Columbia Law School Scholarship Archive Faculty Scholarship Faculty Publications 2016 Governance of Steel and Kryptonite Politics in Contemporary Public Education Reform James S. Liebman Columbia Law School,
[email protected] Christina C. Ma
[email protected] Elizabeth R. Cruikshank Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship Part of the Education Law Commons, Law and Politics Commons, and the Law and Society Commons Recommended Citation James S. Liebman, Christina C. Ma & Elizabeth R. Cruikshank, Governance of Steel and Kryptonite Politics in Contemporary Public Education Reform, (2016). Available at: https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/1950 This Working Paper is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Publications at Scholarship Archive. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Scholarship by an authorized administrator of Scholarship Archive. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Governance of Steel and Kryptonite Politics in Contemporary Public Education Reform James S. Liebman, Elizabeth R. Cruikshank, Christina C. Ma* © ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Abstract Public education in the United States has been crippled by a combination of entrenched bureaucratic governance and special-interest politics. To remedy these failings, school districts, states, and the federal Education Department have adopted education reforms characterized by rigorous outcome-focused standards and assessments and the empowering of public schools, charter or otherwise, to meet the standards. Despite promising initial results, however, the reforms have been widely criticized, including by the populations they most seek to help. To explain this paradox, this Article first tries to assimilate the new education reforms to the most frequently proposed alternatives to bureaucratic governance—marketization, managerialism, professionalism and craft.