“The passage of the No Child Left Behind Act signaled the beginning of a new era of federal education policy and a significantly transformed and expanded national role in our country’s schools.”(McGuinn 66)

The political future of NCLB and the new, more assertive federal role in education will likely be determined by the extent and pace of school improvement, whether the public continues to support federal activism in schools, and the degree to which the bipartisan consensus behind the law can continue to be sustained

Despite claims that public opposition to NCLB has been growing, a closer analysis of public opinion data leads to a more complex-and ultimately more supportive-public view of NCLB and federal activism.

“He has advanced what he calls a “ agenda setting” model to explain the passage of NCLB and argues that state activity on education reform put pressure on the federal government to embrace standards, accountability, and choice.” (McGuinn, 2005, 45)

The 1980s largely resulted in a stalemate as conservative proposals to abolish the Department of Education and to create private school choice programs were defeated and Democratic proposals for a significantly enlarged federal role were also blocked.

Though the new laws did not include many mandates for states, they nonetheless signified a sea change in federal education policy and codified the shift from the historical focus on ensuring equity for disadvantaged students and impoverished schools to a new commitment to improve the academic performance of all students and schools.

“In addition to the intense policy fights in Congress, this period also saw a very public battle over ideas as Republicans devoted considerable time and energy to convincing the public that federal involvement in education was harmful, that funding was not the key element in improving schools, and that vouchers were not a radical idea. They largely failed on all three counts. The conservative positions on education, although popular with the party's base, remained extremely unpopular with the general public and particularly with moderate swing voters.”(McGuinn 53)

“Yet her observation that “standardized accountability systems have been studied and debated more for their effects on achievement than for their potential to reshape the societal basis underlying a public education” (2002, p. 245) suggests that much remains to be understood about the dynamics between accountability and democratic social processes.” (Trujillo, 2013, p.335)

Finding 2:Autocratic Decision Making and Participation

“District studies that operationalize success in broader terms and in multiple ways can round out the discourse on effective districts to encompass other desirable goals for teaching and learning.” (Trujillo, 2013, p.353)

“These findings contribute to the small, but growing body of empirical studies of urban school boards by bringing to the fore evidence about the specific democratic functions of these hotly contested bodies for local governance.” (Trujillo, 2013, p.352)

Data Collection and Analysis

“This rapidly growing field considers, among other things, the relationship between different district governance structures and student performance, usually measured by standardized test scores (Trujillo, in press).” (Trujillo, 2013, p.338)

“In doing so, the board members promoted centrally deter- mined, standardized curricular and instructional practices that were in line with more privatized educational philosophies and approaches to teaching.” (Trujillo, 2013, p.349)

Finding 1: Individualized Goals for Teaching and Learning

“At the heart of the dispute is the question of whether boards of education play an essential role in ensuring an educated citizenry and preserving local, democratic control of public education (Glickman, 1993; Kirst, 1984).” (Trujillo, 2013, p.337)

Implications for Policy and Practice

“Local decision makers should have more information on local needs and conditions and can adjust resource allocations accordingly. Central dictates that are aimed at maximizing welfare on average may oversupply the service in some areas and undersupply it in others. Local officials should respond better to local needs because they are more exposed to pressure from constituents and because they may use quality public services to attract or retain residents.”

Central dictates that are aimed at maximizing welfare on average may oversupply the service in some areas and undersupply it in others. Local officials should respond better to local needs because they are more exposed to pressure from constituents and because they may use quality public services to attract or retain residents.(Gunnarsson,Orazem,Sanchez, & Verdisco, 2009 pg. 26)

o Children in the selected classrooms were given tests of mathematics and language. The same exam was administered in each country, with the exception that the language exam was in Portuguese in Brazil and Spanish elsewhere. The mathematics exam had a maximum score of 32, and the language exam had a top score of 19. We use the raw exam scores as ourmeasure of child schooling outcomes.

o School autonomy and community participation are different. One might presume that schools with greater autonomy on personnel, curricular, or disciplinary matters would also have more parental or community participation in the school. However, in our sample, the two measures of local effort are virtually independent. The simple correlation between the two measures across countries is only weakly positive (sec. D in table 2). While it is possible that other measures of parental participation would be more strongly tied to school autonomy,13 parental participation and school autonomy are clearly unique empirical constructs in our analysis

o The LLECE survey contains multiple measures of the degree of autonomy exercised by the school. Each school principal answered questions regarding the school’s authority in hiring staff, allocating the budget, designing curric- ulum, disciplining and evaluating students, and organizing extracurricular activities

o A weighted sum of teacher responses to questions regarding the inadequacy of the quantity or quality of school supplies is used as an inverse measure of xjk. Teachers were asked to indicate whether various facilities and academic materials were insufficient for academic purposes. Section C of table 2 lists the indicators of school facilities and materials. The first principal component explained 54% of the covariation across the eight instruments used. As with the other aggregations, all the factor loadings were positive, indicating that shortages in one area typically were accompanied by inadequacies in the other school materials and facilities. The most widespread shortages were the lack of sufficient textbooks per student.

