The Changing Politics of State Education Policy Making: A 20-Year Minnesota Perspective

1. Values: the ‘What?’ of the politics of education

“…State legislatures may be open or closed, public-or private-regarding, accessible or inaccessible, structurally complex or simple, reliant on staff or not, and show differences in a variety of means and methods for controlling the flow of policy debate (Fuhrman and Rosenthal 1981, Marshall tf a/. 1989, Mazzoni 1993, Mitchell 1988, Stout 1986. Whether a reflection of the political cultures of the states or other variables is not clear, but it is clear that state policy makers are influenced by values when establishing rules of operation.…”

State Education Policy Formation: The Case of Arizona’s English Language Learner Legislation

“…Sacken and Medina's (1990) study of the revision of the statute for bilingual education found that experts were heavily involved in the process. Mazzoni (1993) and Fowler (1994) both describe two types of policy making: a subsystem arena involving legislators and various insiders and a macro arena involving key leaders in the state and, perhaps, the nation. Certainly the major shift in Arizona's ELL policy development occurred in the state's macro arena, involving the initiative and the election of the state superintendent of public instruction that embraced the SEI policy option.…”

“…Review of documents focused on the identification of six traits: the identity of policy actors, institutional settings, policy content, origins of policy options, values implicit in the policy choices, and the timing of events in terms of a chronological sequence. Four of these traits are drawn from Mazzoni (1993), who identified influential groups (policy actors), locus of accommodation (institutional settings), issue focus (policy content), and prime initiator (origins of policy options) in his studies of state policy making in Minnesota. The values reflected in decisions are adapted from Marshall et al (1989) and timing from Sabatier (2007b).…”

“…Methodologically, studies of state policy making fall within one of three categories: individual case studies in a single state (e.g., Fowler 1994;Mazzoni 1993;Meyer 2006;Sacken and Medina 1990;Stout and Stevens 2000); comparative case studies of a small number of states selected for their diversity (e.g., Marshall et al 1989) or to represent a region (e.g., Cohen-Vogel and Ingle 2007); or a census of all states, focusing on characteristics such as legislation, constitutional clauses, or governmental structures (e.g., Fulton 2011).…”

“…For example, Mazzoni and colleagues conducted a series of case studies of state policy making in Minnesota over a period of 2 decades, most of which used Iannacone's (1967) structural linkage typology for relations among education interest groups and between these groups and the state legislature. In synthesizing this body of work, Mazzoni (1993) concluded that Iannacone's typology was losing utility as the state's government became more bureaucratized, as local education agencies became more dependent on volatile state revenues, and as national and global factors impinged. He did find that Minnesota's reformist cultural tradition and ability to innovate remained, but he concluded that future studies would need to employ more comprehensive frameworks such as new institutionalism (Crowson et al 1996;March and Olsen 1984;Meyer and Rowan 2006;Ostrom 2007), political cultural (Elazar 1972;Marshall et al 1989;Mead 2004), and the advocacy coalition model (Sabatier 2007a).…”