L103 (Spring): 

 Leveraging Social Forces for Sector Level Change in K-12 Education: 

 

Mark Moore and Jal Mehta 

 

Tuesdays and Thursdays, 2 – 5 p.m, Larson 203, March 22nd – April 21st 

Project workshops: Wednesdays, 90 minutes (see official EdLd schedule for dates and times). 

 

Mehta, office hours: http://mehta-officehours.wikispaces.com/ 

 

The Central Focus: Finding Ways to Leverage Good Ideas into Sustainable, Sector Level 
Change 

 

The distinct challenge we take on in this particular module is to think about how individuals with 
good ideas about how to improve the performance of the K-12 educational system in the United 
States can leverage their ideas into systemic changes. Broadly speaking, there are two different 
ideas about sector level change, and two different ideas about the social conditions, processes 
and actions that can get us there. 

 

Markets: “Bottom-Up” (Decentralized) Social Change 

 

One image of sector level change comes to us from economics, and is closely associated with the 
idea that if we could make the K-12 sector more like a market, we could get more sustained, 
significant innovation and improvement in K-12 education. This is sometimes viewed as a 
“bottom up” approach. The idea is that the drive for educational improvement begins with the 
desires and needs of parents and students (backed by society’s interests in helping them achieve 
their goals). Then, educational providers with good ideas about how to achieve educational 
objectives create specific educational opportunities that are offered to parents and students (with 
more or less support from society at large). If parents and students flock to new opportunities and 
abandon old, and if money to support these new operations moves to the new from the old, then 
the valuable new ideas will gain market share compared to the old, and the performance of the 
sector as a whole (as judged by parents and children) will improve. 

 

While this approach is often described as “bottom up,” it might better be described as a system 
that is highly decentralized on both the supply and demand sides of educational services. On the 
demand side, individual parents and students are empowered to evaluate educational services for 
themselves, and choose the bundle of attributes they like best. On the supply side, anyone with a 
good idea about how to supply educational services can start a school. The educational system 
that society ultimately gets and sustains is determined not by a collective decision about the 
overall level, character and distribution of educational services among individual users; but by 
the aggregation of the results of this highly decentralized decision-making system. 

 

 

 

 

 


Government Policy: “Top Down,” (Centralized) System Change 

 

This so-called bottom up system is often contrasted with a top down approach to improving the 
quality of the educational system. This view is often closely associated with efforts to improve 
institutions and processes that organize our collective life together – the choices made by 
governments about how to use the money and authority of the state to accomplish collectively 
defined purposes, and the role that democratic politics play in shaping the arenas in which these 
government policy choices are debated modified, accepted, rejected, etc. In the top down 
approach, government is seen as a potentially important social actor that can help a given polity 
articulate and pursue the collective aspirations and protect the collective interests of the polity as 
well as the individual goals of those who want to use the educational system for their own 
purposes. It can set goals for the overall level and distribution of educational services using its 
money and it authority to pursue goals such as ensuring equality of educational opportunity, 
and/or trying to equalize educational outcomes even when students start with different 
individual, family and social endowments. It can also use its position to create standards and 
reporting systems that can allow both the polities that largely finance and the parents and 
children who largely consume educational services to see clearly what educational providers do, 
and what they achieve with different kinds of student populations. And it can use its ability to 
finance research and development efforts to develop knowledge about what sorts of educational 
processes work best for what populations, and its prestige and links to professional expertise to 
disseminate that knowledge more widely in the society. In short, we often forget that there are 
top down, more centralized approaches to innovation and sustained improvement in a given 
sector that are potentially useful as well as the bottom up approaches. 

 

Towards a Different Perspective on Social Change: Social Entrepreneurship and Cross Sector 
Social Problem-Solving 

 

Perhaps the biggest mistake we make, however, is allowing our thought about how to produce 
significant change in the K-12 sector to flop back and forth from one or another of these 
ideologically laden perspectives. A practical person deeply interested in making sector level 
change – someone we can call a social entrepreneur -- would be curious about the real strengths 
and weaknesses of relying on the bottom up, market idea of sector reform in a sector where there 
are significant collective as well as individual interests, and where government is paying for 
more than 80% of the production! That same person would be curious about the real strengths 
and weaknesses of the public sector to innovate and sustain improvements in the K-12 sphere 
when its track record not only in education, but also other fields has been so poor, and where 
individual consumers seem to have so little influence on what is being produced. 

 

Concerned by obvious problems with both approaches, a practical person might also wonder 
about the potential of a third sector of society – the voluntary sector—in which publicly 
interested suppliers and purchases contribute money, time, and effort to produce educational 
results without earning market returns or being compelled by government to make the necessary 
contributions. This sort of force in education shows up not only among individuals who decide to 
home-school their children, and not only among religious and social groups that agree to 
collectively develop and financially support parochial and private schools, but also among 
parents who volunteer time and money to support schools in general, or their own children in 
learning. It also shows up in the willingness of community foundations or large scale 
philanthropists to contribute funds to educational purpose – whether those funds support 


innovations in educational processes, or help to equalize educational opportunity among the 
disadvantaged, or to help focus civic and public attention on educational issues. 

 

Finally, given that successful efforts to produce significant educational improvement probably 
require: 

 

1) responsiveness both to the individual desires of the users of educational services and to 
those in the wider society who have interests in how much is being spent and what is 
being taught in the publicly regulated and financed sector; 

 


2) the mobilization of assets in the form of money, time and effort not only from fee-paying 
consumers, but also taxpayers and volunteers who sustain the operations of the 
educational system; 

 


3) broad experimentation with educational methods that can work better for some or all of 
the educational consumers; and 

 


4) public, civic, and political discussions about what society as a whole has at stake in and is 
trying to accomplish through the education sector it publicly authorizes, regulates, and 
financially supports through both taxes and tax subsidized contributions. 

 




Thus it seems likely that any significant effort to transform the sector will have to take advantage 
of the motivations, institutional structures and processes that characterize all three major sectors 
of a liberal, democratic society. It seems likely that while initiatives can start in any one sector, 
relying on its particular social forces, institutions, and processes, it is hard how to see how any 
significant sustained innovation can happen without a complex interaction among all three 
sectors. We need the challenge to educational orthodoxy that comes from individual consumers 
of educational services, and those who would like to try different methods of reaching those 
consumers, and the powerful processes of selection that cause successful ideas to get larger and 
less successful ideas to shrink. We need the desires of parents and groups of parents to take 
responsibility for their children’s education not only to press demands on existing institutions, 
but also to create new forms of education, and sometimes to support and supplement the work of 
existing organizations. We need the powerful tools of government to help ensure the freedom to 
experiment and respond, but also to be able to support research that can provide guidance to the 
development of new methods, to create not only opportunities for individuals to choose but also 
for communities and polities to become articulate and demanding about what they want from an 
educational system that will always be at least partly public, and ultimately to pay for an 
educational system that can produce the level and distribution of educational opportunities that 
are consistent with a shared vision of a good and just society. We won’t be able to accomplish 
significant social change working in one sector alone; the successful entrepreneurs will have to 
work to work across sectors and their particular methods of mobilizing, deploying and valuing 
the results of using assets in particular ways. In all likelihood, that means that they will have to 
learn to speak the language of all sectors, and move comfortably across the boundaries, looking 
to create effective constituencies and collaborations to achieve their goals. 

 

Of course, to say that successful social entrepreneurs often span across sectors does not mean 
that any given venture necessarily needs to somehow turn into a massive coordination effort. 
Many successful sectoral change strategies need to succeed twice. One, it needs to succeed 
directly by adding public value in the way that it promises (i.e. if it is a new product, it has to 


sell; if it is a new policy, it has to achieve the ends it specifies; if it is a new social movement, it 
has to mobilize people; if it is a new educational leadership program, it needs to produce good 
leaders!). Second, it needs to have spillover effects – it needs to get lots of other actors who are 
initially aiming to do other things, to, over time, change their actions in ways that are more 
conducive to creating this kind of sectoral change. While sometimes these spillover effects are 
unpredictable, a good sectoral change strategy will have an eye on both one and two from the 
start. There are some strategies, particularly the ongoing political and social movement strategy, 
that explicitly seek to mobilize a variety of levers to achieve sectoral change, which are more 
cross-sectoral in their objectives and do not utilize the two part model outlined above. 

 

Overall Course Objectives 

 

The aim of this course, then, is to prepare EdLD students to embrace and succeed in this 
challenge. Towards this end, we will explore the terrain of social problem solving without falling 
into the trap that a social entrepreneur interested in social change would have to choose between 
market approaches on one hand, and political/governmental approaches on the other. We take a 
less ideologically polarized approach and search for the social forces, the institutional structures, 
and the dynamic processes of social problem solving that can give a particular individual the best 
chance of making significant social change. We will look closely at government as a potentially 
powerful, but also limited force in making social change. We will look equally closely at markets 
as potentially powerful, but also limited forces for social change. We will take a quick look at the 
motivations , institutions and processes of the voluntary sector (volunteerism, mutual self-help, 
charity and philanthropy) as sources of energy and leverage for social change. We will look at 
how to use the law as a potentially powerful but again limited instrument of social change. We 
will even look at science and professionalism – often supported by government – as potentially 
powerful engines that can drive (or retard!) social change. And we will look at how social and 
political movements might be mobilized to produce wider understandings of what values we 
should be pursuing through educational system, and how its performance might be improved. 

 

Our most important goal in the course is to help you become a more imaginative and 
discriminating strategist in taking social change initiatives. Unfortunately, we cannot give you a 
handbook, or a proven set of techniques that can be relied upon to produce social change in all 
circumstances. And much of what we can tell you is bad news; thinking effectively about social 
level change can make your head hurt and your heart quail; and achieving social change is 
always long hard, and uncertain. What we can do, however, is to widen your perspective and 
imagination so that more ideas might come to you as you make your plans or take your actions, 
and you might be better able to test the worth of those ideas before you try them in practice. We 
will rely on you for the practical focus, the desire, and the muscle; our job is to show you the vast 
terrain, and some of the ways through it. 