“However, after correcting for endogeneity, the impact of parental participation on student test scores is consistently positive and significant. Reducing shortages in school supplies and infrastructure also improves student outcomes consistently.” (Gunnarsson et al., 2009, p. 47)

“These findings should give pause to the widespread clamor for decentralization. It is highly likely that schools that willingly manage schools perform better than if they did not exert that effort.” (Gunnarsson et al., 2009, p. 48)

"A sample encompassing eight Latin American countries shows no evidence that more autonomous schools perform better than less autonomous schools. These conclusions are not sensitive to controls for the plausible endogeneity of school autonomy. However, after correcting for endogeneity, the impact of parental participation on student test scores is consistently positive and significant. Reducing shortages in school supplies and infrastructure also improves student outcomes consistently."

“Parental participation and school autonomy are not random occurrences. They are positively influenced by parental human capital and the size and remoteness of the community.” (Gunnarsson et al., 2009, p. 47)

“However, it seems clear that the choice to manage is largely a local and not a central decision. Consequently, policies should grant autonomy in circumstances where the local community would willingly exercise local control.” (Gunnarsson et al., 2009, p. 48)

o The contribution of this study is to formally confront the decision by the local authority of whether or not to exercise control over the school. Rather than presuming the local school managerial effort is determined exclusively by legislative fiat, we assume that the local authority can choose how much effort to exert in running the school. As a consequence, the exertion of local authority must be treated as an endogenous variable and estimates that treat the exercise of local authority as exogenous will be biased.

“The responsibility for school management rests with the central governments in some countries, regional authorities in others, and local authorities in the rest. Many countries allocate a subset of these decisions to each of these levels (OECD 1998, 2000; Walker 2002; Winkler and Gershberg 2002). A summary of the government level holding legal responsibility for various school-management functions in various Latin American countries is presented in table 1 (PREAL 2002).”

Past studies of school productivity (Glewwe 2002; Glewwe and Kremer 2006) have pointed to child, household, teacher, and school characteristics in explaining school performance.(Gunnarsson,Orazem,Sanchez, & Verdisco, 2009 pg. 31)

“To be precise, the observed test score for child i in school j in country k can be described by an equation of the form qijk p f(zijk, xjk, a1jk, a2jk, hijk), where qijk is the ith child’s test score; zijk includes attributes of the child’s parents, household, and community; and xjk represents the level of educational materials provided in school j.” (Gunnarsson et al., 2009, p. 31)

“The level of school inputs will also depend on local provision as well as central distribution of school supplies. As a result,xjk, a1jk, and a2jk are all jointly selected with qijk. If the parents and school officials make these decisions with knowledge of the children’s innate abilities, then least-squares estimation of equation (1) will be biased.” (Gunnarsson et al., 2009, p. 32)

o The parental participation result can be rationalized if parents participate more readily in the school when they observe the school performing poorly given its resources. If true, the least-squares estimate would be biased down- ward because of the negative influence of test scores on parental participation. Alternatively, parental participation may be measured with error, so the least- squares coefficients are subject to attenuation bias. In either event, the estimates suggest that parental participation is more useful for school outcomes than is suggested when the factor is treated as exogenous in least-squares regressions.

“Rural schools are also less likely than metropolitan schools to experience supply shortages, al- though schools in the central cities are supplied better than those in other urban environs.” (Gunnarsson et al., 2009, p. 41)

Using schools in metropolitan centers as the reference point, we find that it is the schools in smaller urban and rural areas that are the most likely to exert autonomous effort and to have parental participation.

“There is strong evidence that local school managerial effort is enhanced when the students have more educated parents. The joint test of the hypothesis that the three measures of parental attributes have no impact is strongly rejected in each equation.” (Gunnarsson et al., 2009, p. 40)

“In all cases, the three measures of central authority are jointly significant, although not individually significant in the shortage regression. The individual effects have mixed signs, but the summed effect of the three measures consistently shows that centralized locus of power is correlated with lower reported local effort to manage schools.” (Gunnarsson et al., 2009, p. 40)

“Of greatest interest is how the exercise of local public school control is moderated by national policies. The effect of local autonomous decision making is moderated by national policies that place the locus of control at the center.” (Gunnarsson et al., 2009, p. 40)