of race and racial inequality within the educational system. By placing their research in the larger political context of the post–World War II era and the Cold War against the Soviet Union and other communist countries, these researchers were writing about their own version of what Derrick Bell (1980, 2004) came to call the “interest-convergence principle,” which was his explanation for how and why the civil rights movement in the United States, including the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, occurred when it did and not at an earlier stage in American history. Bell (2004) defines the principle of “interest convergence” as follows: “The interest of blacks in achieving racial equality will be accommodated only when it converges with the interests of whites” (p. 69). In other words, E. L. Anderson (1946) and Bell (1980) both made strong arguments that without the Cold War and American politicians’ profound fear of being accused of human rights abuses by the Soviet Union, many civil rights gains in the United States would not have occurred when they did, despite ample evidence that racial violence and atrocities had been rampant in the first part of the 20th century.

Bell’s (1980, 2004) interest convergence argument is critical to understanding the context–research relationship we are developing in this chapter, for two reasons:

He applies a parallel argument about the impact of the larger political context on federal judges and their rulings to the one we are making about the impact of the policy context on researchers. What was different in 1954, Bell argues, from the situation in prior years of Jim Crow and racial violence was that the broader political context of the country at the time of the Cold War ensured that White policymakers saw economic and political advantages to abandoning segregation.

The larger political context that Bell argues influenced the U.S. Supreme Court and the American public in the late 1940s and early 1950s no doubt also had a broader impact on educators and education researchers. If a growing number of White Americans—particularly those who lived in the North and were not poor—were suddenly increasingly aware of how problematic Southern racial segregation was to the United States’ standing in the world, no doubt there were education researchers who were part of that population. It is hard to believe that they were not when we look at the content analysis.

Education Research in the Era of School Desegregation, Mid-1950s to Late 1970s

In the aftermath of the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, much of the research related to race and education published in the late 1950s and through the 1960s focused on school desegregation policy, especially student outcomes and implementation. Much like the federal court cases that were ordering local education officials to dismantle de jure segregation in student assignment plans, the researchers were similarly obsessed with how to desegregate school districts that were resisting such efforts.

In addition, some of the research began examining so-called second-generation school desegregation issues. These second-generation concerns included the resegregation of students into separate and unequal classrooms and the sociocultural issues within desegregated schools and classrooms when students of color were not reflected in the curriculum or they were disciplined unfairly. For instance, during the 1960s, there were several articles in both the American Educational Research Journal and Sociology of Education on so-called sociocultural or multicultural issues, which included analyses of curriculum and classroom climates. The overarching questions many researchers were asking during this time, therefore, was whether the school desegregation policies that began with Brown v. Board of Education were fulfilling their promise. The journal content analysis, therefore, does not contradict Bell’s interest convergence argument; rather, it suggests that the larger context in which school desegregation policy was created—for example, the Cold War and the sense of shame it created in the United States about racial inequality—also affected the research community, as growing numbers of education researchers sought to understand whether educational policy lived up to its promise to move the nation beyond Jim Crow.

This research focus on school desegregation implementation continued, with some ebb and flow, into the mid-1970s. Interestingly enough, there were fewer research articles on school desegregation—and on the social context of race and education more generally—during the late 1960s than in the 1940s, the late 1950s, and the 1970s (see Figure 1). There may be several reasons for this drop in the number of articles in the 1960s related to the larger policy context in which education researchers were working. For instance, we know despite the fact that the Brown decision was rendered in 1954, very few schools or students were actually desegregated until the late 1960s or early 1970s (see Bell, 2004; Orfield, 1988; Wells, 2009). In fact, many of the relatively few articles published on the context of racial inequality in education during the late 1960s discussed the lack of progress toward desegregation.

In Sociology of Education, for instance, a series of articles published in the 1960s discussed ongoing segregation in several school systems in the northern, Midwestern, and western United States, including Gary (Indiana), New York City, New Rochelle (New York), and San Francisco. Authors often analyzed the legal, historical, and political context of school desegregation in these non-Southern areas, and often voiced frustration with the lackluster implementation of desegregation. In addition, several articles during that era also focused on the 1966 Coleman report and/or the 1968 U.S. Commission on Civil Rights report, both of which documented the obvious: that very little meaningful desegregation had been implemented by the mid- to late 1960s. Yet since the federal government had commissioned both of these reports, which were research-based examinations of the issues related to race, segregation, and education, they serve as illustrations of the iterative relationship between researchers and the policy context in which they function.