 

The Pedagogic Plan 

 

The Plan for the Module 

 

The plan for the module is to go through these particular forces for change. Each of the ten 3 
hour classes will be divided into two parts. In the first part, we will introduce the particular force 
for change we are considering, consider what it consists of, and how it can be used. In this part, 
we will do some general reading, and examine a case out of the education field in which the 
force was effective. In this second part, we will consider an explicit change strategy that 


someone had in mind, and which somehow gained some traction in the public sphere. We will 
ask trios of students to lead the discussion by examining these by asking them what the 
calculation and strategy of these reformers was, and how it worked out. Our goal is that by the 
end of the course you will be able to see some of the strengths and limitations of each of these 
strategies, and that you will be able to see different ways to increase your leverage for sector 
level change. 

 

Requirements 

The only requirements for this module are that you: 

a) Read and prepare carefully; 

b) Post reading responses for 5 of the 10 classes by 10 p.m. the night before class. 

There is no paper for this class, although there is a lot of reading. We hope that you will use 
some of the time that you would have spent writing doing daily preparation for this class. 

What you learn in this module should flow directly into Performance Assessment #3. 

The Plan for the Parallel Performative Assessment 

 

Parallel to this course, you will be working on the third performative assessment, which asks you 
to develop your own pathway to creating improvement in the sector. The details of this 
assessment are outlined in an accompanying document. In broad strokes, this is your chance to 
develop a strategy for sector level change – the goal you committed yourself to in joining this 
program. That strategy could be the creation of a new product, it could be creating a new 
professional organization, it could be Race to the Top II. The work that you do should draw 
together what you are learning in the EdLD about how to create sector level change with your 
work from the strategy units on diagnosing the environment and developing a theory of change 
as well as an account of its likely impact on teaching and learning. 

 

This is intended as individual work (what pathway do you want to follow as you change the 
sector) and might lead into the work that you plan to do over the next two years. If, however, you 
find your goals are so closely aligned with others that you can profitably work as partners in the 
enterprise, you can work together. 

 

In addition, we will put you in feedback groups with other participants who can offer suggestions 
and critiques. You will have 90 minutes on Wednesdays to meet in these groups and get 
feedback on your developing proposal. More details will be forthcoming in the document on the 
third performative assessment on Monday March 21st. 

 


 

Leveraging Social Forces for Sector Level Change in K-12 Education: 

 

Course Syllabus 

 

March 22nd – 1-4 p.m. (note earlier time) Introduction: Strategies of Sector Level Reform: 
Locating and Exploiting Forces for Change 

 

In this opening class, we focus on specific, concrete social actors who have self-consciously 
committed themselves to trying to improve the performance of the sector through sustainable and 
large scale innovations in the structures and practices through which our society seeks to educate 
its children. The aim in doing so is to show that it is true that there are many social actors who 
are in fact thinking systemically in any of the following three senses: 

 

• they are trying to develop a successful educational practice that can, by scaling up within 
the K-12 sector as it now exists, significantly improve the long run performance of the 
system; 

 


• they are trying to change the laws and public policies that are now preventing the K-12 
sector from achieving the desired results; 

 


• they are trying to increase the number of challenges to existing practices and policies, and 
improve the capacity of the system as a whole to distinguish the good from the bad 
ideas, and to support the good and reject the bad. 

 




Of course, many of these actors are seeking system change by doing these things at local levels, 
and simply hoping that their success at local levels will be noticed and spread more widely as 
successful innovations in policy, or practice, or the capacity of the system as a whole to 
continually learn. But there are others who are working at regional or national levels to go 
beyond the development of a locally good idea, and make it work at a regional or national level, 
or change the system constraints so that their idea can be more nationally influential, or increase 
the overall level of innovation in the K-12 system, and its capacity to distinguish good 
innovations from bad. The main focus on this course will not be on the creation of innovative 
ideas, nor on local implementation, but on helping take the ideas to scale, and/or altering the 
structural characteristic of the system so that it can produce and respond to the good ideas that do 
emerge. 

 

Below is a list describing ‘social actors” who seem to us to have made a commitment to, and 
have an implicit or explicit strategy for, producing significant improvements in the policies and 
practices of the K-12 system in the US. We assume that you know a great deal about these actors 
already. Some of you have worked with these social actors, or identified with them, or wanted to 
get a job with them. We also assume you have your own ideas about what they are trying to do, 
and whether it will be successful or not. We also assume that there are some social actors that 
you know (perhaps even including your own entrepreneurial ideas for social change) that are not 
identified on this list. 

 

• Political and Legal Strategy for Equal Educational Opportunity 


o Campaign for Fiscal Equity 




• National Standards Movement 





• Philanthropic Foundations and the Movement for School Choice 


• Teach for America 


• The New Teacher Project 


• The Charter School Movement 


o KIPP, Achievement First, Uncommon, Green Dot, etc. 




• Reform Management of Public School Systems 


o (Formerly) Joel Klein and NYC Schools 


o (Formerly) Michelle Rhee and DC Public Schools 


o Arne Duncan in Chicago 


o New Orleans Schools 




• Federal Policies to Promote School Improvement and Reform 


o Bush: No Child Left Behind 


o Duncan: Race to the Top 




• Randi Weingarten and the New AFT 


• Larry Berger and Greg Gunn, Wireless Generation 


• The Gates Foundation Education Initiative 


• Michelle Rhee and Students First 




 

The Assignment and Task for Class 1 

 

The task for the first class is to take seriously the problem that these actors face, so that we can 
begin to understand the nature of the task they face, and the calculation they have to make. The 
method is to ask you to take the position of a social actor that is trying to make social change. 

 

NOTA BENE: You can choose that position from the list presented. Or, you could pick an actor 
who is not on this list whom you would like to study. Or, perhaps best of all, you can take 
yourself and your own planned effort to produce significant change as the social actor with 
whom you identify. 

 

For the first part of class, we will take a broad overview to see who is in the K-12 organizational 
field with a significant innovation/reform agenda focused on practices and programs, or the 
policies and programs that give shape to the sector as a whole and bias it towards particular kinds 
of actions and particular kinds of results. Specifically, we will discuss the following questions in 
class. 

 

1) What particular individuals and organizations are now acting as important agents of 
change in the K-12 organizational field? What particular initiatives or movements would 
you add or subtract from the following list? 




 

2) Who are the actors behind these particular efforts? Are the key actors individuals? 
Organizations? Coalitions? Networks? 




 

3) How are these efforts and initiatives positioned in society to make change? Are they 
operating primarily in government, or nonprofit, or for-profit sectors? How are they being 
financed or otherwise resourced? 




 


4) How are the initiatives organized? Are they single organizations or complex networks? 
To what extent is there some kind of self-conscious governance and management of these 
efforts? How is this governance capacity created, sustained, and used? 

 


5) If you had to bet, what do you think the net impact of all of these organizations will be on 
the structure, conduct and performance of the K-12 sector? 

 




In the second part of class, we will discuss briefly how opportunities for social and public 
leadership are distributed in open societies. What conditions allow the variety of actors described 
above to offer their particular kind of leadership? We will also briefly discuss what we mean by 
social innovation and social change. For this discussion, please read the following: 

 

• Moore, M. H. (Unpublished Paper). On the social structure and dynamics of public 
leadership. (handout) 




 

• Moore, M. H. (Unpublished Paper). Social problem-solving, social innovation, and social 
change. (handout) 




 

In the third part of class, instead of looking across the whole set of social actors as though we 
were whole industry analysts, we will look more closely at the strategies being pursued by 
individual changes agents. For each of a selected set of these actors, we will ask the following 
questions” 

 

1) For this particular actor, how do you understand their basic strategy? What is their aim? 
What sources of social support, government legitimacy, and financial resources can they 
rely on to sustain and grow their enterprise? What operational capacities do they have to 
build to exploit the opportunity for value creation that they are pursuing? What would 
you have to believe to think that each could be successful? 




 

2) To the degree that these enterprises seek to produce large scale, sector-wide change, what 
is their basic theory of action? What are the basic points of leverage that they intend to 
exploit to generate change in the system? What social forces are they counting on to 
allow them to exploit these points of leverage? Are they relying principally on political 
forces, the power of law, the use of government dollars, a professional consensus about 
the proper ends and effective means of education, on market forces, on the desires of 
parents and students to demand good performance from the schools that serve them, some 
other force, or some combination of all of the above? 




 

3) How does their position in a particular sector shape their strategy? If one is positioned in 
one particular sector does that limit the kinds of forces one can rely upon, or can one use 
different forces regardless of position? For example, could Joel Klein take advantage of 
certain kinds of market pressures and forces to accomplish his purposes even when he 
was in the government? Can a political movement that concentrates on creating national 
standards create market opportunities of different kinds? Can a nonprofit organization 
influence the policies of government through political action or professional advice, and 
at the same time compete with both government and for profit educational suppliers by 
producing what they claim to be a superior education? Can a for-profit entity find a way 
to improve educational quality by expanding government’s ability to innovate? 




 


4) Do you think these varied efforts are competing with one another, or complementing one 
another’s effort? If they are competing with one another, what particular resources or 
assets are they competing for? If they are complementary, what can each do to strengthen 
the performance of the other (without requiring additional resources)? 

 


5) If you had to advise interested investors in which of these reform initiatives you think 
they should back, which one would it be? Why? 




