The Political Economy of Education Policy: The Case of Class Size Reduction

Abstract

Researchers and policy makers today are too preoccupied with school effectiveness--with finding out what works and how to replicate it. Not enough attention is given to the fact that the schools serve a variety of personal and societal purposes and that these purposes are deeply contested. This article develops a political economy framework for mapping and interpreting the competing purposes of schooling, and then applies this framework to explain 5 basic paradoxes in the national policy debates addressing class size in public elementary schools. The framework presented argues that there are 4 distinct answers to the question, "What kind of an economic good is education?" Education can be seen as a service industry, as a producer of durable goods, as a system of investment in human capital formation, or as the conduit for passing cultural legacies between generations. While business leaders and government officials are trying to secure durable educational achievement, students and their families are often concerned more with the quality of service received at their local school, with rate of return on their financial and effort investments, or with the cultural value of the legacy that participation in the schools is generating for the next generation. Because the major stakeholders in public education hold different views regarding which of these economic goods is of highest priority and which should be vouchsafed by governmental policy, policymakers are tempted to adopt inconsistent and even incoherent policies trying to placate all important constituency groups. Specific contradictions in class size reduction policies can be directly interpreted from the perspective offered herein.