Prior to the 1960s, educational purpose was conceptualized both humanistically and pluralistically; educational reform occurred primarily through a process of persuasion and change at the local level; and equality of educational opportunity focused on both quantitative and qualitive resources and, for African-Americans, emphasized desegregation. In No Child Left Behind, the only purposes of education explicitly mandated by the Federal government were economic—to address poverty and the increasingly unequal distribution of wealth, especially for minorities, and to make the nation more economically competitive at the global level. Standardized test scores were the only measurement that mattered in terms of the evaluation of teachers and schools and “data-driven” decision making became a necessity. When schools failed to meet ambitious prespecified goals, teachers and local administrators were assumed to be unmotivated, uncaring, or even racially prejudiced.These dramatic changes can largely be explained by the success of a policy paradigm, particularly at the federal level, based on the ideas, theories, and methods of neoclassical economics. Initiated by the introduction of human capital theory into educational policy in the late 1950s, this paradigm was also comprised of the education production function and the principal-agent theory. The paradigm was supported by various interest groups from both the left and the right for ideological purposes; supporters benefited from what was perceived as the legitimacy of economic research, but economists benefitted as well. Strong political support for the economic paradigm has come from the left and from a body of advocacy research that arose in the early 1970s known as the Effective Schools Movement. Economists’ notions of both the production function and principal agent theory were used by ESM researchers to support the idea that all children were educable to high levels (as measured by standardized tests), regardless of non-school factors, and that differences in academic achievement between racial groups was the fault of the school. The research of economists, often described by its critics as “neo-liberal” or “neo-conservative,” has actually been used quite powerfully by those committed to social justice and equality of educational opportunity.
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