Subsequently, the spike in articles on the role of social context in racial inequality in U.S. public education in the early 1970s also clearly demonstrated how researchers responded to the belated implementation of school desegregation policy in the late 1960s. Indeed, the vast majority of the early to mid-1970s articles explore issues related to racial/ethnic differences in achievement and social development and the impact of a school’s racial/ethnic makeup on those outcomes. For instance, a 1971 article in AERJ, titled “Self-Concept and Ethnic Group Membership Among Public School Students,” examined the relationship between ethnic group membership of students in public schools in which they were minorities and the impact of that experience on the students’ self-concept (Zirkel & Moses, 1971). The study symbolized a large body of research from that era in which education researchers were attempting to understand the relationship between educational policy and students’ experiences in segregated versus desegregated settings (see, e.g., St. John, 1971).

Interestingly enough, many of the subsequent policy recommendations found in this and other articles of the same era speak to issues that should have shaped educational policy over the past 35 years. Clearly, however, that was not the case, as educational policy headed in the opposite direction (see McGuinn, 2006). But what is also clear is that the policies of the late 1960s and early 1970s—particularly federal court school desegregation orders—had a profound impact on education research, fostering a large body of work on how and why to desegregate schools.

The Post–Civil Rights Era: The Policy and Research on Neo-Plessism

Several journalists and political scientists have documented the evolution of racial politics in this country beginning in the mid- to late-1970s, all revealing important common themes across their analyses (Black & Black, 2003; Edsall & Edsall, 1992; Gitlin, 2007). While the implications of the political shift that occurred at that time have been discussed in terms of public policies in general and educational policies more specifically, we know of no other examination of its impact on education research. As we noted above, the 15-year period from 1975 until the early 1990s marked a low point in the number of education research articles published on the contextual issues contributing to racial inequality in public schools, and we believe this is related in some measure to the political discourse on racial inequality at that time.

We begin this examination of the changing “common sense” regarding the role of the government in solving social problems (such as racial inequality in schools and communities) with an acknowledgment of the larger political, social, and economic context of that sense making. For instance, we know that by the late 1970s, the United States was experiencing rising inflation, high unemployment, an oil shortage that led to long lines and high prices at gas stations, and the Iranian hostage crisis. At the same time, U.S. manufacturers were facing international competition from countries with lower labor costs, leading to a strong sense of insecurity about America’s ability to compete (Edsall & Edsall, 1992; Reich, 2007). Within the social and political realm, the country was becoming more politically divided, as the civil rights coalitions were breaking down due to a growing number of Blacks becoming disillusioned with “liberal” policies that failed to address racial inequality and segregation, especially in the North (Bell, 2004; Orfield & Eaton, 1996). Meanwhile, the more conservative Sun Belt states were growing in population and political influence, becoming the incubators of the New Right (see Black & Black, 2003; Frank, 2005) that is still so clearly affecting our political debates and outcomes today.

The end result was a huge jump in political support for so-called “anti-redistributive racial politics,” which portrays all government programs as taking money out of the pockets of hardworking Americans via taxes and giving it to the undeserving poor, who are more likely than not portrayed as lazy Blacks even though there were far more poor Whites at the time. This political backlash against taxes and the subsequent “redistribution” of tax revenue to be spent on people who did not “deserve” to be supported contributed to a larger frustration with all government programs and the sorts of bureaucracies and regulations that came with them. This in turn reignited a powerful antigovernment (particularly anti–federal government), ideology and the call for more states’ rights and less federal regulation of everything from civil rights to the environment to labor rights. Related to this growing support for deregulation was a growing faith in the free market as a good substitute for government programs in addressing human needs and lifting all boats (Chubb & Moe, 1990; Edsall & Edsall, 1992; Frank, 2005; Friedman, 1962).

This confluence of factors and historic events created the context that led to massive reform of the country’s social welfare and educational policies. It was, we argue, the rhetoric and ideology of the former that shaped the latter and the larger “common sense” understanding of the causes and potential solutions to inequality. Such changes in understanding of the problems to be solved by public policy, we contend, may well have had direct and indirect effects on the way in which researchers studied these problems and the public policies designed to correct them.

