Domesticating a Revolution:

In recognition of the increased demands facing state education departments in this accountability-focused era, Gail L. Sunderman and Gary Orfield present results from a study on the response of these agencies to the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). In this article, Sunderman and Orfield analyze issues of state capacity, compiling data from interviews, policy and program document analysis, and budget and staffing information. They find that state education departments, which are tasked with intervening in underperforming schools to ensure 100 percent proficiency for all students under NCLB, may not have the necessary human and financial resources or organizational capacity to adequately meet their increased responsibilities. In addition to issues of capacity, structural, functional, and political factors all limit the ability of state education departments to completely fulfill their new administrative roles. Sunderman and Orfield suggest that state education departments have shown good faith in their responses and suggest that the federal law turn its attention to necessary infrastructure improvement instead of further increased responsibilities.

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Gail L. Sunderman is a senior research associate for The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University. Her research focuses on educational policy and politics and urban school reform, including the development and implementation of education policy and the impact of policy on the educational opportunities for at-risk students. Her work has appeared in Phi Delta Kappan, Teachers College Record, and Educational Researcher. She is the coauthor of NCLB Meets School Realities: Lessons from the Field (with J. S. Kim and G. Orfield, 2005).

Gary Orfield is a professor of education and social policy at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where his work is centered on the study of civil rights, education policy, urban policy, and minority opportunity. He is also cofounder and director of The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, an initiative that is developing and publishing a new generation of research on multiracial civil rights issues. Orfield’s many  publications include Higher Education and the Color Line: College Access, Racial Equity, and Social Change (coedited with P. Marin and C. L. Horn, 2005) and Dropouts in America: Confronting the Graduation Rate Crisis (2004).