Research On The Limits Of Educational Policy

The enactment of Compulsory Education Act is a milestone in the process of modern education development, which ushers in a new stage of the states' intervening in education. In the whole 20th century, it is a world-wide trend for modern nations to intervene in education, which is termed the nationalization of education. It is in this trend of the states expanding their functions in education that educational policy, with its unprecedented scope and intensity, becomes an important means of intervening, ranging from setting education goals to choosing instruction contents, from establishing the standards of founding and running schools to exerting demands of teachers' performance. It is these educational policies that highlight the uniqueness and importance of the states' mandatory authority in education. However, many large-scale educational reforms motivated and guided by the educational policies are not as successful as was previously expected. The implementation of these educational policies also fails to solve some of the problems these policies initially aimed to tackle, and their results bring no good to the development of education. All of these reflect the limitedness of the role of educational policies. In the late 20th century, there arose the reflection of and discontent for the governments' roles in the public educational system pursued by the nations, and all kinds of educational policies become the target of attack and criticism concerning the effectiveness of the governments' roles in education. The effectiveness of educational policy has become the focus of people's concern, and its limitedness, as proposed in people's criticism, is never to be neglected when we strive to increase their effectiveness.Through the analysis of the following three cases, namely, the Title 1 of 1965 Elementary and Secondary Act in the United States, the National Curriculum of 1988 Education Reform Act in England and the 1997 Quality Education Policy of China, the dissertation explores the limits of educational policies, trying to answer the following questions: Where is the limits of educational policies manifested? What causes them? How to give full play to the positive role of educational policies regardless of their limits?Educational policies are initially drawn up for some goals. But the outcomes of them are not all anticipated. The diversity and complexity of the outcomes of educational policies, especially the emergence of unintended consequences, show the limitation of educational policies, which means the educational policy in the actual operation perhaps...