 

March 24th -- Force 1: Government as a Social Change Maker: The Tools of Government 

 

For much of America’s history, social reformers (particularly those on the left) have imagined 
that government would be the most important agent of social change. Since social reform 
objectives were often cast as moves in the direction of the common good, or in the direction of a 
more just society; and since it was government’s unique role to be responsible for assuring the 
general welfare and promoting justice; it seemed natural to think that government was the social 
institution that should be addressed when improvements in the general welfare or justice of the 
society were to be deliberated and advanced. Similarly, it was hard to imagine that any large 
scale, lasting, significant change in the quality of social life could be made without government 
not only allowing it to occur, but also lending those leading the change significant aid. 
Government’s capacity to raise funds for public purposes through taxation, and to pass and 
enforce laws requiring individuals to behave in ways that contributed to both the general welfare 
and justice were among the most potent assets and sources of leverage available to social 
reformers. Finally, the simple fact that democratic government provided many different avenues 
and opportunities for reformers to pursue their diverse aims meant that the leverage that 
government could supply was at least plausibly within reach of self-nominated reformers. 

 

For all these reasons, it has been natural to reformers to see government and its policies as the 
natural focus of social change. Indeed, for some reformers, changes in government policy 
become the very definition of social change; they do not believe social change has occurred if 
public policies do not change. In their view, the change in government policy represents the 
institutional embodiment of social change as well as a powerful force for producing changes in 
individual and social life. Thus, changes to government policy is both necessary and sufficient to 
cause social change. To others, the focus on government policy is one important route to 
producing important social change. And it is true that securing a formal change in government 
policy is both a measure of a shift in public consciousness, and the creation of conditions that 
will favor further social change in the actual experiences of the individuals who make up society. 
But those who are less obsessed with policy change see government policy as something that is 
useful in producing social change, but does not in itself either cause social change, or represent 
it. 

 

Part of the reason that some do not see government policy changes as either embodying or 
producing social change is that they understand that government policies generally work very 
indirectly to change individual and social conditions. Even when government is very powerfully 
and directly involved – say for example in public educational systems where it provides all the 
financing, all the direction, and all the production of educational services – the real outcome of 
educational services for individuals and communities is produced at least in part by what private 
actors called parents and students choose to do with the services provided. In other situations 
where government is less directly and universally involved – say for example in providing access 
to courts and legal counsel that can help individuals resolve their disputes and find whatever 


justice the state can supply in their adjudication – government’s ability to resolve disputes 
peaceably and ensure justice depends far more on the actions of private individuals pursuing 
their own goals and spending their own money. 

 

The difficulty here is three fold. First, it is often quite difficult to get government to accept the 
claim that some condition that a social entrepreneur regards as an important social problem 
deserving a governmental response is, in fact, a problem for government to solve. With limited 
public resources, and strict ideas about what can reasonably be considered a public rather than a 
private problem, there are many conditions that one might assume are a public problem that will 
not necessarily be pursued by government as though its very life depended on it. For example, 
one might imagine that ensuring access to courts and to justice would be an important 
governmental purpose – close to the core responsibilities of government. Yet, as a practical 
matter, the government does relatively little to ensure effective access to courts. It provides 
courts, but then expects individuals to hire lawyers to help them gain access to the courts. Not 
everyone can afford a lawyer. Why is this not an important social problem at least equivalent to 
the problem of providing equality of educational opportunity? 

 

Second, even if one can persuade government that something ought to be a social problem, there 
are a great many ways that government can choose to act on the problem, and, as noted above, 
many of them leave lots of room for voluntary private choices to make a difference in what gets 
produced. In fact, there is a small political science literature on “the tools of government.” And 
one of the important aspects of this literature is not only its ability to help one imagine the 
variety of different ways that government can choose to act to deal with a social problem, but 
also to see how many of the different instruments leave a great deal of discretion to private actors 
in determining the ultimate results. 

 

Third, the process of trying to persuade government to take a social problem as its own to work 
with is usually dominated by private actors – citizens, taxpayers, interest groups of various kinds, 
and so on. It is private initiative and private voluntary energy that gets items on government’s 
agenda as well as private initiative and energy that determines what happens as government 
policies are created and implemented. 

 

In this class, we will explore the potential of government to act as an important social problem 
solver. Key to this is understanding the various tools that government can bring to bear to deal 
with an acknowledged social problem. But in the background is the understanding that many of 
the tools of government will leave much to the actions of private social actors in determining the 
results that one actually gets from using the tool, and the understanding that private interests and 
political action plays a critical role in authorizing government to act. Democratic government is 
not only by government bureaucrats on the people, but also of, by, and for the people, and the 
people have a way of inserting themselves not only in policy-making, but also in policy 
implementation, and in the production of social results. 

 

What is Government’s Role in Social Problem-Solving? 

 

In the first part of class, we will explore the role of government in helping society determine 
whether some condition is or is not a social problem. We will also consider the changing role of 
different social sectors in solving social problems. For this section of class, read the following: 

 


• Moore, The Shifting Institutional Grounds of Social Problem Solving (Unpublished 
Document) 




 

Be prepared to discuss the following questions: 

 

1) To what extent should the society view access to legal counsel and representation as a 
matter of public (i.e. collective and governmental) rather than purely private (i.e. 
individual and economic) concern? What makes you think it should or should not be a 
focus of public concern? 




 

2) In what ways is our approach to legal counsel similar to and different from our approach 
to education? Why are they different? 




 

Tools of Government: How Can Government Policy Shape Social Conditions? 

 

In the second part of class, we will explore the various “tools” that government can use to shape 
social conditions – ideally to solve public problems. In preparation for this class, please read the 
following: 

 

• O’Hare, M. (1989). A typology of governmental action. Journal of Policy Analysis and 
Management, 8(4), pp. 670-672. (handout) 

 


• Salamon, L. M. (2002). The new governance and the tools of public action: An introduction. 
In L. M. Salamon (Ed.), The tools of government: A guide to the new governance (pp. 1-43). 
New York: Oxford University Press. (handout) 




 

Be prepared to discuss the following questions: 

 

1) What instruments of government have been used (if any) to create either enhanced or 
more equal access to legal representation? 




 

2) What instruments of government have not been used? Why not do you think? 




 

3) Which tools of government do you think would be most useful in widening and 
equalizing access to legal counsel? 

 




Government Efforts to Shape the K-12 Sector 

 

In the third part of class, we will discuss how any of the above applies to the field of education, 
and government’s efforts to solve the problem that the K-12 sector is supposed to solve. 

 

Given the scale of the topic, there is no one reading that best captures these questions. Instead of 
additional reading, please reflect upon some of the readings and discussions we had in the fall, in 
particular, the Hochschild and Scovronick piece on the public/private nature of American 
schooling, the Carol, Bob, Ted, Alice piece on different strategies for reform, and the work on 
the role of the courts and the public around desegregation. 

 

Be prepared to discuss the following questions: 

 


1) To what extent should society view equal access to effective education as a matter of 
public rather than purely private concern? What is the public interest in the level, 
distribution, and quality of educational opportunities? 




 

2) Through what particular governmental institutions and processes does society express 
and operationalize the collective, public interest in shaping the character and performance 
of the nation’s educational system? What tools of government have been used to create 
equal access to high quality, effective education? What tools have not been tried? Why? 




 

3) What values, if any, constrain government from trying to exercise very tight, close 
control over the education of its citizens? 




 

4) What social and political conditions must obtain in order for the different tools of 
government to be effective? To what extent is the success of these tools dependent on 
widespread public agreement about both the ends and means of education in a democratic 
society? Do the different tools allow different actors to become more influential in 
shaping the character of the educational system as a whole? Do they also allow different 
degrees of flexibility and responsiveness in shaping the overall character of the 
educational system? What criteria should we use to evaluate the use of any particular tool 
of government in trying to improve educational performance -- the capacity of the tool to 
encourage operational efficiency in achieving desired social outcome; the capacity of the 
tool to allow responsiveness to parents or other stakeholders who claim an interest in 
educational results; the capacity of the tool to stimulate or avoid a collective discussion of 
the ends or means of educational policy; the capacity of the tool to rally citizens, 
taxpayers, and parents to the cause of educating our children? 




 

5) What should society do with the fact that many private individuals are willing to provide 
for the education of their children at their own expense, and that many of the benefits of 
education accrue to the benefit of individuals? One way to think about this is as a 
valuable asset that can be used to build a larger, stronger educational system than would 
be possible without that strong desire on the part of parents and children to provide and 
pay for (or otherwise provide) education. But a different way to think about this is to see 
that inequality in both the desire and the ability to pay for (or otherwise provide) 
education to their children creates a problem in terms of the system’s desire to ensure 
some degree of equality in educational opportunity? How is it possible to create a system 
that can simultaneously use and take advantage of particular parents’ desires to advance 
the interests of their own particular children, and a collective social aspiration and legal 
obligation to promote equality in both the level and distribution of educational 
opportunity, services, and results? 




 

March 29th – Force 2: Market Mechanisms as a Force for Social Change 

 

In liberal, democratic societies the alternative to politics and government as an instrument of 
social change is markets and the private firms that seek to spot and respond to the demands of 
those with money to spend on the products and services the firms can organize themselves to 
produce. Generally speaking, markets (and the commercial firms that populate them) are thought 
to be more dynamic and more responsive to individual need than government and its subordinate 
agencies. The reason is that private firms have to satisfy the needs of their customers, and do so 
in ways that are superior what their competitors can offer, or they will go out of business. 


Moreover, since the desires of customers are very diverse, and since they also change over time, 
there is constant pressure on producing organizations to adapt and change in response to these 
varied and dynamic demands. This stimulates innovation in products and services on one hand, 
and on processes for producing the desired products and services on the other. In this way, 
market pressures – created by the freedom of individuals to make choices about how to spend 
their own money on one hand, and competition among suppliers on the other – cause the 
suppliers to become highly responsive to what the individuals with money want, and to become 
highly responsive in both the short and the long run to changing market conditions. 