Thus, we believe that the declining number of race-conscious articles in the late 1970s and the lack of articles through the 1980s and well into the 1990s was most likely responsive to the changing rhetoric—for example, a study of the debate about the relationship between intelligence and race or quantitative research examining the impact of school desegregation policy, usually measured in terms of test score data, were the increasingly popular topics to be explored. Furthermore, many of these articles were framed as a response to Jensen’s problematic 1969 article on the relationship between genetics and IQ, which, much like Charles Murray’s 1984 book on welfare (described below) contributed to an anti-equity politics by implying there was no point in focusing on inequalities in children’s environments since intelligence and the “Negro IQ deficit” was primarily to be explained by genetic factors. Thus, to the extent that Jensen’s research was influencing the policy debate and framework, the policies and the research of that framework affected the subsequent education research. For instance, across several issues of the RRE from 1969 to 1971, Light and Smith (1971) debated with Shockley (1971) over the accuracy of Jensen’s claim. Light and Smith (1971) put forth an empirically based argument that Jensen was wrong and that many environmental factors contribute to students’ achievement levels, but Shockley (1971) disagreed with their analysis.

Still these articles and this debate illustrate the difficulty researchers had at that time presenting evidence about the social context of students’ lives and how that context affected student achievement, particularly for students of color who experienced systemic racism. Other articles in the six journals during the subsequent 15-year low point (1975–1990) of publications on these contextual issues were testimony to the lack of thoughtful political discourse on racial inequality at that time. For instance, many of these articles focused on efforts to garner attention for cultural issues and ethnic identity or provided a critique of the cultural deficit models as a way of understanding the achievement gap. Still there was a definite shift in focus, even in these race-conscious articles, toward the problem of the achievement gap, even when the authors were trying to discredit the often problematic and racialized explanations of the gap.

A good example of this more defensive stance on issues of race and education is found in a 1982 RER article published by Shade, in which she tries to shift the focus on individual differences between students based on race to reconnect the issues of race with cultural ethnicity and its relationship to the “psychological, cognitive and behavioral strategies” for learning that different students used. This article points out the mismatch between school culture and the cultural frameworks that African American students grew up with and adopted. While Shade (1982) danced dangerously close to a cultural deficit model argument, she differentiated her perspective, calling it a stylistic approach to learning that required identification of diverse learning styles within an educational setting. In doing this, Shade (1982) shifted the focus from IQ to culture as a lens for examining the gaps in achievement in a way that represented the intent of many of the race-conscious articles published during this era. A discussion of that larger social context of racial inequality or the cultural biases of the instruments used to measure intelligence was mostly absent from the policy discourse and the education research of this era.

The Changing Understanding of What Needs to Be “Fixed”: A New Common Sense

In thinking about the relationship between the political context and the education research on race and education in the 1980s and 1990s, it is important to consider the ideological dimension of the shift in racial politics during that time. For instance, the interest convergence theory noted above evolved into a post–Cold War political alliance, providing a new context for the research during the 1980s and 1990s. Rather than framing the government as the solution, as it had been during the civil rights era, this new era saw the rise of neoliberal or free market ideology, which shifted perceptions about the role of government vis-à-vis free enterprise, framing the latter as the engine of societal well-being. This shift in favor of the market and away from government programs recentered economic and political power upward, leading to greater income inequality. It also fostered an ideological orientation that rejected the idea of “public,” collective action to address social problems. The new orientation instead privileged individualism and market solutions for society’s ills (Covington, 1997; Echaveste & Scott, 2011).

In this post–civil rights era, corporations, foundations, and individual donors made significant investments across organizations to build a conservative political movement to counter the civil rights, feminist, disability, and labor movements (Echaveste & Scott, 2011; Rich, 2004). According to Echaveste and Scott (2011), this conservative movement helped create the “common sense” notion that inequality was caused by individual choices; it also helped undermine, and in many cases, reverse, the gains of the progressive rights movements by successfully capitalizing on fissures related to race, gender, social class, religion, and identity.

