Patricia Burch
Biographic Data
| ID | 289862 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Patricia Burch |
| GIVEN NAMES | Patricia |
| FAMILY NAME | Burch |
| SIGNATURE | BURCH P |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Southern California |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 15 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 70 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 15 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Policy Sociology in the Contemporary Global Era
The intensities of the contemporary moment continue to prompt reflections on the strengths and limitations of approaches typically used to study education policy reform. The central contention of this essay is that policy sociology and its application within education offers needed vantage points on contemporary pressing global policy problems. Future studies would do well to keep the footprint of existing frameworks, which emphasize policy netwo…
Education reform imaginaries
This paper unpacks the discursive work of global education philanthropies to shed light on how the work of educational actors inscribes and directs global forces, connections and imaginaries to specific local ends. We do so by analyzing the discursive work of two educational philanthropies – in the US and India – that are similar but also vary in ways related to their global reach and networks. Building on Appadurai’s notions of -scapes we show t…
Federal policy and the push to privatize education
In recent years, the federal government (under Republican and Democratic administrations alike) has encouraged the outsourcing of core parts of public education’s work, including testing and test preparation, teaching and tutoring, data collection, and human resources management. However, researchers have found little evidence to support policy makers’ assumption that privatization will lead schools to become more efficient and effective. If anyt…
Local Schooling and Organizational Change
The second half of the twentieth century was marked by a decided movement toward more centralized (and nationalized) policymaking for education than had previously been the norm. Among the major pi
Combining Institutional and Distributed Frameworks in Studies of School Leadership
The premise of this article is that studies of distributed leadership could benefit from further incorporation of institutional approaches to better understand complex reform demands facing school leaders working for instructional improvement. We begin by articulating the core components of a distributed perspective on leadership and of an institutional perspective on organizational change. We next describe our methods for reviewing a purposeful …
Technocentrism and social fields in the Indian EdTech movement
All over the globe, educational technology (EdTech) is being sold to schools as a central mechanism for improving access to quality learning for high poverty populations. There is a growing scholarship that interrogates the institutional drivers of the ‘EdTech craze’. Building on this work, this paper examines how technocentrism as a specific strain of neoliberalism is reflected at both the organizational and institutional levels, both by private…
Big Box Schools
Improving the Implementation and Effectiveness of Out-of-School-Time Tutoring
School districts are spending millions on tutoring outside regular school day hours for economically and academically disadvantaged students in need of extra academic assistance. Under No Child Left Behind (NCLB), parents of children in persistently low‐performing schools were allowed to choose their child's tutoring provider, and together with school districts, they were also primarily responsible for holding providers in the private market acco…
The Changing Nature of Private Engagement in Public Education
Recent years have seen a shifting landscape around private engagement in K-12 public education, one that involves a reorientation of education policy and practice around the principles of the marketplace. In this article, we examine the roles of both not-for-profit and for-profit agencies, as distinct from government agencies, in this movement. Past research has generally focused on subsets of these private actors (i.e., for-profit firms, charter…
Making Failure Pay
After the fall
Key legislative objectives for the US Federal educational policy over the past several decades relied heavily on quasi‐market strategies (such as school rating, school closure, the contracting out of schools) as central levers in ‘reforming’ public schools. Using financial data on 11 national for‐profit firms contracting with schools and districts, I argue that for‐profit firms continue to benefit from significant public revenues made available t…
Hidden Markets
Across the U.S., test publishers, software companies, and research firms are swarming to take advantage of the revenues made available by the No Child Left Behind Act. In effect, the education industry has assumed a central place in the day-to-day governance and administration of public schools—a trend that has gone largely unnoticed by policymakers or the press until now. Drawing on analytic tools, Hidden Markets examines specific domains that t…
The professionalization of instructional leadership in the United States
