0.13 Sampson, p., & Roberts, k. (october 2011). historical comparison  (Page 3/14)

Gertle, Walberg, Welch, and Hattie (2007) found no connection with shared decision making and school reform. Tyack and Cuban (1995) stated that reforms were initiated from outside the local school district and thus, not because of site based management, had little sustainability. Therefore, the history of school reform requires the examination of the interaction of social, economics, and legislation within the United States in order to understand the changes within public schools and the sustainability and policies that directed the reforms.

Methodology

This study extends the body of research regarding school reform in the United States. This research examined past school reform using a discourse analysis of text, specifically Presidential speeches and legislative acts with school reform during the different eras over the last 100 years of United States’ history. The questions that guided this study were: 1) What prompted legislators to pass acts to change public education? 2) What external pressures and political climate for legislators impacted passing school reform policies during the different eras? 3) What did the leaders in the United States say about educational reform? and 4) How did the language of the presidents and legislation impact public school reform?

The design of this study is qualitative research using methods of historical research and discourse analysis. The artifacts used in this study were presidents’ inaugural addresses, department of education directors’ speeches, legislative acts, newspaper articles, and journal articles of the different eras. This comparative historical research aims at an analysis of small number of cases with the presidents’ inaugural speeches along with legislative acts of different eras to explain school reform. Historical research tends to examine a few cases to look at the past experiences within the historical context in order to understand present reforms.

McMillan and Schumacher (2006) identified the major steps of qualitative comparative historical design. A major method was the collection of archival data of official documents. The four major steps used in this qualitative comparative historical design were the development of the events of presidents’ inaugural addresses and legislation that impacted school reform. The second step was to examine these events from national impacts and not from individual states. Third there was an inclusion of similarities and differences using interpretive historical sociology. Then the final step was the proposed explanations of the school reform from an analysis of the policy development from the information gathered.

The Presidents’ inaugural speeches are linked to the time. The language of the presidents is linked to the historical and social context and can’t be isolated on its own (El-daly, 2010). Open coding was used to analyze the documents in the speeches, texts, legislative acts, and articles to compare for similarities and differences (Corbin&Strauss, 2008). Codes that did not relate to the coding schemes were deleted. The primary emphasis was a connection between the written words and events that would help define the phenomenon of school reform. The scale of the comparison is a large task and very complex because each of the different eras impacts the social system as well as the political system. However, the separation of the factors was necessary for the analysis but then the causal relationships were reconnected when examining the impact of those factors to the public school reform. Causal relationships are difficult to support and yet the examination of time order helps to show how there could be an association between cause and effect in the context of the social, political and economic contexts related to the school reforms. The pattern of concepts and codes that resulted from the analysis provided a profile for each decade. The patterns then were connected to potential future conversations about what public education can be in the United States.