As a result, following the momentary progressive cohesion in the 1960s and early 1970s, the cross-racial networks that had been critical to progressive politics were being splintered, resulting in the pursuit of sometimes competing goals in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Often, this splintering played out over identity politics, which conservatives and neoliberals capitalized on to advance a narrow policy agenda that embraced the language of individual empowerment and rejected government programs designed to help the nonrich, along with the progressive tax policies that forced the rich to help pay for such programs (Duggan, 2003; Lopez, 2014).

This dramatic political shift toward the right was fostered by a politics of strong distrust in government and thus toward public policies and programs—from welfare to the U.S. Post Office, to public schools. It was also fostered by the argument that everyone employed by the government, including teachers, was underworked and overpaid. The racial overtones of this shifting perception are too often ignored. But as Lopez (2014) noted, by the 1980s, progressive politics that would have supported programs and policies to help the nonrich in general was “despised by a large group of voters as a sop to minorities and an infringement on the rights of Whites” (p. 71).

The racial politics of this era and how it shaped the antigovernment—and thus the anti–public education—rhetoric is well documented in the history of welfare reform (Zucchino, 1997), an area of public policy with strong parallels to educational policy during that era. In other words, what had been seen as much-needed government-funded “programs” when they helped Whites became “welfare” when extended across the color line. Echoing many themes in our most recent presidential election, Lopez (2014) writes that “racial attacks on liberalism shifted the enemy of the middle class from big money to lazy minorities, thereby reframing government programs that helped to build the nation into welfare for undeserving groups” (paraphrasing Phillips, 2014, p. 31).

While we are not arguing that most education researchers bought into the racial politics and conservative ideology of the era, that context had an impact on public policy, including education policy, which, in turn, affected what could be studied (and what many people thought “should” be studied). Thus, the broader reverberation of the politics of the welfare queen myth was reflected in the federal budgets of the 1980s and the sharp cuts in funding for social welfare policies, including public education. Arguing that the free market was a better provider of solutions to social and economic problems than the government, President Ronald Reagan pushed for drastic cuts in federal funding for social welfare and educational programs, particularly those targeted for urban areas. This resulted in a cut of $1.8 billion to budgets of larger cities (Lopez, 2014; Zucchino, 1997).

One of the mechanisms for cutting federal funding was the creation of “block grant” programs that consolidated several remaining Great Society programs into one block of funding that was far smaller than the total of the prior amounts spent on those programs. Block grants were also less likely to support the most disadvantaged children and families because they left more discretion to the state and local officials who often had a history of not serving low-income communities of color. In 1981, the federal block grants represented a 21% reduction in federal funding for all the programs enveloped in the grants (Brown, 2003).

In 1981, Congress passed Reagan’s proposed Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, which dramatically affected educational programs targeted to poor students, as well as welfare programs by eliminating work incentives that had permitted recipients to retain a portion of their earnings while still receiving support. As a result, hundreds of thousands of working-poor households were forced off welfare, and others lost badly needed income, as federal funds for programs targeted at poor students were cut (Cross, 2014; Katz, 1996). Drawing on the political momentum of the welfare queen myth that Reagan had circulated, a central assumption of these policies was that the “undeserving poor” were gaming the system. Bolstering this increasingly popular framing of poor people as simply lazy and waiting for a government handout was the 1984 book written by Charles Murray titled Losing Ground. This book became the bible of welfare reformers and others who wanted to cut federally funded programs, organized around Murray’s central premise that “We tried to provide more for the poor and produced more poor instead” (p. 9).

This way of framing people in poverty—particularly Black people—as undeserving of government support, together with the increasing role of a free-market, neoliberal ideology, set the stage for President Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign promise to “end welfare as we know it.” By the 1994 midterm elections, the Republican-controlled Congress was devising its “Contract With America.” The rhetoric surrounding that debate sometimes compared welfare recipients to “alligators” and “wolves.” Then, in 1995, states seized the opportunity to launch demonstration projects to move Aid to Families with Dependent Children recipients from welfare to low-paying jobs (Katz, 1996). Twenty years after welfare reform, many states have used the changes in the federal law to shift welfare funds from serving the poorest families with the least access to decent-paying jobs to programs such as marriage counseling and college tuition grants that service a more middle- and upper-middle-class clientele. The result is that cash assistance aid to poor families now reaches about 25% of the families it supported 20 years ago as poverty rates have remained high (“A welfare check,” 2016).