 

An important question, however, is to what degree markets and market mechanisms can be relied 
upon to work their magic in fields where any of the following conditions might be true: 

 

• Consumers of the services are uncertain about their own preferences and desires for 
particular products and services, and/or need help in thinking about all the dimensions of 
value they might want to have in mind as they decide what to consume 




 

• Consumers have difficulty getting accurate information from suppliers about all the 
different dimensions of value that concern them 

 


• Society as a whole is paying a significant portion of the costs of the services 

 


• Society as a whole has interests in what consumers choose, and the outcomes those 
choices produce that are not perfectly aligned with consumer choices about what they 
like and value 

 


• Society as a whole has interests in the overall justice and fairness of a system of publicly 
financed and regulated services that it seeks to serve as well as to satisfy the interests of 
individual consumers 




 

In these cases, government may show up in various forms to help achieve desired goals that 
include not only the satisfaction of individual clients, increased responsiveness to individual 
need, increased innovation and steady productivity gains in the provision of specific services, but 
also in such goals as ensuring that all potential users have an opportunity to use a service, and 
that the service is delivered in a way that meets standards of justice and fairness as well as 
efficiently and effectively. The question then is how market mechanisms have to be adjusted to 
allow these social goals to be achieved? How can government become a force that encourages a 
focus on client satisfaction, individualized services, flexible and innovative service providers, 
and whatever distributional objectives society wants to achieve in the cause of justice and 
fairness. 

 

One approach might be to turn the “collective consumer” of society as a whole taxing and 
regulating itself to produce desired social results into an entity that wants responsiveness and 
efficiency as well as consistency and fairness in both the short and long run. A simple way to 
visualize this is to imagine that the collective interests in education are represented by a 
contracting office that seeks to build a highly responsive, highly innovative, relatively low cost, 
and fair school system. In this conception, the government does not have to provide the 
education. But it does not have to turn all the choices about value over to individual clients 
either. If the government can say what it would like to see in terms of the values produced by and 
reflected in the operations of the system, and can measure whether it gets the performance it 


desires, then it can use its money to stimulate all the things that the market is thought to do. It 
just has to represent the varied interests in performance, in experimentation, etc. in its 
procurement activities. 

 

Four questions immediately follow: 

 

• First, would such a system be able to take advantage of market forces to promote 
efficiency, effectiveness, responsiveness, innovation, and steady improvement? 

 


• Second, could such a system actually be created in the real political economy of the 
United States, or would it become corrupted by politics and bureaucracy? 

 


• Third , what would have to happen on the collective, public side to be able to take 
maximum advantage of market pressure on suppliers to improve performance? 

 


• Fourth, how might the current system be pushed in this direction assuming it was 
valuable? 

 




We will explore these big issues about the use of market forces to promote change in education 
in two different sections of class. 

 

In the first section, we will take a close look at how markets are supposed to work to improve the 
welfare of society in general, and the performance of industries over time more specifically. We 
will use this theory to examine how the market does or does not work well to produce a steady 
flow of life-saving, health-improving medicines through the commercial pharmaceutical 
industry. For this section, please read the following: 

 

Readings: 

 

• Schumpeter, J. A. (1961). The theory of economic development. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard 
University Press, pp.74-94. (handout) 




 

• Scherer, F. M. (2010). Pharmaceutical innovation (Chapter 12). In B. H. Halland & N. 
Rosenberg (Eds.), Handbook of the economics of innovation: Volume I (pp. 539-574). 
Burlington: Academic Press. (handout) 

 




Questions for Discussion 

 

1) What would be the characteristics of a high performing pharmaceutical industry? 
From the point of view of investors? From the point of view of consumers? From the 
point of view of society as a whole? 




 

2) What have been the strengths of the commercial pharmaceutical industry? What 
drives those strengths? 




 

3) What have been some weaknesses? What creates those limitations? 




 


4) To what extent is there a public interest in the performance of the commercial 
pharmaceutical industry? What tools of government have been used to advance those 
purposes within this industry? 




 

5) What role, if any, has the voluntary sector played in shaping the performance of the 
pharmaceutical industry? 




 

 In the second part of the class, we will look at a case of a real firm operating in the 
pharmaceutical industry and ask questions about its strategy, and the degree to which it ends up 
service public as well as private purposes. 

 

Case: 

 

• Trager, Alan; The Eli Lilly MDR-TB Partnership: Creating Public and Private Value (HKS 
Case # CR15-07-1871) 




 

Questions for Discussion of Case: 

 

1) How is a commercial enterprise like Eli Lilly supposed to act when it spots an 
opportunity to create a new drug that could deal with a serious illness in the 
world? What are its economic incentives, legal duties, and moral responsibilities? 




 

2) Is Lilly behaving like a normal, profit-maximizing commercial enterprise? In 
what ways is their behavior different? 




 

3) What do you think is motivating them to behave in this different way? To what 
extent could we rely on Lilly and other commercial drug developers to act in this 
particular way? 




 

4) Is there any way that the Government could require Eli Lilly to behave in the way 
they are behaving, or help them to behave this way? Should it do so? What would 
be the long run consequences? 




 

5) What role are NGO’s playing in influencing Lilly’s actions, and helping them 
leverage the technology they have? 




 

In the third section of the class, we will look closely at the question of whether and how market 
mechanisms and processes might best be used to improve the performance of the K-12 sector. 
For this section, please read the following: 

 

Readings: 

 

• Christensen, C. M., Horn, M. B., & Johnson, C. W. (2008). Disrupting class: How disruptive 
innovation will change the way the world learns. New York: McGraw Hill, Chapters 1-2: pp. 
21-70, Chapter 9: pp. 196-221. (handout) 




 

Questions for Discussion 

 


1) What is the basic story behind the claim that market forces could improve the performance of 
the K-12 sector? How much of that story depends on each of the following ideas: 




 

• That individual clients of the K-12 system ought to be able to choose the school they 
attend 




 

• That there should be variability and competition on the supply side of the market 




 

• That an important impetus for educational innovation and responsiveness comes from 
the desire of educational providers to maximize financial returns, and/or to gain 
market share in the educational market? 




 

2) What happens to this basic story when it is brought into the context of the K-12 sector as it 
currently exists? 




 

• Who are the “final demanders” (payers) for the operations of the educational system? 
What do they value? What should they value? Who is the best or most appropriate 
“arbiter of value” for the quality of educational services and results? 




 

• How do the arguments in favor of variation and responsiveness on the supply side of 
the educational system change once we are in the K-12 context? Is the desired level 
of responsiveness determined by parental and student taste, or by differential need, or 
by some combination of the two? How should society as a whole look at high degrees 
of variance in what happens in schools? What is good and bad about variation in 
schooling? 




 

• What processes or mechanisms stimulate educational innovation? What process 
distinguishes the successful innovations from those that are less successful? What 
processes select the successful innovations for growth, and de-select less successful 
practices so that resources no longer need to be wasted on those activities? 




 

3) How is a Voucher System supposed to work? What, if anything, is wrong with the use of 
Vouchers in K-12 Education? 




 

• What, if anything, is different between the use of vouchers on one hand, and a system 
that allows parents to choose where they will send their kids to school, and that 
reimburses schools for their enrollments? 




 

• What is the role of competition among schools in stimulating innovations, and in 
improving the overall performance of the K-12 sector in the short and long run? 




 

• Can one set up a system that creates competition among schools but does not give 
choice among the schools to parents? 




 

• Can one set up a system that gives choice to parents but does not create much 
competition? 




 


4. Given all of the above, do you find plausible Christensen’s arguments about disruptive 
innovation in the educational sector? If so, why? If not, what aspect, specifically, of 
education as a public enterprise would complicate the disruptive innovation story? 

 

March 30th– 2 -5 p.m, Larson G01 (Note special day and room) -- Force 3: Civil Society as a 
Force for Social Change: (I) Volunteerism and Mutual Benefit Organizations 

 

While politics and government on one hand, and markets on the other are generally seen as the 
dominant sectors in liberal democratic societies like the US, a “third sector” also exists in society 
that can be the locus of important change itself, or a force that influences change through 
government and the market. This third sector is often called the voluntary sector. 

 

It (allegedly) differs from the public sector (politics and government) in that it does not rely on 
the coercive power of the state to raise resources or achieve its goals. It relies instead primarily 
on the voluntary actions of individuals to contribute their own attention, time, and money to 
provide the resources that fuel the operations of the sector. 

 

 It (allegedly) differs from the private sector in that the aims of the sector are not to satisfy 
individual material wants of producers and consumers, but to contribute to the public good in 
some way – to make individual and collective life better, particularly for those who are 
disadvantaged and/or oppressed. (Nota Bene: The voluntary sector also includes many mutual 
benefit organizations in which individuals combine together to produce benefits for other 
members of the organization, but not necessarily for the wider public.) 

 

The voluntary sector can be seen as playing many different roles in a liberal society, including all 
of the following: 

 

1) the voluntary sector can be seen as a way for individuals who are dissatisfied with the 
character and impact of current government operations to act independently to solve what 
they see as government’s failures to produce a good and just society as they see it; 




 

2) the voluntary sector can be used as a place for innovation and experimentation to take 
place in the social sphere 




 

3) the voluntary sector can be used as a place to organize social and political movements 
that can act to transform social conditions directly through their influence on the 
population as a whole, or more indirectly by bringing social and political pressure to bear 
on both private sector firms and public policies and organizations. 




 

While the voluntary sector is relatively small compared to government and the market, it may 
play a disproportionate role in producing social change, for it is often within the voluntary sector 
that the seeds of sectoral change are sown. They are sown when an individual or organization is 
seized with an idea about how things might be improved, and mobilizes their own assets to show 
operationally what can be done. They are also sown when an individual or organization decides 
that the government should be doing something different than it currently is, and organizes 
politically to influence the government in their desired direction. They are even sown when 
someone in the voluntary sector develops a product or service that is commercially viable as well 
as socially valuable. 

 


Both volunteerism and philanthropy have been important forces for change in the educational 
sector. We will begin our analysis with volunteerism as a source of energy and improvement. 
The class will, again, be divided into three sections. In the first section, we will look closely at 
the general idea of volunteerism – the idea that individuals might be willing to contribute 
voluntarily to social results particularly when they stand to benefit as well as others more or less 
similarly motivated in society, and where the benefits are both to them as individuals and to the 
society at large. 

