Making Politics Work: Practical Lessons on Politics for Would-Be Education Reformers

An expansive study shows how politics can work for, not just against, efforts to improve America’s schools.

The education reform project has always been about making America’s schools more effective for the children who attend them. In Making Politics Work, authors Paul T. Hill and Ashley E. Jochim show that this project cannot succeed without mastering what is the single largest constraint on its success: politics.

Drawing upon more than a decade of work with dozens of school systems, Hill and Jochim show how failures to secure political support or mitigate inevitable opposition dooms the education reform project from the start. But this outcome is not inevitable. By tracing the evolution of the ＂portfolio strategy＂ across 27 localities that implemented it, they uncover practical lessons that superintendents, state leaders, and foundation officials can use to increase the likelihood that their ideas for improving public education don’t join the list of once-promising initiatives that could not be sustained in the face of intractable political conflict.

Paul T. Hill is professor of practice at Arizona State University and founder and former director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, which studies alternative governance and finance systems for public K-12 education. He is the author of Strife and Progress: Portfolio Strategies for Managing Urban Schools and coauthor of A Democratic Constitution for Public Education, also published by the University of Chicago Press. Ashley E. Jochim is an independent education researcher and Consulting Principal at the Center for Reinventing Public Education at Arizona State University. She is coauthor of A Democratic Constitution for Public Education, also published by the University of Chicago Press.