Education Policy Under Cultural Pluralism

Many policymakers are shedding essential tenets of modern statecraft. Few seek to sustain the monolithic one best system of schooling: herding students through large institutions, regulated by bureaucracy and guided by professionals under monopolistic conditions. Instead, distinctly unmodern forms of policy and institutional reformation are in ascendance: Even when common aims of schooling are advanced, big and impersonal schools are yielding to small and communal ones; networks of alternative schools that offer options to diverse families are preferred over tightly coupled systems; and the meaning of equity is being recast along relativist lines of communities and kids simply being different. The de-centered arrangement of charter schools and preschooling illuminates these shifts away from modern tenets of policymaking, strongly powered by cultural pluralism and political demands from below. These policy cases prompt the long-term question of how government can effectively balance this press for particular forms of schooling and community building against its modern impulse to integrate groups via large institutions.

This article was originally published in Education Researcher by the American Educational Research Association and SAGE Publications.