 

In the first section, we will quickly review some of the academic debate about the degree to 
which societies can rely on volunteerism – or what we will come to call public spirit – in efforts 
to identify or pursue important public purposes. The debate here is partly about human nature: 
are human beings motivated exclusively or overwhelmingly by attention to their own individual 
material interests, or is there some room in the hearts, minds, and stomachs to work for the 
welfare of others, do their duty, or seek to create broad social conditions that are consistent with 
their views of a good and just society? To the extent that the more socially oriented desires, 
obligations and aspirations can make claims on individual human choices about what to do with 
their money, their time, their labor, etc., the capacity for collectively motivated and produced 
action might be enhanced. But the debate is also about the problem of organizing collective 
efforts regardless of individual motivations. The fact that individuals might have socially 
oriented motivations is no guarantee that they can be organized to act on behalf of social 
objectives. They might be afraid to take action. They might worry that nothing will happen. They 
might worry that they will be exploited by cynical individuals who choose to “free ride” on their 
effort. The important question to get a sense of these individual motivations, and how they might 
be mobilized in collective action efforts. 

 

For this section, read: 

 

• Olson, M. (1965). The logic of collective action: Public goods and the theory of groups. 
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, pp. 1-3, pp. 5-43. (handout) 

 


• Putnam, R. D. (1995). Bowling alone: America’s declining social capital. Journal of 
Democracy, 6(1), pp. 65-78. (handout) 




 

Be prepared to discuss the following questions: 

 

1) Why does Olson think it is hard to organize individuals in collective efforts to produce 
collective goods? What is the danger of “free riding”? How does a business firm guard 
against this problem in organizing production? What is different about trying to organize 
a volunteer effort to build a new school playground, or an effort to form a new teacher’s 
union that wanted a different kind of labor contract with the school system, or organizing 
a campaign to stop the closing of a local school? 




 

2) What does Olson think is the solution to the “collective action problem”? Can this 
solution be used when pursuing social or collective goals? 

 


3) How does Putnam think about social capital? Would more social capital create more 
opportunity for collective action? How, if at all, does the existence of social capital 
overcome the “free rider” problem? 

 





4) If collective action is so hard to organize, how come there seems to be so much of it 
around? 

 




In the second section of the course, we will look closely at a classic social action organization – 
the Sierra Club – through the lens of some scholars who are trying to understand what sustains 
the organization, and how its strategy might best be evaluated. For this section, please read the 
following: 

 

• Han, H., Andrews, K. T., Baggetta, M., Ganz, M. & Lim, C., (2004). What makes Sierra 
Club groups effective? A research project exploring the influence of organization, leaders, 
and members on organizational effectiveness. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the 
American Political Science Association, Hilton Chicago and the Palmer House Hilton, 
Chicago, IL. (handout) 




 

Be prepared to discuss the following questions: 

 

1) How does the Sierra Club sustain itself as an organization? 




 

2) What are the key activities, processes and outputs of the organization? How is each of 
these sustained? 

 


3) Would you describe this organization primarily as a mutual benefit organization 
providing services to a group of individuals who enjoy the outdoors, or a service delivery 
organization creating opportunities for both members and non-members to join enjoy 
outdoor activities, or a political group organized to shape government policy so that 
members, other customers, and all citizens can enjoy “wild spaces”? 

 


4) What is the relationship among these different kinds of activities? Do they complement 
one another or compete with one another? 

 


5) Given the different functions performed by this organization, how do you think it ought 
to be governed and managed? 

 


6) What dimensions of value do Ganz et. al. use to evaluate the performance of the Sierra 
club? 




 

In the third section of the class, we will see what role voluntary organizations have or could have 
played in shaping the character and performance of the K-12 sector. We will look in particular at 
two examples of volunteerism in education: religious schools, and home schooling. For this 
section of the class, please read the following: 

 

• Bryk, A. S., Lee, V. E., & Holland, P. B. (1993). Catholic schools and the common good. 
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Chapters 5-6: pp. 126-165; Chapter 12: pp. 
297-327. (handout) 




 

• Lechtreck, R. (1994). The case for home schooling. The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty, 44(1), 
Accessed online at: http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/the-case-for-homeschooling/ 
(handout) 




 


 

Be prepared to discuss the following questions: 

 

1) How does the fact that Catholic schools are part of the third sector shape their ability to 
produce quality schooling? 




 

2) What resources can they draw upon? How do these resources differ from what is 
available in the public sector? 




 

3) What constraints or challenges do they face? How do these differ from the public 
sector? 




 

4) What role could Catholic schools, or other schools from the voluntary sector, play 
in a strategy for sectoral change? 

 

5) Volunteerism has always been important in shaping the K-12 educational sector. Long 
before there were public schools, individuals provided for the education of their children, 
or joined with others to provide education for all their children together. Often these 
volunteer schools were based on religious or ethnic roots. Has this kind of volunteerism 
helped or hurt the K-12 educational system in the US in the past? What support should be 
given to such efforts in the future? Does it matter what purposes we have for education? 
Does it matter how much we would wish to respond to parental desires, and depend on 
them to support education provided at public expense? 


6) A lot of attention has been focused on trying to enrich educational environments beyond 
the boundaries of schools. One way to think about this is to try to wrap a private schooling 
effort around the core of the public school system. To what extent should we think about 
and encourage voluntary efforts to enrich the environment beyond public schools? 

 

April 5th – Force 4: Civil Society as a Force for Social Change: (II) Philanthropy 

 

By definition, philanthropy is the practice of contributing material resources to the benefit of 
others. Generally speaking, we often assume that philanthropy has as its object of beneficence 
the poor or the oppressed. But this is not necessarily the case. Philanthropy can benefit the rich 
and middle class as well as the poor. Think, for example of the philanthropy that supports the 
arts, or libraries, or even sports. 

 

We also often assume that philanthropy refers to individuals or associations that have very large 
endowments and give out large grants of money. Think of the Ford Foundation, or the Gates 
Foundation, or the Carnegie Foundation, or Eli Broad. But the idea of philanthropy could extend 
to all those individuals who make small contributions to their favorite charities. In fact, when one 
looks at the total amount of financial giving in the United States, by far the largest aggregate 
amount is the amount that individuals contribute to their churches. The sum of giving by large 
foundations represents only a small part of that total. 

 

It is also important to understand that the world of philanthropy is changing. For a while, one 
could think of the philanthropic world as one in which individuals – with either small or large 
incomes or wealth – gave to social purposes they deemed important. But in recent decades, 
many “intermediaries” have developed that play the role of aggregating individual contributions 


into larger funds. Think of the United Way, or Community Foundations or Fidelity’s support to 
charitable givers. 

 

In a world in which public funding for schools is being reduced, the role of philanthropy in 
shaping the role of the K-12 educational system is becoming larger. It includes creating 
endowments for independent private schools. It includes creating associations and funds to 
support particular public schools. And it includes the efforts of large scale strategic 
philanthropists to shape the structure, conduct and performance of the publicly financed K-12 
school system. It is this last part of philanthropy that attracts our attention in this particular class, 
but the others should not be forgotten. 

 

In the first section of the class, we will review some of the academic literature that has developed 
that describes and evaluates the practices of large scale philanthropy in the context of a liberal 
democratic society. For this section, please read the following: 

 

Readings: 

 

• Fleishman, J. L. (2007). The foundation: A great American secret: How private wealth is 
changing the world. New York: PublicAffairs, Chapters 1-2: pp. 1-31, Chapter 6: pp. 66-85. 
(handout) 

 


• Letts, C. W., Ryan, W., & Grossman, A. (1997). Virtuous capital: What foundations can 
learn from venture capitalists (Chapter 32). In W. A. Sahlman, H. H. Stevenson, M. J. 
Roberts, & A. Bhide (Eds.), The entrepreneurial venture, second edition (pp. 555-564). 
Boston, Mass.: Harvard Business School Press. (handout) 




 

Recommended 

 

• Frumkin, P. (2006). Strategic giving: The art and science of philanthropy. Chicago, Ill.: The 
University of Chicago Press, Chapter 2: pp. 55-89, Chapter 6: pp. 174-216. (handout) 

 




Be prepared to discuss the following questions: 

 

1) To what extent do you think philanthropic foundations actually have the capacity to 
produce change? What are the broad strategies they use to accomplish this goal? 
Which do you think are relatively more effective than others? 




 

2) What values and purposes guide the efforts of private philanthropists? What kind of 
oversight does the public as a whole have over the actions of philanthropists? 




 

3) What do you think gives individual philanthropists and/or foundations the right to try 
to seek social change? On what do they base their legitimacy? Should they be worried 
about this? Should we? 




 

4) On balance, do you think foundations contribute or detract from efforts to produce 
social change? 




 

In the second part of the class, we will look at the strategy that is being pursued by a particular 
foundation (The Edna McConnell Clarke Foundation) in seeking and important social change 


(less reliance on imprisonment as a social response to crime). We will consider how they seem to 
be thinking about the problem, what steps they have taken to advance their goals, and how well 
they seem to be doing. 

 

For this class, please read: 

 

• Moore, M. H. & Schoen, K. (Unpublished Paper, 1998). Intervening in highly publicized, 
complex systems: Lessons from the Clark Foundation’s “state centered program”. (handout) 




 

Questions for Discussion: 

 

1) Do you think the Clark Foundation has the legitimate right to seek to influence state 
correctional policies? What gives them standing to try to exercise this influence? 




 

2) What do you think about the strategy they are following? Is it likely to be successful? 
How would you know? 




 

3) What are some alternative strategies they might have followed? What can be said for 
and against these alternative strategies? 




 

4) What is particularly difficult about the task they have assigned themselves? Is this 
harder or easier than trying to improve school performance in a state? 




