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Mehta, Jal

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Mehta, Jal
Author's Publications: search.filters.isAuthorOfPublication.7b2399cc-678d-4f2b-b611-f9b2ff12c58d

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 10
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    Professionalization 2.0: The Case for Plural Professionalization in Education
    (Harvard Education Press, 2014) Mehta, Jal; Teles, Steven
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    Jurisdictional Politics: A New Federal Role in Education
    (Harvard Education Press, 2012) Mehta, Jal; Teles, Steven
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    Bringing values back in: How purposes shape practices in coherent school designs
    (Springer Nature, 2015) Mehta, Jal; Fine, Sarah M.
    Perhaps the most daunting challenge in building good educational systems is generating quality practice consistently across classrooms. Recent work has suggested that one way to address this dilemma is by building an educational infrastructure that would guide the work of practitioners. This article seeks to build upon and complicate this work on infrastructure by examining why two very different schools are able to achieve consistency of practice where many other schools do not. Findings suggest that infrastructure is not self-enacting and needs to be coupled to school level design in ways that are coherent and mutually reinforcing if infrastructure is going to lead to consistency of outcomes. At the same time, we find that the schools differ substantially in their visions of knowledge, learning, and teaching (purposes), which in turn imply very different kinds of organizational designs (practices). In conclusion, we suggest that the notion of infrastructure is plural rather than singular, and that different designs are appropriate for different pedagogical visions and social contexts.
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    When Professions Shape Politics: The Case of Accountability in K-12 and Higher Education
    (SAGE Publications, 2013) Mehta, Jal
    Professionalization is an important but overlooked dimension in education politics, particularly the politics of accountability. To isolate the importance of professionalization, this article compares accountability movements in K-12 education with similar movements in higher education. I draw on three pairs of reports that have sought to impose accountability between 1983 and 2006, in each case comparing a report on K-12 with a similar report on higher education. I find that calls for accountability in both sectors have intensified over the period under study, but that higher education has been much more protected from accountability pressures by its greater degree of professionalization, its reputation, its greater share in the private sector, and its decentralized professional autonomy. In conclusion, I connect the findings to broader debates about professionalism and the future of accountability in the two sectors.
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    From “Whether” to “How”: The Varied Roles of Ideas in Politics
    (Oxford University Press, 2010) Mehta, Jal
    This chapter examines ideas of varying levels of generality that define how policymakers should act. Building upon and drawing together the best work in the field, it seeks to offer a synthetic analysis of how ideas matter in politics: what is known, what is not known, and what areas are in need of further research. It considers ideas at three levels of generality: policy solutions, problem definitions, and public philosophies or zeitgeist. It also consider interactions between the levels of ideas, with a particular interest in “upward-flowing” interactions, showing that not only does the conception of a problem constrain policy alternatives, but the fate of specific policy solutions also can have an impact on problem definitions or even broader public philosophies.
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    The Penetration of Technocratic Logic into the Educational Field: Rationalizing Schooling from the Progressives to the Present
    (Teachers College, Columbia University, 2013) Mehta, Jal
    Educational accountability is not a recent invention. Over the course of the 20th century, there were three major movements demanding accountability in American education: the efficiency reforms of the Progressive Era, the now almost forgotten movement toward accountability in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the modern standards and accountability movement, culminating in No Child Left Behind. This paper considers the three movements as cases of school “rationalization” in the Weberian sense, in that each sought to reduce variation and discretion across schools in favor of increasingly formal systems of standardized top-down control. This impulse to rationalize schools cannot be explained by interest group or partisan explanations, as those that have purveyed the reforms defy easy ideological generalization. Instead, these reforms can be understood as a process of penetration of a “technocratic logic” into the educational sphere. In each case, this process exhibited a similar pattern: 1) the creation of a crisis of quality which destabilized the existing educational status quo; 2) the elevation of a technocratic logic, backed by the knowledge base of a high status epistemic community; 3) the rallying of ideologically diverse powerful actors external to the schools behind a commensurating logic that promised control and improvement over an unwieldy school system; and 4) the inability of the education field to resist (and often to be co-opted by) this technocratic logic, due to its historical institutionalization as a highly feminized, weak, bureaucratically-administered field lacking its own set of widely respected countervailing professional standards. Implications suggest that unless teachers are able to develop and organize themselves as a stronger field, they will remain at the whim of external actors; professionalization may also produce better outcomes than the repeated emphasis on rationalizing reforms.
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    How Paradigms Create Politics: The Transformation of American Educational Policy, 1980-2001
    (American Educational Research Association (AERA), 2013) Mehta, Jal
    American educational policy was rapidly transformed between 1980 and 2001. Accountability was introduced into a sphere that had long been loosely coupled, both major political parties reevaluated longstanding positions, and significant institutional control over the schooling shifted to the federal government for the first time in the nation’s history. These changes cannot be explained by conventional theories such as interest groups, rational choice, and historical institutionalism. Drawing on extensive archival research and more than 80 interviews, this article argues that this transformation can be explained by a changed policy paradigm which restructured the political landscape around education reform. More generally, while previous scholars have observed that “policies create politics,” it should also be recognized that “paradigms create politics.”
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    From Bureaucracy to Profession: Remaking the Educational Sector for the Twenty-First Century
    (Harvard Education Publishing Group, 2013) Mehta, Jal
    n this essay, Jal Mehta examines the challenges faced by American schooling and the reasons for persistent failure of American school reforms to achieve successful educational outcomes at scale. He concludes that many of the problems faced by American schools are artifacts of the bureaucratic form in which the education sector as a whole was cast: “We are trying to solve a problem that requires professional skill and expertise by using bureaucratic levers of requirements and regulations.” Building on research from a variety of fields and disciplines, Mehta advances a “sectoral” perspective on education reform, exploring how this shift in thinking could help education stakeholders produce quality practice across the nation.
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    Why Reform Sometimes Succeeds: Understanding the Conditions That Produce Reforms That Last
    (Sage, 2017) Mehta, Jal; Cohen, David
    Counter to narratives of persistently failed school reform, we argue that reforms sometimes succeed, and seek to understand why. Drawing on examples from the founding of public schools to the present, we find that successful system-wide reforms addressed problems that teachers thought they had, by being consistent with prevailing norms and values, by mobilizing a significant public constituency, and building the needed educational infrastructure. We distinguish between system-wide and niche reforms, suggesting that some--particularly those seeking ambitious instruction—failed system-wide but succeeded by creating protected educational niches. We conclude with a discussion of the implications for the Common Core.
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    First-Round Analysis of BPS Proposed 6-zone, 9-zone, 11-zone, and 23-zone School Assignment Plans
    (2012) Levinson, Meira; Noonan, James; Fay, Jacob; Mantil, Ann; Buttimer, Christopher; Mehta, Jal