This was the era in which education research on the contextual explanations of racial disparities all but disappeared. Published in its stead was research on Black students’ aptitude or the test score outcomes of students in desegregated schools (see, e.g., Hannafin, 1983, or Torrey, 1983). The focus of the research was shifting almost entirely in the direction of student “outcomes”—student achievement measured by test scores and dropout rates—and away from contextual explanations for why such outcomes may look different across racial lines.

The Rise of the Tough Love Education Policies: When “Excellence” Became the Only Route to Equity

As the backlash against policies that redistributed opportunities and resources to people of color evolved from the mid-1970s into the 1980s and 1990s, the parallel between education policies and social welfare policies remained strong, and a new wave of educational reform emerged. Thus, both the welfare recipients and the public school educators and students in low-performing schools (and by association, the students’ parents) were portrayed as “problems” to be fixed. In other words, the solution to poverty and to achievement gaps in education was to fix the victims of inequality—students, educators, and parents in low-income communities—regardless of the larger context of economic, social, and political factors that continued to disadvantaged them after tough love policies were passed (Carter & Welner, 2013; Darling-Hammond, 2010; Ladson-Billings, 2006).

Related to this decontextualized way of thinking about public education and the achievement gap is the free-market, antigovernment ideology noted above. Proponents of this free-market, antigovernment rhetoric argue that the best way to improve public education is to force schools to compete for “customers” by providing their parents with more choice in where their children attend school (see Chubb & Moe, 1990; Ravitch, 2010). Deregulation and the introduction of more private service providers are also said to be needed, to supplant the bureaucratic public education system and infuse it with competition, high-stakes incentive systems, and consumer choice (Wells, 2007). Thus, the question we explore in the last section of this chapter is whether this shift in commonsense understandings about the problems and solutions in public education affected the research questions asked and answered.

Much like the welfare reform efforts described above, a series of events in the early 1980s changed the common sense about what was wrong with public education and the role the federal government should play in it. For instance, the Education Consolidation and Improvement Act was a reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, including the largest federally funded education program, Title 1. Under the Education Consolidation and Improvement Act of 1981, Title 1 became Chapter One, and remained the largest federal program for elementary and secondary education, continuing to provide compensatory education in reading and math to disadvantage students. For instance, this act reduced the funding for compensatory education while supposedly “streamlining” the implementation process, a claim that was never proved (Cross, 2014).

At the same time, the guidelines shifted to target the money toward “low-achieving” students in poor schools instead of to poor students. Thus, Chapter One was intended to support special compensatory services for low-achieving students in schools with high concentrations of poor children. Districts were then able to provide special services to low-achieving poor and nonpoor children in schools with above-average concentrations of poverty (Cross, 2014).

This helps contextualize the shift in the education research that we reviewed toward more narrow studies of student achievement rates, and dropout rates measured in terms of outcomes, and not, for the most part, the process by which students drop out of schools (see Fine, 1991, for an exception). Another focus of many research articles published in these journals, during the 1980s in particular, was a decontextualized comparison of public and private schools and of students’ outcomes by race and class within each. This line of research was no doubt fueled by—and in turn fueled—the push for school vouchers that was raging at that time (see Keith & Page, 1985).

Similarly, one seminal edited book on the Black–White test score gap (Jencks & Phillips, 1998) played a pivotal role that no doubt influenced thousands of education researchers in the years after the book was released. Although the volume included contributors who wrote about the broader societal issues of racial inequality, the preponderance of the evidence brought to bear on those issues examined more individual factors—such as psychological and cultural factors. The researchers who contributed to this large volume undoubtedly had a profound impact on what was published in the 1990s in the six top education research journals that we reviewed. Meanwhile, the pattern noted above regarding the ideology of the “undeserving poor,” which legitimized massive welfare reform in the 1990s, played out in a similar but more surreptitious fashion in education reform. While not as vitriolic as the debate over welfare queens, the discourse of federal education policy reform was framed around the inefficiencies and failures of the government-run public education system. The 1983 report A Nation at Risk, released by the National Commission for Excellence in Education, underscored this paradigm shift and created a new “common sense” of educational policy moving forward (Bell, 1988; Ravitch, 2010).

