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Berkeley Graduate School of Education symposium: “The State of Public Education in California” organized by the Berkeley Review of Education.  \nI wanted to really present a very simple argument and get your reactions to this. It is a work in progress now and I have been mulling this over. I have been spending time in charter schools and veterans’organizations and different community groups around the country looking at the decentralization of government. And I want to provoke you a little bit and get you into a discussion.  \nThe argument centers on a problem that we all face when we get up in the morning: what the hell difference does my work make? And how can it be more effective? Someone is trying to improve schools or the social life of kids and adolescents. I want to talk a little bit about the kinds of policy spaces that are being opened and closed in this country and the reasons behind that. And the argument is really that the way in which public spaces are being opened for school reform or narrowed is a broader story about the shrinking state and the diminishing capacity of central government to have enough taxes, to have a fiscal capacity, and to be efficacious on the ground. So, a lot of my work in the last fifteen years has been on decentralized policy regimes. As [one of the BRE editors] mentioned, I have a book on charter schools with Luis Huerta and with some students here. I recently did a book on preschools. I have long been fascinated by what happens on the ground as central states lose legitimacy and lose public authority.  \nSo the starting question is: Where are the openings for improving the organization of schooling? And what are legitimate public spaces to actually try to improve schools or improve the lives of kids and young people? And then there is the a priori question, which is: Well, how, through political processes, are those spaces opened or closed? For example, why is it that we move from a certain optimism in the 60s about the role of the central state, expanding government, and expanding school reform actions to more of a diminished view of, well, let’s sort of take it with market mechanisms, let’s create a few more charter schools, let’s move towards merit pay? What are the spaces that open or close over time, and what is the role of political action in broadening or narrowing those public spaces? And just a note going forward (and this is pretty obvious to a lot of you) but the opening and closing of those public spaces flows from raw political interests, raw  \n1 Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Bruce Fuller, Graduate School of Education, University of California, Berkeley; 3659 Tolman Hall, Berkeley, [CA 94720. Email: b_fuller@berkeley.edu](CA 94720. Email: b_fuller@berkeley.edu)  \nBerkeley Review of Education Vol. 2 No. 1, pp. 85-94  \n86 Fuller  \neconomic interests, the interests of unions to expand membership, the interests of politicians to attract campaign contributions, and the unions of district superintendents to get an even better job than being in suburban Fresno.  \nThere are a lot of raw interests. But there are also a lot of institutional beliefs, or what some people have","cbCaibuEJhS4oPLd","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaibuEJhS4oPLd","pdf",260198,11,"English","# From Reagan to Obama: Core Argument\n## Shrinking state and decentralization\n## Openings and closures of public policy spaces\n## Political interests and institutional “scripts”\n## Historical shift in the role of the central state","[{\"question\":\"What is the central argument about policy changes in public education?\",\"answer\":\"Policy opportunities for school improvement rise and fall as the state’s capacity shrinks. The talk links this to decentralization and to changing political and institutional dynamics.\"},{\"question\":\"What determines whether public spaces for school reform open or close?\",\"answer\":\"The talk emphasizes both raw political and economic interests and “scripts” or belief systems about which interventions will work, such as merit pay, Reading First, or charter schools.\"},{\"question\":\"How did views of the role of the central state change over time?\",\"answer\":\"The talk contrasts postwar and 1960s optimism about expanding state-led schooling with later diminished views, including movement toward market mechanisms and charter-based approaches by the 1980s and beyond.\"}]","From Reagan to Obama - Institutions, Relationships, and the Shrinking State | PDF",1792079810,28]