 

In the third part of class, we will look at the role that philanthropy has played in seeking to 
improve the performance of the K-12 system. For this part of class, please read the following: 

 

• Hess, F. M. (2005). With the best of intentions: How philanthropy is reshaping K-12 
education. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Education Press, Chapters 1, 2 and 8. (required text) 

 


• Lomax, M. L. A better way. (handout) 

 




Be prepared to discuss the following questions: 

 

1) What influence do you think major foundations have had on the course of educational 
reform? 




 

2) On balance, do you think it has been good or bad? 

 


3) What are the main strategies they have relied upon to produce their results? 




 

4) What role can and should they play to be most effective? Do you see the perspectives 
from Colvin, Greene, and Rotherham as conflicting or complementary? 




 


April 7th – Force 5: Law and Law Reform as Forces for Change) 

 

Those interested in sustainable, sector level change are often attracted by the idea of law and law 
reform as an instrument of social change primarily because it seems to offer some significant 
leverage over social behavior and social conditions. If the authority of the state could be engaged 
in the pursuit of some particular social purpose, it seems plausible to imagine that a social effect 
will be larger than if the law were not engaged. Indeed to some, the passage of a law, or the 
creation of a new legal interpretation that creates new rights or new obligations, is the definition 
of a significant social change. To have a purpose enshrined in law is to have created an important 
social change in itself, as well as to create conditions under which real social conditions could 
change as well. The change has been “institutionalized.” 

 

In recent decades, we have seen alternative paths to legal change, and alternative ways to use 
existing law to advance social reform. One way to think about this is to see the methods in terms 
of three broad (and overlapping) categories: 

 

• Efforts to exploit existing laws to advance social reform by concentrating on spotting and 
exploiting existing laws that create both rights and duties (e.g. the idea that we might 
want to use non-traditional labor law to advance labor rights, the idea that we might want 
to use legal rights to transparency to create conditions under which citizens can activate 
established laws in specific ways; the idea that we might be able to bring legal pressure to 
bear on government agencies that are not performing well). 




 

• Efforts to change existing laws through non-political, and non-legislative means (e.g. test 
cases brought to test current interpretations of statutory and common law; Brown v. 
Board of Education? Roe v. Wade?) 




 

• Efforts to use courts and law as a locus of political organizing (e.g. California Legal 
Services). 




 

• Efforts to use political organizing built around ideas of justice and morality to create soft 
law and normative pressures as a way of changing politics and law. 




 

In our discussions, we will try to both enlarge and refine our views about how law as existing 
statutes, as potential statutes, as a distinctive set of institutions with their own powers, processes 
and methods for taking action, and as a moral ideal can be mobilized to create, consolidate, or 
instantiate social change. 

 

In the first part of the course, we will, once again, review some of the academic literature about 
using the law to make social change. The readings will focus, however, on one important case: 
Roe v. Wade. For this part of the class, please read the following: 

 

• US Supreme Court Ruling: Roe v. Wade 410 US 113 (1973) (course website) 




 

• Rosenberg, G. N. (1991). The hollow hope: Can courts bring about social change? Chicago, 
Ill.: The University of Chicago Press, Introduction: pp. 1-8, Chapter 6: pp. 175-201. 
(handout) 




 


• Fung, A. (1993). Making rights real: Roe’s impact on abortion access. Politics & Society, 
21(4), pp. 465-504. (course website) 




 

Recommended 

 

• Tushnet, M. (1989). Rights: An essay in informal political theory. Politics & Society, 17(4), 
pp. 403-451. (course website) 

 




Be Prepared to discuss the following questions: 

 

1) What are the reasons to think that abortion access would have been widely available 
in the 1970s and 1980s even if the Court had not rendered an affirmative decision for 
a woman’s right to choose in Roe v. Wade? 




 

2) In his article, Mark Tushnet offers three arguments against social change through 
legal/constitutional rights. One of these is that legalization of reform is political 
debilitating. What is this argument? Is he right in the case of Roe? Why or why not? 




 

3) Gerald Rosenberg argues that the Court is less attractive than many think as a vehicle 
for social change. Why does he think this? Do you agree? 




 

In the second part of the class, we will look at efforts to use law to produce important change in 
the educational system. It is tempting, of course, to use Brown v. Board of Education, and 
subsequent efforts to eliminate inequality in educational opportunity as our case. But we will 
look instead at a less visible and well known case: the sustained legal effort to influence 
educational financing through the pursuit of rights to education founded in State Constitutions. In 
particular, we are going to foucs on the Abbott case in New Jersey. You don’t need to read the 
case, but please do look at the following: 

 

Readings and Video: 

 

• Short overview of school finance in New Jersey: 
http://www.deborahyaffe.com/finance/history.html 

 


• A panel assessing the impact of Abbott: http://www.blip.tv/file/285658 (This is about a 60 
minute panel – well worth watching, with some of the leading figures on the issue, so be sure 
to leave yourself time to watch it. We picked it after looking through lots of readings – this 
seemed like the best way in to getting multiple perspectives on the efficacy of a legal strategy 
for school finance.) 

 




Questions: 

 

1) To what extent do you think that the law will end up producing significant leverage over 
the level and distribution of school financing? 




 

2) What would be helpful in advancing this cause? Greater legal expertise? More political 
agitation? Some combination of the two? 

 





3) What do you think is the relationship between pursuing a legal strategy on one hand and a 
political strategy on the other? 




 

 

April 12th – Force 6 - Progressivism: Government R and D Support for Social Innovation 

 

Prior to the 20th Century, America did not rely very much on government to produce important 
social change – at least not beyond the realm of economics. Government’s role in shaping 
American society had been limited to support for economic development and for military 
purposes. 

 

At the turn of the 20th century, when confidence in science was perhaps at its highest level, 
American society began to think that if the tools of science were allied with the powers of 
government, some important social progress could be produced. What came to be called the 
Progressive Era began. We imagined that science, or more broadly, rational methods, could be 
used to help us develop substantive knowledge about how to guard the public health through 
improved sewage and water supply, but also administrative and managerial knowledge about 
how we might best organize human beings to produce desired results efficiently and effectively. 
Tradition, patronage, cronyism, even laxness were all to be eliminated through the scourging fire 
of science brought to bear on practical problems. 

 

This progressive ideal has survived for more than a century, though our confidence in its claims 
has waxed and waned. In almost every period of American history one can feel the weight of the 
idea that science can advance human welfare, and that in order to do so, government must both 
support the development of science and find the means to use it in advancing its many purposes 
– not only economic development and defense, but also broader purposes. 

 

Exactly how this might be done, and more particularly, what level of government should take 
responsibility for organizing science for public purposes, remained unclear. Initially, one of the 
strong arguments for federalism was that the different states could serve as “laboratories for 
democracy.” The idea was that states would naturally produce variation on public policies, and 
that variation could then be used and examined both by the national government and by other 
states to discover what particular methods seemed to work better than others. Later, more 
confidence was placed in the federal government. The idea was that the federal government was 
in a good position to support basic and applied research that sought solutions to urgent public 
problems, to carry out field tests of whether particular interventions worked or not, and to help 
disseminate the results to governments throughout the land. There has also long been the idea 
that local governments could play an important role in at least the process of developing and 
experimenting with new methods that were locally responsive and approved, and might point the 
way for others, even if the localities could not be expected to bear the full costs of testing and 
disseminating. 

 

While government’s role in this progressivist ideal was central, it often seemed expedient to 
partner with philanthropic foundations for some of the experimental work. Sometimes 
governments and foundations would join together in developing the ideas to be tried, and 
evaluating them together. Other times, foundations would do this basic work, and hope to 
influence government. In this respect, the progressivist government force for change was closely 
aligned with the philanthropic force for change. 

 


The question for our discussion is whether this idea can become a powerful force for changing 
education. We are certainly spending a lot on it. 

 

The class will be taught in three sections. The first section will focus on some theoretical ideas 
about the role of government in stimulating research and development to promote social change. 
For this section, please read the following: 

 

• Lindblom, C. E. (1990). Inquiry and change: The troubled attempt to understand and shape 
society. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, Chapter 1: pp. 1-14, Chapters 9-11: pp. 
135-191. (handout) 




 

• Moore, M. H. (1995). Learning while doing: Linking knowledge to policy in the 
development of community policing and violence prevention in the United States. In O. H. 
Wikstrom, R. V. Clarke, et al, (Eds.), Integrating crime prevention strategies: Propensity 
and opportunity (pp. 301-331). Stockholm, Sweden: National Council for Crime Prevention. 
(handout) 

 




Be prepared to discuss the following questions: 

 

1) What would be the “rational” and “responsible” way for government to facilitate social 
improvement? 




 

2) What kinds of systems and structures would it take to turn the society as a whole into a 
“learning community”? How close have we come to creating this? What pieces seem to 
be most lacking? 

 


3) What role can government play in helping society as a whole “learn what works” or 
‘learn and produce what is valuable? 

 




In the second part of the class, we will focus on the federal government’s current efforts to 
encourage productivity in the US medical care system by supporting the development of medical 
records systems. For this part of the class, please read: 

 

• HKS Case: Inciting a computer revolution in health care: Implementing the Health 
Information Technology Act. (course website) 




 

Be prepared to discuss the following questions: 

 

1. What is the theory behind the HI-TECH act? Do you believe this can work? 




 

2. What do you think of David Blumenthal’s calculations and actions so far? What seems 
important and effective? What risks is he taking on? What is he doing to mitigate the risks? 

 


3. What advice would you give to him about how best to maximize the opportunity for social 
change? 

 




In the third part of class, we will begin an examination of DOE’s Race to the Top Initiative. For this 
part of the class, please read/consult the following materials: 

 


• McGuinn, P. (2010). Creating cover and constructing capacity: Assessing the origins, 
evolution, and impact of race to the top. American Enterprise Institute Education Stimulus 
Watch Special Report 6, found online at http://www.aei.org/paper/100165 (course website) 




 

Be prepared to discuss the following questions: 

 

1) One important way that the Federal Government often seeks to stimulate innovation 
and change in particular social sectors is through some combination of financing 
social research and development on one hand, and providing financial incentives to 
organizations that embrace favored new processes. If you were giving advice to the 
Secretary of Education about how to design the “Race to the Top Initiative” to 
improve schooling, or to the Director of the White House Office of Social 
Entrepreneurship about how to help bring promising ideas in the public sector to 
scale, what would you say? Does the federal government have much leverage here? 
What can it do to maximize its leverage? 




