Feminist Critical Policy Analysis I

Catherine Marshall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780750706346
• eBook ISBN: 9781135714642
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

This text sets out to challenge the traditional power basis of the policy decision makers in education. It contests that others who have an equal right to be consulted and have their opinions known have been silenced, declared irrelevant, postponed and otherwise ignored. Policies have thus been formed and implemented without even a cursory feminist critical glance. The chapters in this text illustrate how to incorporate critical and feminist lenses and thus create policies to meet the lived realities, the needs, aspirations and values of women and girls. A particular focus is the primary and secondary sectors of education.

Chapter 1

Dismantling and Reconstructing Policy Analysis

Catherine Marshall

Dismantling Policy Analysis¹

‘It’s really an indictment on us and on our society when 12- and 13-year-olds don’t see their future beyond having a baby’, said Dr Henry Foster, President Clinton’s advisor on teen pregnancy (Paik, 1995). Yet, it seems impossible to connect such statements to a focus on education policies for girls. And what about others at the margin in schools—boys who are not on sports teams, kids who do not wear the right shoes, whose families do not speak the right language. Policymakers focus on the guns-and-knives school violence but do not include sexual harassment as a school violence issue. Can our policy literatures change this? Can critical and feminist theory reframe the policy world?

Do policymakers pay more attention to the outcomes-focused analyses reporting numbers of girls-in-math per dollar spent for special programs or to the story of the 14-year-old skipping class, embarrassed and confused about her algebra teacher’s exuberant compliments on her figure? What goes on in shaping training, certification, selection and promotion of educational administrators that ensures white male dominance and leaders oriented toward bureaucratic maintenance? These are feminist and critical policy questions, often neglected. This chapter dismantles policy analysis in order to open, widen and reframe policy questions and methods.² It introduces the perspectives and literatures that underpin feminist critical policy analysis, perspectives illustrated in the ensuing chapters, focusing on policy agendas and arenas for elementary and secondary schooling.³

How can we publish and use analyses of teachers’ status and work lives which blithely skip over the significance of the fact that most teachers are white women (as in Rowan, 1994). How can we not notice that Oakes’ (1985) book on tracking focuses on race and class inequities and makes no connection to gender? How can we cooperate with education systems that support the persistent underrepresentation of women and minorities in administrative and policy positions in education (Bell and Chase, 1993; Ortiz and Marshall, 1988), defining it as an issue of competency and/ or access. How can school leaders countenance reforms that sweep past, or under the rug, concerns about persistent race, class and gender inequities? Why should schools continue informal curriculum practices that reinforce definitions of femininity and masculinity, ignoring how social constructions of gender limit and constrain human possibility? Why have reforms of schooling failed to challenge ‘the “male-as-norm” conceptions of educational purpose, of students, of teachers, of curricula, of pedagogy, and of the profession of education’ (Leach and Davies, 1990:322).⁴ Feminist critical policy analysis raises such questions.

We need theories and methods that integrate gender issues with the realities of power and politics. The master’s tools must be cast aside, by bringing into question all things that were common sense, structured and assumed, from male-female difference to male norms of leadership and power. Integrating feminist and critical theory into policy analysis will add critical issues and ways of framing questions about power, justice and the state. All that is needed is the political choice to do so. Politics of education scholars can take the lead in this dismantling and reframing. Feminist critical policy analysis is research that conducts analyses for women while focusing on policy and politics. This perspective asks an often neglected question of every policy or political action: how is it affected by gender roles?

Curriculum theorists, education philosophers and researchers of teaching careers and classroom dynamics have made important contributions but few scholars in politics and policy have engaged with gender issues or reframed with feminist and critical perspectives. Feminist critical policy analysis is new and rare; it begins with the assumptions that gender inequity results from purposeful (if subconscious) choices to serve some in-group’s ideology and purpose. It is research identifying how the political agenda benefitting white males is embedded in school structures and practices.

There is room for decades of policy research which asks first, how does this policy or structure exclude certain publics (subordinate nationalities, religions, women, the urban poor, the working class, homosexuals), then asks, what political arrangements support policies and structures that devalue alternative perspectives, that reinforce gender, ethnic/race and class inequities, and asks, who benefits from these arrangements, and finally, what are possible ways to restructure power dynamics and political arrangements to address issues of social justice? Also, scholars of politics of education can test their mettle on the array of related policy issues. What happens, for example, when we include gender issues, using models, concepts and methods developed from more mainstream policy issues like choice, desegregation, decentralization, inclusion, school finance or testing? Do the models and methods work? How are the issues redefined?

