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Cathie Jo Martin, Reforming the Reform: Problems of Public Schooling in the American Welfare State by Susan L. Moffitt, Michaela Krug O’Neill, and David K. Cohen, Political Science Quarterly, 2025;, qqaf026, https://doi.org/10.1093/psquar/qqaf026
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Reforming the Reform asks fascinating and perplexing questions: Why do reportedly monumental reforms often lead to policies that have limited impact on the status quo? How do reforms contain the seeds of their own demise and create specific types of problems that will motivate future reforms? More broadly, what accounts for significant policy continuities within moments of institutional change? In short, what happens after reform?
This engaging and illuminating book tells us that reformers at the end of the last century create educational standards and assessment tools to give disadvantaged children access to the same advantages in schooling enjoyed by children of privilege. Yet legislative action is only a starting point in the new educational agenda, as a task of codifying educational standards must occur in the path from legislation to implementation. State and local officials have responsibility for crafting detailed plans to give substance to the legislative mandates, yet their job is far from easy. To fully grasp why they sometimes fail to achieve their intended goals, we must understand how the reforms themselves create new problems: how legislation in one policy domain produces expectations in other areas, how inadequate resources fail to meet new legislative demands, how reforms are implemented unevenly, and how sparks of innovation fade quickly.
