Week Three- Fowler Reading

Chapter One
Summary and Reaction

I love that the book started with a Wizard of Oz reference.  Besides for being one of my favorite movies, the quote, "Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore," is very relevant to where we are in educational policy. We don't know if the direction we're going in is the correct one (NCLB) but going in another direction is an uphill battle and other potential directions are unclear.

Fowler offers her definition of policy, but also provides other definitions.  I liked reading through these, and there were certainly some that resonated with me.

"Policy sometimes is formed from a compromise among political participants...none of whom had quite in the mind the problem to which the agreed problem responds."  Some things to note with this:

• compromise-- policy develops through people giving in to constituencies and no one quite being happy with the result
• one problem "solved", even more problems to combat/understand and deal with 

Fowler took time to go through the history of policies, specifically racial segregation in the schools.

As with statutes, these rules are regulations provide important clues as to what the policy really is.  It is especially important to note whether the rules are written narrowly or broadly.  pg. 6

Policies are always altered during implementation.  pg. 8

School officials had adopted a pattern of inaction that was tacitly supported by the inaction of their state governments.  pg. 9

I believe these quotes summarize implementation of rulings such as Brown v. Board.  I can see many rules and laws being put in place (particularly with compromise) that makes them written very broadly-- making implementation inconsistent among states, districts, etc.  If each group can view the statue differently and implement it as they see fit, the spirit of the law is not met even if techinivally the letter of the law is met.

Figure 1.1 on page 16 shows a diagram of the political process where it flows from one point to the next and vice versa:

Issue Definition

Agenda Setting

Policy Formulation

Policy Adoption

Implementation

Evaluation

Fowler discusses how this happens in different examples through political administrations.  In today's school systems, this system doesn't just exist at the macro level but also in micro levels in school systems, where school officials have to have their hand in policy making and in the individual schools.