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Policy and Organizations Research
The U.S. has many excellent schools and universities, but it has all too many that fail their students. It also proves to be extremely difficult to make all of our schools "good schools", even though school improvement and reform have become serious efforts at the national, state, district, and school levels. To address questions of school quality and equity, the Policy and Organizations Research Emphasis employs the conceptual approaches of sociology, history, and economics to investigate the enduring problems of schooling and to assess the contributions made by policy and school reform initiatives. While there are no easy answers to the complex problem of achieving deep understanding, high performance, and educational equity in American education, we are convinced that solutions can be developed. We seek students who, like us, dedicate themselves to the theoretical breadth and depth required to investigate the problems at hand and to the search for empirical evidence on which to base action.
Coursework is centered on three themes:
Policy: We view policy as a lever for change and as a powerful context that shapes educators' work at multiple levels of the system. We introduce students to the art and science of policy analysis, providing them with the capacities to analyze contemporary policy initiatives critically, and then to inform policy-makers about innovative directions. Students develop insight into the complex processes that shape what policy gets made and how that policy plays out in practice. Students also deepen their understanding of how wider contextual forces — from the values inherent in an economic system, to the political culture surrounding schools, to the preferences expressed by parents and other stakeholders — buffet educational policy as it responds to the needs of our multi-class, multi-racial, multilingual society.
School improvement: Here, we investigate what influences decisions and actions in schools and school systems. We ask what we value in educating students and what works to address these goals. Educators in schools and districts do not directly control state or national policies; they cannot step out of the basic bureaucratic logic of school systems, nor are they free to ignore powerful traditions of society. Constrained by these larger forces, they are nevertheless challenged to create decent, high-achieving educational organizations — and under the right conditions they have the power to do so. This possibility creates a series of questions: What relationships do educators forge under these circumstances? What learning do they engage in? How do they make sense of their reality? What practices do they follow? How do some educators manage to extend the power of their schools despite great obstacles, while others succumb? And how do these choices reflect on actors higher up in the hierarchy — on district, state, and federal policy-makers in both educational and non-educational arenas? To find answers to these questions and others like them, we draw from scholarship on school effectiveness and improvement, organizational behavior and innovation, and the conditions of teachers’ work. We therefore view school improvement as a complex enterprise structured by policies, administrative systems, and matters of teaching and learning, and propelled by the uniquely educational quest for human beings to develop their capacities beyond expectations.
Equity: Throughout our coursework, we maintain a focus on the enduring problem of equity and inequity in American schooling. Students explore the multiple and often competing ways that educators and citizens have understood equity. They deepen their understanding of the ways schools have both promoted and impeded efforts to enhance equity. Students grapple with the interplay of unequal and sometimes oppressive social relations in the wider society and those in schools, including many of the usual suspects: class division; racial and ethnic differences; gender differences; differences of language, immigrant status, religious and political values, and the other sources of variation that make this country so rich and interesting but also so embattled. Both coursework and research opportunities provide students with ways of exploring how schools and non-school policies exacerbate inequality, the mechanisms that might correct these problems, and the practices and proposals leading to more equitable opportunities.
Across all these themes, students learn standards of evidence and methodological tools from qualitative and quantitative research to investigate policy processes and assess what policies and practices are truly effective. Students combine coursework in POME with opportunities to hone research skills in research apprenticeships, research groups, and internship experiences. They also draw on the rich resources available throughout the Graduate School of Education and the entire U.C. Berkeley campus.
Back to Policy, Organization, Measurement, and Evaluation group
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