Identify politics

Issues and debates Blog

Many district politics and policy hurt the students it tried to protect. These are some reasons why are children are hurt:

• State monitoring
• Voting wards
• Councils controls discretionary resources at the site
• The structure of site-based management (SBM) vary widely across states and school districts. Without close analysis of intra-district equity of resources, SBM becomes a trap (Marshall & Gerstl-Pepin). A majority of the cities' 32 school boards carved their districts into fiefdoms where jobs were doled out to loyal campaign workers, lovers, and family or sold for cash (Segal 1997, p. 1).
• All of this lead to firing the superintendent and create a new board. Later shifts included alterations of voting districts, election of a new mayor, and hired a retired Army general as superintendent.
• Although these power shifts make national headlines in the big cities, they are no less dramatic when governance shifts are proposed in rural and suburban districts.

The district patterns, school leaders can re-frame district politics to build on the insights and potential social capital of once silenced and now released voices (Marshall & Gerstl-Pepin, 2005). We are still looking at frameworks to identifying the way a problem definition shapes policy, and the mechanisms that are built into policy to make people take it seriously and follow directions (Marshall & Gerstl-Pepin, 2005). Threats of punishment are cheaper than support but may result in hardening the resistance of those responsible for implementing policy or take away resources from the people who need them the most. Finally, the classifications may provide an organizer for the profusion, confusion, and complexity of local policy, as the analyst tries to predict how policy will be implemented. It is available for the policy makers to use this same system and get up close and personal with the many mechanisms still available for their use.

References

Marshall, C. & Gerstl-Pepin, C. (2005). Re-framing educational politics for social justice. Boston, MA: Pearson Education, Inc./Allyn & Bacon.

Segal, L. (1997). The pitfalls of political decentralization and proposals for reform: The Case of New York City public schools. Public Administration Review.