Such feminist and critical theory-driven questioning will not only inform gender equity issues, it will expand our models and methods. Looking at the more subtle and micropolitical, what happens when we ask deep questions about girls’ and boys’ negotiating identities in the mix of cultural messages about career choices: such feminist theory-driven questioning will reframe important findings about education policy.

Feminist critical policy analysis is ideological, centers on gender, states a clear values base, and identifies the formal and informal processes of power and policy that affect women’s and men’s advancement and full development. Feminist analysis assumes that where policy apparatus creates and maintains male-normed systems, gender issues, by definition, come to the policy system as a challenge, to be resisted. Thus, traditional policy analysis assumptions and methods will not suffice for examining areas of silence, taboo topics, hidden injuries, non-events, and non-decisions. This chapter argues the need to dismantle conventional and limiting definitions of policy analysis, offering the literatures for viewing policy culturally, for expanding methodologies for policy analysis, for incorporating feminist and critical theories. It demonstrates openings for a rich and democratizing agenda for education policy analysts to embrace.

What Needs Dismantling?

‘For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’ (Lorde, 1984:112).

Knowledge, laws, traditions which developed in a public discourse dominated and peopled by white males has left us with constrained methods of policy analysis and ‘partial and perverse understandings’ (Harding, 1986:26) from limited theoretical and political frameworks—greatly in need of dismantling. Critical and feminist education scholars, policy analysts and political scientists provide rationales for the dismantling by describing the limits of traditional, mainstream conceptions and methods and demanding a widened view of policy arenas, policy, policy discourse, politics and policy agendas. Traditional policy analysis is ‘grounded in a narrow, falsely objective, overly instrumental view of rationality that masks its latent biases and allows policy elites and technocrats to present analyses and plans as neutral and objective when they are actually tied to prevailing relations of power’ (Schram’s 1995 review of Forester’s stance: 375). The appeal of traditional policy analysis. Traditional policy analysis tries to identify and calculate effects of policies with apolitical, objective, neutral methods. Seeing social problems as diseases which have real causes and need real and/or symbolic solutions, they endeavor to assist and they assess the merits and efficacy of solutionimplementations (Scheurich, 1994). This is appealing and fits with a dominant liberal optimism of educators and policymakers—an assumption that there will be decisionmakers who will assess, formulate and fund policies and programs that hold clear promise to promote a clearly defined and agreed-upon purpose.

To be employed, to earn contracts, policy analysts must conduct studies that inform the policy debates raised in arenas of power. Thus, dominant values shape problem definitions and determine which are the relevant, significant questions, issues and answers (Scheurich, 1994). The questions and frameworks and the modes of analysis raised by feminist critical theory are excluded. Bias, power, and values drive the identification and legitimation of a problem and the methods seen as useful for studying and solving it. Whether its a cost-benefit analysis of university athletic programs or an analysis of women’s studies programs, the questions, methods and policy-relevant recommendations will be those judged appropriate by dominant interests. Thus, traditional assumptions about value-free, neutral, objective research and analyses become devices that guarantee that dominant ways of thinking will be reinforced by the research and analyses. Further, power, bias and values are embedded in institutions, such as legislatures, family and schools in ways that affect what we do and do not see as problems; some become ‘areas of silence’ (Anderson, 1993). By focusing on measurable, tangible facts that are part of public arena discourse, policy issues are made logical/rational, fixable and free of issues of power differentials.

For less partial analyses, political activism by the oppressed and silenced must be exercised, in order to raise different questions. This book lays out literatures to move to a widened view of policy.

Interconnections of politics and policy in education. Politics and policy surround educators. This chapter presents literatures that widen our definitions to encompass the day-to-day politics and policies we live. When I teach my Politics of Education class, I start with the formal arenas (Congress, state agencies, local boards), with models and systems analysis and the policy issues in the Education Week headlines; students dutifully take notes. Their engagement deepens when we uncover symbolic politics in studies of discrepancies between rhetoric, action and outcomes. Then we get to micropolitics; they know those politics of interaction; they have felt the politics of silencing; they have observed the politics of inattention and symbols-manipulation. The next day I teach a different class on feminist issues in education, where students read about the federal government’s enforcement of Title IX and about the politics of identity negotiation for adolescents in the context of schools’ informal curriculum. Down the hall are classes called Curriculum Theory, Program Evaluation, Philosophy of Education. On the bulletin board, the job announcements all have their affirmative action statements. Outside the front office, there’s a sign saying, ‘If the Dean ain’t happy, ain’t NOBODY happy!’, a notice of legislators’ latest budget slash, and someone from housekeeping (with a staff that is 95 per cent African American) empties the trash bins. All of these are teaching about politics of education; all are about policy arenas.

