The ‘production’ of education: the turn from equity to efficiency in U.S. federal education policy

ABSTRACT

The U.S. federal government has played a growing role in setting nationwide education policy since the passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) in 1965. This Act, along with the ‘Equality of Educational Opportunity’ report commissioned by the 1964 Civil Rights Act, led the U.S. Office of Education to pursue a policy agenda focused on equalizing access and ameliorating poverty through the education system. Despite the promotion of equity serving as the officially stated goal of federal policy, expert evaluations of the government’s efforts incorporated technical assumptions from the field of economics that prioritized maximizing efficiency between inputs and outputs in the education system. When the ESEA was reauthorized in 2002 as No Child Left Behind, significant ‘policy drift’ had occurred such that the evaluation of teacher quality – which was the subject of a large literature in economics on the ‘education production function’ – was incorporated as a key component of the education system’s flagship anti-poverty initiative, Title I.

KEYWORDS:

• Teacher quality
• education production function
• economic expertise
• equality of educational opportunity
• U.S. federal policy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. On the use of documents in general as ‘informants,’ see Scott (1990). On treating scientific literature as a primary informant, see Kelty and Landecker (2009).

2. The Report was not the first study to champion input-output modeling as a useful device for education analysis, but it did bring this kind of research to popular attention. Researchers at RAND had previously made similar recommendations (Kershaw and McKean 1959).

3. Memo from Hal Lyon on ‘Reorganization of NCES, OPPE and Data Processing Service Function,’ LBJ Presidential Library, WHCF, FG 246.

4. Memo from Hal Lyon on ‘Reorganization of NCES, OPPE and Data Processing Service Function,’ LBJ Presidential Library, WHCF, FG 246.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Zachary Griffen

Zachary Griffen is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at UCLA. His dissertation is a comparative and historical study of the relationship between economic expertise and social policy-making in the United States, with a particular focus on education and health care.