ABSTRACT

The U.S. federal government has played a growing role in setting nationwide education policy since the passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) in 1965. This Act, along with the ‘Equality of Educational Opportunity’ report commissioned by the 1964 Civil Rights Act, led the U.S. Office of Education to pursue a policy agenda focused on equalizing access and ameliorating poverty through the education system. Despite the promotion of equity serving as the officially stated goal of federal policy, expert evaluations of the government’s efforts incorporated technical assumptions from the field of economics that prioritized maximizing efficiency between inputs and outputs in the education system. When the ESEA was reauthorized in 2002 as No Child Left Behind, significant ‘policy drift’ had occurred such that the evaluation of teacher quality – which was the subject of a large literature in economics on the ‘education production function’ – was incorporated as a key component of the education system’s flagship anti-poverty initiative, Title I.

摘要

自 1965 年通过《中小学教育法案》(ESEA) 以来，美国联邦政府在制定全国教育政策方面发挥了越来越大的作用。该法案以及 1964 年《民权法案》委托的“教育机会平等”报告，领导美国教育办公室推行一项政策议程，重点是通过教育系统实现平等机会和改善贫困。尽管促进公平作为联邦政策的官方目标，但专家对政府工作的评估纳入了经济领域的技术假设，这些假设优先考虑最大化效率在教育系统的投入和产出之间。当 ESEA 在 2002 年被重新授权为不让一个孩子掉队时，发生了显着的“政策漂移”，以至于教师质量的评估——这是关于“教育生产函数”的大量经济学文献的主题——被纳入教育系统的旗舰反贫困倡议 Title I 的关键组成部分。