 

2) What is your understanding of the theory that is guiding the Race to the Top 
Initiative? How does Arne Duncan and his staff believe they can transform K-12 
Education? What levers are they relying on? What effects do they expect? 




 

3) How do these strategies relate to our ongoing discussion about sectoral change? How 
are they trying to leverage the power of government to affect other parts of the 
sector? 




 

4) How would you assess their chances of success at this stage? What are the most 
favorable developments? What seems like a waste of time or a distraction? 




 

5) How would you compare the Race to the Top Initiative to the HI-Tech Initiative? 
Who has the more difficult job – Blumenthal or Duncan? Who has the more powerful 
instruments and processes to rely on? 




 

 

April 14th – Force 7: Institutional Isomorphism and Professional Ideology 

 

Many ideas about how society organized its productive work – from government agencies, 
through markets, to volunteerism – were thrown into turmoil by a pioneering work by 
sociologists Paul DiMaggio and Woody Powell. Their work began with an important empirical 
observation; namely, that all organizations working in a particular industry or sector tended to 
look very much alike. This was true in private sector industries as well as in public sector 
enterprises. 

 

Economic theorists had an explanation for this. They claimed that this homogeneity in form was 
explained by the fact that competitive pressures to perform caused all surviving private sector 
firms to converge eventually on one form. Presumably, this was the form that allowed the firm to 
operate at the technically efficient production possibility frontier. If firms didn’t find this form, 
they would be competed out of existence. That was a reasonable claim, but it could not account 
for the fact that every time one looked into one of these particular organizations, one found many 
ways to improve performance, and that the dominant firms in industries that all looked alike 
were always being challenged by firms that did things differently. 


 

DiMaggio and Powell suggested a different idea about what caused firms to resemble one 
another. They argued that what many firms sought was not performance per se, but legitimacy. 
What they needed to feel good about themselves and to stay alive was not real performance, but 
others perceptions of them that they were doing the right things (which might or might not be 
related to real performance). If this were true, one easy way for firms to claim legitimacy would 
be to look as much like other firms as possible. 

 

Perhaps the homogeneity was explained, then, by the desire to appear legitimate rather than the 
desire to perform. If that could be true even in the private sector where reasonably good 
measures of performance existed, how much more likely would it to be true in the public sector 
where measures of performance were much less reliable. Perhaps the public sector’s move 
towards the adoption of so-called best practices was not a technological advance in performance, 
but merely a way to legitimate certain practices whose real efficacy was unknown! 

 

A slightly different way to think and talk about Powell and DiMaggio’s idea is to imagine that 
there is such a thing as a professional ideology that is powerfully governing in the public sector. 
There are schools that train individuals to be generals, sanitation engineers, doctors, etc. 
professional boards that certify both individuals and practices, standard measures that are used to 
evaluate performance, and so on. Through these devices, individuals learn what it means to be a 
good professional, and how to do the job. 

 

If the drive for legitimacy, and the power of professional ideology exist in the world as powerful 
forces, then they might be seen as forces that guide a great deal of behavior in a given social 
production system. At the outset, these forces might be seen as powerful sources of resistance to 
new ideas about improvement. And so they are. But, if one can find a way to get one’s hands on 
the content of that professional ideology, then that might become a powerful force for change. 

 

It is worth noting that this force for change often acts in concert with progressivism, since the 
government can often play an important role with professionals in shaping the aims and 
techniques of a given profession that guides production in particular sectors. 

 

At any rate, our task in this class is to come to grips with the forces of institutional isomorphism 
and professional ideology as keys to making significant change. 

 

In the first part of the class, we will look at the academic theories about institutional 
isomorphism, or institutional mimesis. For this session, please read the following: 

 

• DiMaggio, P. J. & Powell, W. W. (1983). The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism 
and collective rationality in organizational fields. American Sociological Review, 48, pp. 
147-160. (course website) 




 

• Moore, M. H. (1988). What sort of ideas become public ideas? (Chapter 3). In R. B. Reich 
(Ed.), The power of public ideas (pp. 55-83). Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 
(handout) 




 

Be prepared to discuss the following questions: 

 


1) What do you think of the claim that organizations pursue “legitimacy” more avidly than 
performance, and that the way they gain legitimacy is to operate pretty much like 
everyone else does? If this were true, what would it mean for the efficiency of private 
sector organizations in searching for and finding improved methods of producing 
particular goods and services? 

 


2) Suppose that organizations gain legitimacy partly through real performance, and partly by 
imitating other organizations in the field. Suppose farther that some organizations were 
better able to monitor performance than others. If organizations cannot monitor 
performance very well, or choose not to, what would that imply for the degree to which 
they focused on either performance or imitation as a way of gaining legitimacy? What 
would that mean for the long run performance of the organizations that had difficulty 
measuring performance? 

 


3) Why is it that some ideas become powerful? What qualities do they seem to have that 
given them the kind of standing that causes organizations to use them as the touchstone 
of their legitimacy? 

 


4) In what ways, if any, would these ideas about organizational isomorphism and 
professional ideology influence the way you were thinking about the methods that the 
Race to the Top Initiative could use to bring about significant social change? 




 

In the second part of the class, we will return to the field of policing to discuss how a particular 
professional ideology took root in policing and dominated the field for 50 years, and a method 
that was used to help transform that professional ideology. For this part of the class, please read: 

 

• Roth, J. A., et al. (2000). COPS and the nature of policing (Chapter 6). In J. A. Roth, et al. 
(Eds.), National evaluation of the COPS program: Title I of the 1994 crime act (pp. 179-
231). Washington, DC: The National Institute of Justice. (handout) 




 

• Moore, M. H. & Hartmann, F. X. (Unpublished Paper, 1999). On the theory and practice of 
“executive sessions”. (handout) 




 

Be prepared to discuss the following questions: 

 

1) What were the goals of the COPS program? 




 

2) What were the primary instruments that were used to advance these goals? 




 

3) To what extent do you think these instruments would be effective in changing the 
basic strategy of policing? 




 

4) To what extent do you think it was successful? 




 

5) What other things would you recommend doing to try to influence the professional 
ideology of policing? Which institutions and processes would you try to reach? 




 

 

In the third part of the class, we will focus on an application to education. For this part of the 
class, please read the following: 


 

• Meyer, J. W. & Rowan, B. (1977). Institutionalized organizations: Formal structure as myth 
and ceremony. The American Journal of Sociology, 83(2), pp. 340-363. (course website) 




 

• Berry, B., et al. (2008). Creating and sustaining urban teacher residencies: A new way to 
recruit, prepare, and retain effective teachers in high-needs districts. The Aspen Institute and 
Center for Teaching Quality. Found online at 
http://www.teachingquality.org/legacy/AspenUTR.pdf. (course website) 




 

Questions: 

 

1) Is professional ideology a conservative force or a force for change in education? 




 

2) How can professional ideology be mobilized to create change in the educational arena? 




 

3) Do you share the skepticism that is often expressed about professional ideology in the 
educational sector? Is the key to utilize this ideology or to challenge it? 




 

4) What can we learn from the case of teacher’s residencies? Why was it able to diffuse 
when other reforms have not? 




 

 

April 19th -- Force 8: Social Movements and Social Marketing as Forces for Change 

 

Many of the forces for social change we have examined so far have not focused directly on what 
might be thought of as the fundamental driver of social change – namely, the values and 
aspirations held by individuals in the society as a whole for the nature of their social life – 
something that could be described as social or public opinion, or perhaps even public spirit. Of 
course, the views of individual citizens, and particularly the way they have been aggregated and 
clumped together through various social processes and institutions, has been in the background 
of much of the discussion we have had so far. In democratic systems, social and public opinion 
lie behind the politics that constrain or give guidance to governmental action. In markets, 
consumer desires, backed by their willingness and ability to pay, are critical to shaping the 
productive activities of suppliers in competitive markets. In civil society, social desires to 
provide for others, or to create conditions in society, are primary driving forces that cause 
individuals to create producing organizations, and to contribute to them even when they do not 
directly benefit. When we look at law, at progressivism, and at professional ideology, public 
opinion is again in the background of these institutional mechanisms – something that gives 
guidance to these processes, or that gives energy and legitimacy to them -- but the main action is 
in the hands of those who can command institutional power of various kinds and claim that they 
are acting in accord with public aspirations and desires rather than demonstrating that they are 
closely aligned with public opinion, or actually mobilizing it. In some sense, acting from 
platforms in government, in the commercial sector, in the nonprofit sector, in law, or in a 
profession, one can afford to cheat a little bit. One can use the institutional leverage that comes 
from such positions, claim to be using that position legitimately by acting in the broad public 
interest, but never quite do the political work of testing the degree to which one’s actions are 
aligned with public opinion, making oneself accountable to the public, or working on mobilizing 
public opinion to ensure that one is aligned with it, and able to use it to help achieve results. 

 


In this section, we focus attention on the views of individuals, and what they want for 
themselves, for those with whom they identify, and for the society as a whole. Instead of treating 
those as fixed, we will treat them as changeable; instead of thinking of them as stagnant, we will 
think of them as mobilizeable. The social change agent has as his or her target, and his or her 
primary resource to use in making significant change the nature, salience, and urgency of their 
individually held social aspirations. The more individuals one can get to feel urgently about 
advancing a particular social goal, and acting to further that cause, the larger and more sustained 
the effect one can have. 

