In the contemporary U.S., the state, through the Legislative Assembly, the State Board of
Education, and the Department of Education, sets policies for K-12 education. These include goals
and standards that affect the kinds of influences local officials, parents, and students can have
on various education programs, required and elective coursework, graduation requirements, and
curriculum content. The state ought to be able to justify their education policies to citizens.
I argue here for a pragmatist informed "minimalist approach" to justifying education policies.
This approach has state officials (and subsequently local officials) use local, situated reasons
for justifying their education standards, goals, and curriculum. I argue that if state officials
utilize a minimalist approach to justify education policies, it will be easier for citizens to
contest (or support) the state's policies because the language employed will better represent
citizen's local, situated common experiences, and be contestable on those grounds. One consequence of this
minimalist approach is that state officials could exclude justifications that are made by appealing
to isolated, abstract conceptions. Isolated, abstract conceptions are, as pragmatists such as Rorty have argued, transcendental in
nature and doomed to failure; fortunately, as the pragmatist defense of a minimalist approach
shows, they are also unnecessary.
Some implications of adopting a pragmatist-informed approach is that the state should give up terms
and phrases that attempt to (i) construct a unifying theory for justification or for truth; (ii)
construct and somehow universally justify a single best particular method for interpreting texts
and analyzing scientific processes; and/or (iii) construct comprehensive and complete standards.
Rather, state officials ought to identify local, situated reasons for particular policies. From
these local appeals, state officials could construct a minimal set of education policies that leave
room for local officials and teachers to have particular
freedoms in constructing programs, projects, and curricula.
I approach this argument through a critique of select education policies in Oregon, Texas, Arizona,
and Tennessee. I argue that these policies, like many education policies and standards, lack
adequate justifications. Those justifications that are provided are too vague and susceptible to
interpretations that are not relevant to the particular purposes of the policies. For instance,
certain policies have illegitimately led to the denial of funding for "Ethnic Studies" programs in
Arizona, or allowed for irrelevant teacher and student criticisms of theories within the sciences
to be explored and entertained as legitimate in Tennessee classrooms. My recommendations, if
followed, would give state officials grounds for excluding the concerns of citizens that are not relevant to particular policies and provide a
legitimate, justifiable basis for constructing state education policies. / Graduation date: 2013
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ORGSU/oai:ir.library.oregonstate.edu:1957/38112 |
| Date | 07 January 2013 |
| Creators | Creighton, Sean (Sean Patrick) |
| Contributors | Kaplan, Jonathan |
| Source Sets | Oregon State University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
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