Cultural approaches in political science, feminist, cultural studies, critical and postpositivist turns in education policy literature lead the critique and promising new direction for policy analysis, broadening the arenas for analyses of power, politics and policy.

Cultural Approaches to Political Arenas

By looking culturally, we can see values bubbling in a ‘policy primeval soup’ cauldron (Kingdon, 1984) and focus on the power-driven social constructions that shape education policy.

Defining politics. The straightforward, traditional definition of politics: ‘who gets what when and how’ (Lasswell, 1936) is rendered more complex by Easton’s definition: ‘the authoritative allocation of values’. But C.Wright Mills’ definition: ‘turning personal troubles into public issues’—recognizes that human agents decide, based on their values, what should be part of the authority-based (policy arena) agenda and thus, what should be a public issue (Mitchell et al., 1995). This definition turns attention to which or whose troubles get positive public attention and helpful resources (corporate farmers, school sports) and whose troubles do not garner such attention (child care, prevention of sexual harassment in schools, arts education) or negative controlling attention (welfare mothers, teacher quality).⁵ Some issues are not part of policy debates—women coping with an abusive boss or husband, girls who remain passive and quiet in classroom discussions, women teachers who don’t aspire to be superintendents. By defining these as private choices, they are ignored in policy arenas.

Cultural values and choices in policy arenas. Cultural values create the power that drives choices.⁶ In the policy primeval soup, ideas are constantly floating around. Some policy ideas are not even acknowledged, much less considered viable options, if they do not coincide with prevailing ideology and culture. Value acceptability, or how a given idea fits with national culture or ideology, affects how these values enter into policy decisions. ‘Policy windows’ (Kingdon, 1984) open to these acceptable values because of a change in the political stream (a change of administration, a shift in Congress or national mood), or because a new problem captures the attention of policymakers.⁷ Thus, Sputnik opened policy windows for math and science curriculum policy but no such window opened for government-supported curricula for prevention of violence toward women.

Policy communities, assumptive worlds, and logical frames. Policymakers are political creatures (a fact that too many policy analysts forget) in political communities where language, ideas and information are the medium of exchange. A policy community is a loose network of policy professionals and advocates who cluster around a specific area of governmental action—agencies, politicians, political parties, interest groups and their leaders and staff, policy advocates, and experts. Policy communities function within norms like ‘keep it in the family’, roles of the main members and the exchangerelationships and tensions among them (Campbell et al., 1989) and the ‘assumptive worlds’ of policy actors—their understandings about how to act and talk, about who initiates action, and what are the limits on policy options (Marshall, Mitchell and Wirt, 1989). ‘Logics’, ‘models’ or ‘frameworks’ are important units of analysis in public policy for probing policymakers’ thoughts (Anderson, 1978; Rein, 1983). They are the basis for policy formulation as well as ‘standards of how to judge and criticize policymaking performance’ and have the power to offer different definitions of what is real and important. Thus, policy analyses can identify how, for example, legislators attend to a gender policy for girls in math but declare inappropriate any policy discussion of power/sexuality dynamics in sex education curricula.⁸

The public sphere, agenda-setting, and masternarratives. Where is the policy arena, where does public policy take place? How does an elite dictate what is right and good, relegating other people and other agendas to the margin, and what happens among subaltern counterpublics ‘members of subordinated groups [who] invent and circulate counterdiscourse to formulate opposition interpretation of their identities, interests, and needs’ (Fraser, 1994:123)? Those who decide the agenda in the public sphere arrange ‘the…hegemonic mode of domination’ (Fraser, 1994:117).⁹ Thus, the arrangements and boundaries for public, dominant, legitimate discourse matter. As discourse in the public sphere helped to institutionalize a more bureaucratic elite form rather than a participatory-democratic form of gove...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• Dedication
• Preface
• Chapter 1
• Part I: The Legitimized Formal Arenas of Policy
• Part II: The Politics of Silence and Ambiguity
• Part III: New Politics, New Policy
• Notes on Contributors