This qualitative case study analyzes the process of writing academic standards in one U.S. state, Missouri. The researchers took a critical pragmatic approach, which entailed close examination of the intentions and interactions of various participants in the writing process (teachers, politicians, business leaders, the public), in order to understand the text that was finally produced. School reform legislation delegated responsibility for writing the standards to a teacher work group, but the teachers found that their "professional" status and their intention to write standards that reflected a "constructivist" view of knowledge would meet with opposition. Politicians, who held different assumptions about the audience, organization, and content of the standards, exercised their greater power to control the outcome of the process. As the researchers analyzed public records and documents generated during the writing process, they constructed a chronological narrative detailing points of tension among political actors. From the narrative, they identified four conflicts that significantly influenced the final wording of the standards. They argue that as a consequence of these conflicts, Missouri's standards are characterized by a dichotomous view of content and process; bland, seemingly value-neutral language; and lack of specificity. Such conflicts and outcomes are not limited to this context. A comparative, international perspective shows that they seem to occur when groups in societies marked by political conflicts over education attempt to codify what "all students should know." What should students know and be able to do? This study examines what happened when policymakers addressed this question in the process of writing academic standards 1 for public school students in one midwestern U.S. state, Missouri. Four conflicts arose during the process.

This qualitative policy study applies an interactionist framework for policy analysis, especially the concept of intentions, to an examination of the construction of multicultural education policy in a midwestern U.S. school district. Intentions-purposes and goals meant to shape the behavior of actors in the future and at other sites-motivate actors to act in the policy arena, to use policy as a vehicle for realizing their purposes. Initiated in response to a racial conflict in a high school, the policy process entailed the school board's creation of a committee including many African American community members to generate recommendations for improving race relations. During the process, the school board's intentions, and those of many community members, were transformed due to the administration's reinforcement of district conventions and power structures. Race relations became multicultural issues. Community members who misconstrued the process as granting them real policy-making authority were most disappointed with the outcomes.

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Utilizing hierarchical linear models, this study of 144 private schools (72 Catholic and 72 non-Catholic schools) drawn from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 discovered that Catholic school students scored lower in reading than students at non-Catholic private schools. Analysis of internal school characteristics suggested that lower growth in reading achievement might be related in part to lower student morale in Catholic schools. However, we found no significant differences between Catholic and non-Catholic private secondary schools in the development of students' math, history/social studies, and science abilities from eighth to tenth grades. This study also identified important student- and school-level variables such as Catholicism, gender, risk factor, parental involvement, and enrollment size that help to explain the outcomes.

Definitions of key policy terms are important elements in policy construction. Accordingly, the power to define such terms is a linguistic marker of relationships among players in the policy process. Combining a linguistic framework with the cultural framework of Marshall, Mitchell, and Wirt (1989), this article traces definition of the term at risk in the context of one state, Arizona. Researchers in the Department of Education used the definition process as an opportunity to enhance the department’s prestige and power in relation to other policy-making bodies.