In particular, the members of the commission critiqued the lower expectations that they saw manifested in declining homework time for high school seniors and lower average “achievement” as measured by standardized tests (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983). Despite the fact that these critiques were made with little solid evidence and were subsequently refuted (see Berliner & Bidwell, 1995), they became part of a new common sense about what was “wrong” with public education in America and what was needed to resurrect it (see McGuinn, 2006). This rhetoric, in turn, led to the rise of the accountability movement in education, the next iteration of the “boot strap” mentality that put the burden of solving inequality on individual educators and students.

But not far below these explicit critiques of the public education bureaucracy was a backlash against Great Society educational programs that had been framed by a more contextual way of understanding inequality in education. In the post-1980s, programs like school desegregation and bilingual education that were targeted toward the most disadvantaged by assuring their access to schools and programs were being cut back and often replaced with accountability reforms that placed tremendous pressure on educators to produce similar results in unequal contexts or face punitive measures. Much like the work requirements of welfare policies that were strongly enforced regardless of the job market or the quality of the job training available to welfare recipients, the federal educational policies began linking federal funding to student “outcomes,” narrowly measured by standardized tests (McGuinn, 2006; Ravitch, 2010; Wells & Holme, 2005).

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, a string of laws were passed, including the 1988 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, called the Hawkins-Stafford Bill, which directly linked Title I funding to students’ achievement levels as defined by the states, which were required to identify schools where students were not achieving as expected. In 1994, President Clinton signed the Goals 2000 legislation that provided states with support for upgrading their school accountability systems and focusing almost exclusively on student outcomes, despite valiant efforts on the part of civil rights advocates to include “opportunity to learn” standards, which would have required schools, communities, and perhaps researchers to more carefully examine the nature of unequal educational opportunities.

These 1990s policies prodded and then required the states to construct elaborate accountability systems of standards and tests in order to receive the federal education funding that they had come to rely on. They laid the groundwork for the federal government to pass a more invasive federal policy that would not only require states to establish accountability systems but also would institute a set of sanctions for schools, districts, and states that failed to meet their achievement goals. President George W. Bush wholeheartedly supported this bipartisan legislation due to its embodiment of the “common sense” about a tough-love, free-market accountability system as the solution to poverty, inequality, and lack of excellence (Horn & Willburn, 2013; McGuinn, 2006).

Thus, from the early 1980s through the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) era, which ended in 2015 with the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act, a dramatic shift in the federal role in public education occurred. In many ways, NCLB completed the evolution of the federal role in schooling, away from enforcing local compliance with civil rights laws and providing additional funding to poor students and schools, toward enforcing “excellence” measured by narrow standardized tests as the main “output” (DeBray, 2005; Horn & Willburn, 2013; McGuinn, 2006; Rothstein, Jacobsen, & Wilder, 2008).

This shift in the role of the federal government in public education required a shift in the policymakers’ and the general publics’ understanding of the “problems” to be solved by education policy—and a shift in their understanding of the causes of the problems. In other words, this dramatic swing in educational policy focus “from an emphasis on equalizing inputs to an emphasis on equalizing outcomes” led to arguments that equality of educational opportunity would be achieved not by ensuring disadvantaged students greater access to high-achieving schools or compensatory resources but rather by ensuring that all public schools were accountable for producing the same student outcomes across highly unequal contexts (Darling-Hammond, 2010; Ladson-Billings, 2012). In an era of “accountability,” the argument went, educational equity could be achieved via “separate but more equal” schools. Sheer will, hard work, and an eye on reaching the state standards and achievement goals as measured primarily by standardized tests was all that was needed. According to President George W. Bush, NCLB was designed to attack “the soft bigotry of low expectations” (“Bush Warns Against,” 1999).

Although we are not arguing that education researchers were ensconced in this “boot strap” ideology, the research published in the six journals during this period strongly suggests an emphasis on the problems in education as being vested in local communities and schools and not as much in the larger society in which the schools exist. We see, for instance, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a sharp decline in the number of articles that examined the social context of racial inequality and a growing number of articles looking at very micro-level solutions to racial achievement gaps.

Thus, educational reform for the last 30 years has been strongly grounded in neoliberal ideology centered on individual responsibility, the backlash against redistributive government programs and equity-minded policies of the 1960s and 1970s, and tough love accountability. This trend led to a set of public policies that ignored the larger context of the labor market, the nature of poverty, ongoing segregation, and racial inequality, not to mention the impact of heavy-handed and narrowly defined accountability measures on curriculum and teaching in low-income schools with low test scores (Braun, Wang, Jenkins, & Weibaum, 2006; Lee & Wong, 2004; Rothstein et al., 2008; Wells, 2014; White, 2014). Clearly the shift had an impact on the type of education research that was deemed important and valuable in the policy world. We know it affected the type and amount of education research that was funded directly by the federal government (Lagemann, 2000).