 

There are two somewhat different versions of this. In one case, the social movement operates to 
make broad social claims on the actions of many established institutions with the power to 
produce changes in the society. The influence comes from public opinion and affects the actions 
of social actors in a position to affect social outcomes. Think of mobilizing an army of citizens to 
demand action from government, from private organizations, from nonprofit organizations, to 
change laws, to alter policies and practices, and so on. In the other case, the social movement is 
something that a single actor – often the government – seeks to launch as a method of 
accomplishing specific policy objectives that depend on the more or less voluntary action of 
large numbers of individuals to act in specific ways to achieve policy outcomes. Think of efforts 
designed to encourage solid waste re-cycling, or to reduce childhood obesity, or to participate in 
the education of one’s own children. These are broadly similar in the sense that the social change 
agent is trying to influence large numbers of social actors – often individuals, or individuals 
already pre-sorted into sympathetic audiences – to take action on behalf of social purposes. 

 

The principal differences are that in the first case one is trying to build a general social program 
and persuade the social actors to call other social actors to account for specific actions that 
advance or retard that social movement; in the second, one is trying to persuade individuals to 
take action themselves by changing their own behavior in a way that produce social results. We 
will call the first a real social movement in that its efforts are to bring pressure to bear across a 
broad range of behaviors and institutions. We will call the second a public marketing effort 
because it is focused on directly producing a particular result by persuading individuals to act in 
specific ways. The practical line between these efforts may be very thin, but for various analytic 
purposes it is worth distinguishing between them. 

 

As in other classes, we will divide this class into three sections: a review of the theories, an 
application to a field other than education, and then an application to education. In preparation 
for the first session on the theory, please read the following: 

 

• Weiss, J. A. (2002). Public information (Chapter 7). In L. M. Salamon (Ed.), The tools of 
government: A guide to the new governance (pp. 217-254). New York: Oxford University 
Press. (handout) 




 

• Ganz, M. (2006). Left behind: Social movements, parties, and the politics of reform. The 
Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations, Working Paper No. 34. (handout) 

 




Be prepared to discuss the following questions: 

 

1. What is the idea of social or public marketing? Why might it be important to social 
change agents? What particular kinds of social agents might find these ideas useful? 




 


2. How would you distinguish the idea of social or public marketing from the older, more 
traditional idea of building social and political movements? In what ways are the aims 
and methods similar? In what ways different? What are the relative strengths and 
weaknesses? What might a social marketer borrow from social movement strategists? 
What might social movement strategists borrow from social marketers? 

 


3. What role do you think technology can play in supporting both marketing and social 
movement efforts? 

 




In the second part of the class, we will divide you into two groups to present analyses of two 
different cases that could be described as social marketing and/or social mobilization efforts. One 
focuses on the creation of an organization that seeks to build a movement that can reduce teen 
pregnancy in the US. The other focuses on an effort to create a social movement that can demand 
more social responsibility from commercial firms working in Brazil. For this part of the class, 
please read the following: 

 

• HBS Case: National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy. (handout) 

 


• HKS Case: The Ethos Institute (A): Challenging Business to Become the Vanguard of Social 
Progress in Brazil. (course website) 

 




Be prepared to discuss the following questions: 

 

1) How would you describe the basic aims of the social change agents in these 
cases? What is there principal strategy? How have they organized and financed 
themselves? What particular activities do they carry out to secure their goals? 




 

2) Do you think they can succeed? What would success look like? What are key 
milestones along the way to success? 




 

3) Would you describe this initiative as a social marketing or a social change 
initiative? What criteria are you using to distinguish one from the other? Would 
you recommend that the organization shift towards one or the other of these 
approaches? 




 

In the third section of the class, we will focus on an application in the field of education. For this 
section, please read the following: 

 

• Website of Michelle Rhee’s Students First: http: www.studentsfirst.org, and additional 
press materials, TBD. 




 

Be prepared to discuss following questions: 

 

1) Is there an existing social movement for educational reform? What are its ingredients? 
Where does Michelle Rhee’s efforts fit in this larger phenomenon? 




 

2) What strategy is Michelle Rhee now following? Is it a marketing campaign or a social 
movement, or somewhere in-between? 




 


3) Do you think her strategy can or will succeed? If you were a private investor who would 
be paid off she succeeded in making some kind of change in the K-12 sector, would you 
invest in her? What are the principal strengths and weaknesses of her approach? 




 

4) If she or someone else had done the work she is now planning to do prior to her tenure as 
Superintendant of the DC Schools, how much would this organization have helped her, 
and in what particular ways? What does your answer suggest about the potential of such 
social change movements for improving education? 




 

 

April 21st – 9 a.m. – 12 p.m., Gutman 440 (Note special time and room) Force 9: Political 
Movements as Forces for Change 

 

Political movements are very similar to social movements. They are both rooted in the values 
and aspirations of individual citizens as they have been developed through particular social 
processes that have produced both convergence and divergence in individual views. They come 
alive when those values are activated by particular conditions that are used by issue 
entrepreneurs to put something on the social or public agenda. The only thing that makes them 
different is that political movements often focus their attention specifically on trying to influence 
government and the way that government uses its tools of influence. They do not simply try to 
persuade private social actors to do publicly valuable things; they seek to grasp and use the 
powers of government for public purposes. Not all social movements become political 
movements. And not all political movements could be described as social movements. But many 
movements in American history have been both – including the drive against slavery organized 
by the abolitionists, or the drive against drinking organized by the prohibitionists, or, more 
recently, the drive against both smoking and drunk driving. Whereas social movements calculate 
their acts and measure their impact by the influence they can exert on both collective and 
individual private actors, political movements calculate their acts and measure their impact by 
the influence they can exert on government policy, and through those efforts, the impact on 
society at large. 

 

In the first part of this class, we will review some of the key academic works on political 
movements. 

 

• Goss, K. A. (2006). Disarmed: The missing movement for gun control in America. 
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, Chapters 1-2: pp. 1-72, Chapter 7: pp. 190-
199. (handout) 




 

• Ganz, M. (2010). Leading change: Leadership, organization, and social movements 
(Chapter 19). In N. Nohria & R. Khurana (Eds.), Handbook of leadership theory and 
practice (pp. 509-550). Boston, Mass.: Harvard Business School Press. (handout) 




 

Be prepared to discuss the following questions. 

 

1) How do these different authors define political movements? 


2) What do they think are necessary conditions for such movements to come into existence 
and become influential? 


3) What role, if any, do they assign to individual leadership, or to self-conscious co-
ordination and coalition building? How much that occurs in political movements seems to 





be a result of central planning versus some combination of opportunistic responses to 
circumstances, and some capacity for mutual adjustment among engaged actors? 


4) What does this imply about efforts to create and lead a political movement? 




 

In the second part of class, we will look at a classic example of a political movement in the 
United States – the movement to achieve voting rights for discriminated against minorities. For 
this part of the class, please read the following: 

 

• HKS Case: The Voting Rights Act of 1965 (A): The Selma Campaign. (course website) 




 

• HKS Case: The Voting Rights Act of 1965 (B): LBJ and the Department of Justice. (course 
website) 




 

Be prepared to discuss the following questions: 

 

1) To what extent were the conditions deemed necessary for a successful political 
movement present in the Voting Rights Act Case? What (or who) had created these 
conditions? 




 

2) Previous civil rights movements had relied heavily on law and legal strategies to achieve 
important civil rights. Was the strategy in the case of Voting Rights equally focused on 
law, or was it more focused on creating and using a political movement? Why do you 
think that was true? 

 


3) Who do you think were the key strategists of the Voting Rights movement? What form 
did their leadership take? What calculations were they making? Were they acting in 
concert with one another through conscious agreement, or something much less explicit 
and co-ordinated than that? What would be a good way to govern such a complex 
movement? 




 

In the third part of class, we will reflect on the question of whether a political movement for 
educational improvement currently exists in the United States, what were the forces that fueled it 
and who were the actors that gave it a focus, and what would now be necessary to sustain, re-
energize, re-direct, or otherwise improve. We will come at this question by starting with the 
standards movement – treating it as a relatively powerful and enduring political force that has 
been shaping the context that has motivated and guided educational reform efforts. We will treat 
this as a kind of living case for analysis, and will benefit from having one of the architects of this 
political movement join us – namely, Professor Robert Schwartz. 

 

In preparation for this class, please read the following: 

 

• Ravitch, D. (1995). Debating the future of American education: Do we need national 
standards and assessments? Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, Introduction: pp. 1-
8, General Discussion: pp. 73-82. (handout) 




 

• Sizer, T. R. (1995). Will national standards and assessments make a difference? In D. 
Ravitch (Ed.), Debating the future of American education: Do we need national standards 
and assessments? (pp. 33-39). Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution. (handout) 




 


• Romer, R. (1995). Explaining standards to the public. In D. Ravitch (Ed.), Debating the 
future of American education: Do we need national standards and assessments? (pp. 66-72). 
Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution. (handout) 




 

• Schwartz, R. B. (2003). The emerging state leadership role in education reform: Notes of a 
participant-observer (Chapter 9). In D. T. Gordon (Ed.), A nation reformed: American 
education 20 years after a nation at risk (pp. 131-151). Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard 
Education Press. (handout) 

 




Be prepared to discuss the following questions: 

 

1) How important do you think the standards movement has been in giving impetus and 
direction to K-12 educational reform in the US? 




 

2) What were the key ingredients of this movement? How was it built? By whom was it 
built? How long did it take? 




 

3) Do you think the standards movement can be considered a political movement? In what 
ways does it seem to operate like a political movement? In what ways is it different from 
what we often think of as a political movement? 




 

4) How is it different to think about standards as a political movement, as opposed to, a 
regulatory strategy for achieving certain academic outcomes? Is it possible, for example, 
that No Child Left Behind has had some success as a contributing force to a political and 
social movement, even if (for argument’s sake) it has been mostly unsuccessful in its 
actual effects on classrooms and students? 

 


5) What is your prediction about the future of this movement? Will it continue to be vital 
and important, or will it fade? What strategic implications does this have for your future 
work?