While there has been considerable scholarship on the role of school and district leadership within instructional change, there has been little analysis of the values and orientations that undergird current policy debates about instructional leadership. This article outlines the importance of examining instructional leadership in the context of broader political and cultural debates about government and about how society should be organized. It id…
Educational Policy and Practice From the Perspective of Institutional Theory
Institutional analyses of public education have increased in number in recent years. However, studies in education drawing on institutional analyses have not fully incorporated recent contributions from institutional theory, particularly relative to other domains such as law and health policy. The author sketches a framework that integrates recent institutional theorizing to guide scholarship on these and other issues in K–12 public education in …
Managing in the Middle
This article investigates how mid-level managers make sense of and mediate district accountability policy. Arguing that teachers’evolving perceptions and understanding of accountability policies are likely to be mediated by school leaders, the authors explore how school managers enact their policy environments, focusing chiefly on the ways in which they construct district accountability policies. Adopting a cognitive or interpretive frame on impl…
Educational Policy and Practice From the Perspective of Institutional Theory
Institutional analyses of public education have increased in number in recent years. However, studies in education drawing on institutional analyses have not fully incorporated recent contributions from institutional theory, particularly relative to other domains such as law and health policy. The author sketches a framework that integrates recent institutional theorizing to guide scholarship on these and other issues in K–12 public education in …
The Changing Nature of Private Engagement in Public Education
Recent years have seen a shifting landscape around private engagement in K-12 public education, one that involves a reorientation of education policy and practice around the principles of the marketplace. In this article, we examine the roles of both not-for-profit and for-profit agencies, as distinct from government agencies, in this movement. Past research has generally focused on subsets of these private actors (i.e., for-profit firms, charter…
After the fall
Key legislative objectives for the US Federal educational policy over the past several decades relied heavily on quasi‐market strategies (such as school rating, school closure, the contracting out of schools) as central levers in ‘reforming’ public schools. Using financial data on 11 national for‐profit firms contracting with schools and districts, I argue that for‐profit firms continue to benefit from significant public revenues made available t…
Technocentrism and social fields in the Indian EdTech movement
All over the globe, educational technology (EdTech) is being sold to schools as a central mechanism for improving access to quality learning for high poverty populations. There is a growing scholarship that interrogates the institutional drivers of the ‘EdTech craze’. Building on this work, this paper examines how technocentrism as a specific strain of neoliberalism is reflected at both the organizational and institutional levels, both by private…
Education reform imaginaries
This paper unpacks the discursive work of global education philanthropies to shed light on how the work of educational actors inscribes and directs global forces, connections and imaginaries to specific local ends. We do so by analyzing the discursive work of two educational philanthropies – in the US and India – that are similar but also vary in ways related to their global reach and networks. Building on Appadurai’s notions of -scapes we show t…
Local Schooling and Organizational Change
The second half of the twentieth century was marked by a decided movement toward more centralized (and nationalized) policymaking for education than had previously been the norm. Among the major pi
Improving the Implementation and Effectiveness of Out-of-School-Time Tutoring
School districts are spending millions on tutoring outside regular school day hours for economically and academically disadvantaged students in need of extra academic assistance. Under No Child Left Behind (NCLB), parents of children in persistently low‐performing schools were allowed to choose their child's tutoring provider, and together with school districts, they were also primarily responsible for holding providers in the private market acco…
Managing in the Middle
This article investigates how mid-level managers make sense of and mediate district accountability policy. Arguing that teachers’evolving perceptions and understanding of accountability policies are likely to be mediated by school leaders, the authors explore how school managers enact their policy environments, focusing chiefly on the ways in which they construct district accountability policies. Adopting a cognitive or interpretive frame on impl…
The professionalization of instructional leadership in the United States
While there has been considerable scholarship on the role of school and district leadership within instructional change, there has been little analysis of the values and orientations that undergird current policy debates about instructional leadership. This article outlines the importance of examining instructional leadership in the context of broader political and cultural debates about government and about how society should be organized. It id…
Educational Policy and Practice From the Perspective of Institutional Theory