A Slow Resurgence of the Research on Racial Inequality: Bringing Context Back

By the mid- to late-1990s, as the total number of articles addressing issues of race and the context of racial inequality began to increase, the published research in the six journals we studied shifted in large part toward a micro-level focus on racial identity, culturally relevant pedagogy, sociolinguistics, parent–school relationships, and resilience on the part of students of color. The more macro-level, policy-oriented articles examined issues such as the lack of implementation of multicultural education or school desegregation policy.

In more recent years, beginning in the early 2000s, we see evidence that education researchers may well be affected by the larger social context in a very different way. Here we see researchers ahead of what will hopefully be the next shift in the policy discourse to refocus on societal explanations for the so-called achievement gap, well ahead of projected changes in educational policy to address racial inequality more directly (see Hannah-Jones, 2016). This resurgence of research and academic writing on the broader, societal causes of racial inequality in the U.S. education system seems to have begun at about the time of the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision in 2004 and snowballed since. It may also reflect the changing racial demographics of the education research community, as the more racially and ethnically diverse and biracial millennial generation enters the academy (AERA, 2016). Whatever the cause, this scholarship, we argue, may in fact be shifting the research–policy relationship in a new, more proactive direction, with the researchers out ahead of the politics. If this is indeed the case, we may see a more progressive educational policy agenda in the coming years.

In many of the articles published in these journals during this era, researchers were framing their analysis in the context of policy discourse and policy development that was ignoring these insights. For instance, in a 1995 issue of the AERJ, two articles—one written by Gloria Ladson-Billings and the other by Marilyn Cochran-Smith—argue in favor of teaching that connects with students’ cultural understandings of the world. Building on the arguments central to the Shade (1982) article discussed above, these two 1995 articles are, to a large extent, a response to the way in which school desegregation policy has been implemented—that is, primarily on a superficial level that has focused almost exclusively on getting the right mix of students in a school without paying attention to the culture or norms of the school. This powerful theme of bringing a more culturally based focus into the discussion of race, diversity, and teaching made a lot of sense in terms of what had been ignored for too long in the field of education—namely, the role of culture in learning and student engagement.

These 1990s publications suggest an increasing degree of frustration and push-back against the prevailing policy context, steeped in the power of A Nation at Risk and subsequent reports that framed the problems in the field of education in terms of a lack of accountability for student outcomes in a lackluster system. Ignored in this context was the systemic inequality in which the schools existed and the structural and cultural implications of that context for how students, educators, parents, and schools were valued and how achievement was measured. We see evidence that by the 1990s a growing number of researchers and journal editors were pushing back against the dominant policy framework. By the early 2000s, the push-back was expanding to include more articles and journal pages.

The Research Out in Front of the Discourse on Issues of Race and the Context of Inequality

Indeed, by the first 5 years of the 2000s, it was far less evident that the policy milieu was having the same impact on research as was suggested by the data from 1975 to 1990. Instead, we see evidence, beginning with a series of articles published in conjunction with the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, that the education research community began resisting the “tough love accountability” narrative of the policy world, to argue that context and broader societal issues of racial inequality permeate the educational system. A good example of the resistance is illustrated in a 2003 article in Educational Researcher by Stepick (2003), who highlighted the contradictions of educational policy with regard to race and racialized achievement gaps. Stepick wrote that while policymakers are quick to implement high-stakes testing for K–12 students, the harshest consequences of which are borne by minority students, the policymakers simultaneously attack race-conscious policies, such as affirmative action, that could help these students. Meanwhile, Stepick (2003) issued a rallying cry for education researchers to reveal this inherent contraction by demonstrating that the problems “confronting minority students are far more complex and profound than performance on standardized tests” (p. 3).

