Education Policy Analysis Archives (EPAA)

EPAA/AAPE is a peer-reviewed, open-access, international, multilingual, and multidisciplinary journal designed for researchers, practitioners, policy makers, and development analysts concerned with education policies. It is published by the Mary Lou Fulton College of Education at Arizona State University and was edited by University of South Florida College of Education Professor Dr. Sherman Dorn from 2003-2008. There are currently over 500 issues in this digital collection, Vol. 1/No.1 (1993) - Vol. 16/No. 7 (2008).

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Merging Educational Finance Reform and Desegregation Goals

Deborah M. Kazal-Thresher

… This paper explores how desegregation goals can be merged with educational finance reform to more systematically address educational quality in schools serving low income and minority populations. By moving toward centralized control over school financing, the inequity of school outcomes that are based on unequal school resources can be reduced. In addition, state determined expenditures when combined with desegregation monies, would meet the original intention of desegregation funds by clearly providing add-on monies for additional services for minority children, while at the same time, creating a better monitoring mechanism.
Anti-Intellectualism in U.S. Schools

Aimee Howley, Edwina P. Pendarvis, and Craig B. Howley

In this essay we present an argument about the relationship between schools' intellectual mission and their role in advancing social justice. In providing an argument of this sort, we claim neither to present a comprehensive review of literature nor to analyze specific educational policies. Rather, we bring together findings about certain features of schools in the United States that we believe contribute to their anti-intellectualism. This examination allows us to tell a story about schools that we think needs to be told; and it also elaborates a frame of reference from which to reconsider schools' mission and practice. Reframing these bases of schooling may be a necessary prelude to educational policies that promote both intellectual and egalitarian outcomes.
Students and Educational Productivity

Benjamin Levin

The literature on productivity in education is extensive. The object of this effort is to find a production function--a mathematical expression of the relationship between inputs and outputs in education. In this paper, the status of the literature on production functions is reviewed. Most of these approaches have seen schooling as something that is done to students, rather than thinking about education as something that students essentially do for themselves. An argument is developed that makes students the key factors in shaping school outcomes, and therefore a central focus of our thinking about productivity. The paper concludes with suggestions for research and policy.
Book Review Issue, April 26, 1993

Steven J. Fountaine, Susan Haag, and Kent P. Scribner

Reviews for the following books: Robert Leestma and Herbert J. Walberg (Eds.), "Japanese Educational Productivity," reviewed by Steven J. Fountaine
Thomas Sowell, "Inside American Education: The Decline, the Deception, the Dogmas," reviewed by Susan Haag
Chester E. Finn Jr. and Theodor Rebarbar (Eds.), "Education Reform in the '90s," reviewed by Kent Parades Scribner
The Devil's Bargain: Educational Research and the Teacher

Ivor F. Goodson

The concern of this paper is to explore why it is that so much educational research has tended to be manifestly irrelevant to the teacher. A secondary question is how that irrelevance has been structured and maintained over the years. There are I think three particularly acute problems. Firstly the role of the older foundational disciplines in studying education. Secondly, the role of faculties of education generally. Thirdly, related to the decline of foundational disciplines and the crisis in the faculties of education, the dangers implicit in too hasty an embrace of the panacea of more practical study of education.
Educational Reform in an Era of Disinformation

David C. Berliner

Data which suggest the failure of America's schools to educate its youth well do not survive careful scrutiny. School reforms based on these questionable data are wrongheaded and potentially distructive of quality education. Reforms of the kind proposed by those who have started from an assumption that America's schools have failed will exacerbate the differences between the "have" and the "have-not" school districts.
Action Research and Social Movement: A Challenge for Policy Research

Stephen Kemmis

Large-scale policy research on topics of concern to teachers may assist in changing educational theory, policy and practice, as may educational action research. This article discusses different traditions of action research in relation to their views about the connection of research and social movement, touching on the so-called "macro-micro" problem which bedevils conceptualizations of this relationship.