Educational Policy

Bottom-up reform as a policy strategy for decades has faltered in implementation. This article starts from the premise that these disappointing results stem from researchers’and practitioners’almost exclusive focus on implementation in schools or on what some call “the bottom” of hierarchical education systems but not shifts in policy makers’roles that might enable school change—the “up” in bottom-up reform. These gaps are addressed with a strategic, comparative case study of city-level policy makers in bottom-up reform implementation in Oakland, California, during the 1990s. The author demonstrates that organizational learning theory defines basic dimensions of policy makers’ roles in implementation and that they faced four paradoxes in adopting these roles. Over time, they tended to favor avenues consistent with traditional topdown, not bottom-up, policy making. Findings highlight policy makers as important participants in bottom-up reform implementation and suggest that new institutional supports for them may enable implementation.

This qualitative study compared the availability of, access to, and use of new technologies in a group of low– and high–socioeconomic status (SES) California high schools. Although student-computer ratios in the schools were similar, the social contexts of computer use differed, with low-SES schools affected by uneven human support networks, irregular home access to computers by students, and pressure to raise school test scores while addressing the needs of large numbers of English learners. These differences were expressed within three main patterns of technology access and use, labeled performativity, workability, and complexity, each of which shaped schools’ efforts to deploy new technologies for academic preparation.

This article contributes to the growing body of research exploring the importance of the social context in shaping the use of educational technologies. It presents the results of a 3 1/2 year instrumental case study examining the power of the social context to shape, in negative ways, the use of technology in one urban elementary school. Three unsuccessful dynamics are identified that serve to block effective instructional uses of computers and these behaviors are related to what Linda McNeil described as “defensive teaching.” These unsuccessful interactions, it is argued, represent actors’ efforts to resolve the dilemma of how to get through the day without confronting the overwhelming instructional tasks teachers and students at the school face. The authors conclude by noting that the use of technology did not strongly shape the interpersonal and political dynamics involved and that similar types of defensive teaching and learning can be found in educational situations without technology.