For decades, politicians have sought to improve the quality of education, often through reforms. These efforts were typically driven by larger societal changes, political shifts in power or ideology, and the demands of business.
The resulting policy landscape is complex and varied, reflecting different theories of how schools should be run and the varying abilities and incentives of state and local governments. The most common approach is to set standards for students, evaluating their performance against those goals and determining whether schools deserve rewards or sanctions. This reflects an assumption that schools should be judged as a business, and that the success of a business depends on clear, defined standards and measurable objectives.
Using standardized tests and school report cards to identify areas of weakness, intervention strategies are implemented to improve student performance. These policies are meant to reduce educational disparities and ensure that all students have access to a high-quality education.
In many countries, there are also efforts to decentralize authority by allowing states and districts to set their own standards for students. This allows more autonomy, but it creates a dilemma: different states and districts have varying capacities and political incentives to engage in standards-setting. This can result in significant variability in standards from place to place and may weaken the coherence of policy across the nation.
The last major innovation has been the globalization of higher education, which has modeled business by creating a network of universities under strict management that can be evaluated with standard metrics. As a result, most university strategic plans now resemble those of McDonalds or the Central Intelligence Agency.
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