One important hallmark of William Lowe Boyd's scholarship was his uncanny ability to identify and articulate changes in the key ideas that shape and reshape scholarly, professional, and public discussions of educational policy and politics. Whether one thinks about debates over centralization and decentralization of policy control, changes in…

Develops a political economy framework for mapping and interpreting the competing purposes of schooling by examining five paradoxes in national policy debates addressing class size in public elementary schools. The framework highlights answers to the question: What kind of an economic good is education? (education as a service industry, producer…

This article emanates from a study of urban school teachers and administrators and discusses metaphors for the kinds of management styles encountered at a variety of schools. The intellectual histories of each type of management style--machinistic, organistic, market place, or conversational--are described and their educational applications are…

Key policy actors in six states (Arizona, California, Illinois, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Wisconsin) indicate a strong national consensus about seven basic policy mechanisms. While school finance dominated policy making, personnel, testing, and program definition policies had importance, followed by school governance, curriculum materials,…

Article reanalyzes and expands upon data from Tennessee's Project STAR which examined the effects of class size reduction on student achievement in the primary grades. It describes six competing theories of class size impact on achievement and test performance, settling on the student group/modeling interpretation of study data. (SM)