Institutional analyses of public education have increased in number in recent years. However, studies in education drawing on institutional analyses have not fully incorporated recent contributions from institutional theory, particularly relative to other domains such as law and health policy. The author sketches a framework that integrates recent institutional theorizing to guide scholarship on these and other issues in K–12 public education in …
Hidden Markets
Across the U.S., test publishers, software companies, and research firms are swarming to take advantage of the revenues made available by the No Child Left Behind Act. In effect, the education industry has assumed a central place in the day-to-day governance and administration of public schools—a trend that has gone largely unnoticed by policymakers or the press until now. Drawing on analytic tools, Hidden Markets examines specific domains that t…
After the fall
Key legislative objectives for the US Federal educational policy over the past several decades relied heavily on quasi‐market strategies (such as school rating, school closure, the contracting out of schools) as central levers in ‘reforming’ public schools. Using financial data on 11 national for‐profit firms contracting with schools and districts, I argue that for‐profit firms continue to benefit from significant public revenues made available t…
The Changing Nature of Private Engagement in Public Education
Recent years have seen a shifting landscape around private engagement in K-12 public education, one that involves a reorientation of education policy and practice around the principles of the marketplace. In this article, we examine the roles of both not-for-profit and for-profit agencies, as distinct from government agencies, in this movement. Past research has generally focused on subsets of these private actors (i.e., for-profit firms, charter…
Making Failure Pay
Improving the Implementation and Effectiveness of Out-of-School-Time Tutoring
School districts are spending millions on tutoring outside regular school day hours for economically and academically disadvantaged students in need of extra academic assistance. Under No Child Left Behind (NCLB), parents of children in persistently low‐performing schools were allowed to choose their child's tutoring provider, and together with school districts, they were also primarily responsible for holding providers in the private market acco…
Big Box Schools
Technocentrism and social fields in the Indian EdTech movement
All over the globe, educational technology (EdTech) is being sold to schools as a central mechanism for improving access to quality learning for high poverty populations. There is a growing scholarship that interrogates the institutional drivers of the ‘EdTech craze’. Building on this work, this paper examines how technocentrism as a specific strain of neoliberalism is reflected at both the organizational and institutional levels, both by private…
Federal policy and the push to privatize education
In recent years, the federal government (under Republican and Democratic administrations alike) has encouraged the outsourcing of core parts of public education’s work, including testing and test preparation, teaching and tutoring, data collection, and human resources management. However, researchers have found little evidence to support policy makers’ assumption that privatization will lead schools to become more efficient and effective. If anyt…
Local Schooling and Organizational Change
The second half of the twentieth century was marked by a decided movement toward more centralized (and nationalized) policymaking for education than had previously been the norm. Among the major pi
Combining Institutional and Distributed Frameworks in Studies of School Leadership
The premise of this article is that studies of distributed leadership could benefit from further incorporation of institutional approaches to better understand complex reform demands facing school leaders working for instructional improvement. We begin by articulating the core components of a distributed perspective on leadership and of an institutional perspective on organizational change. We next describe our methods for reviewing a purposeful …
Policy Sociology in the Contemporary Global Era
The intensities of the contemporary moment continue to prompt reflections on the strengths and limitations of approaches typically used to study education policy reform. The central contention of this essay is that policy sociology and its application within education offers needed vantage points on contemporary pressing global policy problems. Future studies would do well to keep the footprint of existing frameworks, which emphasize policy netwo…
Education reform imaginaries
This paper unpacks the discursive work of global education philanthropies to shed light on how the work of educational actors inscribes and directs global forces, connections and imaginaries to specific local ends. We do so by analyzing the discursive work of two educational philanthropies – in the US and India – that are similar but also vary in ways related to their global reach and networks. Building on Appadurai’s notions of -scapes we show t…
Political science (13 works) · Sociology (11 works) · Public Administration (9 works) · Public relations (9 works) · Economics (8 works) · Public Administration (7 works) · School Choice and Performance (6 works) · Business (5 works) · Social science (5 works) · Educational Assessment and Improvement (4 works)