Purpose: Nearly all schools in the United States closed in spring 2020, at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. We analyze traditional public and charter school reopenings for the 2020–21 school year in five urban districts. We provide a rich and theoretically grounded description of how and why educational leaders made reopening decisions in each of our case districts. Research Methods: We used data from a multiple-case study from March 2020 to July 2021. The research team conducted 56 interviews with school, district, and system-level leaders; triangulated with publicly available data; and also drew on interview data from a subsample of parents and guardians in each of our sites. We analyzed these data through qualitative coding and memo writing and conducted detailed single- and cross-case analyses. Findings: School system leaders in our case sites generally consulted public health authorities, accounted for state-level health and educational guidance, and engaged with and were responsive to the interests of different stakeholders. Districts’ adherence to and strategic uses of public health guidance, as well as a combination of union-district relations and labor market dynamics, influenced reopening. Parents, city, and state lawmakers, and local institutional conditions also played a role, helping to explain differences across cases. Implications: In contrast to the “politics or science” framing that has dominated research and public discourse on school reopening, we show that local pandemic conditions and local political dynamics both mattered and in fact were interrelated. Our findings have some implications for how educational leaders might navigate future crises.

In 2013, Governor Jerry Brown and the California legislature radically restructured the state’s school funding system and accountability systems with a weighted student formula and a mandated local planning process in each district. The new law substitutes local politics and grassroots agency for state-driven mandates and compliance reviews. While the Local Control Funding Formula has had immediate impact, early evaluations suggest that districts like the new system and are earnest in their implementation efforts, but it will take years to assess the effect of the multi-indicator Local Control Accountability Plans. Simultaneously, the state is implementing the Common Core State Standards and the associated Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium tests, which make creating local accountability plans more complicated.

Scholars of American politics and public policy recognize the interdependence of governments and corporations in the United States. This article presents research findings that high school civics textbooks, where most Americans first encounter the research and theories of political science, have little to say about this interdependence. This challenges our civic education aspirations and leaves many Americans without means of understanding or effectively engaging important current public policy controversies. One possible remedy: include interdependence in textbook treatments of the separation of powers.

The conventional wisdom we encounter in public discourse is that governments and the private sector in the United States are separate and hostile. We are told every day that a core political conflict of our time is between governmental and private power, and that these run on incompatible worldviews: politics versus markets. Governments, we are told, are the opposite of markets, and only one of these worldviews offers the best way to organize our lives and solve our problems. Many, perhaps most, Americans share this belief that governments and the private sector have inherently conflicting roles in American society. Textbooks and journalism reinforce this belief by presenting politics and government as sharply separate from private and economic activity. Because of this misunderstanding, much of American public debate is stale and dysfunctional, bickering about symbols and illusions rather than focusing on real choices about the exercise of power. This pattern is likely to continue to 2020 and beyond unless we challenge it and offer more realistic and constructive alternatives. A clearer understanding of the real nature of public and private can lead to revitalized politics and policy agendas at all levels.

Drawing on a four-year study of the last 40 years of education reform in Los Angeles, Learning from L.A. captures the sweeping change in American education. It puts forth a provocative argument: while school reformers and education historians have tended to focus on the success or failure of individual initiatives, they have overlooked the fact that, over the past several decades, the institution of public education itself has been transformed. Colorful characters, dramatic encounters, and political skirmishes enliven this rich account of the wrenching transformations that took place in the Los Angeles Unified School District from the 1960s onward. The book focuses particularly on four key ideas that emerged through a succession of reforms beginning in the 1990s decentralization, standards, school choice, and grassroots participation. Though the particular plans that gave rise to these ideas may have faded, the ideas themselves have taken root and developed in ways that those who inaugurated or participated in these reforms never anticipated. Winner of Outstanding Academic Title, Choice Districts in Research and Reform Publication Award, American Educational Research Association

Were the 2006 midterm elections a Big Deal or No Big Deal? On the surface, the outcome seems ordinary: a setback for the president's party in his sixth year, and a return to divided government. Taking a longer view, these elections are historically important. Democratic victories interrupted the work of a sustained Republican "revolution" rolling back the bipartisan Progressive project of the 20th Century in regulation, public provision and civil rights.

I synthesize some of the lessons we have learned about systemic school reform in order and derive two explicit hypotheses about when such reforms are likely to be more and less successful. The first hypothesis focuses on program implementation: to achieve success, any systemic reform must overcome challenges at each stage of the policy-making process, from agenda-setting to policy choice to implementation. The second hypothesis focuses on the federated nature of education policymaking in the United States: any successful systemic reform must offer a program that aligns local efforts with state and sometimes federal policy. I derive and test more specific hypotheses related to recent systemic reform efforts in the Los Angeles region—especially the Los Angeles Annenberg Metropolitan Project, or LAAMP—which ran from 1995 through 2001. The case confirms the hypotheses and enables a clearer understanding of systemic school reform.

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Once characterized as poor, transitory, and “powerless,” national party organizations in the United States are now financially secure, stable, and highly influential in election campaigns and in their relations with state and local party committees. The transformation of the Democratic and Republican national, congressional, and senatorial campaign committees can be explained using theories of organizational change from the organizational behavior literature and traditional arguments about electoral competition and coalition-building from the parties literature. This paper explains the timing and content of party organizational development by focusing on the nature of the problems that confront the parties, the crises that create opportunities for party organizational change, the motives and behaviors of political entrepreneurs instigating the change, and the internal politics of the party organizations themselves. The explanation accounts for the different paths of institutionalization taken by the six national party organizations and for the variations in the roles they currently play in the electoral process.