Similarly, in a 2010 chapter in RRE, Will Jordon wrote that defining “equity” as simply closing the achievement gap between White students and students of color—as measured almost exclusively by test scores—is problematic in the context of a multicultural society in which one’s social class strongly influences life chances. Jordon reexamined equity by situating the issue of concept within an analysis of broader social forces that cultivate inequality, including employment, housing, criminal justice, and so forth, “so that educational inequality is part and parcel of overarching social ills” (p. 142).

The spike in the number of articles focused on racial inequality and its relationship to social context since 2000 in these top education research journals, as illustrated in Table 1, is impressive, to say the least. The articles that appear in 2004 and shortly thereafter in one of the many special issues published in conjunction with the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education are an important part of this story, but they are certainly not the only factor. Even prior to 2004, the number of articles related to social context and racial inequality were on the rise, and the increase continued after the anniversary, with the peak 5-year period thus far being 2010 to 2015.

Other factors at play, we believe, are the changing demographics of the education research community, which, we noted above, means that more of the authors, reviewers, and editors of these leading journals are scholars of color (AERA, 2016). Another fact, based on our content analysis, appears to be utter frustration with an educational policy milieu in which the problems and solutions continue to run contrary to thoughtful scholarship on educational inequality and the contextual variables that influence it. The Jordon (2010) article is but one example of this, as we see ample evidence that education researchers are trying to have a more profound effect on the way policymakers and the general public understand the problems to be solved in our field. This is also, we believe, a sign of a broader push-back against the ways in which the knowledge of our field and the understanding of teaching as a profession have been minimized, at best, and outright ignored, at worst in politics and policy.

Conclusion: Potential of Social Science and Education Research to Shape the Policy Agenda

We want to conclude this review of research in education by returning to the wisdom and insight of Weiss and Bucuvalas, who, in their 1980 book Social Science Research and Decision-Making, explained the ways in which social science research supplies more than data. They noted that research also supplies “perspective on events, generalizations about cause and effect, theories about the ways in which people and institutions interact,” and understandings of the construction of social, political, and economic systems. To the extent that such research-based understandings affect the choices of those in positions of authority, Weiss and Bucuvalas (1980) wrote, they can “substantially influence not only discrete decisions but the whole framework within which issues are defined and policy responses considered” (p. 2).

The need for a new framework for education policymaking has never been more apparent. The demographics of the U.S. population—especially the school-age population—are changing rapidly. As of September 2014, the percentage of the U.S. K–12 public school population that is White non-Hispanic fell below 50% for the first time ever in our nation’s history. Just 35 years ago, students enrolled in U.S. public schools were 79% percent White non-Hispanic. Our nation is undergoing a demographic sea change, and our public schools are at the forefront of this change, with an overall student population that is now about 30% Hispanic, 16% Black, and more than 5% Asian/Pacific Islander. At the same time, opposition to the “colorblind” or “postracial” rhetoric of the last 35 years of educational policy discourse is rising, especially in the aftermath of Ferguson and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement.

The implications of this turning tide for education research are unknown. One hopeful sign is that policymakers are showing more interest in what the research says is found in the newly passed Every Student Succeeds Act, which allows more leeway for the states to develop accountability systems and school improvement plans. The new law uses the term evidence-based to describe requirements for every aspect of these plans, from parent engagement to early childhood programs. This wording suggests that the federal government wants states to pay attention to research and that the research may have had some impact on how the law was written and how states and districts proceed. If our content analysis of six leading journals in education is any indicator of how the knowledge of the field is advancing, the research could encourage local and state policymakers to consider broader contextual issues, such as racial inequality, as critical factors in the effort to close achievement gaps. At the same time, the results of the 2016 presidential election suggest that more progressive approaches to addressing the changing demographics of our student population face an uphill battle. Research on topics such as the educational benefits of diverse schools and classrooms (see Wells, Fox, & Cordovo-Coba, 2016) can not only, hopefully, influence a national debate on issues of changing demographics, but it can also help inform grassroots efforts to embrace diverse schools and communities.

This centennial RRE chapter is intended to empower education researchers who focus on issues of racial inequality to contemplate collectively how their research could substantially influence not only discrete decisions but, as Weiss and Bucuvalas (1980) argue, “the whole framework within which issues are defined and policy responses considered” (p. 2). This kind of collective contemplation could be an important goal for AERA in its second century.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Thomas Geib, a graduate student at Teachers College, Columbia University, for his research assistance on the content analysis of the journal articles.

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